← It Could Happen Here
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This is an I heart podcast. Guaranteed human high key. Listen to High Key, a bold, joyful, unfiltered culture podcast. Speaking of crunchy, what did you think of your trainers run? I was amazing on that show, sister. Were you? I had some. I was amazing and I was better than you would be if you went. This is exactly why Bob is a good drag queen, because she won't back down. She's not gonna go double back on that lie. I felt like you came in real hot, real strong, and that is just not the game, girl. Y', all, I'm gonna tell you why you're wrong and I can't wait to do this. Please listen to High key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why, hands down, you count on Grainger for auto reordering. With on time Restocks, your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift and you can end your day knowing they got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.
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Call Zone Media.
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Last week two major news networks, CNN and cnbc, partnered with the so called prediction market Calshi, an online political Betting platform to use Kalsh real time betting data in TV news segments, online news content and as Kalshee announced on X the Everything app. Quote to integrate prediction markets into CNN's global newsroom. With Kalshee threatening quote A new era of media is here. This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis, regular CNN Viewers may have noticed that this integration has already been happening for some time. This past election cycle, news anchors used betting odds in place of an addition to polling data to weigh the likelihood of candidates winning elections. CNN's chief data analyst Harry Entin, a Nate Silver protege who used to work for 538, trailblazed the use of political gambling data in news stories. Earlier this year, Kalshee praised Enten by name in their announcement of the CNN partnership. Quote Enten is an expert at translating what data and polling are saying on any given issue and through this integration he can tap into real time prediction markets data to better inform and fact check his reporting. Unquote. Here's an example of this reporting in a CNN segment from October 2025.
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If you go back six months ago, you go back to April Kate Baldwin what were we looking at? Well we were looking at the Democrats with a very clear shot of taking control of the US House of Representatives. According to the Cauchy prediction market odds we saw them at an 83% chance but those odds have gone plummeting down. Now we're talking about just a 63% chance while the GOP's chances up like a rocket up like gold up from 17% to now a 37% chance. So we'll look like a pretty clear likely Democratic win in the House come next year. Has become much closer to a toss up at this point. Although still slightly leaning Democratic, Harry Enton.
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Never clarifies how these quote unquote odds are formed or what they really are. To a viewer who just tuned in or maybe isn't paying that much attention, it would be very unclear that these numbers are actually from a gambling website. They're just big percentages displayed on screen the way you would see polling data or legitimate information used in a newsroom. This short section using the Kalshi prediction market odds was then followed by three minutes of analysis using selective midterm voting data from 2017 to 2018 to support the movement in these gambling odds. The gambling odds themselves were the load bearing piece of information. In this piece Cow she's main competitor, another so called prediction market called Poly Market partnered with X the Everything app and Yahoo Finance earlier this year to integrate their prediction data into online news content. Time magazine and Sports Illustrated have also both launched deals with the prediction market platform Galactic so what exactly are these prediction markets and how do they function? On polymarket and Kalshi, users can bet yes or no on the outcome of a question relating to world events, which is called a market. As more money is wagered on either side, the odds of the outcome change. Currently, top questions include various predictions for time, person of the year, will the US Strike Venezuela before the end of the year, the release of the Epstein files, and who will be the next president? Kalshee has Trump's chances at 6%. Here's Polymarket CEO Shane Coplan explaining on 60 Minutes, you make money if you're.
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Right, you lose money if you're wrong.
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And as a result it creates this.
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Information that's really useful for people.
