Kate Knibbs: So, you went twice?
Makena Kelly: Yes, Kate. I went twice.
Kate Knibbs: I missed that.
Zoë Schiffer: Wait, is the Pentagon Pizza thing a joke about pizza predicting war?
Makena Kelly: Yes.
Zoë Schiffer: Oh my God.
Makena Kelly: Because they had these Pentagon pizza trackers. When I came back the second night, yes, I came back the second night. Everything was working for the most part. There were still screens that were turned off, but I never saw any Bloomberg channels. There were some Bloomberg-type monitoring endpoints that it looked like Polymarket had built themselves, but the actual $50,000 Bloomberg terminal was nowhere to be found. And yes, the second night, again, many people were looking to watch the event, except I found several people who bet on platforms like Polymarket and. Kalshi. One was called William, and he said he was a soldier, he wouldn’t give me his full name. And last year he got involved in this for the first time by putting, I think, all of his tax revenue into Oklahoma City sports betting.
Makena Kelly, voice memo: So, did you use Kalshi?
William, memory voice: Yes.
Makena Kelly, voice memo: When did you start using the service?
William, memory voice: Probably when I got my rent back.
Makena Kelly, voice memo: All right.
William, memory voice: So, I filed my taxes very early and I said, “Oh, sweet. I got my tax form. What am I going to do with it?” So, I was like, “I’ll just put it in Kalshi.”
Makena Kelly: He said that he goes up and down 100 dollars, but has not had any big wins. Some of the things we have heard. Some people who make insider bets make millions and millions of dollars. This is a guy who was interested in this and is just playing it for fun, it seems.
Brian Barrett: Kate, what do you see when you see a pop-up like this with Polymarket trying—is it an attempt to justify itself by just risking the markets? And how does it relate to what you’re seeing with these companies anyway, that there’s explosive growth that they’ve tried to reach more people and get more people into what they’re offering?
Kate Knibbs: I mean, this scene obviously looks like a pretty bad attempt to woo the DC press, if nothing else. One thing that Makena said covers what’s going on right now, the thing about the guys wearing the Palantir helmets. So, I think it was the same week that this bar opened. Polymarket announced a partnership with Palantir and Palantir is helping them protect the integrity of their game marketplace. So, Palantir will basically try to help Polymarket find insiders and market manipulations in all sports games, which is wild. I asked Polymarket last week if they had any other deals with Palantir when I was trying to get them to say anything about whether they were investigating the Iran gambling that has been raising a lot of eyebrows. And they said that Palantir was just helping them with games, which I thought was amazing. And it talks about how they’re expanding rapidly, but doing it in this ad hoc way that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Because I was like, “If you’re going to involve Palantir, why not have them do this geospatial stuff instead of March Madness?” Yes, wild, wild times.
