Bulwark Takes - Trump Found a New Way to Profit Off the Presidency (w/ Justin Wolfers) | Receipts Live

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

Join Catherine Rampell and Justin Wolfers as they cover the week's biggest economics and finance news.Check out Justin's Substack, Platypus Economics: https://platypuseconomics.com/

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of Receipts Live. I am Catherine Rampel and JVL is off this week, but I am delighted to invite on my friend and I don't know. Do I want to say mentor? I don't know. A longtime source, maybe more like source than mentor, but we're buddies too. Justin Wilfers, he is an economist at the University of Michigan. He is also the founder of Platypus.

economics and before we hopped on this live, I was asking Justin what his title was beyond that. And you said it was first deputy. What was it? First deputy platypus. The first deputy platypus. I'm the chief economist of, I'm the founder. I'm the CEO. I get to give myself all the job titles.

All the job titles. That's a burden of being the boss. You own the economics group at Bullwark. So you could be chief economic platypus. of the Bull Walk? Yeah. I don't know. I think you have a monopoly on the platyptopi.

What is the plural of platy? It's a very common mistake there. That is combining a Greek and the Latin root. It's actually acceptable, but it's not good form. They're platypuses. But before we go another step, Catherine, I know you're going to know the answer to this. What's a baby platypus called? A pup?

I'm making this up. That's a good guess. Wouldn't that be cute? What is it? Close. It's a puggle. A puggle! Yeah.

Oh, I love it. I love it. Yeah. Well, I mean, talk about economics. Yeah. Or, you know, Greek and Latin roots and plurals and Australian beasts. In any event, we are here, yes, to talk about economics, thank you for keeping me on task, Justin. And today I wanted to start out by talking about this little headline that dropped yesterday.

on what is happening with Trump's truth social business. So Trump Media, which owns Truth Social, which as far as I can tell, doesn't have a lot of users who are there to do anything other than follow Trump posts, but maybe there's a lively community that I'm just not party to. Truth Social is the place where Donald Trump posts

all of his missives, such as they are, Sometimes it's like, you know, AI generated slop and sometimes it's news about what's happening in a war. They will be selling early access to Trump's posts there, which sounds like somebody's going to make some money off of that. Maybe lots of somebody are going to make some money off of that because, again, like some of this is market moving information, whether it's about the war or about jobs reporting or not. So I guess, Justin, first of all, I just want to get your top line response to this development. I am speaking slowly and pausing just because it's all so dumb. And like, I want to bring joy to the world. I want to teach the world economics.

I want to talk about smart and beautiful things, and it's all so dumb. Look, the truth is already everyone on Wall Street already has a scraper that's set to read every one of these things. and get it out to their trading floor right away. Precisely for the reason you said, it turns out the way that we declare war in other countries now is by truth social post. By the way, it also then means that the Iranians and the Israelis and the Saudis, all of their embassies,

have to have truth social accounts because they need to understand what official government policy is. By the time you count all the embassies in the world, I think you've got the title membership of truth social fully accounted for. You know, there's something, this is so bizarre. So already this is important. And if you charge access to real-time announcements of important government policies,

then there's a bunch of folks on Wall Street who have no choice but to pay. So therefore, it would make a lot of money. So well done, Mr. President, you thought of it. Let's just take a step back. The weird thing here is the president owns a media company. Like, I just want to pause on the moment for how freaking weird that is. I remember when Belisconi was elected, is it prime minister in Italy? And he owned a bunch of media outlets.

And I was like, what the hell is wrong with the Italians? First world countries would never do this. Talk about the backward European corrupt old world ways. These people are nuts. Now, the president has a media company and no one watches it or uses it. and it's intensely valuable because of the role that he's given it. It turns out, by the way, Catherine, you might remember the proper now of it. There is an official government publication that's meant to have all our proclamations about what we're doing.

Is it called the Gazette or is that the Australian name for it? There's the Federal Register. The Federal Register, right. There's a place where the government is meant to publish what the government's doing and the legislation that gave rise to that says everyone should be able to look. It's like there should be a community notice board where we all go and figure out. They pin up what they're doing and we all go and have a look. So we have a federal register.

