‘Uncanny Valley’: Iran War in the AI Era, Prediction Market Ethics, and Paramount Beats Netflix

Zoë Schiffer: Emil Michael, you should turn off your views on LinkedIn because people can see when they look at your phone.

Brian Barrett: Yeah, that’s a tip for Emil Michael if you’re listening. And then, if you listen to Uncanny Valley, which you should.

Leah Feiger: And this is really the Trump official that’s kind of leading the war against Anthropic here. He has these deep ties to the tech world and he’s the Pentagon’s public enemy number one of anyone who’s trying to cross the Pentagon. So the fact that, one, he has not maybe the best op sec in the world? But two, is comfortable making this such a public battle, is very much something to take note because it’s not just a message to Anthropic in my mind. It’s a message to anyone else who would dare question these policies.

Brian Barrett: I want to go to something top of mind. Have you all checked your Kalshi or Polymarket portfolios lately? How are we doing?

Leah Feiger: Well, I haven’t invested yet in our Survivor winners, but soon, soon.

Brian Barrett: No, in terms of things that are surprising but shouldn’t be anymore, prediction markets obviously have sort of taken over so much of our lives in so many ways by—I mean the general “our,” not the three of us.

Leah Feiger: The three of us actually text every single morning and go, “What’d you make on Kalshi last night?”

Brian Barrett: Yeah. But surprising, not surprising, there’s so much betting going on around the Iran war to continue that thread. Right now, one of the top bets on Polymarket is “Will the Iran regime fall by June 30th?” Total bets around 7 million dollars in that market alone.

Leah Feiger: That’s so upsetting, Brian.

Brian Barrett: Yeah.

Leah Feiger: These are people’s lives. I don’t know. I understand that so much of this has become a gamified version of itself. I understand that the stock market and the way that we do so much of all of this, but this feels extra gamified to me.

Brian Barrett: Well, and in terms of people’s lives, I mean, there was a big controversy just earlier this week about how Kalshi settled a bet or resolved a market. There was a 54 million dollar market on the fate of Iran’s supreme leader. I believe that they phrased it—Leah, correct me if I’m wrong—they phrased it as, like, he’ll be out of power.

Leah Feiger: That was exactly what happened.

Brian Barrett: And then he was blown up by a missile.

Leah Feiger: So technically out of power, but that wasn’t the bet.

Brian Barrett: Because you can’t bet, and they’re like, “We don’t allow you to bet on deaths here.” So he’s out of power, but not. So they are invariably betting on whether people will die, just finding cute ways around it and then having a hard time resolving these markets, so that’s a problem. The fact that there was a 54 million dollar bounty out on this guy collectively from betters, including one user called MAGAMyMan, who had won $553,000 on the timing of all this. It is outrageous. And I think whether or not any of this is insider trading, it’s grotesque.