Some More News - Some More News: Polymarket, Kalshi, And The New Gambling Economy

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

Hi. Today we're looking at Polymarket, Kalshi, and other prediction markets – how they work, how easily they are gamed, and the (very obvious) dangers of having society bet on everything. Get the world's news at https://ground.news/SMN to compare coverage and see through biased coverage. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through our link.Hosted by Cody JohnstonExecutive Producer - Katy StollDirected by Will GordhWritten by David Christopher Bell and Amanda ScherkerEdited by Gregg MellerProduced by Jonathan HarrisPost-Production Supervisor - John ConwayResearcher - Marco Siler-GonzalesGraphics by Clint DeNiscoHead Writer - David Christopher BellPATREON: https://patreon.com/somemorenewsMERCH: https://shop.somemorenews.comYOUTUBE MEMBERSHIP: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvlj0IzjSnNoduQF0l3VGng/join#somemorenews #Polymarket #KalshiThis year, skip breaking a sweat AND breaking the bank. Get this new customer offer and your 3-month Unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month at https://mintmobile.com/morenews – Upfront payment of $45 required (equivalent to $15/mo.). Limited time new customer offer for first 3 months only. Speeds may slow above 50GB on Unlimited plan. Taxes & fees extra. See MINT MOBILE for details.Pluto TV. Stream Now. Pay Never.Double up the love this Mother's Day and buy ONE DOZEN roses and get ANOTHER DOZEN for free at http://1800Flowers.com/NEWS. Love!Try Gusto today at https://gusto.com/MORENEWS and get three months free when you run your first payroll.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello there, all my freaks, geeks, dweeps, plebs, misfits, and white-browed tits. The bird, it's a bird, you can't bleep it, you can't bleep a bird. Use your beak to like and subscribe to this video if you're able to. Thank you so much. You get some seed. And here's some news. There sure is a lot of stuff and are a lot of things happening. War, war crimes, crimes, climate disasters, regular disasters, climate disasters, pain, suffering, fear, murder, sex, joy, the moon briefly.

More crimes, that new Mortal Kombat film. And I think that is it for now. And honestly, it's been like this for a while. Stuff. It happens a lot. And it used to be that there was nothing we could do about it. But what if that changed? What if some hero or heroes

looked at all the stuff that was happening and thought, perhaps we could convince everyone to bet money on every single thing and event, thus monetizing our entire waking world in order to drown all living things in the crushing ocean of capitalism. Neat idea. Someone should write a Black Mirror episode about that and not actually do it. Oh wait, I'm so sorry.

They did it already. Shucks, humanity is doomed. Did you bet on how quickly I'd mention Black Mirror in this episode? Congratulations if you bet I would do it before the title. Anyway, here's the title. The prediction market is is a terrifying scam. Listen, I'm hip, I grumble.

Who hasn't been forced to do a pickleback shot in the bathroom of a church because they lost a prop bet at a funeral? It happens. This isn't going to be an episode about the pitfalls of gambling, of which there are numerous. No, this is about sites like Polymarket, Calci, Cody Betts.com,

the world's largest gambling site for all things Cody, except, hey now, don't you dare call it gambling? According to these companies, they aren't gambling apps. They simply arrange events contracts in the prediction market. To quote Kalshi's lawyer, it's super not gambling because there are no odds being set. Never mind that their own Twitter account posted, Hello, sports lovers, American odds are live on web. Or that they sell $25 hats that read, what are the odds?

Or that when Kalshi first introduced sports trading, it builds itself as the first nationwide legal sports betting platform. And frequently uses the word bet in advertisements. It's not gambling, you got that! I will bet you 20 bucks, it's not gambling. Anyway, these new gambling websites allow people to place gambling bets on sporting events, but also on everything and anything else.

When will Tay-Tay get married? Are there gonna be aliens? What of this Jesus fellow and his comeback? These are the aforementioned proposition bets or side bets, now becoming the primary method of betting for some. And business is good. In March alone, traders pumped $24 billion into Polymarket and Kalshi. In the same month, Kalshi raised over a billion dollars in their last bout of fundraising, which the board celebrated by doing push-ups.

As a celebration, I have never seen push-ups as a celebration of anything. Literally the opposite. Maybe if you want to celebrate that you're at the airport. But even then, you do pull-ups instead of push-off. Anyway, now valued at $22 billion, the company nearly doubled its apparent worth in mere months, just as Polly Market was eyeing similar success. Gambling is, it seems, everywhere. And you're probably wondering, like, how?

