December 17, 2025 • 33 mins
Betting used to be something you did in a casino. Now it lives in your pocket and you can bet on just about anything: sports, Labubus, elections, and even forest fires. Dexter talks with Emily Stewart, senior correspondent at Business Insider, about why betting is everywhere, how any of it is legal, and if it’s changing how we experience real world events.
Got something you’re curious about? Hit us up killswitch@kaleidoscope.nyc, or @killswitchpod, or @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky.
Read:
- Emily’s article, “Everything’s casino”: https://www.businessinsider.com/kalshi-polymarket-fanduel-draftkings-sports-betting-gambling-2025-11
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
The first thing that comes for me was like this
pool where you could bet on the price of some
La Boo Boo release that's about to happen. You know,
Is it gonna be more than one hundred and twenty dollars?
Are they gonna be more than one hundred and thirty dollars?
It's like, I really was, like I can't imagine trying
to explain this to myself five years ago. But that's
(00:32):
where we're at.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider. One
of her beats is gambling, and that's been getting pretty
weird recently because people aren't just betting on sports now,
they're betting on real life. Okay, betting on whether or
not the next Lab Boo Boo job is gonna be
over or under one hundred and thirty dollars. Okay, you
(00:55):
don't know, I don't know. Some buddy has a friend
who works at Loo Boo Wu Incorporated or whatever it is,
and they know and they can just say, hey, look,
I'm about to put a g on one of these
size how much is it going to be? I'll split
(01:16):
it with you boom five hundred. That just seems right
for manipulations, insider trading, whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
The CEO of poly Market did an interview the other
day with Axios and they asked him about this.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Nobody is under the impression that nobody knows the answer, right,
And I think what's cool about polymarket is that it
creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge
the information to the market and the market to change.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
When you say divulge, you mean the people who actually know.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Yeah, or if someone tells someone and then the market responds.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
He kind of hinted at that, like this is sort
of the point of prediction markets. Like the idea is
that they are supposed to like predict right, like the
wisdom of the craft, et cetera, et cetera. So does
some extent. That's kind of the way it's supposed to go.
Your friend who works at lavoovo tells you, and then
(02:09):
you tell other people and like the crowd figures it
out right.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
That's why I wanted to talk to Emily. She's been
covering the rise of gambling for the past few years
and detailing this movement to turn everything into a casino,
and her latest article on this is titled appropriately enough,
Everything's Casino. You have a line in your article that
says the answer to, hey, is all of this activity
on prediction markets kosher seems to be shruggy emoticon and
(02:35):
shameless plug. You can also watch this show on YouTube
if you'd like to see this. But there is a
shruggy emoji on the screen right now, because that's probably
the best explanation I can think of. Where we're at
right now is like, I don't know, this.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Is like pretty stereotypical to say it, like, it's like
the Wild West a little bit right now, and it
has been for a while.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is kill.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
Switch, I'm dexter Thomas, i'morring, I'm goodbye.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
What would you say it was? It really started this
boom that we're in in gambling in the US right now.
Speaker 5 (03:52):
I do think a.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Lot of it does come to sports betting. Right So,
in twenty eighteen, the Supreme Court struck down a federal
law saying that sports gambling was illegal in the United States,
and then a bunch of states started to legalize it.
And you know, they say that they have good reasons
for this, that it's a good source of tax revenue.
Never mind that tax revenue goes to like gambling addiction programs.
(04:16):
But they start to see that this is a waiter
is money, and right now in the thirty eight states
have legalized sports gambling.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Over the past few years, sports betting in the US
has exploded close to one in four Americans who participated
in sports betting over the last year. And all that
betting last year generated about thirteen point seven billion dollars
in revenue for the sports betting companies obviously, and the
overall betting market is projected to reach over sixty billion
dollars by the end of the decade. So who are
(04:44):
these betting companies. Well, for all intents and purposes, there's
basically two. FanDuel and DraftKings. Together they control about eighty
percent of the US market. Both of these companies started
out as apps for fantasy sports, where you make up
pretend sports teams to compete against your friends and pretend
sports teams you know, fun little howy while you watch
the game. But after the Supreme Court opened the door
(05:05):
to legal sports betting, both those companies pivoted fast.
Speaker 5 (05:10):
So basically in like twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Sports gambling started in New York and it was like
literally everywhere, you could not escape it. It was really
like on every ad, on every channel. And also what
a lot of these companies were doing was giving you
like free money to bet with and so a lot
of people did that and I made like three hundred
and four hundred dollars off of it. I knew people
(05:33):
who made like three thousand dollars off of it.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Oh so you partook, I partook.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
And I will say a lot of these companies have
stopped giving those away because people figured out how to
gain them. It was just one of those things where
like sports gambling was everywhere, and I was like, well,
what's all the hullabaloo about?
Speaker 5 (05:48):
And it felt like every bar, every sporting event.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
You know, you go to a basketball game now and
there's a group of twenty year olds in front.
Speaker 5 (05:55):
Of you who are on FanDuel placing bets.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
When most people thought about gamblers, you'd have these images
of casinos in Las Vegas, maybe people wearing some Oceans
eleven type suits, people gathered around a poker table, or
maybe just someone chain smoking in front of a slot machine.
But today a realistic picture of a gambler is a
little different. It's mostly just someone staring at their phone.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Your phone's right in your pocket. It's real easy to do,
it's real fun to do. Gambling is entertainment. Gambling is
a form of fun, and it is a way I think,
you know, for young men to bond. And what we're
seeing now, especially with sports betting, is it's really been
embraced kind of by everyone, you know, like the announcers
are listing out there.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Parlays, Okay, A parlay is a bet that links multiple
small bets together, So like you could bet that your
team will win, or you could bet that your team
will win and that they'll win in double overtime and
that the winning point will be a field goal. There's
a pretty small chance of all that happening in a chain,
but if all those bets do come true, the payout
(06:55):
can be huge. Sports leagues in the US used to
really resist betting that were that it would impact the
integrity of the game, but illegal betting markets continue to
grow and the leagues started to change their tomb I am.
Speaker 5 (07:08):
A Packer fan.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
R I'm from Wisconsin, like, so usually I would just
watch like the Packer game right, But if I'm betting
on all of these games, suddenly you know, these guys
are watching all Sunday, They're watching every single game, and
that's happening too on Saturday when they're betting on college sports.
A big part of what's happening here is like everybody's
figured out that this is a big way to make money,
(07:29):
and all these sports leagues that were kind of like
icked about it have suddenly recognized the opportunity.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
When you open one of these apps, it's got pretty
much every sports league you'd expect listed across the top.
There's the NFL, the MLB, the NBA, the UFC, along
with some leagues that you probably not only didn't realize
that you could bet on, but that you probably didn't
even realize exist. Tap into those leagues and it drops
you into a menu of games that are happening right now.
(07:56):
The odds are updating in real time, and there's flashy
promos trying to pull you into a bet. And for example,
if you're watching an NBA game on League Pass, you
can actually sink your fan Duel account so that your
live bets show up right on the screen as you
watch the whole experience is built to keep you exploring,
keep you tapping, and keep you betting.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
They're honestly well designed. I'll go in and open it up.