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These companies would like you to believe that the ratio of people betting yes or no on a certain outcome of world events is somehow useful or reliable information for the general public to forecast the future. Whether that's through betting on the likelihood of an upcoming recession, the winner of a sports game which days of the week Israel will bomb Gaza or what movie will win best picture almost $50 million is currently being wagered over a potential Russia Ukraine ceasefire in 2025. Production markets currently have $3 billion in weekly trading volume. I do need to note these companies argue that hedging outcomes of world events legally is not gambling because that would be illegal. Payments through unauthorized gambling sites are illegal under the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement act of 2006, which suppressed the early prediction markets of the 2000s. But Kalshi is regulated as a platform for trading financial derivatives rather than securities trading or straight up legalized gambling, and this determines what entity they have to register with and what regulations they're subject to. Kalshi launched in 2021 with a federal license from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and after a years long battle in October 2024 a federal appeals court ruled in favor of Kalshee allowing online prediction market betting on US elections, rejecting claims by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that the practice was illegal gambling and their concerns that prediction market betting could undermine election integrity. Former CFTC Chairman Rostam Benham in a statement in May of 2024 Reading quote contracts involving political events ultimately commoditize and degrade the integrity of the uniquely American experience of participating and in the democratic electoral process. Allowing these contracts would push the cftc, a financial market regulator, into a position far beyond its congressional mandate and expertise Unquote. A week before his dad took office in January 2025, Donald Trump Jr became a strategic advisor at Cal Poly market, launched in 2020 without registering with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and was fined $1.4 million by the CFTC in 2022 for operating as an unregulated exchange and was henceforth prohibited from allowing bets from US based users. Though the Poly Market CEO sees it a little different.
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It was a $1.4 million fine and also it was a settlement and you could not have customers in the United States.
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Yeah, we had to go and geoblock trading the US and move certain operations offshore.
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And it wasn't, hey, you're banned from.
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Trading in the U.S. it's like, until you're licensed.
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I mean, it was breaking the law.
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I mean, people say breaking the law, it's like, which law? You know, so if anything, it's incompatible.
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It's incompatible with the law. Yeah.
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With the regulatory matrix that existed the past two years, Polymarket has found to be facilitating illegal gambling and subsequently banned in the countries of Switzerland, France, the uk, Poland, Singapore, Belgium, Romania and Australia.
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Most of these bans just require geo blocking users, which can be easily circumvented through the use of a vpn. And since the financial transactions on Polymarket are all done through cryptocurrency, it's not clear that Polymarket is taking any steps to enforce these bans beyond geo blocking. In the midst of facing regulatory hurdles and bans from across the globe, Polymarket still exploded in popularity last year, attracting investment from Peter Thiel's venture capital firm and hundreds of thousands of new users, primarily driven by betting on the US Presidential election, speculation on whether Biden would drop out of the race and who Trump would pick as vice president, all despite the platform technically being banned in the United States. After the first presidential debate in July 2024 around the attempted assassination of Trump and the RNC, Polymarket gained 60,000 new accounts. The year prior, Polymarket averaged 2,300 new accounts per month. August 2024 saw 70,000 new accounts. September 90,000. October 300,000. The month after Trump's second inauguration, 400,000. Currently, Polymarket has over 60,000 daily active traders and hundreds of thousands of monthly traders since October 2024. To give another example of their recent growth, in April 2023, Poly Markets monthly volume was about $3 million. A year later it was 39 million. In November 2024, it was 2.5 billion. Last month it was 3.7 billion.
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Hey, it's Ed Helms. And welcome back to snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode.
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32 lost nuclear weapons. You're like, wait, stop.
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What?
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Yeah, Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid.
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70S basketball player who still wore knee pads. Yes. It's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Scheer made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow, Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.
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What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?
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Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.
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I forgot whose podcast we were doing.
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Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's, let's, let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Poynter, Chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Atria Health Institute in New York City. On this show, I'll be talking to top researchers and top clinicians, asking them your burning questions and bringing that information about women's health and midlife directly to you. 100% of women go through menopause. It can be such a struggle for our quality of life. But even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? The types of symptoms that people talk about is forgetting everything. I never used to forget things. They're concerned that one they have dementia.
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And the other one is do I have adhd?
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There is unprecedented promise with regard to cannabis and cannabinoids to sleep better, to have less pain, to have better mood and also to have better day to day life. Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Poynter on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you're listening now.