Isn't gambling, you know, illegal in some states? The Buzzkill states, sure. And even in the cool states, it's still highly regulated. Meanwhile, Polymarket doesn't even ask for an ID. And yet, as of this year, it's now allowed in the entire country. How did that even happen? Good question. The answer is stupid and predictable.

So I guess you can bet on it on Polymarket. In short, is Trump. It's Trump. It's the guy you thought it was going to be. See, back in the Biden years, Polymark and Kalshi took wildly different approaches to legitimizing themselves. with the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. That's the agency that oversees markets

that bet on the value of other assets, which I guess these gambling websites count as. Polymarket went to the Pirate Bay route and basically ignored regulations until Biden's DOJ bit them in the ass, while Kalshi actually tried to go through the front door and register with the CFTC, leading to regulation struggles down the road.

None of which mattered when the gilded casino failure got elected and put his own guy in charge, a former crypto regulator named Michael Selling. And because Trump loves and does scams, the DOJ and CFTC promptly dropped their probe and sites like Polymarket were slightly tweaked to be legitimized in the eyes of the federal government, calling it events contracts instead of sports gambling and so on. Kind of like how the stock market isn't gambling because we don't call it that. A very obvious grift made possible by the obvious crime guy. In a single election,

we flipped from cracking down on online gambling to the new CFTC head openly advocating to keep the prediction market alive and well, to the point that the administration is suing any state that tries to regulate it themselves. Because that's the federal government's job, you see, or rather, it would be if they did it. And that's why today we're taking action by coming out with some clear guidance that will help our exchanges, which really are the first line of defense. Our exchanges self-certified contracts and have their own rule books, and they need to be understanding of what the CFTC's expectations are, so we're going to put that out. It sounds to me like you're trying to invoke that same situation where it's up to the

Calches or the other prediction markets to start self-regulating or else, and you can make an example of it if you think there are stupid things they're doing. I think it's more a free market approach than the Biden administration, but we're certainly going to have our exchanges as the first line defense as our statute requires. We are putting out guidance today that's going to set certain expectations of the exchanges. There are certain contracts. Can you tell us this? I'm going to be very straight.

You keep saying we're putting out certain guidance and then we're saying tell us the certain guidance and then you're saying, well, call the great, you know, call the other guys. Do you see what I'm saying? Tell us what the guidance is. Spoilers, he never says what the guidance is. That's Michael Selig talking around the. seemingly saying that they're just gonna put out a loose rulebook and then trust that the companies will follow it. You know how corporations really respond to the honor system? Oh,

worth noting that four of the five CFTC bipartisan commissioners have stepped down. Now leaving this single guy in charge, Michael Selig, who coincidentally had previous job experience at a law firm that represents Polly Market and was also a lawyer for the venture capital firm that led one of Calhsi's funding rounds. Scam shit, folks, helped along by the Republican philosophy of small government. See, it's not simply that the CFTC is now controlled by Trump, but the agency itself has also been slowly defunded

and defanged the same way every agency is being nerfed. The result is the CFTC enforcement office in Chicago going from having 20 lawyers to exactly zero, thanks to layoff. and staff departures due to anger over said layoffs. Simultaneously, the gambling companies are doing the opposite, beefing up so as to be impossible to regulate, specifically hiring former CFTC employees and warming their way into White House events.

So in a crumbling country run by a corrupt crime idiot, the question of how is far less complicated than it should be, and ultimately rather dumb. Short answer? America! The why of it, however, is also dumb actually, because Polymarket and Kalshi are more than gambling sites you see. As I said, it's a prediction market, as in a tool used to foresee future events, like a roulette wheel made for those minority report balls. Totally different and super important, according to the people who run the market. Last year, Polymarket CEO Shane Copeland

told 60 Minutes that his company is the most accurate thing we have as mankind. Kalshi co-founder to Kourmansor similarly bragged that we're making the world a little bit smarter about the future, and I think that's a very valuable thing to build. See, the idea here is that these sites aren't just for betting, but rather function as more accurate polling of public opinion, which in turn more accurately predicts future events. This is actually backed up by a little bit of science. in that past experiments found that a crowd of people could more accurately predict an outcome than a single individual.

It's that ask the audience philosophy. Of course, in terms of predictions, what that ultimately says is that if enough people make an educated guess about a basic situation, most of them will guess correctly. It's not magic. In terms of polling, it does on paper have value. Prediction markets have been especially more accurate at predicting election results. than political polls, during which people frequently lie because they're too ashamed to admit

their shitty opinions that suck and are bad. When there's money on the line, you tend to be more honest. Nobody picks the horse they want to win, they pick the horse they think will win. Or failing that, the one with the neatest name. Which I'm pretty sure is how Senator Mike Crapo got elected. I know that's not how you pronounce his name, but I'm not going to adjust it.