In it like lists out for me, like what are
live games? Maybe I just wanted to gamble on I
don't know, like the Chiefs this weekend, but I wonder
what's going on now so I can get that kind
of like instant gratification quick hit. And they also do
try to entice you to take like harder bets to win,
(08:38):
but they offer like a bonus. So let's say you
do like a five game parlay or whatever, but you
would win extra if you were to win, but like
the odds are very very low that you are.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Going to win. There's even social pages that show the
bets that your friends are making. It makes betting something
social so that you check in on it like you
check social media. A lot of the things that you're
describing are things that you see on TikTok or things
that you see on Instagram. It can figure out something
that Okay, you're interested in betting off football games, how
(09:11):
about you bet on this baseball game.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
When I recorded on this last year, I talked to
an expert who kind of like compared some of these
apps to like dating apps or even you know, like
a thought machine. Right, it's like very solitary activity and
it's just kind of like endless. If you're on a
baseball game, you can bet on every pitch. Like I
have a good friend here in New York who I
think has like a flight gambling problem, but not the biggest,
And sometimes I'll look over at him and we'll be
(09:35):
at a bar and watching a game and I realize,
like he's betting on every single pitch that's going to happen,
or he'll ask me, do you think this is going
to be a touchdown or not?
Speaker 5 (09:44):
And he's like, not a sports guy, just like scambling.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
So maybe you're not a sports guy, or let's just
keep it gender neutral. Maybe you're not into sports. Well
that's okay, because these sports gambling apps have realized that
they can keep making money off of you by expanding
the things beyond sports.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
So last year DraftKings they bought a lottery company, right,
and you're like, well, wait, what's kind of like an
online lottery? And that's because again, like, okay, we got
you into sports gambling, but maybe like, oh you we
like the lottery too, or even like you know, Caesars
and MGM have sports betting apps, and what's going on
(10:22):
with the casinos is like their population is aging, right,
like a lot of like twenty two year olds or not.
Maybe hitting up Vegas certainly not Atlantic City, but it's
a way to get you in the door. Maybe you
start sports betting and suddenly they say like, hey, why
don't you come visit us in Las Vegas, and hey,
now you're a member of our little rewards club or whatever.
I was talking to this guy named Chris Grove who's
(10:43):
like a gambling investor out in Las Vegas.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
And he made a point to me.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
He was like, you know a lot of these companies
are betting that once you've bet on one thing, you'll
bet on another thing. That is really really played out
where I think Americans have gotten sort of, you know,
a real taste for them, and it really shows up everywhere. Right.
Speaker 5 (11:02):
Once you get a taste for it, you start to
figure why not.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
And you know, if the prediction markets right now are
really spreading in the United States, and that's wheally he
predict event outcomes, and they're really jumping in on sports
gambling because that's a good like it's not a gateway drug,
but it's a gateway to something.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
The gateway to gambling on everything. That's where prediction markets
come in, and we'll get into how those are taken
over and kind of eating sports betting's lunch after the break.
So in twenty twenty four, in the lead up to
(11:42):
the US presidential election, we started to see a new
trend in gambling betting on real world events.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
The thing that is undeniable was the night of the election,
poly market was the first destination to basically convey that's
trumpet one.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
That's Shane Copeland, the CEO of Paul, the same guy
from that Axios interview that we played earlier.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
We were in the office and we were looking at
the odds and it looked like a done deal. And
if you were just watching TV, you would think it's
neck and neck.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
These companies like do have this high minded thing of
we want to focus on the wisdom of the crowds
and people will put their money where their mouth is
in politics. They will say this is actually a better
indicator than the polls because people are actually like investing
their money in this.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Prediction markets sell shares and answers to questions about the future.
So if you think something will happen, you buy yes shares.
If you think it won't happen, you buy no shares.
As more people trade, the prices move up and down,
and those prices work like odds about how likely the
event is. So let me just give you some examples
from right now when I'm recording this episode. Here's one.
(12:51):
Do you think that Trump will use the word communism
this week, either in a press conference or online? If
you do, you can bet on it. Current markets are
predicting sixty six percent odds of that happening. Okay, here's
another one. Do you think that Zoron Mumdani will be
Times Person of the Year. So there's actually a potential
leverage opportunity here because the markets say only two percent yes.
(13:13):
Or you can go with the safer bet, go with
the crowd because sixty four percent of people are betting
yes to artificial intelligence being the person of the year.
Or if you just bet on the weather, you can
bet on whether or not the temperature will hit between
forty six and forty seven degrees fahrenheit today in New York.
If it doesn't make it, there or if it goes
higher than that, you lose all your money and so on.
(13:35):
You get the idea. So where do you make these bets? Well,
right now there's two main players and prediction markets kal
She and Polymarket.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
They're both pretty new, like pandemic era things. Kalshi is
right now up and running in the US. You can
go on and use it. Poly Market was in the
US for a while and then got into some hot water,
and twenty twenty two they're on their way back right now.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Polymarket had to stop operating in the United States in
twenty twenty two because they were running without proper registration.
But in twenty twenty five they just bought a derivative
exchange that had just gotten an approved registration from the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which could pave the way for
them to operate again legally in the United States. And Okay,
that was a whole lot of mumbo jumbo. So let's
(14:21):
just get to the point here. How is it that
these things can be legal?
Speaker 1 (14:26):
The way that they say they are legal is not
that like laws of regulations have changed, but basically they
seem to have found a loophole to say that they
should be regulated by the Commodities Features Trading Commissions, the CFTC,
because traditionally, like gambling has really been regulated by the states,
and they say, actually, like we're doing events contracts, we're
(14:50):
doing a different thing, and the CFTC says whether or
not we should exist, and Trump's CFTC has basically said
sounds good.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Or to summarize all that, under federal law, a platform
like call she can operate because they're registered to something
called a designated contract market. In that framework, their bets
aren't treated like casino gambling. They're treated more like financial contracts,
as in, you and I agree to sign a contract
where if this happens, you pay me, and if that happens,
(15:19):
I pay you. Just on a bigger scale.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Polymarket is about to get an investment of up to
two billion dollars from the parent company of the New
York Stock Exchange. I think both of them have involvement
from dollars from juniors, and then the president and family
are involved in prediction markets, they're in crypto, They are
involved in some of this stuff for sure.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
And they're only getting more popular. As of December, call
Shee was valued at eleven billion dollars, and Polymarket is
rumored to be not too far behind that. And part
of what's fueling that growth is the regulatory gap that
has allowed call she for now at least, to offer
these event based contracts and sports even in states where
traditional sports betting is banned.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Right now, if you're in a state where sports gambling
is not legal, I was just in the Midwest and Wisconsin,
sports gambling is not allowed there, members of my family
go across the border to Illinois, where it is allowed,
and sports gamble like your phone knows where you are
right what kelshe has says they figured out and eventually
Polymarket they say, like, we are not subject to these
(16:22):
state regulations. We are regulated by the CFTC. CFTC says
we can exist in all fifty states. And so if
you're in California, where sports betting is not allowed in
Texas other states, you can go on to calshe and
there will be something on there that says, you know, well,
ex team win tomorrow, yes, no, and you can do that.
