Better Offline - The WSJ On Polymarket's Questionable Ads

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

In this week’s Better Offline, Ed talks with the Wall Street Journal’s Caitlin Ostroff and Katherine Long about how Polymarket is working with influencers to show videos of fake bets cashing out - and how the prediction markets have grown into a large, barely-regulated operation.Please support me by subscribing to my premium newsletter - here’s $10 off your first year of annual https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/84rt762qen They Looked Like They Were Getting Rich on Polymarket—but None of It Was Real - https://www.wsj.com/business/media/polymarket-social-media-bets-prediction-market-441cdeb5?st=57dR12&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink Caitlin Ostroff https://x.com/ceostroff https://bsky.app/profile/ceostroff.bsky.social https://www.wsj.com/news/author/caitlin-ostroff Katherine Longhttps://bsky.app/profile/klong.bsky.social https://x.com/ByKLong https://www.wsj.com/news/author/katherine-long YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. Buy our new “FUCK DATA CENTERS” shirts today! --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [e-mail]  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than adds supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-8-44-I-Hart.

Also Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I am, of course, your host, Ed Zetron. What's our offline? Today I am joined by two incredible reports from the Wall Street Journal, Catherine Long and Caitlin Ostrov, who just published an incredible and truly horrible story about Polymarket and their extremely questionable influencer marketing campaigns. Catherine, Caitlin, thanks for joining me.

So happy to be here. Thanks for having us. Okay. So walk me through exactly what Polymarket was doing with these influences and social media? What were they paying for? What was the end result? So the in result was an onslaught of videos that appeared to show college age social media creators betting and winning large amounts of money online.

But what we found is that all of those bets were actually fake. They were placed on a dummy platform that Polly Market built to almost exactly, but not precisely resemble the website. And some of the wins that the influence. influencers showed themselves having were faked as well. The creators were using things like outdated footage or altered headlines to suggest that they won really lucrative vets when in fact they would have lost. Right. So just to be clear, so the bets were fake, the website was fake, but also the bets would have lost. A lot of them would have. Not every single one, but the majority

of the videos where bets were placed would have actually lost in real. life, but they were depicted as winning. That's truly awful. I thought Polymarket was illegal in America as well. You would be right about that. Polymarket entered a settlement with federal regulators back in 2022, in which they agreed to stop offering their platform to U.S. traders. But as anybody who's used a VPN knows, it's pretty trivial to get around things like that kind of geo-fencing. anybody with a VPN has been able to access Polymarket, even if they're based in the US or other countries where polymarket is banned. And so these influences, they're American-based, right? So it's a mix. Some are based in Canada, some are based in the US, and then they're likely creators and other jurisdictions as

well, but that was one of the mix that we looked at in our corpus. And so it looks like here is about 1,100 videos you went over. So that's truly, it's truly a massive scale operation, but do you think it's bigger than the ones you saw? Or is it just, like, did you get any idea of the total scale? Yeah, so we reviewed 1,100 videos that had been posted between late December, correct me if I'm wrong, Caitlin. Was it late December or late November? Late last year, late 2025, by all accounts, late 2025 and mid-May of this year. So 1,100 videos, 10 creators. My impression and belief from my report, reporting and Caitlin's reporting and the reporting of our other colleagues is that this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as polymarkets marketing operation. We identified dozens of other creators who are posting videos in similar formats. We didn't scrape their videos, but we thought our sample size was sufficient. That's crazy. So walk me through the exact stage. So you have a video of a guy guessing whether Trump will say, inshallah, I think was one of probably not in your, but.

like Trump will say burger or something, and then they're staring at the TV, and then they go, oh, he said burger, but the website they were making the bet on was just completely fake? Yes. Just completely. So, yeah. So, yeah, so in these videos, when you watch them, you will often see a college-age student kind of go in with like this hook phrase where they'll say, throw what or wait what? And then they will be like, oh, I can like, I can bet on this.

and they'll depict the market, and then sometimes it will show essentially what the outcome is of that market. They'll cut to video of Trump saying a certain word or phrase, and then they'll jump up and down and sort of give the impression that they've won. And this is targeting children, so college age, kids, like it's explicitly targeting young people. Well, I wouldn't go that far as to say it's explicitly targeting young people, but what we do know about who it's targeting is that it is targeting Americans. We looked at Polymarkets instructions to people who were paid to boost the reach of this campaign online. A third-party contractor that Polymarket worked with to help manage the campaign said, we'll only pay you if at least 60% of your audience is based in the United States.