This sheen of legitimacy is why these companies have managed deals with long-standing media institutions. Kalshi has partnerships with CNN, CNBC, and now Fox, to naturally integrate its real-time data into their reporting. While Polly Market linked up with Dow Jones, not the stock index, but the publishing company, that among other things, manages the Wall Street Journal, as well as with Twitter, the X-The Everything's Bad app. In what feels like overnight, a bunch of semi-legal betting websites are now part of the foundation, of how America gets its information about the world. And that is weird, because just to point out the obvious, there's a difference between someone betting

on who they think will become the president and who they will vote for, right? Like, that is so very obviously an immediate flaw in using this to replace polling. A person might be voting for one person, but pessimistically think the other is gonna win. And honestly, that is the most quaint reason these sites are bad.

After all, when you create a completely unregulated betting market that anyone can participate in, you're ultimately just creating a scam machine that gets more and more toxic, especially when, and this is very key, their probabilities are based on money. It's not how many people are betting on a specific outcome, but rather how much money is being bet on a specific outcome versus the other. If you take just a second to consider that, you realize how corruptible and not at all accurate of a system that is. But don't consider it because I'll consider it for you.

That's what you pay me the seeds for. And so after the break from what I'm now calling all things co-considered, we will discuss all the ways this can and has gone wrong. Oh, what are the ads for? Well, you better place your bets now, or maybe don't, because we're about to tell you why it's a bad idea. So don't place your bets on what the ads are about.

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Number of words. Up front payment of $45 for three-month five-gigabyte plan required, equivalent to $15 a month. New customer offer for first three months only, then full-price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mitt Mobile for details. Nailed it. Welcome, or caw as the birds say. We were lip-flapping about these newfangled gambling websites like Polymarket and Cal Sheet and how they've been magically legitimate. not just by our crime government, but by our media institutions as well. And that's odd because there are just so many ways these sites can be manipulated. The most obvious example is insider trading, people betting on the outcome of something they are personally already aware of. For example, when Jeff Bezos' stepson told his frat brothers that his stepfather wasn't attending the Super Bowl, they all pulled up Polymarket and placed bets as high as $10,000 on that outcome. Ignoring the depressing fact that we're now just gambling on whether or not one of the richest guys is going to attend a sporting event, Bezos' his stepson and his friends did nail it.

Though, while that, I guess, accurately predicted the event, it wasn't actually predicting it. It was just people who knew the answer. Hilariously, the opposite version happened when a rumor spread that Mark Wahlberg's kid said her dad would be attending the game, causing everyone to best. on it only for Funky Bunch to be Flaky Bunch instead. Again, a rumor about something the child of someone said. But that means it didn't predict the outcome there because someone was able to manipulate the odds. And in both cases, this all adds up to people

with privileged information manipulating the market. This isn't some weird outlier either. Market manipulation is the fertilizer from which the prediction market blooms. From corporate product launches to details of Super Bowl halftime shows, there are countless ways to leverage all manner of non-public intel. You can now even bet on pre-taped reality shows, giving contestants or crew members an obvious slam dunk. One recent study identified more than 200,000 sketchy trades, likely made by insiders that earned them 140 million dollars. And what's especially wild is that this ability to bet on things you know.

The outcome for isn't a bug. This is a proud feature, at least according to the founder of Polly Market himself. Like, of course there's people who are working on it who know when it's going to come. And I think what's cool about Polly Market is that it creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market and the market to change and all of a sudden is trading at 95 cents and people like, oh. When you say divulge, you mean the people who actually know? Yeah.

Or someone tells someone and then the market responds. Of course that's him. He's like 12. That's the face of a man whose greatest emotional and physical struggle was getting a keg up a flight of stairs. But okay, sure. I guess, according to that rich child, this is a betting website where the odds can be openly manipulated

by anyone with inside knowledge of the outcome, which frankly sounds like a shitty betting website. There even is an insider finder tool to help traders watch for patterns that indicate insider trading. But hey, maybe Michael Selig and his CFTC book of polite suggestions will clamp down on this. And then as the second line... Where is the line? So if somebody wanted to bet on what Becky's going to wear today on the air,

or what color tie I'm going to wear, is that a... Is that over the line or under the line for you? Well, the first question is whether it's susceptible to manipulation. If there's a real risk of that, again, the exchanges are evaluating that. But I'm asking you the question, because I can wear whatever color tie I want and she can wear whatever she wants. And there's a whole group of people in this building who will see what we're wearing before we're wearing it. Of course, but our markets are information machines, right?