(16:44):
They say it's not gambling. They kind of will hedge
on whether it's betting. Kelshy's gone into some hot water
because for a while they were advertising saying that you
can now sports bet in California, and they say, like
that was an oops, and vendor did it and that
wasn't our fault.
Speaker 5 (17:02):
But everybody I talked to for the story we've been
talking about it's like this gambling. It's a little silly
to pretend like this is not what it is.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Call she has different modes, including a sports fan mode
that makes the interface look almost identical to apps like
FanDuel and DraftKings. And remember when I said earlier that federally,
call she can operate, but on the state level, some
jurisdictions are not having it. Just recently, the state of
Connecticut issued a cease and desist arguing that call she
was effectively offering sports betting without a license. Call she countersuit,
(17:36):
saying that the Commodities Exchange Act says that they're in
the clear. And beyond sports betting, these apps are making
their way into anything that can be gambled on or gamified,
including the stock market, which honestly was already getting pretty gamified. Robinhood,
the stock trading app, has recently partnered with call she
to allow NFL and college football trading all inside the
(17:56):
Robin hood app One of the reasons I really wanted
to talk to is your article, which is entitled Everything's
Casino brilliant title. I want to read a little bit
from the first paragraph here. I thought the Stock Exchange
guys were supposed to be the serious ones in the room,
helping communities grow and people save for retirement, not teaming
(18:17):
up with the guys who let you guess when the
US government will admit that aliens exist. But this is
the reality of the Year of Our Lord twenty twenty five.
Americans have a growing appetite for leaving their fortunes to
the fates, and businesses are eager to capitalize.
Speaker 5 (18:32):
And to be fair the aliens.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
You can place that bet on both poly Mark and Kelshi.
My editor was like, you have to be joking, and
I was like, no, well you you.
Speaker 5 (18:42):
Can guess it.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
And so I think there is just like this real
confluence here of like the serious people have kind of
realized like there's money to be made off of the
on serious stuff. You know, you think back to like
the game stop stuff for a lot of people was
like pretty fun, but some people really want to end
all right.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
In case you don't remember the game Stop Saga. In
twenty twenty one, a bunch of investors on Reddit started
buying up shares of game Stop, this store that sells
video games, and they sent the prices of those shares
up over sixteen hundred percent in just a few weeks.
Some people made a lot of money, other people lost
a lot of money. Robinhood blocked people from being able
to buy the stock for a while, which was a
whole other thing. There's multiple documentaries about it. Basically it
(19:25):
was a mess, and most of that really had almost
nothing to do with the actual store that sells video games.
It was pretty much just gambling.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
You look at the crypto market, right and like you
have people out there will say, like yes, like bitcoin matters,
and there's underline whatever. But like if you're I don't know,
if you're investing in like fart coin, like it is
not because you believe in like the ongoing value of
fart coin, like I certainly hope not, you know what
I mean. It's because like you think that like some
(19:58):
other guy is gonna pay more for it, hopefully later,
and like you can kind of get out of the
scam before you get got by the scam.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Everybody scamming each other.
Speaker 5 (20:07):
Everybody scamming each other.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Everybody thinks that like, well, maybe I can ride it
up type situation. And I think, really, like these companies
have realized there is a huge appetite for it, and
like once people get an appetite, like they're going to
engage in more and more and more. And I think
that's where like there's real harm. Like I remember when
kind of like the day trading stuff was really taking
off during the pandemic, and I would talk to people
(20:30):
who'd gotten into like options trading, and the story was
always the same. It was like I did a few
and I thought I was a stock market genius. That
I did a few more, and I got wiped out.
And like that's what happens at the casino, right, Like
you hit on a couple and then you're up and
you should walk away, but you don't, and then you
(20:50):
lose it all and you get wiped out.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Recently, the co founder of Calls, Trek Mansur, said this
to the long term vision is to financialize everything and
create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion,
that long term vision is kind of already here. In
just the last few weeks, call she signed deals with
major news networks, first CNN and then CNBC to bring
real time prediction market data directly into their news coverage.
(21:15):
The CNN deal gives them real time access to data
on call sheet and as Axios reports quote, that data
will be featured on CNN's air through a real time
data ticker and can be referenced across CNN's platforms when
journalists discuss news predictions. In quote, the CNBC partnership looks
pretty similar. Call She's data is going to be featured
(21:35):
on business news programs like squawk Box and Fast Money.
They'll also have a dedicated call she on air ticker
and a page on the website. As call She's co
founder puts it, this is quote the next evolution, moving
from data about what's happening now to real time forecasts
about what's happening next. Okay, but what's the stop people
(21:55):
from manipulating what happens next? That's after the break. Just
this month, a polymarket user under the handle Alpha Raccoon
reportedly made one million dollars in just twenty four hours.
(22:18):
This user correctly predicted twenty two of twenty three bets
on Google's twenty twenty five year in search rankings, so
confident accurate betting on Google specific topics. This sounds like
something that would be pretty difficult to do unless you
had some kind of connection to the company. Now, this
might sound like I'm accusing this user of insider training,
(22:41):
and a lot of people actually have made that accusation,
But to be clear, I am not making that accusation.
Sometimes people just get lucky. But even if I wanted
to make that accusation, honestly, it wouldn't matter because the
CFTC's current rules don't explicitly cover insider training in prediction markets.
So legally speaking, Alpha Raccoon wouldn't have done anything wrong.
(23:02):
But that's just one way to run it. Even if
you don't have the inside scoop on something, there are
other ways that you could manipulate the results of a bet.
You know. The first time that I really started thinking
about prediction markets is during the fires here in La
So that was in January, and I saw that people
were betting on anything and everything related to fires. Is
(23:26):
the mayor still going to be in office at the
end of such and such date. But one of the
big ones that I saw was will the fires be
ninety percent contained by X date. And that's when I
really started thinking, Okay, what happens when somebody has a
(23:47):
stake in what happens in a natural disaster or a
real world event.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Yeah, I would certainly hope there's not a firefighter who's like,
I'm going to sit this one out because I want
to win. So there's just like something a little bit
gross about beending on something that will affect someone's actual
life and livelihood, especially on the wildfires. That's an area
where like the argument that it's about like the wisdom
(24:17):
of the crowds falls apart a little bit, like somebody
on a prediction market who's in Chicago or abroad has
no idea what's going on with the wildfires, Like they
don't have like some special insight.
Speaker 5 (24:32):
And I think that's where it's a little bit like
like do we need to be doing this? What does
it mean that we are doing this? And it's just
like sad as.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
A society To be really clear here, it's less that
I really think somebody is going to go out and
throw a match in the brushes and try to up
their chances on, you know, winning that polymarket bit it's
a little bit like what has happened with sports. And
one of the arguments against having gambling and sports was
that it will ruin our faith in the game, that
(25:04):
people will start manipulating things and we won't be able
to trust that this sport that we care so much about,
this culture is pure. You expand that to reality, where
the local election is somebody putting their dumb on the
scales in the election of purpose. We already don't trust
local politics. We already don't trust a lot of things.
