McKay Coppins

And we have seen actually a number of examples of this since then.

What kind of surprised me, though, is when I first saw that bet on Maduro, the way it played out, I assumed that it would be kind of treated like an example of abuse, right?

That there was some insider trading, that the platforms would crack down on it, that the gambler would be rooted out, kicked off the platform, and it would be remembered as kind of a blip in the story of these predictive markets.

What I didn't realize until I started playing around with them myself and talking to people who are involved in these platforms is that insider trading is actually kind of built into the whole enterprise.

There are several people involved in these predictive markets who actually will tell you point blank that they encourage insider trading.

Because insider trading increases the predictive utility of the platforms, right?

And I think to understand their vision is important here.

They argue that, you know, the digital public square has for the last couple of decades existed primarily on social media, which has devolved into a cesspool of AI slop and rage bait and trolling and people kind of not acting in good faith.

The argument that they will make is that if you migrate the public square from social media over to these predictive markets, people will be incentivized to take positions based on what they genuinely believe and what they actually know.

And they would point to the example of the potential military or government insider who took his position based on what he knew to be true as an example of these markets working.

Now you can track insiders like him, these anonymous accounts, and see what positions they're taking.

And you might get a pretty good sense of what's going to happen in the next stage of, for example, the war in Iran.

Now,

I think a lot of people listening to this will say that's incredibly cynical and kind of almost dystopian.

And I frankly would agree with you.

But the people who run these platforms are not backing away from the idea of, you know, allowing insider trading on their platform.

I will say Kalshi, I think, technically prohibits it, but there is very little evidence that they try to root it out.

Polymarket actively encourages it.

Well, I mean, Kalshi could, for example, at the very least, try to in flagrant examples of insider trading like the Maduro case that you just mentioned, they could ban the person who started that account.

Right.