He just privatized it and personalized it. That's literally what happened. He took the federal register private and said, you have to pay him to see it. Yeah. Yeah. So he makes money. He makes money. But I guess my broader question is, what is this due to market integrity?

I mean, do we care about that? I presume that there is a reason why historically, at least for whatever it is, the past century, we have had the SEC and other regulators that did try to crack down on insider trading. We have laws about laws and regulations about insider trading because we want a fair playing field. But maybe you can explain like why that matters

and whether it matters, I guess, that the president is kind of inserting himself into all of that. Can we just spend a moment on the teleprompter guy? Okay. I mean, that's amazing. I do want to get to the teleprompter guy. Okay, I'll stay put for a moment, but he's fabulous. I mean, just in terms of like, you know, if this were literally a soap opera and you and I were in the writers room, Catherine would have said, how about we have the teleprompter guy bet on this?

and I would have been like, wow. That sounds like a plot twist from you, Catherine. Okay, let's go back a step. Why do we have various forms of financial regulation? There's actually two reasons. One, there's a bunch of stuff that we just feel is unfair. And, you know, it churns the stomach a little, and we, as human beings, think some things are unfair.

I think it's unfair that the teleprompter guy gets to win all his bets, and I don't. Would the American economy be better or worse off if the teleprompter guy wasn't doing it, actually, who cares? Right? Most of the American economy is those of us going to work and actually doing stuff rather than betting on the teleprompter. So it didn't really matter. So there is this very, very strong fairness norm.

The fairness norm that we think some things are cheating, that we think some things are lying, we think that some things are stealing. Teleprompter guy was stealing. Can we just stop for a minute and explain to people who teleprompter guy is? I just like this guy. Yeah, okay. So in case people are not familiar. So the teleprompter operator, the guy who, I don't know, controls the little glass screens that the president is supposed to be reading off of, has been placing bets on Kalshi about what the president would say. And presumably he has an inside track to what the president would say because he is running the teleprompter. He's literally running the teleprompter.

He is literally running the teleprompter. So he's making bets on this. That's the sum total of it. He won 100 grand. I have to say, that seems like less money than I would have guessed, given how much. That's my favorite thing about this. Teleprompter guys, not only corrupt, he's an idiot. Yeah.

Yeah, it seems like he doesn't like much bigger bets. If you were literally in charge of showing the words for the president to read out loud, and the best you can do is when $100,000, you're corrupt and stupid. It's baffling and hopefully in jail. Yeah. But my favourite part is sometimes the president jumps a paragraph in the speech. And so the paragraph might be a paragraph who is just about to talk about emus

because we love talking about Australian wildlife. And if he jumps over the emu bit, he's the teleprompter guy who's picking up his phone and reversing his bet on emus. He's meant to be working for the American people, the president of the United States. He's reversing his bets, probably Trump's stumbling over his teleprompter at that moment. Everything's glorious about it, but we're here to talk about economics. No, I mean, it's all relevant, I think. Like people are making a buck and they're not super competent, but they're making a buck anyway

because it is so easy to make a buck if you are connected to the president. I mean, I think that's kind of a takeaway here. It's that if you are betting on any. anything remotely related to what this president says or does, and you do not have inside information, you're a chump. Because there is somebody who is on the other side of that bet. And in these prediction markets, it's a zero-sum game, right? Like, I win and you lose or vice versa.

And so if somebody else has inside information because they have access to his speech, or they know what the jobs numbers are going to be, or they know where he's going to bomb next. And I don't, then I'm flying blind and they can take advantage of that, basically. Yeah? Also, what a moment we're in that knowing where the president's going to bomb next is one of the most important economic indicators of our time.

There's a time we actually used to talk about whether to bomb, have a long national debate, bring experts in, sit down and try and talk it out first. But that's a whole other issue. Okay, let's come back to the economics of this. Yeah. You might be offended that teleprompter guy, he didn't look very handsome, you might be offended that he made $100,000 and he made him from someone else. That's unfair.