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In summer 2025, Cash Patel's FBI and the CFTC under Trump dropped investigations into whether Polymarket was illegally allowing US users to place bets using VPNs. Shortly thereafter, Donald Trump Jr's venture capital firm invested in the platform and Trump Jr himself joined Polymarket's advisory board. Curiously, a few days after Trump Jr joined Polymarket, the commodity futures Trading Commission announced it was going to allow polymarket to operate in the United States after acquiring another company that held a U.S. license. This past October, Trump's own Truth Social announced it was partnering with Crypto.com to launch Truth Predict Quote a revolutionary prediction market backed by President Trump for enhanced decision making. Unquote. When Barry Weiss's 60 Minutes did a puff piece on Polymarket with its CEO last week, Anderson Cooper inquired about the risk of insider trading. Poly Markets CEO Shane Kaplan seemed to think that a little bit of insider trading might be good actually, but predictive.
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Markets do rely on someone having some inside information.
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Yeah, I think that people going and having an edge to the market is a good thing. Obviously you need to curate them and you need to be really clear and stringent on where the line is drawn and like sort of ethics and spend a lot of time on that. But it's sort of an inevitability that this will happen and there's a lot of benefits from it and you know people will adapt. The CEO did not elaborate on what Poly Markets practice of curating insider trading looks like and where their quote unquote stringent line is drawn. Because in reality it doesn't seem this line exists. They essentially encourage insider trading through these vague statements and lack of clear enforcement. From the point of view of these platforms, insider trading makes their prediction markets more accurate. So it's a net positive and if it fucks over some users on the other side of a bet, that's just the cost of business. Last week, an alleged insider trader won over a million dollars for bets on Google's 2025 Year in Search rankings listing 22 out of 23 in the correct order. This user has made a series of early bets related to Google the past year like the exact release date of Google's Gemini 3.0, which they won $150,000 on. But because this Poly Market user isn't trading stock, there's no clear regulatory mechanism to stop this behavior. And polymarket can't reverse these trades because they run through the blockchain and not that they would even necessarily want to. Professional gambler, political data analyst and poly market advisor Nate Silver was also asked about insider trading on the China Talk podcast two months ago.
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Are you worried about insider trading with this, with all this political betting? I mean there's an aspect of like look, these are all crypto, you know, you get on these markets with crypto and, and like, like there were markets like which way is Suzanne Collins going to vote? And you know, the sort of the, like, you know, like the tail outcomes for like a legislative assistant in her office are, you know, you can make 10 times your salary in like a minute. Right? Yeah. What's your, what's your thinking on this?
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For sure. I mean, look, I think there are a couple of qualifications though. Like first of all, I think people on the inside often aren't as well as informed as they think and, or there are some downsides to having an inside view and not an outside view. You might drink the Kool Aid, so to speak. Right. You might be in a bubble.
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Yeah, look, I mean, I mean there are ones where it's like you can literally, I mean there's been a lots of group chats, people talking about like very, very sketchy trades and one way bets that are being made in the stock market of like what's going to happen with a trade deal. I mean you can literally be the person who decides.
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Right.
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And be betting on the side if they're weird. If there are incentives to make money in a world of 8 billion people, many of whom are very competitive and all of whom, not all of them, most of them access the Internet.
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Right.
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People are going to find a way, a way to do it. Right.
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Let's pause here for a sec. What do you think Nick goes on to list as a comparison to political insider trading as like an unfortunate but somewhat inevitable consequence of our evolving system of finance.
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Like in the crypto space we've seen like an increasing number of like crypto kidnappings, right? Well, I mean that's one of the consequences of people are worth vast amounts of wealth that isn't very secure. It's just, it's just going to, going to happen until you up security or have better solutions or whatever else. And so like you know, I don't think there's necessarily anymore or less insider trading on, like, Polymarket than there might be for in sports betting sites. We've seen a lot of sports betting scandals or for regular equities. You know, I, I believe the literature says that, like, members of Congress achieve abnormal returns from their stock portfolios. I'd have to double. I'm sure there's some debate about that. I have to like to double check that, right?