(25:24):
Now there's a financial incentive to change all these little
small things, right, And that's kind of what I'm saying
here is like I think you can be watching a
college game and somebody misses a pitch and it really
sucks to be watching a game and think, did he
do that because he's having a bad day, or did
you do that because he wants a payday?
Speaker 4 (25:43):
Right?
Speaker 5 (25:43):
We don't trust things enough as it is. Let alone,
where it's like, is there something weird going on here?
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Like everything that's happening right now is sports gambling, where
it isn't like these guys aren't impervious to this stuff.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
In twenty twenty four, Toronto Forward John Say Porter was
banned for life from the NBA when they found out
that he'd been sharing inside information and betting on games,
including his own teams games. He ended up pleading guilty
to conspiracy to commit wirefraud, saying quote, I know what
I did was wrong, unlawful, and I'm deeply sorry end quote.
(26:18):
He hasn't been sentenced yet, but he's looking at three
to four years in federal prison if prosecutors get their way.
And this year more major gambling accusations came down to
the NBA.
Speaker 6 (26:27):
We've got some breaking news this morning. The former Celtics
Terry Rogier and Chauncey Billups have been arrested in New
York City. Police Department. Sources tell CBS News that the
arrests are in relation to two different federal criminal cases.
One involves a sports betting ring involving former and current
NBA players, including some who allegedly faked injuries.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
The other one of them was that like a specific player,
he was like telling people like I am going to
like Sam injured or I'm sick during this game, right,
and so that way they could take the under on
how many points he was going to score during the game,
because if he wasn't playing, he wasn't.
Speaker 5 (27:07):
Going to score a lot of points.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
We were also seeing, you know, it looks like there
was a former player who was passing information about like
Lebron James and saying like he's on the injured list
or he's not playing tonight, and so then he would
pass that information on and people would be able to
bet them that like the Lakers were going to lose.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Now, as of December, Rosier and Billips have both pled
not guilty in their cases. But gambling apps like these
put athletes in a really weird position.
Speaker 5 (27:34):
And then also you know they're probably under pressure from family,
from friends to be like hey, like do you know
what's going on? Do you know who's on the injured list?
Speaker 1 (27:41):
And things like that, right, and also the way that
you know, especially now with the apps, like there's a
lot of prop betting going on where it's like it's
not just who will win the game, you can make
all these seeny tiny bets throughout the game.
Speaker 5 (27:52):
The abuse that a lot of athletes are getting two
from gamblers and betters, and just like scary messages and
threats and something pretty scary that it's like, you know,
you missed a free throw and some guy is messaging
you on Instagram, like threatening to go after your family
or sending you a venmo request because they lost their
(28:14):
bet on you. And so it's like, it's not great
for fans, and it's also not great for the people
on the field or the court.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
For example, it was recently reported in The Athletic that
a Major League Baseball pitcher received a venmo request with
a threatening message that reads, quote, you owe me nine
thousand dollars because you blew the game. I need you
to send me that money or I'm gonna find your family.
The article also quoted an NBA player who says he
got threats over Instagram DM for messing up someone's parlay,
(28:44):
and the stakes can get a lot higher than that.
Four to four recently reported on a really weird situation
involving a live map run by the Institute for the
Study of War, which tracks the front lines of the
war in Ukraine. This map is considered the gold standard
of information. So here's what happened. A bet was placed
on polymarket about whether or not Russia would control a
(29:05):
specific city by a specific date, and there was a
million dollars in trading volume on this and just before
that date came, the map showed that Russia had just
captured the city. So the bet was settled and all
the money was paid out, and right after that the
map suddenly reverted and it showed that Russia had never
controlled that city, which suggested that someone with edit access
(29:29):
had redrawn the map just before the bet ended.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Maybe in ten years we'll look back and be like
this was fine and everybody was like setting their hair
on fire for no reason.
Speaker 5 (29:41):
But I do sometimes wonder if, for like in.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Our Marlboro Man moment of smoking was like cool and
fun before everybody was like holy gee, is like this
is maybe not great? And like right now the narrative
around so much of this is like it's interesting and fun,
and then like maybe like some of this stuff is
a little icky, but like like whatever, it's probably it's
(30:05):
just like quirky and are we gonna soon kind of
like and think, oh.
Speaker 5 (30:09):
Man, this stuff was like really bad in a lot
of ways.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Okay, but where are we going from here? So maybe
it's as Emily writes in our article, that quote, it
speaks to a sort of nihilism within the American public.
The idea that the system's flawed, so you may as
well go for it with a gamble. So maybe what
we need to understand first is the background of why
this desire to gamble is so strong.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
I do think, I mean, this is just like human nature, right,
and I think like we need to understand like why
people enjoy these things. You just kind of like at
least have to acknowledge, like enough people think this is fun,
So like what's going on here?
Speaker 5 (30:50):
And like if it is not going to be outlawed.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
Completely, like at least like we got to talk about guardrails.
Speaker 5 (30:57):
You got to talk to the people who are into
it to know where the gartreil should be.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Thank you so much for checking out another episode a
kill Switch. You can email us at kill Switch at
Kaleidoscope dot NYC or on Instagram. We're at kill Switch pod,
and you know, maybe think about leaving us a review.
It helps other people find the show, which in turn
helps us keep doing our thing. And once you've done that,
as we said earlier in the show, kill Switch is
(31:28):
on YouTube. So if you've been wondering what the Fisker
cars look like or thevtuber avatars look like, you can
find it all there the link for that and everything
else as always is in the show notes. Kill Switch
is hosted by Me Dexter Thomas is produced by Shena Ozaki,
darl Louck Potts and Julian Nutter. Our theme song is
by me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixes a
(31:50):
show from Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Oswa lashin On,
Guesshatikadur and Kate Osborne from iHeart. Our executive producers a
Katrina Norville and Nikki E. Tor Yo. So one more thing. So,
remember when I was talking about the bet for who
was going to be on Times cover for the Person
of the Year issue, and I was saying that the
(32:11):
quote unquote safe bet because sixty six percent of people
were betting yes on this was artificial intelligence. Well, as
we're editing this right now, the bet has ended because
Times cover has come out and AI is on the
cover in big letters. But you got to read the
whole cover because the full phrase is, well, the winner
(32:31):
this year is plural. It's the architects of AI. So
it's also got a picture of Sam Altman on there.
There's Jensen Wangan and a bunch of other people, and
now a whole bunch of gamblers are big mad because
they bet specifically on AI winning and they feel like
this should count. But both polymarket and Kalsh have said
(32:52):
that no, this does not count. And so I guess
that the people who bet on other winning win. And
I'm I mean, when I was first reporting on this,
I took a screenshot of the page that had all
of the different options, and Other was so far down
the list that it doesn't even appear in my screenshot.
