How Polymarket Made Fake Bets Go Viral

Summary

Episode Summary: "How Polymarket Made Fake Bets Go Viral"

Podcast: The Journal.
Hosts: Ryan Knudsen and Jessica Mendoza
Date: July 6, 2026

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Main Theme

This episode uncovers how Polymarket, a leading online prediction market, fueled its explosive popularity by leveraging viral videos that showcased fake high-stakes wins. Through a collaborative investigation, Journal reporters Caitlin Ostroff and Katherine Long reveal the mechanisms behind the creation and dissemination of these deceptive videos and explore the broader implications for online advertising, social media trust, and regulation of prediction markets.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Viral Polymarket Videos Phenomenon

• Videos on Social Media: The episode kicks off with a breakdown of the viral videos depicting young users (often college-age men) easily winning thousands of dollars by betting on Polymarket—even on trivial events like "Will Trump say 'hat' this week?"
  Notable Quote:
  • “Bro, what will Trump say? 25%, bro. He has to.” – Ryan Knudsen (00:04)
• Glamorous Portrayal: Featured users like Hai Ing Nguyen flaunt their apparent Polymarket wealth, with videos showing lavish lifestyles.
  Memorable Moment:
  • In one video, she's dancing on a beach with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. The text overlaying the video says, polymarket funds my life. – Caitlin Ostroff (01:51)

2. The Investigation: Digging Into the Data

• Suspicious Patterns: Ostroff and Long notice recurring templates and implausible winning streaks.
• Attempt to Trace Bets: Since all Polymarket trades are on a public blockchain, they try to match video “winners” to real wallet transactions but find no evidence of such massive wins.
• Revelation through a Typo: A key breakthrough occurs when a colleague notices that video creators navigate to "poiimarket.com" (with an 'i' instead of an 'l'), a password-protected fake site mimicking Polymarket’s interface.
  Memorable Discovery:
  • “After we discovered poiimarket, we started noticing small inconsistencies between the websites the creators were using and Polymarket.com's actual interface.” – Caitlin Ostroff (08:35)

3. Exposing the Fakery

• Discrepancies and Errors: Examples include incorrect interface labels (“nir” instead of “no”) and manipulated timelines—such as users reacting to political speeches out of sequence.
• No Real Wins: The investigators demonstrate that, in aggregate, if the bets shown were placed for real, users would have actually lost significant money. Data Point:
  • If those users had actually made all of those bets, like that fake McDonald's one, they would have lost $166,000. – Ryan Knudsen (10:36)
• Reporter Reaction:
  Notable Quotes:
  • “I was in shock. I was like, what a horrible time to live on social media.” – Katherine Long (11:11)
  • “Is this just social media these days? Can I believe anything that I see online?” – Caitlin Ostroff (11:17)

4. The Role of Paid Promotion and “Clipping”

• Paid Creators: Some creators admit to being paid $2,000–$3,000/month after being contacted.
• Clipping Campaign: Reporters find Polymarket was working with a third-party marketing firm, Virality, employing “clippers” (global contractors, often teenagers) to boost the spread of these fake videos and create the illusion of grassroots buzz.
  Explanation:
  • “The goal of clipping is to create this appearance of a groundswell of organic interest in a product or a brand.” – Caitlin Ostroff (15:43)
• Training Materials: Incidentally, training guides on faking accounts and making videos “look organic” are found in the open. Memorable Moment:
  • “A bunch of instructional materials for the clippers were just sitting there entirely out in the open.” – Katherine Long (16:30)

5. Scale and Impact

• Campaign Reach: The campaign’s scale is staggering; original videos garnered 10–15 million views, but with “clipping” their reach shot up to 140 million.
• Global Teenage Army: Many clippers were teens in Asia, using tips to make their content appear as if from the US—sometimes as young as 14.