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It's fine, Bros. It's just like cryptocurrency kidnapping. It's fine, actually. So Nate goes on to say that prediction market insider trading isn't that different from Congressmen doing insider trading on the stock market or like rigged sports betting. But he really neglects to emphasize that those things are also bad and should be aggressively clamped down on. That shouldn't be allowed. And prediction markets intentionally skirt regulation. They currently have far less legal protections for users against unfair practices. And with crypto, they can be pretty anonymized, enabling bad actors. And now news companies are legitimizing turning everyone's phone into a corrupt casino for world events, whether that's Israel starving Palestine or how many tweets Elon Musk is going to publish this week. The day before Kalshi announced their partnership agreement with CNN and NCNBC, CBS aired a 60 Minutes puff piece on Polymarket anchored by Anderson Cooper.
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When we met with Copeland last month, more than $3.6 million had been wagered on whether or not Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro would be out of power by the end of the year. Polymarket users didn't think so. They gave it only a 23% chance. And if you buy no on that, and you're buying it at 78 cents and at the end of the year, he's still in power. Yeah, you get a dollar per share, so you've made a profit of 22 cents per share. I can see why this would be. I mean, I don't want to use the term addictive, but it would be compelling. I mean, maybe it is addictive, I don't know, but it's certainly compelling. This is how I see it. If you are into geopolitics, this creates an incentive for you to dig in to what's going on in Venezuela and.
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Try and get an edge. Anderson Cooper, who both works for the newly cowshi partnered CNN as well as CBS's 60 Minutes, is so hesitant to call this clearly addictive practice addictive, quote, unquote, compelling. Here's how Polymarket CEO Shane Copeland explained The platform earlier in this piece. It's a site where you can basically bet on current events, some sort of question about the future, like an election. And as a result, when a ton of people are betting, you get the.
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Betting odds, which basically tell you how likely each outcome is and how accurate is it.
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It's the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now, until someone else creates some sort of super crystal ball. Anderson Cooper responds with narration that the CEO, quote, may be prone to hyperbole, but he's definitely on to something, unquote. In explaining how Poly Market users attempt to seek truth and gain an edge, Copeland told the story of how in 2024, an anonymous French user made over $80 million on polymarket by betting on Trump winning the presidential election. And to bolster his Bets, he contracted YouGov to conduct private polls in swing states. People thought he just liked Trump, and he had actually commissioned a ton of private polls.
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He did something called neighbor polling, which.
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Is you ask people who they think their neighbors are likely to vote for for scenarios for an election where there's a stigma to saying you're going to vote for somebody and people feel some sort of social awkwardness. And what he noticed was there was a huge discrepancy in the neighbor polling versus the normal polling. And the neighbor polling favored Trump enormously. He thought Trump was undervalued. If this guy was not able to make 80 million, but rather able to make $80,000, he would have never gone through the hassle. But when you get markets that are big enough, you create this incentive for people to go above and beyond to try and find truth. What the CEO is arguing here is that the sheer scale of money being wagered creates incentive to, quote, unquote, find truth. In media discussions of prediction markets, there's this specter of objectivity around the gambled odds, which obviously the CEO of Polymarket has a personal incentive to encourage. But Anderson Cooper here doesn't challenge this notion of capital T truth. Even though Donald Trump was way ahead in prediction market odds back during the 2020 election, which had his chances of winning that election far higher than what pure polling models showed. Kalshee claims that prediction markets can help journalists quote, unquote, fact check, but doesn't explain how fact can be determined from speculative gambling markets. Where is the fact in gambling? Well, we will find out after these ads.
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If you're a maintenance supervisor for a commercial property, you've had to deal with everything from leaky faucets to flickering light bulbs. But nothing's worse. Than that ancient boiler that's lived in the building since the day it was built 50 years ago. It's enough to make anyone lose their cool. That's where Grainger comes in. With industrial grade products and dependable, fast delivery, Grainger can help with any challenge, from worn out components to everyday necessities. Call clickgrainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. Hey, it's Ed Helms. And welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu. Every single episode.