I think it's probably a fraction of a percent. So
congratulations to those people, I guess. So anyway, fifty five
(33:17):
million dollars in trading volume and the vast majority of
that it looks like we're betting on artificial intelligence winning
and they just lost whatever money they put into this.
You cannot make this stuff up anyway. That's it from us.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
Catch on the next one. Fine,
The first thing that comes for me was like this
pool where you could bet on the price of some
La Boo Boo release that's about to happen. You know,
Is it gonna be more than one hundred and twenty dollars?
Are they gonna be more than one hundred and thirty dollars?
It's like, I really was, like I can't imagine trying
to explain this to myself five years ago. But that's
(00:32):
where we're at.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider. One
of her beats is gambling, and that's been getting pretty
weird recently because people aren't just betting on sports now,
they're betting on real life. Okay, betting on whether or
not the next Lab Boo Boo job is gonna be
over or under one hundred and thirty dollars. Okay, you
(00:55):
don't know, I don't know. Some buddy has a friend
who works at Loo Boo Wu Incorporated or whatever it is,
and they know and they can just say, hey, look,
I'm about to put a g on one of these
size how much is it going to be? I'll split
(01:16):
it with you boom five hundred. That just seems right
for manipulations, insider trading, whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
The CEO of poly Market did an interview the other
day with Axios and they asked him about this.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Nobody is under the impression that nobody knows the answer, right,
And I think what's cool about polymarket is that it
creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge
the information to the market and the market to change.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
When you say divulge, you mean the people who actually know.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Yeah, or if someone tells someone and then the market responds.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
He kind of hinted at that, like this is sort
of the point of prediction markets. Like the idea is
that they are supposed to like predict right, like the
wisdom of the craft, et cetera, et cetera. So does
some extent. That's kind of the way it's supposed to go.
Your friend who works at lavoovo tells you, and then
(02:09):
you tell other people and like the crowd figures it
out right.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
That's why I wanted to talk to Emily. She's been
covering the rise of gambling for the past few years
and detailing this movement to turn everything into a casino,
and her latest article on this is titled appropriately enough,
Everything's Casino. You have a line in your article that
says the answer to, hey, is all of this activity
on prediction markets kosher seems to be shruggy emoticon and
(02:35):
shameless plug. You can also watch this show on YouTube
if you'd like to see this. But there is a
shruggy emoji on the screen right now, because that's probably
the best explanation I can think of. Where we're at
right now is like, I don't know, this.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Is like pretty stereotypical to say it, like, it's like
the Wild West a little bit right now, and it
has been for a while.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is kill.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
Switch, I'm dexter Thomas, i'morring, I'm goodbye.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
What would you say it was? It really started this
boom that we're in in gambling in the US right now.
Speaker 5 (03:52):
I do think a.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Lot of it does come to sports betting. Right So,
in twenty eighteen, the Supreme Court struck down a federal
law saying that sports gambling was illegal in the United States,
and then a bunch of states started to legalize it.
And you know, they say that they have good reasons
for this, that it's a good source of tax revenue.
Never mind that tax revenue goes to like gambling addiction programs.
(04:16):
But they start to see that this is a waiter
is money, and right now in the thirty eight states
have legalized sports gambling.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Over the past few years, sports betting in the US
has exploded close to one in four Americans who participated
in sports betting over the last year. And all that
betting last year generated about thirteen point seven billion dollars
in revenue for the sports betting companies obviously, and the
overall betting market is projected to reach over sixty billion
dollars by the end of the decade. So who are
(04:44):
these betting companies. Well, for all intents and purposes, there's
basically two. FanDuel and DraftKings. Together they control about eighty
percent of the US market. Both of these companies started
out as apps for fantasy sports, where you make up
pretend sports teams to compete against your friends and pretend
sports teams you know, fun little howy while you watch
the game. But after the Supreme Court opened the door
(05:05):
to legal sports betting, both those companies pivoted fast.
Speaker 5 (05:10):
So basically in like twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Sports gambling started in New York and it was like
literally everywhere, you could not escape it. It was really
like on every ad, on every channel. And also what
a lot of these companies were doing was giving you
like free money to bet with and so a lot
of people did that and I made like three hundred
and four hundred dollars off of it. I knew people
(05:33):
who made like three thousand dollars off of it.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Oh so you partook, I partook.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
And I will say a lot of these companies have
stopped giving those away because people figured out how to
gain them. It was just one of those things where
like sports gambling was everywhere, and I was like, well,
what's all the hullabaloo about?
Speaker 5 (05:48):
And it felt like every bar, every sporting event.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
You know, you go to a basketball game now and
there's a group of twenty year olds in front.
Speaker 5 (05:55):
Of you who are on FanDuel placing bets.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
When most people thought about gamblers, you'd have these images
of casinos in Las Vegas, maybe people wearing some Oceans
eleven type suits, people gathered around a poker table, or
maybe just someone chain smoking in front of a slot machine.
But today a realistic picture of a gambler is a
little different. It's mostly just someone staring at their phone.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Your phone's right in your pocket. It's real easy to do,
it's real fun to do. Gambling is entertainment. Gambling is
a form of fun, and it is a way I think,
you know, for young men to bond. And what we're
seeing now, especially with sports betting, is it's really been
embraced kind of by everyone, you know, like the announcers
are listing out there.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Parlays, Okay, A parlay is a bet that links multiple
small bets together, So like you could bet that your
team will win, or you could bet that your team
will win and that they'll win in double overtime and
that the winning point will be a field goal. There's
a pretty small chance of all that happening in a chain,
but if all those bets do come true, the payout
(06:55):
can be huge. Sports leagues in the US used to
really resist betting that were that it would impact the
integrity of the game, but illegal betting markets continue to
grow and the leagues started to change their tomb I am.
Speaker 5 (07:08):
A Packer fan.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
R I'm from Wisconsin, like, so usually I would just
watch like the Packer game right, But if I'm betting
on all of these games, suddenly you know, these guys
are watching all Sunday, They're watching every single game, and
that's happening too on Saturday when they're betting on college sports.
A big part of what's happening here is like everybody's
figured out that this is a big way to make money,
(07:29):
and all these sports leagues that were kind of like
icked about it have suddenly recognized the opportunity.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
When you open one of these apps, it's got pretty
much every sports league you'd expect listed across the top.
There's the NFL, the MLB, the NBA, the UFC, along
with some leagues that you probably not only didn't realize
that you could bet on, but that you probably didn't
even realize exist. Tap into those leagues and it drops
you into a menu of games that are happening right now.
(07:56):
The odds are updating in real time, and there's flashy
promos trying to pull you into a bet. And for example,
if you're watching an NBA game on League Pass, you
can actually sink your fan Duel account so that your
live bets show up right on the screen as you
watch the whole experience is built to keep you exploring,
keep you tapping, and keep you betting.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
They're honestly well designed. I'll go in and open it up.