6. Legal and Regulatory Fallout

• Federal Laws: While US law prohibits deceptive advertising, Polymarket’s main platform is now offshore, complicating enforcement.
• Regulatory Investigations: The CFTC, which has already banned Polymarket’s crypto-based betting in the US, is prompted by the investigation to consider further scrutiny. Senators have also called for formal inquiries. Quotes:
  • “Reporting, like the Journal’s, was what made it more important for offshore prediction markets to come back to the United States where they could be more effectively regulated.” – Caitlin Ostroff (19:05)
• FTC Silence: The FTC declines comment on potential investigations.

7. The Real Odds: Who Really Wins on Polymarket?

• Losing Odds for Most: Data shows 70% of users lose money; profits generally accrue to a tiny group (small hedge funds/trading firms). Data Point:
  • “About two thirds of the profits on polymarket go to 0.1% of users.” – Ryan Knudsen (20:48)
• Predominantly Young Male Audience: The primary target is young men, who are most likely to lose money, unlike the successful personas portrayed in viral videos.

8. The Ongoing Problem

• Continuing Fakes: Even after exposure, similar fake videos about events like the 2026 World Cup persist—frequently featuring glaring factual errors but still garnering large audiences. Example:
  • A video claims a $1,000 bet on Saudi Arabia (with Cristiano Ronaldo) could win a million, though Ronaldo plays for Portugal and Saudi Arabia lost early.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• On the Video Format:

  • “Bro, this is crazy.” – Ryan Knudsen (00:45)
  • “They purport to make tens of thousands, sometimes more of dollars. And for college students, that is an insane amount of money.” – Katherine Long (01:20)

• Discovery of Fakery:

  • “Literally none.” – Katherine Long, when asked how much of the videos were real (02:32)
  • “The whole thing looked very real. But no real money was ever placed on any of these bets.” – Katherine Long (10:29)
  • “Is this just social media these days? Can I believe anything that I see online?” – Caitlin Ostroff (11:17)

• On the Mechanics of Deception:

  • “Here’s how you warm it up. Here’s how your profile should look. Here’s how you make your videos seem organic and not like they’re … brand promotional content.” – Caitlin Ostroff (16:43)
  • “Turns out paying a legion of teenagers in Asia to repost clips is effective marketing.” – Ryan Knudsen (18:10)

• Regulatory Context:

  • “Subsequently, two senators called on the CFTC to investigate, based on our reporting. And we also learned that the CFTC has an ongoing investigation into Polymarket.” – Caitlin Ostroff (19:25)

• On Actual User Outcomes:

  • “Most people lose money on polymarket.” – Caitlin Ostroff (20:32)
  • “The primary audience for people to gamble, whether it’s sports betting or prediction markets, is young men.” – Katherine Long (21:06)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 00:04–01:51: Viral videos description and the surface-level appearance of easy money on Polymarket
• 02:31–04:34: Early skepticism and the investigative approach
• 06:07–08:46: Tracing the money and interface discrepancies
• 09:12–10:36: Discovering timeline manipulations and aggregate “losses”
• 11:17–12:27: Social media trust and creator outreach
• 14:01–16:43: Polymarket’s competitive context & marketing tactics, including clipping
• 17:31–18:10: Clipping’s scope, global labor, and targeting US users
• 18:10–19:25: Regulatory reaction, CFTC/FTC, and continuing legal limbo
• 20:32–21:14: Hard data on user losses and profit concentration

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Conclusion

Through detailed reporting and digital sleuthing, this episode reveals an elaborate, globally orchestrated campaign of video fakery designed to make Polymarket look like a gold mine for the average bettor, while in reality the odds are stacked against typical users. The system exploited social media virality, global gig labor, and regulatory loopholes—raising challenging questions about truth in advertising, the power of digital marketing, and the commodification of online trust. Fake bets may have gone viral, but the only guaranteed winners were the marketers and a tiny fraction of algorithm-savvy traders.

Transcript

[Ryan Knudsen]

Bro, what will Trump say? Barack Hussein Obama this week. 25%, bro. He has to. There are these videos you might have seen on TikTok or Instagram. They all follow the same kind of pattern. There's often someone who looks like a college student on their computer looking at the betting site Poly Market.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

They have tens of thousands of dollars, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars in their Poly Market account. They place a bet.

