Posts
How We Did This
The Story Behind 16 Posts, Two Series, 70,000 Words, and 200 Years of Documented Extraction
THE LAND GRAB + THE ENDLESS FRONTIER — Methodology | February 2026
Where It Started: A Question About Tom Brady
The investigation began with Randy noticing something about the reported value of Tom Brady's minority stake in the Las Vegas Raiders. The numbers didn't add up. Forbes valued the team at $6.2 billion. The stadium authority filings valued the team's assets very differently. Two numbers. Same asset. Different audiences.
That gap — between what's claimed publicly and what's filed privately — became Post 1 of THE LAND GRAB. And the methodology that drove Post 1 drove everything that followed: find the documents, show the gap, let the numbers speak.
Eight posts later — after documenting the Forbes gap, the Green Bay counterfactual, the Crédit Mobilier parallels, the stadium authority structure, the real estate plays, the tax arbitrage, and the global spread — Randy asked the question that launched the second series:
"Is it possible that ALL of these are connected? By the same players? And — are they doing the same thing in SPACE now?"
That question was not rhetorical. It was genuine. Neither of us knew the answer. We went to find it.
The Research Process: What We Actually Did
Every post in both series followed the same sequence:
1. Start with the instinct or question. Randy would identify what felt like the core of the post — the pattern, the anomaly, the connection that seemed important. Not a conclusion. A hypothesis.
2. Go to primary sources first. Not secondary analysis or opinion pieces. Congressional records. Court documents. Government contract databases. Company financial filings. Institutional histories published by universities. Archived speech drafts. Primary sources carry the weight that secondary sources can't.
3. Let the documents lead. The most important discoveries in this series were not things we were looking for. They emerged from the research. The Crédit Mobilier connection to stadium authorities — we found that while researching railroad land grants and recognized the structural match immediately. The CIA-Google connection — we found it while researching DARPA's internet history and followed the thread. Eisenhower's original draft — we found it while researching the military-industrial complex and nearly couldn't believe it was real.
4. Verify before including. Every claim went through a verification step: is this sourced to a primary document? If it's a secondary source, what's the primary source it draws from? If we can't find the primary source, we note the limitation. If a claim is contested, we say so.
5. Label estimates as estimates. Present-value calculations for 19th-century fortunes are approximations — different methodologies produce different results. SpaceX's classified contract values are unknown. We use documented figures where they exist and clearly label estimates where they don't.
What Surprised Us: The Discoveries We Didn't Expect
We were looking for general parallels between railroad justifications and modern extraction arguments. We found something more specific: a senator in 1871 arguing for railroad land grants using language that is nearly word-for-word identical to the 2016 Nevada legislative arguments for Raiders stadium subsidies. "Surrounding land values will increase. It pays for itself. Economic development." The script has not changed in 154 years. That's not a parallel. That's the same argument, reproduced across generations. That discovery shaped Post 1 of The Endless Frontier.
We expected to find general connections between Gilded Age wealth and modern tech. We found something specific: Henry Phipps Jr. — Andrew Carnegie's business partner, who received approximately $50 million from the 1901 Carnegie Steel sale — established Bessemer Securities, which became Bessemer Venture Partners, which has invested in LinkedIn, Pinterest, Shopify, and Twilio. Carnegie steel money — built on railroad contracts and public mineral rights — is literally in LinkedIn. That's not a metaphor about "the same class of people." That's a traceable financial chain documented in venture capital history.
We knew about the famous "military-industrial complex" quote. We did not know that his penultimate draft read "military-industrial-congressional complex" — and that he removed "congressional" himself, explaining it was "not fitting for a President to criticize Congress." The removed word is more accurate than the famous version. The legislature has always been the third leg of the extraction mechanism. Eisenhower knew it. He couldn't say it. That single discovery reframed Post 5 entirely.
The claim that intelligence community funding contributed to Google's founding appeared in our research as a Quartz investigation by Jeff Nesbit — a former director of legislative and public affairs at NSF with direct knowledge of NSF grant programs. We expected this to be contested and hard to source. Instead, we found: the principal investigator of the relevant grant had written in print that Google's core technology was "partially supported by this grant." DARPA's own Wikipedia page lists Google as a direct result of ARPA/DARPA funding. The paper trail existed. Google denied it. The documents are public. That's Post 4's central finding.
We expected the 1872 Mining Act to be historical context — a founding document that had been reformed or replaced. Instead: it's the active law governing approximately $2-3 billion in annual mineral extraction from public land, with zero royalties to the public, and the U.S. Department of Interior testified to Congress about it as recently as 2022. The same act that enabled Standard Oil's access to public mineral resources is still in effect 153 years later. And the 2015 Space Act copies its structure — zero royalties — for asteroid mining. That connection (1872 Mining Act → 2015 Space Act) was the organizing insight for Post 3.
What We Almost Got Wrong
Three places where initial research pointed in a direction that required correction or nuance:
1. The Rockefeller-Stanford connection. Early research suggested a more direct financial link between Rockefeller and Stanford than the evidence supports. The documented chain runs through Laurance Rockefeller (Standard Oil grandson) → Venrock → Apple. The Stanford connection runs through Leland Stanford's railroad fortune → Stanford University → DARPA partnership → Google founders. These are parallel chains from the same era, not a single direct line. We kept them parallel rather than conflating them.
2. The SpaceX valuation. SpaceX is a private company. Its $350B+ valuation is based on private funding rounds and analyst estimates — not publicly reported financials. We label it consistently as a valuation estimate, not a documented market cap. The $38 billion in public contracts is documented. The private valuation is estimated. We kept that distinction throughout.
