Polymarket: The Pentagon's Crypto Comeback | Simply Originals

**Rusty** (0:00)
You've probably used this product. Maybe yesterday, maybe this morning. If you ever typed, what are the odds Bitcoin hits 200,000? Or pulled up the probability on the next Fed decision? Or checked what the market thinks about the next regulatory ruling? There's a very good chance you ended up on Polymarket. And when you got there, you assumed something. You assumed you were looking at the wisdom of the crowd, a clean signal. The market speaking truth. You were not. Because Polymarket didn't start in 2020 Its intellectual foundation runs directly through a Pentagon program from 2003 that was so radioactive, so fundamentally offensive to members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, mind you, that the United States Senate moved to kill it within days of learning it even existed. That program was called the Policy Analysis Market, PAM. But many people know it by a totally different name, the Terrorism Futures Market. Yeah, that was an actual thing, and it's getting a reboot. Today is an investigative episode, sourced, documented, based on one of the most important pieces of research journalism published in the Bitcoin and crypto space this year. A deep dive by Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin at Unlimited Hangout, the full article linked in the description. Read it, share it, because by the end of this video, you're going to understand three things. One, what Darpa's policy analysis market actually was, how it was killed, and why the man who built it has never stopped working toward the same destination. Two, how Shane Copland, by his own admission, is following in the footsteps of the big tech billionaires he idolized as a teenager. Oh, and he appears to have resurrected that pentagram, oh, excuse me, Pentagon program with crypto rails and Silicon Valley money, and they're calling it innovation. Well, that's how they're pitching it. And three, why every Bitcoiner who has ever looked at a Polymarket odds chart needs to understand what they're actually looking at. Welcome back, I'm Rusty, and we got a lot to get to.
All right, let's begin July 2003, Washington, DC. Oh, and don't forget to click Subscribe, it helps us out a lot and it helps you stay up to date with the Peaceful Revolution. But two United States senators, Democrat Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Ron Wyden of Oregon, call an emergency press conference. They have just discovered what the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, has been quietly building inside a division called FutureMap. Futures markets applied to prediction. And what FutureMap contained was a sub program, the Policy Analysis Market, PAM. Here's what PAM was designed to do. Let traders bet on the future, not on stocks, not on commodities, on geopolitical events, specifically political assassinations, military coups, the overthrow of foreign governments, terrorist attacks in the Middle East. The theory, and look, I'll be honest with you, there is a real intellectual theory here, is that markets aggregate information better than intelligence agencies. If someone with inside knowledge bets on an attack, the price moves, you see the signal, you prevent it. That's the theory. Senator Dorgan's description at the press conference was slightly different, he called it, and this is a direct, quote, a federal betting parlor on atrocities. Senator Wyden added that it created, quote, an incentive actually to commit acts of terrorism. And again, this is in the wake of the Patriot Act in 9-11.
Anyway, continuing, within days of that press conference, PAM was dead. Congress killed it bipartisan, immediate, radioactive. And the man who ran the Darpa office responsible, John Poindexter, was gone from the Pentagon within a month.
Now, John Poindexter, 10 seconds, because his presence in this story is not incidental. John Poindexter was Ronald Reagan's national security adviser. He was convicted on five felony counts during the Iran-Contra Affair. Lying to Congress, obstruction of justice, and two counts of destroying evidence. His convictions were later overturned on a technicality involving how his immunized congressional testimony had been used at a trial. And then, the George W. Bush administration made him the head of Darpa's Information Awareness Office. In 2002, FutureMap and its PAM subprogram were formally replaced under Poindexter's IAO. The intellectual architect of PAM wasn't Poindexter.
He was the administrator. The actual builder of PAM's theoretical framework is an economist named Robin Hansen. And this is where the thread gets interesting. Robin Hansen's career did not begin in academia.
It began at Lockheed. Yeah, the defense contractor.
Then he moved to a company called Sterling Software, where he worked on a NASA contract. Now Sterling Software. Need to stop here a moment because this detail is in the investigative reporting and it matters. Sterling Software was owned and run by two Dallas-based billionaires, Sam Wiley and Charles Wiley. The Wiley brothers were among George W. Bush's largest political donors from his gubernational campaigns through his presidential runs. And here's the very detail. Robin Hansen does not publicly list Sterling Software on his own CV.