That's one reason to have financial market regulation. Another reason is, I want everyone at home now to notice something, now that you understand something you should have understood a week ago, which is when you're betting on whether the president will say the word emu, you're just a guy at home. There's someone else who wrote the speech and someone else who runs the teleprompter and someone else is distributing transcripts to the media and someone else is in the media

who also could be active in this market. Given that, before you bet with someone, you need to always ask yourself, why does the other person want to bet with me? Once you ask yourself that, all of a sudden you ask, oh, it might be because they're teleprompter guy. And as soon as you understand that,

you shouldn't bet against them. And so this now is the efficiency case. This is why we have financial market regulation, which is there are some forms of financial markets that are actually more important than whether Trump says the word emu. And in order to get what we call price discovery for the market to operate at a reasonable place, you have to have people trading in it. But if everyone's afraid that the other bloke knows something they don't, then no one trades. And then the market doesn't work. In fact, if you'd asked me two years ago, are these markets on whether someone, will say a word, are they going to work? I would have predicted that they wouldn't, because I

would have thought, I'm an economist. So we write down models where people are incredibly sophisticated and people continually disappointers. I would have thought people would think of themselves, oh, I'm worried that I'm up against teleprompter guy. Or I'm worried, you know, will Trevor Noah say the following word? I'm worried, going on the other side of that, bet's Trevor Noah. You should have been smart enough to figure that out. But so that's the reason we want to allow everyone access to information and as far as possible put them on the and footing. Now this all comes back to now what the president's going to do is sell access to his words to an elite few. There are a bunch of ways this could go. One is that everyone has to,

everyone who wants to be active in the market for other reasons now has to buy this information so that they don't actually end up betting against the metaphorical equivalent of teleprompter guy, which is anyone who's bought access to the president. So either everyone has to buy this, the president gets rich, it's a pure transfer, or some people don't buy it and as a result don't want to trade in the market. This now, by the way, gets a lot beyond, will the president say emu? Because now I'm thinking about any part of my savings. Like my savings goes into a 401k or it goes into a big diversified index fund.

Do I want to buy in that, knowing everyone who's selling, knows which companies are about to get a leg up from the White House? That's the thing about financial markets. When someone gains, someone else loses. And when someone loses, that might cause them to change their behavior. And so that's why we want financial regulation and giving, you know, that's why this selling truth socials such an amazing name, truths as well. I love that for him. I know. It's very Orwell. Orwellian is a term that gets overused, but it does feel all are well. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like extortion and distortion, all packaged into one, right?

that he's like extorting financial firms that need to pay him off to get this information because otherwise they'll be, they know that there's this information asymmetry and they'll be, you know, they'll lose money. You just do something that folks at home can take away from them, which is when you're at a dinner party and you want to pretend like you're an economist, you call this, what was the term you used there, Catherine? Information asymmetry. So I get paid more when I use longer words with more. syllables because that makes what I do feel complicated and therefore you have to pay to learn about it. So we are talking about what's called information asymmetry. When I talk to my Econ 101 students,

I actually like them to understand it. So I always say... So sorry for dropping. Sorry, I'm not teasing you. You've been very good at this for many years. But I describe all of this as the economics of I know something you don't know. Yeah. And anytime you're doing business in the back your mind, you want to think, did they know something? I don't know. And if you're not thinking that, then you're the chump. Yep, yep. I will point out also that there have been prior times when people were worried that Trump insiders, Trump friends, cronies, business partners, whatever, had access to inside information. And, you know, the White House at least pretended to be embarrassed by it periodically. like there was this time, I think we have the tweet in 2018.

Trump tweeted a couple of hours. Do you remember this? It tweeted a couple of hours before the jobs numbers came out, indicating that the jobs numbers were going to be good because he was looking forward to them. And I remember this was like a big deal in, at least in financial journalism world because, you know, those of us who have covered the jobs report

know that they're very tightly kept under wraps. There's this embargo. Actually, I don't know if they still do it, but they used to allow journalists into an official locked room where they could see the information of what was in the jobs report, like at 8 o'clock for an 8.30 release. And, you know, there are all of these procedures around it. And the White House was not even allowed to talk about it

until an hour after the numbers came out, lest it appear political. We were so concerned about keeping the information secret, first of all, so that no one could probably. off it off of it. And second of all, making sure that this, that the information not only was independently collected, but actually appeared to be independently collected as well. And there was this fear that if the White House weighed in and tried to spin it too early, then people wouldn't believe the data or they would be somehow compromised. And of course, Donald Trump threw all of that