And then, as to the point you alluded to, yes, the creators who are making these videos, They are college-aged, college students, people in their early to mid-20s, certainly. Jesus. It feels like introducing children to gambling on some level. I mean, maybe you can't say that, but I'm certain. I mean, it seems like showing young people doing something and saying, you can get bread, which is a young person's way of referring to money for the old heads listening. I knew that one.

I'm not that old. But it just, it feels quite dystopian is kind of what I'm getting at. It certainly is marketed to give the impression that this is a way to make money off of what you know. So the majority of the bets that we looked at, you know, they showed a trade being placed. Most didn't show an outcome. But for those that did, you know, almost all of them, it was someone winning. I think there was like, what, four or five, Catherine in the group that we looked at where someone was depicted as losing their bet. So the overarching message was you can make money.

I kind of find it fascinating that there's one where they lost. Anyway, keep going. Yeah, I was just going to chime in and add that, you know, in addition to the creator showing themselves appearing to win money, they also implied that they were wealthy in other ways, including by showing account balances on this dummy website, where, again, no real money was being traded. These balances were fictitious. But the videos showed their account balances on Polly Market in the tens of thousands of dollars. Some even had balances over $100,000.

And one of the creators whose videos we reviewed, she shows herself placing bets from a San Francisco bedroom. And then she'll have a video where she's showing herself dancing on a beach in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. And she says, Polly Market funds my life. And there's a Hello Kitty sticker in the corner that says, I am unemployed. So the impression is certainly that, you know, these people are making enough money off of Polymarket to support themselves and support themselves in fairly high style. And it sounds like kind of like a real operation here, like in the sense that there is, like they're building functional dummy websites.

Because looking at, as we speak, I have the animate gifts from the piece up. And it's, these seem quite intricate. These, perhaps they're vibe code and it doesn't really matter because no pay. rail are in there, but these seem like they are built to look identical. They are extremely convincing. Catherine and I and our colleagues were looking at these for about two weeks before our colleague Neil Mehta realized that, like, this is not polymarket. Like, we started off firmly believing that this was polymarket.

Right. When you say that, so this is the P-O-I-Y market website, when you say you believed it was polymarket, what did you think the purpose was? when you found that? We thought these were just videos that, you know, people were making, showing themselves placing actual trades on polymarket. I don't think we had a theory at the onset as to why they were doing this, but we came across a bunch of these videos and we were curious to understand, you know, what was happening,

like who these people were, how they were making money. And so we have this database of all of the polymarket trades that we had been building over the past several months. And we started off trying to trace these trades. We wanted to understand, you know, what bets were happening, who was making these. And we went to go about finding those because all of polymarkets data is public. And we very quickly realized that we could not figure out, like, we couldn't place these trades.

We could not find the actual trades shown in the video. And it took us a minute to realize that this was not actually happening on polymarket. And the red flag for that ended up being that website, P-O-I-Y market, which our colleague Neil Mehta saw and flagged to us. Hell yeah. Good work, Neil. Great work, Neil. Yeah, major shout out to Neil. Here's the thing, though. So wait, maybe I'm just misunderstanding this. So not only did the trades, did some of the trades never exist? Like it was never possible to bet on that particular outcome? All of the markets that we saw did exist.

And that's one of the reasons why it took us so long to understand that we were looking at a fake website. I mean, we were combing through this database, Caitlin, has been painstakingly building over months of every single trade on Polly Market, which, you know, is accessible to us because Pollymark is a blockchain-based system. So everything is public. And, you know, we're looking for these trades that appear to have taken place. right? We saw a video of it taking place and it just didn't seem to exist in this database. And at that point, we, you know, thanks to Neal's eagle eyes, showing that, you know, one of these creators had seemingly made a mistake and accidentally left the URL of this fake site, POI-Y market, yeah, that P-O-I-Y market, yeah, that Polly Market had built in his video.