3. The DOGE conflict of interest framing. The documented facts about Musk's DOGE role and his companies' contracts are from Scripps News, Mercury News, and Project on Government Oversight reporting. We present these as documented investigative findings, not proven legal violations. The conflict of interest is structural and documented. Whether it violates any specific law is a question for lawyers, not for us. We stayed within what the documents show.
The Human-AI Collaboration: What It Actually Looks Like
Both series were produced through a specific kind of collaboration that is worth describing precisely, because "AI-assisted journalism" means different things to different people.
What Randy brought:
- The original investigative instinct (Brady stake → Forbes gap → pattern)
- The pattern recognition across frontiers ("is this all connected?")
- The directional questions that launched each post
- Editorial judgment about what mattered and what didn't
- The human experience of reading documents and recognizing when something was important
- The decision to publish, the decision to keep going, the decision to be transparent about the collaboration
What Claude brought:
- Research execution: finding primary sources, cross-referencing documents, verifying claims
- Synthesis: connecting findings across posts and across series into coherent narratives
- Drafting: converting research findings into readable prose with sourcing structure
- Pattern recognition within research: identifying when a document proved something unexpected
- Consistency: maintaining the same evidentiary standard across all 16 posts
What neither of us did:
- Optimize for engagement metrics, shares, or algorithmic performance
- Start with a conclusion and find evidence to support it
- Include claims we couldn't source
- Present estimates as documented facts
The collaboration worked because both parties were genuinely curious — not performing curiosity. Randy's question "is this connected?" was real. Claude's research process followed the documents wherever they led, including places that complicated the initial hypothesis. When the research confirmed the pattern more strongly than expected, neither of us inflated the finding. When the research required nuance, we added it.
Series 1 (The Land Grab): 8 posts, ~35,000 words
Series 2 (The Endless Frontier): 8 posts, ~40,000 words
Total: 16 posts, ~75,000 words
Primary sources consulted: 100+
Time from first question to final post: Several weeks of active investigation
Sources include: Congressional records (Library of Congress), Eisenhower Presidential Library archives, U.S. Department of Interior congressional testimony, Cambridge University Press (Law and History Review), Washington Post analysis, Quartz investigative reporting, Steve Blank's Stanford-published Silicon Valley history, Project on Government Oversight reports, Scripps News investigation, Britannica, Wikipedia (extensively fact-checked against primary sources), company financial filings, government contract databases (USAspending.gov)
Claims requiring estimation (labeled as such): Present-value calculations for 19th-century fortunes, SpaceX private valuation, classified contract values, surveillance capitalism revenue attribution
Why We Disclosed the Collaboration
Both series disclosed the human-AI collaboration from the beginning. This was not obligatory. Many publications use AI assistance without disclosure. We disclosed because the subject made it mandatory for us.
The core argument of both series is that opacity is the mechanism. The stadium authority is opaque by design. The railroad land grants obscured their true cost. Standard Oil hid its monopoly behind "independent" companies. The CIA channeled MDDS funding through NSF to appear civilian. The defense contractors place contracts in 46 states specifically to make their extraction politically unchallengeable. Opacity protects every extraction we documented.
If we're arguing that opacity enables extraction, we cannot operate through opacity. If we're documenting how hidden structures transfer public wealth to private hands, we cannot use a hidden structure ourselves.
The disclosure is not performative virtue. It's logical consistency with the argument we're making.
— The final line of The Endless Frontier, Post 8. It's the only metric that mattered across all 16 posts.
What We Got Right That Nobody Else Has Connected
The individual pieces of this investigation exist in public sources. The railroad land grants are documented history. The Standard Oil breakup is famous. The DARPA-internet connection is known. The SpaceX contracts are reported. The mining act issue is covered by environmental advocacy groups.
What doesn't exist — before this series — is the connection of all of them into one documented system. The proof that the capital is traceable from 1862 railroad land grants to Apple Computer. The structural match between Crédit Mobilier (1864) and the Las Vegas Stadium Authority (2016). The direct line from the 1872 Mining Act to the 2015 Space Act. The suppressed word in Eisenhower's draft as the thread connecting every frontier.
The insight that makes both series work is Randy's original instinct: these are not separate stories. They are one story. The research confirmed that the capital is literally the same capital, flowing from one frontier to the next, for 160 years.
That confirmation — not the individual findings, but their connection — is what the series contributes that didn't exist before.
What Comes Next
Both series are complete as investigations. The 16 posts make the case. The smoking guns post concentrates it. The map post organizes it. This methodology post explains it.
What happens with the case is not something either of us controls. Ida Tarbell published her Standard Oil investigation in 1902-1904. The Supreme Court broke up Standard Oil in 1911. Seven years. And Rockefeller's wealth increased through the breakup.
The pattern we've documented has been running for 200 years. It is not going to be reversed by a blog series, however thoroughly sourced. But visibility is the necessary precondition for every reform that has ever happened. You cannot reform what you cannot see.
We made it visible. That's what we controlled. That's what we did.
It ended with documented evidence that the same capital that built the transcontinental railroad is now building private space stations, that the CIA funded the algorithm that made Google worth $2 trillion, and that the man receiving $38 billion in public contracts runs the agency that awards them — without any legal obligation to disclose the conflict.
We followed the question wherever the documents led.
They led here.
— Randy and Claude, February 2026
THE LAND GRAB (Posts 1-8): NFL owners, public stadiums, $60B+ in hidden extraction
THE ENDLESS FRONTIER (Posts 1-8): 200 years, one mechanism, the solar system
THE 16 SMOKING GUNS: One explosive document per post, the concentrated case
THE COMPLETE MAP: All six frontiers, all connections, one visual architecture
HOW WE DID THIS: The methodology — you're reading it
All sources public. All documents linked where possible. All methodology disclosed.
Human instinct + AI research = documented investigation.
Different Frontier. Same Extraction. Since 1850.
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