out the window. And so this was like a big deal. I mean, it's, it feels kind of quaint now that people were upset about Trump just saying, suggesting that the jobs numbers were going to be good. But I do remember there was a lot of concern like, well, if he's posting this early, what is he telling people that's not blasted out for the public? What's he telling, you know, Carl I can or whoever about what the jobs numbers are going to be? And now I feel like there's not even a pretense that he's not going to try to help his buddies or help people profit off of it. Is this what the ballwalks about?

You're making me so mad. I mean, there's a little bit of that. It's about helping people harness their anger so that they understand what's going on and can use that anger productively. Because those were simpler times, but I actually want to make a point that it's not just that those were simple times. So there were simpler times. The problem is today, so everyone at home, American taxpayers, they fund the Bureau of Labor statistics going and collect all these numbers. You're paying for that, that product. But the reality is I spend half my time online today with people telling me all the numbers are made up.

And I'm not telling you it's people from the right. It's people from the left that are telling me this. Yeah. And they're not, but I'm not going to call them insane because what's happening is half the numbers that people hear, half the numbers are fake. And it's just that you and I, Catherine, happen to be deep in the weeds. and we know numbers that come from 1,600 Pennsylvania Avenue, that's the White House, are usually made up. Numbers that come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics are never made up.

Numbers that come from the U.S. Department of Agriculture used to not be made up. Numbers that come from the Commerce Department used to be true, even if occasionally a little bit spun. Now they're often literal falsehoods, but the Commerce Department has the Census Bureau, and every number that comes from the Census Bureau is true. So if you don't have the time and energy to spend that Catherine and I do in trying to figure out the provenance of each number, and I mean provenance, really like you would say a bottle of wine or an old antique, you have to know what it touched at each and every point along the way. We understand the providence and we can tell you what's true and what's false.

If you don't have that time, then you have this sense, half the numbers are made up, almost anything that's politically convenient is a lie. And then you'll see an economic number come out and it'll be politically convenient. It's not crazy for you to say, I'm not sure I believe it. Now, on that number, I'm here to tell you, you can believe it. And when the inflation report just came out with good numbers, many of my liberal friends were like, it's all made up. And I will in fact tell you my least favorite thing is people on social media saying, I'm out, I'm not going to watch platypus economics anymore because you believe this

bullshit. And I'm like, I've got expertise in the truth on my side that you want to carefully curate your environment to insulate from you from the truth. That's your own problem. See you later. But the temptations are to lean the wrong way here. But I want to come back to the point. We actually have the truth and the president. We paid for the truth, but the president has made it so no one believes it, which means it's much less valuable. Our tax dollars are being spent less efficiently. They're creating numbers that used to be credible are now equally truthful but no longer credible and therefore no longer valuable. Sorry, I'm mad.

Well, so I endorse 99% of what you just said. Wow, a 1% clash. This is going to be brutal. I know. The one caveat that I would have about trusting the numbers, not trusting the numbers, is that while I do not think the numbers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces the jobs report, some of the inflation data and some other, you know, headline metrics, I don't think those, I don't think they're cooking the books because to use your framing,

I understand the provenance of it. I do think, I do worry that the numbers have gotten less correct or less accurate, not because of deliberate manipulation, but because of deliberate under-resourcing. And so if, yes, so if you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which produces the GDP numbers and a bunch of other things, they have lost a lot, a lot of civil servants. The last I had looked at this, I think the head count was down like 20%, somewhere between 10 and 20% since Donald Trump took office. And that has effects on quality. I mean, in particular, like, for the jobs numbers, you know, I'm not telling,

I know Justin knows all of this, but just for those who are, you know, again, not as in the weeds on all this because you're not paid to be. The jobs. numbers, those have gotten harder to collect and to measure over time in large part because people are not answering their phones anymore. And so the survey response rates, all of those data, or at least that survey, that data released anyway, is based on surveys. And if people are less likely to answer their phones, if people are less likely to answer the door, all the different ways that the government tracks people down, then you're going to have more noise. And then, And so that's been a problem independent of who is in office. And that's true, not just for government

surveys. That's true for all sorts of different surveys as well in polls. But then you layer on top of that the fact that there were these big cuts via Doge and, you know, hiring freezes and things like that in the past year. You do have higher error rates, more noise in these data because like in the example for, you know, for those who are listening, BLS also collects data for the CPI, the Consumer Price Index. They have had to shut down some of their regional price collection bureaus. I forget what the formal term of art is for that. Maybe you know, Justin.