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32 lost nuclear weapons. You're like, wait, stop what?
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Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player who still wore knee pads. Yes. It's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Scheer made me feel good. I'm like, oh wow. Angela and Jenna, I am sorry. So psyched you're here.
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What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?
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Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.
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I forgot whose podcast we were doing.
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Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's, let's, let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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To quote from Poly Market Advisor Nate Silver's blog, the Silver Bulletin, quote It's basically good when people are more exposed to probabilities and they become more normalized. But of course, I also analyze polls and build probabilistic models myself. In that capacity, I strongly disagree with the notion that prediction markets can serve as a good substitute for polls. These sorts of claims are sometimes advanced by the prediction market companies themselves, including polymarket. To be fair, one minor pet peeve is that both reporters and readers often confuse probabilities for poll results, unquote. As Nate goes on to explain, If Trump is up 55 to 45 over Kamala Harris on a prediction market, that's not saying that Trump is expected to win by 10 points. It means that 10% more users on the website favor Trump winning, which is pretty close to a toss up. This confusion is a huge problem, which is bolstered in both how prediction market companies market their platform, but also how journalists use gambling data in news stories. If you see a social media post, an advertisement, or a random news segment showing percentages tied to pictures of two politicians in a race without context, those betting numbers could be interpreted in a number of ways and influence someone's perception of an election and maybe even their choice on who to vote for or even whether to vote at all. In an October speech, Zoran Mamdani referenced Kalshee billboards predicting a Cuomo victory in the Democratic primary.
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When I walked the length of Manhattan just a few days before the election, hundreds of New Yorkers marched alongside me.
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And when we strode into Times Square under a billboard with betting odds that showed Cuomo's chances of winning at nearly 80%, we knew that the so called experts were set to get it wrong yet again.
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Andrew Cuomo was supposed to be inevitable. When you see the Kalsh odds that.
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Have our chances of victory in the 90s, know this.
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You are reading the same things that.
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Andrew Cuomo read when he went to.
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Sleep each night in June believing that his victory was promised. We cannot allow complacency to infiltrate this movement.
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Kalsi excitedly shared the latter half of that clip proclaiming breaking Zoran Mumdani references his Kalshi odds on stage. Kalshi is mainstream, unquote. Despite this clip demonstrating how prediction markets often suffer from inaccurate bias. Last week discount Steve Kornacki, former 538 analyst and now CNN's data expert Harry Enton shared this segment about the Tennessee District 7 special election on X, the Everything app with the caption, odds are Dems will come within 10 points of a win, if not outright win.
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I would say if you had to look at the congressional map, any district that Donald Trump won by 22 points, you would say, you know, you've got like nearly a 100% chance of winning if you're running for Congress there. But what are the prediction markets saying right now? Yeah, what are we talking about in terms of prediction market odds? Look, the Democrat has a 50, 15% chance of winning in that race, okay, a 15% chance, which ain't nothing in a district that Donald Trump won by 22 points. But here, I think is the key nugget on this side of the, of the ledger, and that is a GOP win by under 10 points. There's a 68% chance of that. So there is a more than two thirds chance that the Republican candidate, yes, they win, but they win by a significantly lower margin than Donald Trump. We're talking about double digits smaller. We're talking about a huge, huge shift to the left. We're talking about, when you add these two together, we're talking about a more than 80% chance that there is a clear double digit shift to the left and a 15% chance the Democrat actually wins in a district that Donald Trump won by 22 points. That just shows you how bad the environment is for Republicans right now that the Democrat has any sort of a chance in this. Talk to me about the special.