In it like lists out for me, like what are
live games? Maybe I just wanted to gamble on I
don't know, like the Chiefs this weekend, but I wonder
what's going on now so I can get that kind
of like instant gratification quick hit. And they also do
try to entice you to take like harder bets to win,
(08:38):
but they offer like a bonus. So let's say you
do like a five game parlay or whatever, but you
would win extra if you were to win, but like
the odds are very very low that you are.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Going to win. There's even social pages that show the
bets that your friends are making. It makes betting something
social so that you check in on it like you
check social media. A lot of the things that you're
describing are things that you see on TikTok or things
that you see on Instagram. It can figure out something
that Okay, you're interested in betting off football games, how
(09:11):
about you bet on this baseball game.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
When I recorded on this last year, I talked to
an expert who kind of like compared some of these
apps to like dating apps or even you know, like
a thought machine. Right, it's like very solitary activity and
it's just kind of like endless. If you're on a
baseball game, you can bet on every pitch. Like I
have a good friend here in New York who I
think has like a flight gambling problem, but not the biggest,
And sometimes I'll look over at him and we'll be
(09:35):
at a bar and watching a game and I realize,
like he's betting on every single pitch that's going to happen,
or he'll ask me, do you think this is going
to be a touchdown or not?
Speaker 5 (09:44):
And he's like, not a sports guy, just like scambling.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
So maybe you're not a sports guy, or let's just
keep it gender neutral. Maybe you're not into sports. Well
that's okay, because these sports gambling apps have realized that
they can keep making money off of you by expanding
the things beyond sports.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
So last year DraftKings they bought a lottery company, right,
and you're like, well, wait, what's kind of like an
online lottery? And that's because again, like, okay, we got
you into sports gambling, but maybe like, oh you we
like the lottery too, or even like you know, Caesars
and MGM have sports betting apps, and what's going on
(10:22):
with the casinos is like their population is aging, right,
like a lot of like twenty two year olds or not.
Maybe hitting up Vegas certainly not Atlantic City, but it's
a way to get you in the door. Maybe you
start sports betting and suddenly they say like, hey, why
don't you come visit us in Las Vegas, and hey,
now you're a member of our little rewards club or whatever.
I was talking to this guy named Chris Grove who's
(10:43):
like a gambling investor out in Las Vegas.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
And he made a point to me.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
He was like, you know a lot of these companies
are betting that once you've bet on one thing, you'll
bet on another thing. That is really really played out
where I think Americans have gotten sort of, you know,
a real taste for them, and it really shows up everywhere. Right.
Speaker 5 (11:02):
Once you get a taste for it, you start to
figure why not.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
And you know, if the prediction markets right now are
really spreading in the United States, and that's wheally he
predict event outcomes, and they're really jumping in on sports
gambling because that's a good like it's not a gateway drug,
but it's a gateway to something.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
The gateway to gambling on everything. That's where prediction markets
come in, and we'll get into how those are taken
over and kind of eating sports betting's lunch after the break.
So in twenty twenty four, in the lead up to
(11:42):
the US presidential election, we started to see a new
trend in gambling betting on real world events.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
The thing that is undeniable was the night of the election,
poly market was the first destination to basically convey that's
trumpet one.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
That's Shane Copeland, the CEO of Paul, the same guy
from that Axios interview that we played earlier.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
We were in the office and we were looking at
the odds and it looked like a done deal. And
if you were just watching TV, you would think it's
neck and neck.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
These companies like do have this high minded thing of
we want to focus on the wisdom of the crowds
and people will put their money where their mouth is
in politics. They will say this is actually a better
indicator than the polls because people are actually like investing
their money in this.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Prediction markets sell shares and answers to questions about the future.
So if you think something will happen, you buy yes shares.
If you think it won't happen, you buy no shares.
As more people trade, the prices move up and down,
and those prices work like odds about how likely the
event is. So let me just give you some examples
from right now when I'm recording this episode. Here's one.
(12:51):
Do you think that Trump will use the word communism
this week, either in a press conference or online? If
you do, you can bet on it. Current markets are
predicting sixty six percent odds of that happening. Okay, here's
another one. Do you think that Zoron Mumdani will be
Times Person of the Year. So there's actually a potential
leverage opportunity here because the markets say only two percent yes.
(13:13):
Or you can go with the safer bet, go with
the crowd because sixty four percent of people are betting
yes to artificial intelligence being the person of the year.
Or if you just bet on the weather, you can
bet on whether or not the temperature will hit between
forty six and forty seven degrees fahrenheit today in New York.
If it doesn't make it, there or if it goes
higher than that, you lose all your money and so on.
(13:35):
You get the idea. So where do you make these bets? Well,
right now there's two main players and prediction markets kal
She and Polymarket.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
They're both pretty new, like pandemic era things. Kalshi is
right now up and running in the US. You can
go on and use it. Poly Market was in the
US for a while and then got into some hot water,
and twenty twenty two they're on their way back right now.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Polymarket had to stop operating in the United States in
twenty twenty two because they were running without proper registration.
But in twenty twenty five they just bought a derivative
exchange that had just gotten an approved registration from the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which could pave the way for
them to operate again legally in the United States. And Okay,
that was a whole lot of mumbo jumbo. So let's
(14:21):
just get to the point here. How is it that
these things can be legal?
Speaker 1 (14:26):
The way that they say they are legal is not
that like laws of regulations have changed, but basically they
seem to have found a loophole to say that they
should be regulated by the Commodities Features Trading Commissions, the CFTC,
because traditionally, like gambling has really been regulated by the states,
and they say, actually, like we're doing events contracts, we're
(14:50):
doing a different thing, and the CFTC says whether or
not we should exist, and Trump's CFTC has basically said
sounds good.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Or to summarize all that, under federal law, a platform
like call she can operate because they're registered to something
called a designated contract market. In that framework, their bets
aren't treated like casino gambling. They're treated more like financial contracts,
as in, you and I agree to sign a contract
where if this happens, you pay me, and if that happens,
(15:19):
I pay you. Just on a bigger scale.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Polymarket is about to get an investment of up to
two billion dollars from the parent company of the New
York Stock Exchange. I think both of them have involvement
from dollars from juniors, and then the president and family
are involved in prediction markets, they're in crypto, They are
involved in some of this stuff for sure.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
And they're only getting more popular. As of December, call
Shee was valued at eleven billion dollars, and Polymarket is
rumored to be not too far behind that. And part
of what's fueling that growth is the regulatory gap that
has allowed call she for now at least, to offer
these event based contracts and sports even in states where
traditional sports betting is banned.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Right now, if you're in a state where sports gambling
is not legal, I was just in the Midwest and Wisconsin,
sports gambling is not allowed there, members of my family
go across the border to Illinois, where it is allowed,
and sports gamble like your phone knows where you are
right what kelshe has says they figured out and eventually
Polymarket they say, like, we are not subject to these
(16:22):
state regulations. We are regulated by the CFTC. CFTC says
we can exist in all fifty states. And so if
you're in California, where sports betting is not allowed in
Texas other states, you can go on to calshe and
there will be something on there that says, you know, well,
ex team win tomorrow, yes, no, and you can do that.