But they've had to shut these down. And so they're like not collecting price data in Buffalo or wherever. And so I would say that I'm worried that the numbers become less trustworthy because there is a different form of sabotage going on. Now, that doesn't mean that, like, there'll be more flattering to the president. They may or may not be if you take Buffalo out of the mix. I don't know. But at the very least, they become a little noisier, a little less accurate.

And that's the kind of sabotage that I'm worried about, even for the data series where I'm not concerned about, like, again, book cooking and deliberate meddling and that sort of thing. I want your audience to know how amazing you are. So I think I've said this to you, but I haven't said it to your audience. Catherine is the leading economics journalist of her generation. And I'm an economist. So when she says, if she said silly things, I'm paid to understand if it was silly,

I'm also paid to understand if it's insightful. And all of that is insightful and correct. And I admire you greatly. I also love the fact that you invited me here to bore the crap out of your audience by talking about details of data collection for particular series at the BLS. No, but I think people are into it. I mean, that's why they're tuning in. You talked about how they longer collect price data from Buffalo.

I have to just give you one very important family anecdote. And maybe you could try this too. Every time my family drives through Buffalo, I have to remind them that the sentence, Buffalo, Buffalo, Buffalo, Buffalo is a grammatically correct sentence. We have a lovely family conversation about grammar. So always remember that as you go through Buffalo. Deep questions about how many buffaloes you need. Does it need to be odd or even?

Turns out I think all of it works. great sport, but that wasn't the point. See, the thing is, with economic statistics, no economic statistic is correct because we don't actually know the truth. They're all estimates of what's going on, just like if you get out a ruler to measure the size of something, you're only get it right to within a 16th of an inch. Like the instrument's just not made for the job. There's no such thing as perfection. At least that's what my therapist tells me. It says, stop striving. So there's always errors.

And so then there's a really good, responsible, thoughtful debate to have for nerds to have. Nerds like Catherine and me to say, hey, you know what? I think they're measuring it wrong in Buffalo. I think they're getting this bit wrong. And that's serious because how we measure things is always up for debate. These are questions of statistical art. There's no just measure it. No sentence is ever that simple.

And the problem is that in the current moment, we can't have that discussion, or if we do, it's taken to mean something else. And so the point that Catherine was making is our estimates are unbiased. Unbiased just means it could be an underestimate, it could be an overestimate. Who knows? Political biases, it always leans. It tends to lean one direction. And so I'm admitting errors exist.

I'm not admitting that they always lean in one direction. And then Catherine's making one more point that's really important, which is, could be an underestimate, could be an overestimate. The less resources you give to that, the more likely. it is to be a larger under or overestimate, and that's absolutely true. The point is there's sophisticated, important decisions about how best to measure things, and we can't have them. And that makes me sad. See, I've made you angry. I've made you sad. All sorts of material. It's an emotional rollercoaster today. It is. And it's because of you. Sorry. Hopefully people are enjoying the

ride with us. Before we go, the last thing I wanted to ask you about is about prediction markets writ large. So we talked about teleprompter guy and how he made these inside bets on Kalshi and made a whopping 100K, which is not no money, but anyway, not the payday he could have had. You were an early believer in advocate of prediction markets, like before it was cool. And actually, I was going through your CV before this and looking at like, what did you write at the time? And let's, so this is from, I think this is from 2008. I forget when this is from, but this is from Science magazine, which is like one of the leading scientific journals. And you just have a murderer's row of co-authors on this thing,

including a bunch of Nobel laureates who are advocating for deregulation of prediction markets. So the little blurb on the right, if folks can read it, is the ability of groups of people to make predictions is a potent research tool that should be freed of unnecessary government restrictions. Prediction markets obviously have been massively deregulated in the year since and are a very controversial, I guess I would say, expansion of the online ecosystem, online entertainment ecosystem. And I guess I'm wondering how you feel about this industry today. Do you feel like it lived up to the promise that you saw in it back in the early 2000s? What I love is that you just brought up an article in which I'm listed as a co-author of Kenneth Arrow. And the rest of today, you could just call me Kenneth Arrow's co-author. For folks at home, Kenneth Arrow was one of the three greatest economists of the 20th century.