[Ryan Knudsen]

The bets often seem trivial, like, will Donald Trump say a certain word by a certain day? And the people in the videos make it seem like you're being let in on a secret. Bro, what will Trump say?

[Caitlin Ostroff]

Hat.

[Sponsor Voice 1]

This week?

[Ryan Knudsen]

35%, bro. This is crazy.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

They press the buy button, Confetti explodes across their screen. Then the camera cuts to them in front of a television. They're watching Donald Trump give a speec speech.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Stiff guy, you're a shit. He'll take other things, but not a free hat. There it is. It happened. Trump said hat.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

They jump up. They scream with joy. They're so excited. They've just won money.

[Sponsor Voice 2]

Yes.

[Katherine Long]

Yes.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Our colleague Katherine Long has been covering prediction markets along with data reporter Caitlin Ostroff. And in the videos, these people will make winning look easy. Here's Caitlin.

[Katherine Long]

They purport to make tens of thousands, sometimes more of dollars. And for college students, that is an insane amount of money.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Yeah, for anybody, that's a lot of money.

[Katherine Long]

For anybody, that's a lot of money. But especially for college students, you know, you're.

[Ryan Knudsen]

You're covering rent and you're throwing a really good party.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

Yeah, it's a lot of Chipotle bowls,

[Ryan Knudsen]

but it's not just Chipotle bowl money. In the videos, Polymarket looks like a side hustle, or even a main hustle. Take one woman named Hai Ing Nguyen.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

She lives in San Francisco. She's in her mid-20s, and she appears to have this glamorous life based on her Polymar Market earnings. And one video, she's dancing on a beach with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. And the text overlaying the video says, polymarket funds my life. And videos show her Polymarket account appears to have tens of thousands of dollars in it. That means she's. She's sitting on a lot of cash.

[Ryan Knudsen]

In another video, she's wearing a gown. Text on screen says, I could literally kiss the rich man that showed me this. Then it cuts to her trading on Polymarket. And so you did an investigation, and what did you discover about these videos?

[Caitlin Ostroff]

We discovered that none of it was real.

[Katherine Long]

Literally none.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Welcome to the Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Ryan knudsen. It's Monday, July 6th. Coming up on the show, how Polymarket made fake bets go viral.

[Sponsor Voice 2]

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[Ryan Knudsen]

As they dove into the brave new world of prediction markets, Catherine and Caitlin have been spending a lot of time together.

[Katherine Long]

To quote a phrase I've previously used, trauma bonded at this point, probably, or

[Caitlin Ostroff]

joined at the hip. I believe you. You said recently in a text message. Yes, but Caitlyn's the, Caitlin's the real data whiz on the team, and Katherine

[Katherine Long]

has the ability to find stuff that no one else does. So it's, it's a dual effort.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

I love going down a rabbit hole. It's one thing about me.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Prediction markets let you bet on everything from who will win an election to whether it'll rain tomorrow to whether Jesus will return to Earth by 2027. They've been around in some form for a couple decades, but online platforms like Polymarket are a recent phenomenon. Here's Caitlin.

[Katherine Long]

These are companies that have really scaled up over the last two years. Polymarket and its rival Kalshi both are valued at tens of billions of dollars. It's attracted huge money from investors.

[Ryan Knudsen]

We should say that Polymarket has a data partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. While reporting on Polymarket, Catherine and Kaitlin kept coming across these videos. They showed regular people, usually college aged, usually men, amassing huge wallets on Polymarket, which seemed kind of unlikely because, remember, this is essentially gambling. No one actually knows the future. And these videos seem to follow a template. They'd start with A similar hook.

[Sponsor Voice 3]

Bro.

[Sponsor Voice 2]

Bro. Bro.

[Sponsor Voice 1]

Bro.

[Sponsor Voice 3]

What?

[Sponsor Voice 1]

Bro. What?

[Ryan Knudsen]

Bro, What? Wait, what? As the bet was placed, there'd be a moment of disbelief and suspense. Bro, there'. Wait, this is real right now. Wait, this has to be free money, right? What the. And then if they won a celebration. There were literally hundreds of videos like this. They didn't look like ads per se, but they definitely made Polymarket look good.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

We weren't sure whether they were being paid by Polymarket, but they seemed to post a lot about Polymarket and they seem to be making a lot of money on Polymarket.

