Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Tunde Ogunlana: But one of the things that again, stuck out to me as kind of a capital markets guy, at least through my lens, that I see a lot of the world through, is one of the articles cited that this is a $1.1 trillion market or soon will be. That's what it's estimated to be, this poly market thing. And I was just thinking, it's interesting because to your point, James, about the insider stuff and kind of like I was thinking, this is another example where we're creating actually new economies. This is where we are in the information age. Because when I thought about it, it's like, how is this different than the stock market? Well, it's very different if you think about the industrial aids, the idea of capital.
The market was created as a way for businesses to issue shares.
The owners got to either go into debt buying issuing bonds, or they got to go share by issuing stock and having their own equity diluted. But by doing that, they receive more capital. And the idea is they can then use that to grow the company and the shareholders benefit, hopefully. Because if the company does well, then everyone's making money as the share price goes up. This is very different.
[00:01:11] James Keys: But a lot of the stock trading that happens is not that. You know, like a lot of the stock trading that happens is day trading and stuff, which this is very similar.
[00:01:19] Tunde Ogunlana: Yeah, that is a lot of it. But at the end of the day, it's still an asset that someone is owning. In the end of the day, whether you own those shares for five minutes or five years, you're a shareholder of a corporation that's doing something like, I'll hold up my iPhone. If I own Apple, I know that I own shares of that.
[00:01:35] James Keys: Bottom line is, my man, I recognize that.
[00:01:40] Tunde Ogunlana: Yeah, it's an imagined order, but it's now real in our society.
[00:01:43] James Keys: What I'm saying, though, contracts that you own a piece of with. If I own a piece of this contract in Kalshi, I can even cash it out early if I want to, to cut my losses.
[00:01:53] Tunde Ogunlana: I don't disagree with that. That's like a futures contract or a commod commodities.
[00:01:56] James Keys: My point is, if I'm just betting on. They seem very similar.
[00:02:00] Tunde Ogunlana: But no, if I'm betting on Willicolos Maduro, be the leader of Venezuela tomorrow or not, there's no capital in that. There's no contract in that. That's just a bet. And that's what I'm saying. If that becomes a trillion dollar slice of our $30 trillion economy, it's another example where the Technology is just allowing new realities to be created. And that's just different than let's say a capital market system where there's still a certain. And you're right, it's an imagined order asset, but it's still capital. And shares in a corporation is still an asset. An idea of who's gonna.
[00:02:35] James Keys: It's an asset in the imagined order though. But. Okay, I mean.
[00:02:38] Tunde Ogunlana: Correct.
But a bet on whether someone's gonna get kidnapped or not is not an asset in any order. So that's all I'm saying.
[00:02:46] James Keys: It is in this order. It is, it's something that can be
[00:02:49] Tunde Ogunlana: bought in like you said, a contract loan that can appreciate the value.
[00:02:53] James Keys: What can appreciate in value, it can depreciate in value, can be owned, it can be sold, all of those things. That sounds a lot like property to me, you know, and so.
[00:03:00] Tunde Ogunlana: But the imagined order that you're contract can be. But the bet. But what I'm saying is the idea of if something's going to happen tomorrow or not is not something you could take around for a long time and say I'm going to sell it to you three years from now and in exchange for value, a share of a corporation or a note of a bond is. And so that's it. But anyway, I know we got.
[00:03:21] James Keys: Well, let me. I have a thought that I wanted to share the. I think that you initially talked about the concern about who gets punished here and I thought that that was a really good point and I just wanted to flesh that out a little bit more because as specifically with my view on these types of things is that this is the, you know, like I said, the wild wild west or the sausage making and all that other type of stuff. Like we, the society is better off in my opinion when something new gets introduced like this, provided it's not something crazy like genocide or murder for hire or, you know, it's like those things. So okay, yeah, that's bad. We, we don't need to see it play out in order to figure out how we can, you know, best, you know, utilize what it may be able to offer while minimizing the downsides. But for something like this, you let it play out. I think right now, you know, we've seen that, you know, with, with lots of things. We've seen that as far as how the Internet and so forth proliferated in the 90s and things started happening and then the regulation came through and then it was like, okay, yeah, we got something that's at least workable now. It's not perfect.
The concern I would have, it really relates to the kinds of people that here in the United States we've been putting in power.
They don't seem to be the kind of people that would have society's best interests at heart.
And I'm saying this over a long period of time, generally speaking, and maybe this is the nature of our political system now where it's very money driven and, and so people who have the best interest at heart may not be the best fundraisers, and the best fundraisers are going to be the people who we're going to be putting in power, more or less. But I look now like, even like society Learned in the 20s, 1920s and you know, 1920s, 1930s that insider trading in stocks was bad.
And it's illegal for most Americans. You know who it's not illegal for, though? It's Congress, the people who makes the rules. You know, the people who make the rules are able to this day, people complain about like, oh yeah, Congress, all the insider trading they're doing, all how their wealth grows because they know where to put their money. You know, before they approve this or for this, all this stuff's going on. So my concern would be that while the rules may start getting applied to rank and file people, rules may be getting created, regulations may be created that will apply to everybody else, that the people who are making the decisions actually that are most consequential, the rules may not be applying to them and they may be still taking us off, making us feel all the downsides of this because they're taking advantage in ways because they're just not wired in a way or thinking in a way. The kinds of people that they are, they're great fundraisers, but they're not saying, hey, if this is good for everybody else's society, this is probably good for me. And so I think that's a larger societal hole that we have right now where just the nature of the people that are successful in running for office, or maybe they're good people, but what they have to do to get in office and to stay in office warps them in a way that makes them changes their perspective or what they value or what they think is important. So that challenge is going to be there as well. And so we'll have to deal with that when it comes.
[00:06:18] Tunde Ogunlana: But.