And it was only because of that clue that we started being able to unravel that all of these videos that we were looking at were actually being placed on fake websites, which as we've mentioned, the fake websites were almost identical to the real polymarket. But, you know, once we started looking for some more of these clues, once we knew that the website was fake, we were able to distinguish various ways in which to tell the fake website from the real website. Listen. And you're there for heart-wrenching knock-ass. World's biggest stage. And breathtaking triumph.

In 20206, FIFA World Cup. The knockout stage. Every match, every moment. Listen on TSN Radio. Join the globe. On the road to the July 19th final. 2026 FIFA World Cup. Stream it all live on TSN Radio.

Available on IHeart Radio. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad support streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-4-4-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. So was it just Poi Market or where they're like multiple other fake websites as

well. I mean, once we started looking for other, like, simulated polymarket websites, we did find a couple of others, but the, I think all of the ones that, like, we were able to identify specifically what the website was was Poley Market. There was one other where it was like this developer link that appeared in a handful of videos, where it was like one of the, like, polymarket developers, like their name, dot polymarket.dev. And so it was like this internal development site that appeared in a couple of the videos that also seemed like it was being used. So we weren't always certain, like which simulated platform the trade was happening on, in part because we heard from creators, part of the instruction that

they got in making these videos was to not make it obvious that it was on a simulated website. So if you were on a P-O-I-Y market, you might uppercase the I to make it appear like polymarket. And so, you know, we came across a handful of these, but I don't think we are exactly certain of how much each one was used. That's, it's so strange. How is this not illegal? I mean, I guess if the website itself is illegal, then illegally advertising the illegal

website is kind of just a, just kind of doubling down at that point doesn't really matter. Like, has the government, I saw that there was some sort of federal inquiry into Polymarket. Was it related to this story? We are not sure of the precise parameters or subject of the federal inquiry. You're referring, I assume, to CFTC investigation that we reported on last week. Yeah, the contours of that investigation are as yet unclear. I know I know that it is ongoing and extensive, according to a person familiar with the investigation. You know, I should add as well that the CFTC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission,

the agency conducting this investigation, a spokesperson for that agency, declined to comment on the existence of an investigation citing agency policy. Yeah, it's just so strange because I don't think I've seen anything like this in tech outside of crypto, which I know is, I know that crypto is kind of, I think Polymarket is a crypto product, right? Or it's a blockchain one. Yeah, it is. That's correct. They moved on from that crap. The crap referring to a comment that I'm making, not the journalist in question. No, Polymarket is a crypto, is a crypto. It's on, it's on crypto rails, as they would say. Yes. That's so strange. What differentiates this from Kalshi? Because I basically consider them the same

website at this point, but I guess they're different somehow? So we like, again, our social media feeds are just full with videos for different platforms. You know, we, we came across the polymarket videos of them placing these trades. We've certainly come across a lot of videos of, you know, people promoting Kalshi, but we haven't come across anything similar in the sense of, you know, polymarket was. telling people, use the simulated website, create these bets, and do not disclose that you have any affiliation. We are always looking to see what we might be missing in coverage of the space. But, you know, Colsey is, I guess, one difference between it and Polly Market is also that it is regulated by CFTC.

Polymarket has a new U.S. product launched late last year. That is CFTC regulated, but the broader platform is. is still offshore. So, you know, we try to look to see what we might be missing in this space. But the Polymarket videos kind of stuck out to us as we were going through our own social media feeds, just trying to understand, you know, why we were getting so many of these, what was behind that, and we did not expect it to lead to these simulated bets. So are your algorithms, but so did you do this on your own phones or like a journal-approved one? Because I'm wondering, are your algorithms ruined now?

Oh, yeah, my algorithm is cooked. It's just like 18-year-old Zinn kids telling you to gamble on the future. Always see our prediction markets. I see no other content at this point. Yeah, that must be awful. It's great for keeping track of things. It's probably not great for a long-term mental help. Yeah, this is why you've just got to look at like lifting videos and palace cats.

That's how I get around this. You just need to cleanse your feed every so often. But on a legal level, just like on a thing, what differentiates? Like you said that Polly Market has a U.S. approved product. Is that a prediction market? Is it something different? And why is Kalshi able to operate legally but not Pollymarket? Yeah.