(16:44):
They say it's not gambling. They kind of will hedge
on whether it's betting. Kelshy's gone into some hot water
because for a while they were advertising saying that you
can now sports bet in California, and they say, like
that was an oops, and vendor did it and that
wasn't our fault.
Speaker 5 (17:02):
But everybody I talked to for the story we've been
talking about it's like this gambling. It's a little silly
to pretend like this is not what it is.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Call she has different modes, including a sports fan mode
that makes the interface look almost identical to apps like
FanDuel and DraftKings. And remember when I said earlier that federally,
call she can operate, but on the state level, some
jurisdictions are not having it. Just recently, the state of
Connecticut issued a cease and desist arguing that call she
was effectively offering sports betting without a license. Call she countersuit,
(17:36):
saying that the Commodities Exchange Act says that they're in
the clear. And beyond sports betting, these apps are making
their way into anything that can be gambled on or gamified,
including the stock market, which honestly was already getting pretty gamified. Robinhood,
the stock trading app, has recently partnered with call she
to allow NFL and college football trading all inside the
(17:56):
Robin hood app One of the reasons I really wanted
to talk to is your article, which is entitled Everything's
Casino brilliant title. I want to read a little bit
from the first paragraph here. I thought the Stock Exchange
guys were supposed to be the serious ones in the room,
helping communities grow and people save for retirement, not teaming
(18:17):
up with the guys who let you guess when the
US government will admit that aliens exist. But this is
the reality of the Year of Our Lord twenty twenty five.
Americans have a growing appetite for leaving their fortunes to
the fates, and businesses are eager to capitalize.
Speaker 5 (18:32):
And to be fair the aliens.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
You can place that bet on both poly Mark and Kelshi.
My editor was like, you have to be joking, and
I was like, no, well you you.
Speaker 5 (18:42):
Can guess it.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
And so I think there is just like this real
confluence here of like the serious people have kind of
realized like there's money to be made off of the
on serious stuff. You know, you think back to like
the game stop stuff for a lot of people was
like pretty fun, but some people really want to end
all right.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
In case you don't remember the game Stop Saga. In
twenty twenty one, a bunch of investors on Reddit started
buying up shares of game Stop, this store that sells
video games, and they sent the prices of those shares
up over sixteen hundred percent in just a few weeks.
Some people made a lot of money, other people lost
a lot of money. Robinhood blocked people from being able
to buy the stock for a while, which was a
whole other thing. There's multiple documentaries about it. Basically it
(19:25):
was a mess, and most of that really had almost
nothing to do with the actual store that sells video games.
It was pretty much just gambling.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
You look at the crypto market, right and like you
have people out there will say, like yes, like bitcoin matters,
and there's underline whatever. But like if you're I don't know,
if you're investing in like fart coin, like it is
not because you believe in like the ongoing value of
fart coin, like I certainly hope not, you know what
I mean. It's because like you think that like some
(19:58):
other guy is gonna pay more for it, hopefully later,
and like you can kind of get out of the
scam before you get got by the scam.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Everybody scamming each other.
Speaker 5 (20:07):
Everybody scamming each other.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Everybody thinks that like, well, maybe I can ride it
up type situation. And I think, really, like these companies
have realized there is a huge appetite for it, and
like once people get an appetite, like they're going to
engage in more and more and more. And I think
that's where like there's real harm. Like I remember when
kind of like the day trading stuff was really taking
off during the pandemic, and I would talk to people
(20:30):
who'd gotten into like options trading, and the story was
always the same. It was like I did a few
and I thought I was a stock market genius. That
I did a few more, and I got wiped out.
And like that's what happens at the casino, right, Like
you hit on a couple and then you're up and
you should walk away, but you don't, and then you
(20:50):
lose it all and you get wiped out.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Recently, the co founder of Calls, Trek Mansur, said this
to the long term vision is to financialize everything and
create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion,
that long term vision is kind of already here. In
just the last few weeks, call she signed deals with
major news networks, first CNN and then CNBC to bring
real time prediction market data directly into their news coverage.
(21:15):
The CNN deal gives them real time access to data
on call sheet and as Axios reports quote, that data
will be featured on CNN's air through a real time
data ticker and can be referenced across CNN's platforms when
journalists discuss news predictions. In quote, the CNBC partnership looks
pretty similar. Call She's data is going to be featured
(21:35):
on business news programs like squawk Box and Fast Money.
They'll also have a dedicated call she on air ticker
and a page on the website. As call She's co
founder puts it, this is quote the next evolution, moving
from data about what's happening now to real time forecasts
about what's happening next. Okay, but what's the stop people
(21:55):
from manipulating what happens next? That's after the break. Just
this month, a polymarket user under the handle Alpha Raccoon
reportedly made one million dollars in just twenty four hours.
(22:18):
This user correctly predicted twenty two of twenty three bets
on Google's twenty twenty five year in search rankings, so
confident accurate betting on Google specific topics. This sounds like
something that would be pretty difficult to do unless you
had some kind of connection to the company. Now, this
might sound like I'm accusing this user of insider training,
(22:41):
and a lot of people actually have made that accusation,
But to be clear, I am not making that accusation.
Sometimes people just get lucky. But even if I wanted
to make that accusation, honestly, it wouldn't matter because the
CFTC's current rules don't explicitly cover insider training in prediction markets.
So legally speaking, Alpha Raccoon wouldn't have done anything wrong.
(23:02):
But that's just one way to run it. Even if
you don't have the inside scoop on something, there are
other ways that you could manipulate the results of a bet.
You know. The first time that I really started thinking
about prediction markets is during the fires here in La
So that was in January, and I saw that people
were betting on anything and everything related to fires. Is
(23:26):
the mayor still going to be in office at the
end of such and such date. But one of the
big ones that I saw was will the fires be
ninety percent contained by X date. And that's when I
really started thinking, Okay, what happens when somebody has a
(23:47):
stake in what happens in a natural disaster or a
real world event.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Yeah, I would certainly hope there's not a firefighter who's like,
I'm going to sit this one out because I want
to win. So there's just like something a little bit
gross about beending on something that will affect someone's actual
life and livelihood, especially on the wildfires. That's an area
where like the argument that it's about like the wisdom
(24:17):
of the crowds falls apart a little bit, like somebody
on a prediction market who's in Chicago or abroad has
no idea what's going on with the wildfires, Like they
don't have like some special insight.
Speaker 5 (24:32):
And I think that's where it's a little bit like
like do we need to be doing this? What does
it mean that we are doing this? And it's just
like sad as.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
A society To be really clear here, it's less that
I really think somebody is going to go out and
throw a match in the brushes and try to up
their chances on, you know, winning that polymarket bit it's
a little bit like what has happened with sports. And
one of the arguments against having gambling and sports was
that it will ruin our faith in the game, that
(25:04):
people will start manipulating things and we won't be able
to trust that this sport that we care so much about,
this culture is pure. You expand that to reality, where
the local election is somebody putting their dumb on the
scales in the election of purpose. We already don't trust
local politics. We already don't trust a lot of things.