And for a brief time, my colleague at Stanford, but not in any deep. sense of profound collaborator of mine as much as I might want to claim him. Look, great question. Look, let me explain the dream from back then. Here's the idea. We use a simple prediction market. We all know about prediction markets on elections, right? So there might be a prediction market right now that says it's a 55% chance the Democrats are likely to win the next election. What the research tends to show is that price, people are willing to buy a security that pays a dollar if a Democrat becomes president. If that price is 55 cents, we'd say markets are acting as if they believe. There's a 55% chance that Democrat wins the next

election. Of course, a market can't believe anything because a market is a collection of people, but let's personalize it just as a bit of a shortcut here. And it turns out that those sorts of predictions tend to be more accurate than any other kind. They're more accurate than Nate Silver. They're more accurate than poles. They're more accurate than econometric models. They're more accurate than talking heads on CNN. They just turn out. And by the way, that's not a surprise to anyone who studies economics, because if they weren't more accurate than the alternative, it necessarily follows.

There's a way that you could use that alternative prediction structure, like a forecast, to make money. So people keep betting based on, you know, in Michigan, I see a lot of yard signs out. And Catherine, you're in New York and you see a lot of New Yorkers are very excited. And you bet and I bet. you watch the debate and the price comes to reflect what you see what i see and whatever it in the market sees so the idea was actually there's a lot of stuff that people already a lot of risks that people already trade for for instance even before those political prediction markets

people would take their understanding of who's likely to win the next presidency and that would inform whether they were going to buy or sell stock in a say an electric vehicle company that would depend a lot on the future regulatory environment so people already trading that risk. But if I see that the price of electric vehicle manufacturers is high, it doesn't tell me exactly what's going on with the election. So it was just saying, can we take this information that people are already gathering and make it transparent? One simple number, 55%. And so the idea is sometimes if we extracted that information, we made it transparent, it's already stuff people are trading on, that that broadcast the information, we're all better informed in this instance about our political

future. We could also have prediction markets on which brand of car is likely to cause the most deaths next year. Well, that would be really helpful for me as I'm trying to think about what kind of car to buy because I want to buy a really safe car. So in your view of the world back in 2008 or whenever that article came out, you saw prediction markets as this tool that could make consumers better informed, that could make businesses more informed, investors more informed. This was basically like a way of x-raying the world and seeing a bunch of invisible otherwise invisible information. Am I kind of capturing? That's right. That's right. And it's a byproduct. People are already doing all this

research. Let's just make it transparent. Okay. So that's the benefit of prediction markets. That benefit still exists. Right now we can log on to Kalshi and see the chant, you know, what do markets think that the odds are that Trump says emu. By the way, I keep saying, because I bet a thousand that I get Catherine Rampel to say emu before the end of the show. So that's the benefit. And that benefit's real. A lot of journalists should.

I'm going to say should market test their opinions by seeing I'm telling my audience this, but does the market disagree? Markets are usually smarter than people. And so I think it's a very good tool. Now, here's the problem. If you actually go to Carl Shee, 90 or polymarket, roughly 90% of the money being bet is actually on sports. And so we wanted this X-ray machine to reveal economically useful information,

but knowing whether the Red Sox score a run in the bottom of the third, it doesn't matter. That information that we collect and we broadcast and we understand more clearly doesn't make the economy more efficient. It doesn't make you live a better, richer, full of life. So a lot of what we're calling prediction markets is actually just sports betting. That's the reality. These firms are taking this idea that I champion 15 years ago and using it to become backdoor sports books.