So, zooming out here a bit, right? So Kalshi is Polymarkets biggest competitor. Kelshi and Polly Market, they're both prediction markets. The biggest distinction between the two is that Calci made a huge bet that it could successfully achieve U.S. regulated status. And Polly Market, conversely, decided that it was okay operating offshore as an unregistered crypto entity that, you know, people can access if they have a VPN, but, you know, they're not technically supposed to.

So Calci has not necessarily played nice with regulators. You know, it had a pretty significant legal battle early in its career over whether election markets would be allowed on the platform. But it did have success. It won that battle. And now Calci is a U.S. regulated prediction market, which it says is legally available in all 50 states, although there's currently some commotion over Nevada, which... I mean, as a Vegas resident, you can't take our beautiful gambling away from Vegas residents. Exactly. So as one might suspect, the gambling industry is extremely worried about the rise of prediction markets. You know, unlike online sports books or in-person gambling, CalShe and other U.S. regulated prediction markets have successfully, up till now, made the argument that they are federally regulated.

That means that states cannot restrict their operations. So state gambling commissions can't. can't impose conditions on how they operate. They also can't levy taxes on prediction markets. So Calci has, you know, fairly successfully been playing within this federal regulatory structure. Polymarket has been playing outside of it. And for a while, the two platforms seemed to be growing sort of in lockstep. You know, Polymarket started out with a bit of a lead. It got a huge amount of traction after the 2024 presidential election.

which it successfully called for Donald Trump. Calci was a bit of a bit more. It was a lesser known quantity at the time. I had less name recognition. But starting around late 2025, Calci actually started to eke ahead of polymarket when it comes to a relative share of trading volume on prediction markets.

And as of last month, Calci was doing insanely more volume than Polymarket on Polymarkets offshore and US app combined. Do you know what those volumes might be? Roughly? Are we talking to... I would have to go back to a little bit of the end. I'd love to consult a chart in our story.

It was for the month of May, twice the amount of volume, almost twice, sorry, the amount of volume on Colsey versus Polly Market. That's really boring. I mean, I think, so looking this up, it looks like $17 billion in the month of May alone. We live in a godless society. This is a statement I am saying, not the journalist in question. It's very worrying.

I find this whole thing quite worrying. Not just the gambling, but the financialization of everything. I don't think it's good to gamble on every outcome personally. And I worry about this spreading personally. And I don't like it feels like it needs regulation in an extreme way that basically doesn't exist yet. I mean, I can talk a little bit about my own experiences here. you know, I started covering, Caitlin's been covering this space a lot longer than I have. I sort of jumped into it at the beginning of this year. And as part of the process of growing familiar with how prediction markets operate, I decided to watch the State of the Union through the lens of a prediction market live streamer who was live streaming the state of the union and talking about the bets that he was placing on what President Trump would say during, during the that speech. And, you know, I think similar to watching live sports on which you have wagered,

it was simultaneously more exciting and I think also slightly concerning the way that instead of sort of listening for the content of the speech, it very rapidly for me turned into something closer to a game of sort of wondering what the next word is. Like what is he going to say? and will it hit? Like, will the bet hit? And so I understand where the concerns that you're describing emanate from, certainly. I would say also that, you know, there's a lot of people who point to prediction markets as an extremely legitimate financial tool and one that institutions can increasingly take advantage of. Media and women are looking for more. More into themselves, their businesses, their elected

leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the honest talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart and I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting.

Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-I-Hart. I mean, the only people I think they're taking, I think the only advantage being taken is of the customers, because I have to wonder how many people win and it probably isn't very much. And the fact that they have to resort to this kind of marketing suggests that the wins are not quite as common as they want you to believe. Well, and that's one of a previous story that Catherine and I worked on together basically analyzed just that how many people actually win on fiction markets.