[Ryan Knudsen]

These videos made Kaitlin and Catherine curious what was going on here. To get to the bottom of it, they thought maybe they could follow the money.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

We were wondering if we could find their wallets, basically, and see how much money they were actually making.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Their crypto wallets, to be exact. Because Polymarket uses crypto for all of its trades, every single bet is technically public, kept on a virtual ledger called the blockchain. These incredibly lucky bets should be findable, right?

[Katherine Long]

Like, could we find the actual trades? Could we understand, you know, the mechanics of how that was happening?

[Ryan Knudsen]

So that's an incredible question. Walk me through how you started reporting this out.

[Katherine Long]

So back in 2024, when I had started looking at Polymarket, I had started building this database of all of the trades that exist on Polymarket. Sometimes I hoard data just to see if it comes in handy in the future. This is one of those cases.

[Ryan Knudsen]

It's the same thing I say about white T shirts.

[Katherine Long]

Exactly. Sometimes things just come in handy.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Yeah, exactly. So she started searching her database using information from the videos, what day the bet was placed, how much money was

[Katherine Long]

won, and again and again, we could not find anything.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Caitlin worried that her database was incomplete, that she'd been hoarding useless data. But then she and Catherine got a text.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

I'd left the office and I got a text on my phone from our colleague Neil, who was banging his head against the wall going through some of these videos. And he said, guys, I figured it out. I just watched a video where instead of entering the URL, polymarket.com, the creator actually goes to a website called poii

[Ryan Knudsen]

market.com as in P O I Y instead of P O L Y.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

That's right, yeah.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Uh huh. Which, by the way, I mean, a capital I looks a lot like an L. It's indistinguishable.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

Yeah.

[Ryan Knudsen]

So then did you immediately type in poi?

[Katherine Long]

Oh, yeah. And what did you type in Polymarket

[Ryan Knudsen]

on our phones and what did you find when you pulled up that website?

[Caitlin Ostroff]

It goes to this password protected page.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Katherine and Kaitlin had assumed the video showed real bets on polymarket.com, but with this discovery, they had just learned that the creators were using a fake version of the site.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

After we discovered poi e market, we started noticing small inconsistencies between the websites the creators were using and Polymarket.com's actual interface, their actual website.

[Ryan Knudsen]

For example, the fake site would sometimes have a citation on the page saying source polymarket.com but the real site doesn't have that. It doesn't need to cite itself.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

There are other sort of small glitches, too. I mean, we noticed in some of the videos the buttons where you click buy. Usually those buttons say yes or no. In some of the videos that we saw, they didn't say yes or no. They would. They would say, you know, yes and then the name of the team or an abbreviation for the team.

[Ryan Knudsen]

In one video of a bet on a sporting event, the button that should say no actually said nir. For the Northern Ireland soccer team being bet on. It looked like a stupid coding error. As Catherine and Caitlin looked closer at the videos themselves, they noticed more fishiness. Take this one by a business student in Vancouver, Canada, named George Makahara. Trump say McDonald's in January. He appears to place a $1,000 bet on whether Trump will say the word McDonald's in January. Then the video cuts to Makahara watching Trump give a speech.

[Katherine Long]

Good deal as usual.

[Ryan Knudsen]

But, you know, in the old days, McDonald's.

[Sponsor Voice 2]

Yo.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Makahara jumps out of his seat. In the video, it looks like he's just won $100,000. In reality, that Trump speech took place in two months earlier, in November, not January. In dozens of the videos, the timeline of events was manipulated, showing creators reacting to things that actually happened weeks or months in the past. And they weren't actually making bets at all. They were just recreating the appearance of an instance in which somebody won.

[Katherine Long]

Yes.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

Yeah, that's right.

[Katherine Long]

It was all fake. Like, the whole thing looked very real. But no real money was ever placed on any of these bets.