(25:24):
Now there's a financial incentive to change all these little
small things, right, And that's kind of what I'm saying
here is like I think you can be watching a
college game and somebody misses a pitch and it really
sucks to be watching a game and think, did he
do that because he's having a bad day, or did
you do that because he wants a payday?
Speaker 4 (25:43):
Right?
Speaker 5 (25:43):
We don't trust things enough as it is. Let alone,
where it's like, is there something weird going on here?
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Like everything that's happening right now is sports gambling, where
it isn't like these guys aren't impervious to this stuff.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
In twenty twenty four, Toronto Forward John Say Porter was
banned for life from the NBA when they found out
that he'd been sharing inside information and betting on games,
including his own teams games. He ended up pleading guilty
to conspiracy to commit wirefraud, saying quote, I know what
I did was wrong, unlawful, and I'm deeply sorry end quote.
(26:18):
He hasn't been sentenced yet, but he's looking at three
to four years in federal prison if prosecutors get their way.
And this year more major gambling accusations came down to
the NBA.
Speaker 6 (26:27):
We've got some breaking news this morning. The former Celtics
Terry Rogier and Chauncey Billups have been arrested in New
York City. Police Department. Sources tell CBS News that the
arrests are in relation to two different federal criminal cases.
One involves a sports betting ring involving former and current
NBA players, including some who allegedly faked injuries.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
The other one of them was that like a specific player,
he was like telling people like I am going to
like Sam injured or I'm sick during this game, right,
and so that way they could take the under on
how many points he was going to score during the game,
because if he wasn't playing, he wasn't.
Speaker 5 (27:07):
Going to score a lot of points.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
We were also seeing, you know, it looks like there
was a former player who was passing information about like
Lebron James and saying like he's on the injured list
or he's not playing tonight, and so then he would
pass that information on and people would be able to
bet them that like the Lakers were going to lose.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Now, as of December, Rosier and Billips have both pled
not guilty in their cases. But gambling apps like these
put athletes in a really weird position.
Speaker 5 (27:34):
And then also you know they're probably under pressure from family,
from friends to be like hey, like do you know
what's going on? Do you know who's on the injured list?
Speaker 1 (27:41):
And things like that, right, and also the way that
you know, especially now with the apps, like there's a
lot of prop betting going on where it's like it's
not just who will win the game, you can make
all these seeny tiny bets throughout the game.
Speaker 5 (27:52):
The abuse that a lot of athletes are getting two
from gamblers and betters, and just like scary messages and
threats and something pretty scary that it's like, you know,
you missed a free throw and some guy is messaging
you on Instagram, like threatening to go after your family
or sending you a venmo request because they lost their
(28:14):
bet on you. And so it's like, it's not great
for fans, and it's also not great for the people
on the field or the court.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
For example, it was recently reported in The Athletic that
a Major League Baseball pitcher received a venmo request with
a threatening message that reads, quote, you owe me nine
thousand dollars because you blew the game. I need you
to send me that money or I'm gonna find your family.
The article also quoted an NBA player who says he
got threats over Instagram DM for messing up someone's parlay,
(28:44):
and the stakes can get a lot higher than that.
Four to four recently reported on a really weird situation
involving a live map run by the Institute for the
Study of War, which tracks the front lines of the
war in Ukraine. This map is considered the gold standard
of information. So here's what happened. A bet was placed
on polymarket about whether or not Russia would control a
(29:05):
specific city by a specific date, and there was a
million dollars in trading volume on this and just before
that date came, the map showed that Russia had just
captured the city. So the bet was settled and all
the money was paid out, and right after that the
map suddenly reverted and it showed that Russia had never
controlled that city, which suggested that someone with edit access
(29:29):
had redrawn the map just before the bet ended.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Maybe in ten years we'll look back and be like
this was fine and everybody was like setting their hair
on fire for no reason.
Speaker 5 (29:41):
But I do sometimes wonder if, for like in.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Our Marlboro Man moment of smoking was like cool and
fun before everybody was like holy gee, is like this
is maybe not great? And like right now the narrative
around so much of this is like it's interesting and fun,
and then like maybe like some of this stuff is
a little icky, but like like whatever, it's probably it's
(30:05):
just like quirky and are we gonna soon kind of
like and think, oh.
Speaker 5 (30:09):
Man, this stuff was like really bad in a lot
of ways.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Okay, but where are we going from here? So maybe
it's as Emily writes in our article, that quote, it
speaks to a sort of nihilism within the American public.
The idea that the system's flawed, so you may as
well go for it with a gamble. So maybe what
we need to understand first is the background of why
this desire to gamble is so strong.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
I do think, I mean, this is just like human nature, right,
and I think like we need to understand like why
people enjoy these things. You just kind of like at
least have to acknowledge, like enough people think this is fun,
So like what's going on here?
Speaker 5 (30:50):
And like if it is not going to be outlawed.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
Completely, like at least like we got to talk about guardrails.
Speaker 5 (30:57):
You got to talk to the people who are into
it to know where the gartreil should be.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Thank you so much for checking out another episode a
kill Switch. You can email us at kill Switch at
Kaleidoscope dot NYC or on Instagram. We're at kill Switch pod,
and you know, maybe think about leaving us a review.
It helps other people find the show, which in turn
helps us keep doing our thing. And once you've done that,
as we said earlier in the show, kill Switch is
(31:28):
on YouTube. So if you've been wondering what the Fisker
cars look like or thevtuber avatars look like, you can
find it all there the link for that and everything
else as always is in the show notes. Kill Switch
is hosted by Me Dexter Thomas is produced by Shena Ozaki,
darl Louck Potts and Julian Nutter. Our theme song is
by me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixes a
(31:50):
show from Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Oswa lashin On,
Guesshatikadur and Kate Osborne from iHeart. Our executive producers a
Katrina Norville and Nikki E. Tor Yo. So one more thing. So,
remember when I was talking about the bet for who
was going to be on Times cover for the Person
of the Year issue, and I was saying that the
(32:11):
quote unquote safe bet because sixty six percent of people
were betting yes on this was artificial intelligence. Well, as
we're editing this right now, the bet has ended because
Times cover has come out and AI is on the
cover in big letters. But you got to read the
whole cover because the full phrase is, well, the winner
(32:31):
this year is plural. It's the architects of AI. So
it's also got a picture of Sam Altman on there.
There's Jensen Wangan and a bunch of other people, and
now a whole bunch of gamblers are big mad because
they bet specifically on AI winning and they feel like
this should count. But both polymarket and Kalsh have said
(32:52):
that no, this does not count. And so I guess
that the people who bet on other winning win. And
I'm I mean, when I was first reporting on this,
I took a screenshot of the page that had all
of the different options, and Other was so far down
the list that it doesn't even appear in my screenshot.
I think it's probably a fraction of a percent. So
congratulations to those people, I guess. So anyway, fifty five
(33:17):
million dollars in trading volume and the vast majority of
that it looks like we're betting on artificial intelligence winning
and they just lost whatever money they put into this.
You cannot make this stuff up anyway. That's it from us.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
Catch on the next one. Fine,
kill switch News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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