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He's just authoritatively rattling off complete speculation on a Democrat victory as big screens display percentages in huge text with source kalshee in tiny text at the bottom of the screen. Ordinary polling showed that this was a close race that leaned red by two to eight points and the Republican did end up winning by nine points, to quote the broken clock Nate Silver quote. Without having polls to look at, the prediction markets would probably kind of suck at making election forecasts. Translating polls into probabilities is considerably more complicated when there are many correlated races at once, such as in the battle for the Electoral College or control of Congress. Prediction markets had a strong 2024 in this regard. They leaned toward Trump when our model had it at 50 50. I don't think this was because of any special modeling insight per se, but because they incorporated some sort of prior intuition that Trump would overperform his polls again, so give the markets credit for that. These sorts of soft quote unquote intangible intuitions can be valuable, though you'd need a lot of data to determine whether they add or subtract the value in the long run. As Nate himself acknowledges, someone like Andrew Cuomo had much higher betting odds throughout the entire New York mayoral race than a purely statistical model would show. A contention I have with Nate, one of many is though I call prediction market numbers gambling odds, they are not actual probabilities. These odds aren't based on objective mathematical principles like flipping a coin, the three door problem, or even something like blackjack. These odds are created whole cloth through guessing, sometimes educated or data informed guessing, but still primarily through people's intuition which is susceptible to group impulses. Many random world events lack a reliable basis of continuous controlled data that's needed to form a probability like that which is applied to legalized sports betting. This is quite evident in the betting odds around the last People conclave, which had very little relevant data to use for informed predictions. There was no existing probability to support the election of an American Pope, a first time occurrence. With prediction markets, people can still do research to make an informed bet, but it's not really the case that X candidate is mathematically expected to win an election. 80 out of a hundred instances, a hive mind of users have formed that statistical division through the power of money. 80% of users are betting that a certain result is likely to occur. So the problem isn't just that like Nate says, people are confusing probabilities for polls, it's that they're confusing prediction market betting odds for mathematical probabilities. It's this difference that allows betting on sports outcomes via Calcium Polymarket, even in states that ban typical sports betting because you're not actually betting on fixed odds, you're betting against other investors. And now news companies are not just manufacturing consent and normalizing political gambling, but are actively encouraging the use of these platforms and endorsing the predictive capacity of these gambling markets. Anderson Cooper calls it the quote unquote wisdom of crowds. But we already have methods for learning group consensus like polling, which may have problems, but frankly far fewer problems than gambling on world events. Beyond the moral qualms of betting money on human suffering, prediction markets are susceptible to not just personal bias, but group bias based on the current ratio of odds. This in group consensus can be influenced by short lived trending topics and these platforms cater to a hyper online point of view. Prediction market users provide a very non representational sample variety pulling from a very specific type of guy who regularly uses these platforms. To quote from Kalshee's CNN partnership announcement, quote Kalshee has become the definitive source for staying informed about the future and is used by reporters, politicians, pundits, Wall street and Main Street. It recently called the New York City mayoral election eight minutes after polls closed hours before the media. It's because of this accuracy that that Kalsh's data will serve as a powerful complement to CNN's reporting. Journalists can more easily surface credible information to their audiences about the real time probabilities of future cultural and political events, unquote. In practice, this reporting mixes gambling data and actually reputable or credible polls in a confusing way. Like this recent CNN segment which cites calciods on whether Trump will send tariff stimulus checks as well as CBS YouGov polling data on if tariffs lower prices. Back to back in the same segment.
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Do they think that the tariffs that these rebate checks are actually coming? And at this point, no, no, I mean chance Trump tariffs, the tariff stimulus checks are sent to Americans by August of 2026. It's a 25% chance. That's a one in four. So that's not nothing. But the American people right now are craving, craving some relief. And at this point it doesn't look like it is coming. Although I will note John Berman this 25%, it is greater than this 6% who say that tariffs decrease prices or that 5% back in March which are just you never see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5%. So look, 25% ain't nothing, but at this point it's low. Yeah, it's interesting the prediction markets think that only 11 in 4 chance that it will actually happen there.