And what we found was that, you know, about 70% of people who had traded on polymarket lost money, and losers to winners on Kalsi, you know, was about 2.9 to 1. And so, you know, these, while a lot of the marketing is centered around, these are prediction markets where you can win money. In reality, most people do not win money. Kind of feels like the Draft Kings stuff as well, the sports scam claim, where it's like, oh yeah, of course, it's really easy to, and this is not a statement I align with it. It's easy. You just bet on what the winning team will be. but the existence of spreads and also the existence of the weird nomenclature that the

prediction markets use is how they get you. Like I remember with Cam, I was talking about with Nick Devor and Rebecca Ungerino from Barons. And it was just like, yeah, the wording around Kamenay's potential death. And then they just pulled the entire thing, screwed a bunch of people over and how they design and they say what a win is seems to also undermine people. Right. And we've previously reported that, you know, the wording for pretty much all of these prediction markets really matters. And so there's, you know, been a lot of people who've reached out to

us as journalists and said, you know, I put money on this market, understanding that this is how it was structured. And then the resolution was entirely unexpected or I don't think that it was a proper resolution. And so, you know, especially for some of these markets where it's not really a finite outcome or the rules might be written in a way where there's potential for different interpretation, you know, there really is a risk of, you know, the market not going how people who are betting understand it might. Or maybe people can't even see the rules. The rules are difficult to access in the first place. That was the case of somebody we profiled for our last story who wagered everything he had earned so far on prediction markets and ended up

losing it all and is now living in a homeless shelter. Classic gambler stuff as well. I mean, it's even in Vegas, so I live in Vegas. And you walk around and even there in like the gambling hub of everywhere, the airport is full of the, hey, if you've got a gambling problem, call this number. Hey, gambling problems are scary. Gambling problem, gambling problem. Next to a slot machine, of course. But it doesn't feel like, probably due to a lack of regulatory oversight, that there's the same alarm, concern, thought from the people making these markets.

Do they seem, have you heard anything from them about concerns related to gambling addiction or anything like that? So, Kelsey fairly recently did add some language related to gambling addiction on its homepage. It gave people the option to exclude themselves from the website, which is another common feature that many gambling apps have. What does that mean? Self-exclusion is if somebody feels that they have a gambling problem, they can ask to be banned from the website, from the gambling app, from the casino. It's sort of, you know, it's not really a nuclear option, but it's a tool that people who are managing a gambling addiction can use if they feel like their gambling has gotten out of hand. You know, I think that these platforms, they don't conceive of themselves as gambling.

They conceive of themselves as trading. This is, you know, in their minds more akin to day trading or, you know, trading in currencies than it is to gambling. question. So this is, hopefully this is a no, but I know what I had, Ariafasan and Caleb Wilson on talking about sports gambling a few months ago. Apparently, Draf Kings and the like, sorry, that was last year, Draf Kings and the like, they have like an account manager that will actually work with significant bettors. Do you know if such a thing exists with Kalshian Polymarket? Do they have high rollers that they cover it? Is that something, I don't even mean influences. I don't know the answer to this. I hope the answer is no. That's not something that I have heard about.

You know, what I can say from our own reporting is that both platforms seem intent on, you know, recruiting college students. And Polymarket in particular has set up relationships with college clubs, fraternities, offering them, you know, payments in exchange for signing their classmates up to the site. So I would say it's... Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Tell me more about that. What? What? This was a story that I reported with colleagues, including my colleague Kevin Dugan, back in, I believe it was March. It was about both platforms efforts to sign up college students. And, you know, some great reporting that Kevin brought to the story was about polymarket's efforts to recruit students at Columbia University.

And they signed this partnership with a fraternity at Columbia. and in exchange for every student that members of that fraternity signed up, the fraternity got some money. And at the end of it, there was a big sort of polymarket funded party. The fraternity got a plaque that said, you know, that they were the first member of the Polymarket Pledge Pledge class. And, you know, a lawsuit that was filed last week made similar allegations pertaining to Polymercris activities on other campuses.

Have you heard about anything else like that? with Kalshi perhaps, or is it just, were those the only events? Kalshi had some much smaller, much less well-funded partnerships with campus groups. I would say Polymarket is the prime mover in that space when it comes to recruiting college students. Getting kids into gambling, that's my statement. This is all truly horrible. Have you, so the one thing, as we wrap up here, one thing that, I keep coming back to is, are there not guidelines around truth and advertising that these cross over with?