[Ryan Knudsen]

If you added up all the bets made in these videos, in this alternate reality, it looked like the users made more than $900,000 in total. But in the real world, Kaitlin and Katherine crunched the numbers, and if those users had actually made all of those bets, like that fake McDonald's one, they would have lost $166,000. So not only did they not win. They would have actually lost had they actually done the thing that they were showing.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

That's right, yes.

[Ryan Knudsen]

I mean, what were you thinking as you were making these discoveries?

[Caitlin Ostroff]

Actually, I don't know what I was thinking. I was just kind of stunned. I was in disbelief.

[Katherine Long]

I was in shock. I was like, what a horrible time to live on social media.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

One thing I thought a lot about during this reporting was, is this just social media these days? Can I believe anything that I see online? Is it all just undisclosed advertisements at this point?

[Ryan Knudsen]

After discovering all this, Kaelyn and Catherine started reaching out to the video creators themselves. After being contacted, some put polymarket Partner in their posts or they took them down. Some said they were paid about 2 to $3,000 a month for these posts. The users we mentioned, George Makahara and Hyein Nguyen, both declined to comment. After Kaitlyn and Catherine reached out to polymarket, that fake website POI market, the one with an I instead of an L, was taken down. The company said in a statement that it was, quote, committed to maintaining accurate, fair and transparent markets. We are part of a rapidly growing industry and are constantly evaluating ways to improve how we're engaging and earning the trust of our audience. End quote. So why was polymarket doing all of this? That's next.

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[Ryan Knudsen]

Polymarket is one of the world's largest prediction markets, worth about $14 billion. But in the past year, it's seen some fierce competition.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

The two biggest prediction markets, Polymarket and Kalshi, are both in a head to head against each other. Interestingly, Polymarket, which started out sort of in the in the top spot, was overtaken by Kelshi when it comes to the volume traded on prediction markets last year. So Polymarket is maybe feeling a little, a little, a little bit of pressure. They're feeling threatened.

[Ryan Knudsen]

There's new competitors too. Robinhood and Fanduel have also launched prediction markets at the same time. Polymarket's main crypto based platform has technically been banned from operating in the US since 2022. Polymarket reincorporated that platform in Panama. The company recently released a separate US app, but it has far fewer users than its main site.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

In general, Polymarket is trying to grow as fast as possible and it knows that it's needs a constant stream of new users on the platform to make it profitable and fun for the existing users to trade.

[Ryan Knudsen]

To grow, Polymarket launched an aggressive marketing campaign and a big part of that was those videos where creators made fake bets and won loads of fake money. But Caitlin and Catherine soon realized that Polymarket didn't stop there. There's actually a whole other layer to this story. How did you discover that this clipping stuff was going on?

[Caitlin Ostroff]

We rabbit holed.

[Katherine Long]

We love the Internet.

[Ryan Knudsen]

The rabbit hole they went down was into a recent marketing phenomenon known as clipping.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

The goal of clipping is to create this appearance of a groundswell of organic interest in a product or a brand. It's this idea that all of a sudden out of nowhere, people are talking about this phenomenon.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Catherine started looking around for websites that recruit clippers from around the world and

[Caitlin Ostroff]

almost immediately I stumbled on a website that was recruiting clippers for Polymarket.

[Ryan Knudsen]

She discovered that Polymarket was working with a third party marketing company called Virality. Virality paid a global army of contractors to clip and share the fake Polymarket videos. On their journey down the rabbit hole, Kaitlyn and Katherine made another discovery online.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

And interestingly enough, a bunch of instructional materials for the clippers were just sitting

[Katherine Long]

there entirely out in the open.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Oh my God.

[Katherine Long]

So it was just sitting there.

[Ryan Knudsen]

They hit a gold mine. They found a bunch of training materials where Virality instructed its clippers on how to make fake accounts.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

Here's how you warm it up. Here's how your profile should look. Here's how you make your videos seem organic and not like they're brand brand promotional content.