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B
Is this really what the future of political forecasting is going to be? Maybe, maybe not. But there are four horsemen of this political gambling apocalypse. Nate Silver, via his gamification of election predictions based on his time as a professional gambler sports betting especially since the Supreme Court struck down a federal law banning sports betting outside of Nevada in 2018, resulting in almost 40 states subsequently legalizing some form of sports betting, which has facilitated the accessibility of gambling to grow dramatically across the country the past 10 years through the spread of online sports betting apps. The third horseman is Trump or the Trump administration through their removal of regulatory hurdles facing prediction markets. And finally, that CNN guy, Harry Enton, a Nate Silver protege who trailblazed the use of political gambling data in news stories the past year. These four horsemen Nate Silver Sports betting Trump and Harry Anton have created the cultural and political conditions for political gambling to spread like wildfire. Which hey, is also something you can bet on. During the L A fires, prediction market users could bet on how many acres would burn. So what is the end game of this, this gambling apocalypse that seems to be inching its way closer and closer? To answer that, here's a clip from Kalshee co founder and CEO Tarek Mansur.
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The long term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.
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B
We are living in a world where.
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A
Like we, we have an abundance of information, but there's a lot of noise and like we don't really understand what's real from what's not. And prediction markets are an antidote to that.
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B
They do a very, very good job.
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A
At distilling information and surfacing truth to people.
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B
And you're seeing this sort of massive.
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Shift where like people are using them.
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B
Whenever they think about questions about the.
- [41:27]
A
Future, you know, whenever they're debating about anything. And I think that trajectory is going to keep going. That's a new consumer habit that I don't think is going to be undone.
- [41:35]
B
This is the demon child of crypto and sports betting, this financialization of everything to form a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion, creating new addictive consumer habits. These companies want to apply the logic of smartphone sports betting to everything where everyone gets to be their own little Nate Silver while carrying around their own digital casino in their pocket, getting addicted to gambling on speculation of world suffering. And CNN is complicit in this. CNN and others have decided to partner with platforms that enable the people who decide when to drop bombs around the world to win millions of dollars by betting money on the choices they themselves are making at the expense of the rest of the world. And these companies think this is a good thing because the betting odds can serve as a potential heads up that something is likely to happen. Simple consumer protections for users, which currently are non existent, are just not enough. Congress needs to be far more involved in regulating online betting and in the case of political events, it should just be completely banned. It is detrimental to a healthy society. It incentivizes corruption, cruelty and erodes public trust. Gambling doesn't need to go away entirely, but it should return to being time and location locked. Go to Las Vegas like a fucking adult. Currently there is no existing mechanism for individual states to regulate prediction markets. Only the federal government can. And Trump's federal government certainly seems like it's not going to considering the President's son works for both of the main platforms, Kalshi and Poly Market. And while news companies are legitimizing this, these platforms are now working as their own news aggregators. Specifically polymarket social media account, which is acting as a news aggregation account because that drives traffic back to their website, where people can bet on the news stories that Polymarket is sharing, even if those news stories are speculative or completely made up. On December 5th, Polymarket posted quote justin suspected j6 pipe bombers legal counsel projected to argue he was included in Trump's pardon of Those involved in January 6th, unquote. This claim subsequently spread all around the Internet, parroted by people of a variety of political orientations. But if you read closely, the original Post says suspected J6 pipe bombers legal counsel projected to argue he was included in Trump's pardon. Polymarket is just spreading gambling information as if it is news content, quote unquote projected just means that Polymarket users are betting on this. But these projected posts are mixed in with other posts just aggregating the day's news. So unless you are paying super close attention, which rarely people on the Internet are, this becomes a Trojan horse of disinformation. When news companies use the term projected on election night, usually that indicates with pretty clear mathematical certainty that an event is going to happen. When Polymarket uses projected in news tweets, it only indicates that Internet gamblers are swinging around money in an effort to create truth with once legitimate news companies, not just complicit, but active participants in this process. That does it for us today at It Could Happen Here. See you on the other side.
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It Could Happen Here is a production.
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Of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media.
- [45:36]
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Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts, you.
- [45:44]
A
Can now find sources for It Could.
- [45:45]
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Happen here, listed directly in Episode Descriptions.
- [45:48]
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Thanks for listening. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.