Yeah, so the Federal Trade Commission, which governs advertising, does have rules that require that advertisements be truthful and accurate. And then the CFTC also requires that, you know, marketing and that information not be deceptive. So there are laws from at least two federal regulators that, you know, do touch on how prediction markets market themselves to the public. That's, but they don't appear to, I just, I keep thinking about these videos and I've had the animated gift just in the corner as I talk to you. And I'm just, I don't see how there's not anything being done about this, because even in a very conservative government, this is a kind of vice that,

could genuinely cause a form of financial crisis with young people, especially at a time when young people have trouble accumulating wealth? Well, I mean, we don't know like entirely what's happening on a regulatory front. Again, we've reported that the CFTC has some sort of investigation ongoing into polymarket, although we don't know the scope of details of that. And just from, you know, myself covering crypto for the last many years, you know, often federal inquiries when they happen can take many years. And so I think, you know, a lot of, a lot of these platforms are very new. And so I don't think we necessarily know, you know, how, if and how, from a regulatory perspective, things might unfold. I should add here as well that, you know,

both Pauley Market and its primary competitor, Kalshi, have ties to the White House in the form of involvement from Donald Trump Jr. So Donald Trump Jr. is a strategic advisor to Kalshi. He is through an investment fund, an investor in Polly Market. We don't have any reporting to suggest that that has played any kind of role in the regulators' willingness or unwillingness to take on prediction markets. But I think that, you know, that's important to mention here. Yeah, I mean, I also, I will say, I would buy that they like doing this because it makes things easier for them.

But I also think there's just no regulatory enforcement. the moment. It's just like, it feels we're just in a regulatory vacuum where the damage is going to come not so much from what happens, but what doesn't happen. What there isn't an aggrave? Like, we don't, like the FTC could cut in here at some point. I don't know. It feels that the SEC could do something, but to your point earlier around crypto, it feels that when Gary Gensler left the SEC, that was kind of the end of any serious crypto regulation anyway, which would have likely led to regulating this. Yeah, I mean, we're obviously extremely interested in what, if any, actions regulators will take on this. And we plan to continue reporting and try to

find out more about what's going on behind the scenes here. Yeah. Well, any closing thoughts, anything left off from the industry that I haven't gone over because this has been wonderful and also truly darkened my heart. Like, I'm going to need to take a walk around the block. No, Ed, I'm so sorry to hear that. No, no, it's not your fault. It's been a very entertaining episode, but just this whole story is so grim. It's a feeling I understand. I mean, I think what really, like, stuck with me through all this reporting was, like, just how good the videos were at reporting to be on Polly Market.

And I, like, it gave me a bunch of anxiety for, you know, family members who are younger and even myself, but more than, you know, like, how hard this is to actually know is what you're watching, you know, truly something. real or is it, you know, deceptive in some sort of manner? And so that's, that's what, that's been what stuck with me. Yeah. Yeah. It does feel like social media is becoming increasingly fake in that way. Go ahead. Yeah, I would, I would underscore what Caitlin said that, um, is also something that has really been resonating with me. And I would just add that, you know, if any of your listeners have experiences with prediction markets, we'd love to hear from them. Um, and our contact information is on our

author pages on WSJ.com. Well, as we wrap up, then, where can people find you? Find us in the Wall Street Journal. If you're a printhead, you know, we still publish in print, but otherwise it's WSJ.com. We live and breathe on social media right now, so you can give us a follow there too. Yeah, where are you at? You're on Twitter and Blue Sky? Just Twitter? Where can we find you? I'm on Twitter at by K. Long and on Blue Sky at, you know, I don't, I don't remember my Post guy username.

All of my socials are C.E. Ostrop. So I like should be about looking like consistent. Caitlin has the, Caitlin has the best nominative determinism initials of all time. Her initials are CEO and she is our boss. No, Neil is our boss. Big shout to Neil for finding poor e-market. I am of course, Ed Zetroni.

I'll be back with a monologue on Friday. You can of course bet on this on Goot. Each goot is worth a thousand slubs. So make sure to invest your slubs. based on the number of times I said the in this episode. That will, of course, funnel into a... It's an account in the Cayman Islands I have. It's fully legal.

I've checked with many lawyers, several of which haven't been disbarred. This has, of course, been Better Offline. I'm your host at Zitron. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-O-W-E-S-E-S-E-E-S-E.

Ski.com. You can email me at EZ at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's your ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to R-slash Better Offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the I-HeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.