And we're looking for efficient information about some of these questions. And there's a distinction between insider trading or something that's manipulable from just trading on certain information. And so, sure, if somebody sees what color tie you're wearing and there's a contract in that, that's not necessarily inside information. I mean, look at that man. He was right there also rolling the keg up those stairs. He looks like he has multiple Facebook groups devoted to warning people about him. Anyway, I guess if someone on the inside gets some information, that's not necessarily inside information, according to the guy now in charge of all of this.

And sure, this doesn't seem that bad when you're talking about the color of a tie. Except that's not the only thing that they're betting on, is it? Take for example whether or not we're going to fucking bomb a country. Mere hours before the US dropped missiles on Iran, the odds of supreme leader Ali Khomeini leaving office rose from less than 25% to over 50% on polymarket. Again, before. And then we killed him. A crypto analytics firm later identified six suspected insiders who made last-minute bets

and profited off of the assassination to the tune of $1.2 million. Insiders with who? Or whom? No matter the answer, it's an abomination. And it happened again right before the current ceasefire was announced. People clearly in the room with the president making some extra money on the side. Or maybe this is now their primary source of income, which is a haunting possibility. This very quickly and easily creates an avenue for politicians to circumvent all kinds of bribery laws, right?

Not that people seem to care these days, but what's to stop a congressperson from making laws in order to win a bet? Or to be given special information from a corporation in exchange for approving a merger. It's a corruption machine. But don't worry, the White House sent an email telling people not to do that,

which will take care of it. And so this brings us to an even more insidious problem with the entire prediction market. Because while it's not even close to being predicted, it might actually function as a way for people to change both the odds and the outcome of events. As I said, this market calculates the odds of an outcome based on how much money is bet on it. This means that if you have money, you can easily change the odds of these predictions. And if you change the odds of a prediction, you change the way people think about that prediction,

which changes their behavior around it, which potentially changes the outcome. And so very obviously, like all these problems are very obvious, this puts the power in the hands of the very wealthy and powerful. This was actually backed up by a master's thesis from a student at the University of Chicago who studied the transactions of half a million polymarket traders. She found that a small class of people overwhelmingly influenced the results because they either have an ungodly amount of money or have superior access to information and analytic. Or maybe they have both, like that French guy who commissioned a bunch of election polls before eventually betting on a Trump victory. He won $80 million, which is, and this is true, just about enough to buy every French citizen a baguette. That's what they eat. That's how they survive. One study found that wagering enough to shock any given prediction market by just 5%

changed the course of the betting so significantly that its effects were still obvious 60 days later. So not only does the market not always self-correct, but it means that anyone with even a little bit of money can sway things significantly. As one campaign official explained in the relatively small betting pool of their candidate's election, they could swing the odds by 40 points with a single bet of $2,500. What good are election polls if the candidate can literally just pay to swing it in their favor? After all, if people are literally betting money on an outcome, they're just, they can literally, They can be easily manipulated into facilitating that outcome by any means necessary. It's monetizing public opinion, which in turn creates an incentive for people to change reality.

The wealthy already get to use their money to change reality. They don't need another more lazy way to do that. New polymarket odds! Cyber trucks are cool and pleasant to look at. This isn't giving power to the common folk. It's not empowerment. It's an extremely convenient tool for for the world's elite to manipulate the odds of any event

and make money while they do it. This is all why one study found that the top 0.04% of traders on polymarket, just under 700 accounts in total, enjoy more than 70% of the profits. It's rich people, completely unregulated, being allowed to fuck with this betting market, sometimes even blatantly as a joke. I was a little distracted because I was tracking

the prediction market about what coin will say on their next earnings call, and I just want to, you know, add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain staking, and Web3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call. That's Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, rattling off some word slop during an earnings call specifically because he was looking to see what the prediction market bet on. For fun, Armstrong said he did not personally have any money at stake, but he could have, and no would have cared, it seems. And that there is a clear example of the prediction market, not predicting an outcome, but creating it. After all, simply seeing that people are

betting on an event inherently changes that event. There are entire sci-fi premises where a time traveler says a thing will happen or that a moment of time is important, and that alone threatens to change the outcome. If I knew people were betting on what I'll say in an episode, that would very obviously influence what I said, right? Poop-wagon donkey widower, and it's shockingly easy for this to happen, Fortnite Tamagachi come salad. It just kind of makes everything a little more like slop, right? Everybody can troll the markets and every news event feels that much more sensationalized. It's baffling that these companies are being inexplicably legitimized as some kind of

reliable source of data when their main motivation is to increase betting. Like, for example, when those nerds flew around our moon, they observed shades. of color on the surface related to its mineral composition. This was a completely expected occurrence that was described by Polymarket in a tweet, quote, just in, Artemis 2 crew reports seeing strange squiggles and unexpected shades of green and brown during lunar flyby. So why did they turn it into a clickbait headline? Again, this wasn't some supernatural event, it was just something they expected to see on the moon.

