Zoe Schiffer: Emile Michael, you should turn off your thoughts on LinkedIn because people can see when they look at your phone.
Brian Barrett: Yes, if you’re listening, this is a tip for Emil Michael. And then, if you listen uncanny valleyWhich you should do.
Leah Fieger: And it’s actually Trump officials who are leading the war against Anthropic here. He has deep ties to the tech world and is the Pentagon’s public enemy number one, trying to cross the Pentagon. So the fact is that, one, he probably doesn’t have the best op sec in the world? But two, whether it’s comfortable making it such a public fight is worth noting because it’s just not a message to Anthropic in my mind. This is a message to anyone else who would dare to question these policies.
Brian Barrett: I want to go to something above the mind. Have you all checked your Kalshi or Polymarket portfolios recently? how are we?
Leah Fieger: Well, I haven’t invested in ours yet survivor Winner, but soon, soon.
Brian Barrett: No, in terms of things that are amazing but shouldn’t happen anymore, prediction markets have clearly taken over the majority of our lives in many ways – I mean the usual “us”, not the three of us.
Leah Fieger: The three of us actually text every morning and say, “What did you make on Kalshi last night?”
Brian Barrett: Yes. But surprisingly, not surprisingly, there is a lot of betting around an Iran war to continue that trend. Right now, one of the top bets on Polymarket is “Will the Iran regime fall by June 30?” Bets totaled approximately $7 million on that market alone.
Leah Fieger: This is very disturbing, Brian.
Brian Barrett: Yes.
Leah Fieger: These are people’s lives. I don’t know. I think a lot of it has become a gamified version of itself. I understand the stock market and the way we do all this, but it seems overly complicated to me.
Brian Barrett: Well, and in terms of people’s lives, I mean, there was a big controversy earlier this week about how Kalshi settled a bet or settled a market. There was a market of 54 million dollars on the fortune of Iran’s supreme leader. I believe he phrased it – Leah, correct me if I’m wrong – he phrased it like, he’ll be out of power.
Leah Fieger: Exactly the same thing happened.
Brian Barrett: And then it was blown up by a missile.
Leah Fieger: So technically out of power, but that wasn’t the condition.
Brian Barrett: Because you can’t place bets, and they say, “We don’t allow you to place bets on deaths here.” So he is out of power, but no. So they’re always betting on whether people will die or not, just finding good ways to avoid that and then these markets are having a hard time solving that, so that’s a problem. The fact is that there was a collective $54 million in bounties on this individual, including a user named MAGAMyMan who had won $553,000 at the time of all this. this is outrageous. And I think whether or not any of this is insider trading is bizarre.
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