[Ryan Knudsen]

The clippers then reposted the fake polymarket videos thousands of times, sometimes with new music or overlaid text. Virality declined to comment. In their digging, Catherine and Kaelyn also reviewed internal chat logs. They could see close to 20,000 messages between these clippers and Virality, the marketing firm, and something became very clear. The campaign was aimed at Americans. According to these materials, Virality only paid Clippers if at least 60% of their audience was in the US and in the chat logs, they could see clippers swapping tips on how to reach US Users.

[Katherine Long]

Like, they would say, well, are you using a US Phone number? Can you get a US SIM card? These are all of the ways in which you can try and make sure that your account is reaching a US Audience, even though you are a teenager sitting in Asia. And some of these people who were clippers would disclose that they were 14 years old and doing this.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

Yeah, there were a bunch of messages that were in Tagalog. You know, there were a bunch of messages about being a student in India. So it's pretty clear from the message logs that the clippers were mostly teens. They were mostly living in Asia, they weren't getting paid very much, and they were all swapping tips on how to make it seem like they were in

[Ryan Knudsen]

the U.S. turns out paying a legion of teenagers in Asia to repost clips is effective marketing on their own. The fake videos that Katelyn and Catherine reviewed got around 10 to 15 million views in total. With a clipping campaign, the videos racked up over 140 million views on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. That's according to the analytics provider tubular. That's 10 times the original reach. You might be wondering, aren't there laws against deceptive advertising? Yes, there are indeed. Federal law requires brands to be truthful about what they're promoting. Although there is some gray area. Caitlin and Catherine reached out to the U.S. commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC. That's the federal body that regulates prediction markets and enacted that US Polymarket ban in the first place.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

When we asked the CFTC about the findings in our story, they said that reporting, like the journals, was what made it more important for offshore prediction markets to come back to the United States. Where they could be more effectively regulated by the cftc.

[Ryan Knudsen]

In other words, the CFTC is saying like, well, they're kind of outside of our jurisdiction because they're not technically here.

[Caitlin Ostroff]

Yeah, that's right. Subsequently, two senators called on the CFTC to investigate, based on our reporting. And we also learned that the CFTC has an ongoing investigation into Polymarket.

[Ryan Knudsen]

What about the Federal Trade Commission? Doesn't the Federal Trade Commission regulate advertising?

[Caitlin Ostroff]

The Federal Trade Commission declined to comment, citing a policy of not commenting on potential investigations.

[Ryan Knudsen]

More broadly, the Trump administration has taken a relaxed approach to regulating prediction markets. Several states have tried to rein in those businesses, but the CFTC has sued to block those regulations. Trump recently called politicians who want the states to regulate these markets quote scum in a truth social post. Trump's son Don Jr. Is an investor in Polymarket. A spokesperson for Don Jr. Didn't respond to requests for comment. A White House spokesman said there are no conflicts of interest and that Trump acts in the best interests of the American public. Are these ads at all in any way an illustration of the kind of money that people can make on Polymarket?

[Caitlin Ostroff]

No, no. Most people lose money on polymarket.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Who does win money on polymarket?

[Caitlin Ostroff]

Almost nobody. Previously we reported that 70% of polymarket users lose money. That's based on Caitlin's incredible data analysis.

[Ryan Knudsen]

Kaitlin found that about two thirds of the profits on polymarket go to 0.1% of users. And those users tend to be small hedge funds and trading firms that are informed by reams of data. Meanwhile, the average better who's losing money looks a lot like the people in those fake videos.

[Katherine Long]

The primary audience for people to gamble, whether it's sports betting or prediction markets, is young men.

[Ryan Knudsen]

As Caitlin and Catherine were wrapping up their reporting, they started noticing a lot of new polymarket videos about the World Cup. Like the other men videos, they also showed trading on what appears to be a fake version of Polymarket. Wait, what? 2026 FIFA World cup winner? If I scroll all the way down, how does Saudi Arabia only have a 0.1% chance? Bro, they literally have Ronaldo. The young man types in a one thousand dollar bet. It showed a potential payout of a million dollars. But Cristiano Ronaldo actually plays for Portugal in the World Cup. Saudi Arabia was knocked out in the first round. That video is still up. That's all for today. Monday, July 6th. The Journal is a coproduction of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Neil Meta and Brenna Smith. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.