That's the first objection. There's a second one. I grew up, I don't know if you know this about me. As a teenager, I worked on the racetrack in Australia. I used to work for bookies and professional gamblers. I had no idea. In fact, I finished high school and I was going to become a bookie or a professional gambler. I wasn't going to go to college.

The following part won't surprise you, Catherine. At age 18, I was an obnoxious little bastard, and I got fired in my first week for talking back to my bookie, my boss. And I thought to myself, oh, there's nothing better to do. I may as well go to college, and I started studying economics. So that's how I became an economist.

I was actually a gambler first. Now, there was a bloke I worked with. I used to like to bet because I like the intellectual challenge. I want to figure out whether I'm better at math than the next guy. There was a bloke I used to work with. He used to be a bank teller. And I said, him, well, you're going to bet on the next race? And he says, no, I don't bet.

I'm like, oh, come on, mate. And he said, Okay, and he handed me five bucks and I bet on number one, bet that five bucks on number one. Six months later, this guy was betting thousands of dollars per race. Some days he'd come to work in a car and sometimes he'd come on the train because he'd had to steal his car. He stole enormous amounts of money from his family business. He stole from my boss. He basically destroyed his family's life.

Compulsive gambling is an absolutely utterly serious disease and a disjointed, destroys lives as surely as crack cocaine does. And for anyone at home has had a professional gambler in their lives, it's so awful. It really is addiction. So what we've had, we've gone from a country of Puritans that basically had, you're allowed to gamble in Vegas while you're on a bucks weekend, but that's it. To gambling's everywhere, advertising about gambling is everywhere. We're going to call it prediction markets to pretend it makes the world more efficient.

I'm just told you almost none of this does. we're not going to do anything to help the real victims. So to put this in an economics framework, the question is, are the benefits, the benefits of the market. It's a little bit more fun to watch the Red Sox if you bet $10 on it for 98% of us. And in some cases, there's some useful information revelation. On the other side, there's the one or two percent who destroy their lives.

And I don't know about you, but I'm happy to not bet $10 on the Red Sox and go back in time and save that blow. fly. The problem is we haven't had a grown-up debate about it. Worse than that, the two biggest players now have so much money. I'm going to bet you money right now. I'll bet you $100, Catherine, that there's been an internal discussion at the Bullwark whether to take their money. I don't know the answer to that question. I'm still right. I know it has. Not I know, no. I just, they're talking to everyone. And maybe you made one choice, be made another. But as a result, once you've let the cat out of the bag, now there's big money

interest on allowing this to continue. Do you know how much lobbying money there is for the families who've seen their lives destroyed? Like, these are single moms whose husbands are in jail. They're not represented in the debate at all. And so if politics ends up being a weighing machine of competing interests, one of them just doesn't weigh enough. And so I don't know what the right answer for America is I have views, but what I do know is we never had the debate. And that saddens me enormously. And just to bring things full circle to what we started out, our discussion on, which is who has inside access to this president, who gets inside information from this president. There's also a question of who has, not just is extracting inside information, but is

potentially imparting specially protected information or more impactful information, which is. Let me add one more fact. There's two major competitors in the space, Kalshi and Polly Market. Guess who both of them has as a paid advisor? Yeah, that's where I was going. Well, answer. Yes, yes. Donald Trump, Jr. Yeah.

He's advising both companies in a duopoly. How's that even legal, let alone come back to ethical? I think that those are rhetorical questions and not substantive ones that we actually are going to be about. Is my emotion here, Catherine? I'm sorry. You can't go to tell me something happy. Can you do that?

Something happy. My daughter is about to turn one and she's babbling up a storm. So that keeps me happy. That keeps me sane and grounded, even as the world around me goes nuts. Justin Wilfers, Justin Wilfers, thank you so much for joining me today. This was a great conversation and I hope we can have you back. I believe I am talking with your better half, Betsy Stevenson, later this evening. I think.

The kids said you called and that you wanted to do them about the economy as well. Yeah, I look forward to it. Maybe we'll talk to them about their gambling habits as well. Justin Wolfers, thanks so much for joining. Thanks everyone for tuning in. And, you know, don't gamble, guys. It rots your life.

All right. Thanks so much. Tune in for more Bullwork takes. We have lots more content for you. Have a great weekend.