What a weird exaggeration to make. Unless you remember that Polymarket pushes any news that might draw people into betting on their gambling website around the existence of alien life. Therefore, any news about space will be converted by them into the most clickbaity headlines imaginable. This idea gets even more clownish when you realize that this betting is often on things that are subjective. For example, whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would would wear a formal suit to a June 2025 NATO summit. Trading volume on Polymarket reached $210 million,

with some users putting hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line. Except Zelensky didn't make the results clear cut, and wore an outfit that's kind of a blumberjacks retort to black tie optional. Everyone from the BBC to the New York Post to Ukraine's official Instagram page called it a suit. But the sartorial snobs who decided this for Polymer's, for Polymarket ultimately ruled it not quite sooty enough. This creates yet another fucked up angle,

which is that these sites could make anybody or any news story the subject of gambling. Athletes and refs are used to that, and the dangers and threats that come with it. They shouldn't have to be, but they are. But a journalist, a low-level celebrity, some random person on the news, suddenly people are financially invested in their fate

to a very unhealthy degree, And it's already happened. When a journalist wrote an article about an Iranian missile strike, they ended up getting death threats from people unhappy that they changed the outcome of a bet. That's weird and bad, right? If some kid gets trapped in a well and people start betting on if or when they get out, what's to stop someone from going to that well and changing the outcome?

What's to stop that kid from having to deal with hate mail their whole life? Why do we want to turn every news event into this stressful divisive scandal where reporters are scared to convey basic reality, even more than it already is. Do we really want every headline to be sensationalized to appeal to the people gambling on the outcome? Breaking! This just in! No! It's so obviously grotesque and weird and can go wrong in so many creative ways, like watching a circus bear. And of course, the most grotesque angle is how it affects people who are making important things.

political decisions. Going back to that bombing of Iran and the people who had placed insider bets on it, well, what if those people had the power to stop the bombing? What if there were even more reasons to not bomb Iran than there already were? And those people were financially incentivized to still carry out the bombing. They would have money to protect after all. It's hard to fully describe how evil that scenario is, that there's now an industry where someone can bet money on something terrible they are going to do, and therefore will ignore any reason to not do that thing. I don't know how else to describe that except for evil.

Kalshi has pointed to their rules against profiting off of something like death, but they can't really avoid that. I literally just described a situation where a reporter got death threats. Why would we want this? Why would we want to make the internet and the news even more tribalist? to have people rooting for terrible things to happen simply because they'll make money if it does. To make some people even more cruel and greedy and bloodthirsty.

Especially when it's so manipulatable, it's the rich and powerful dangling money to bait the public into supporting potentially horrible things. A cheat code into the zeitgeist, the same way Elon Musk attempted to dominate the discourse by purchasing Twitter and tweaking the algorithm. And if you think this won't be harnessed by the right wing, Well, that's really cute.

Why? Because obviously, it already has been. Trump and his GOP are now the crime party. So naturally, these companies are courting them. Donald Trump Jr. is an advisor for both Polymarket and Kalshi and has also invested many millions into Polymarket. Oh, also, Truth Social is starting their own prediction market. Cool, not at all a fucked up thing to happen.

Polymarket will have to ramp up their account on there, I guess. As it stands, the Polymarket Twitter account regularly embraces right-wing and conspiracy theory lies. Speaking of lies, sure seems like Nick Shirley, that pranktube or child who does fascist propaganda now, has some kind of ad deal with Polymarket as well. I don't know for sure, I guess, but... Uh... And another thing to take note of is Gavin Newsom right now on Polymarket, He is the leading nominee for the Democrats come 2028.

Appears to be the case. Because Little Nick is exactly the type of person these companies want to court. Young, dumb, and full of fascist propaganda. At one point, Polymarket was paying college fraternities for signing up users. Money, which many Brotherhoods promptly blew on keggers that featured Polymarket branded beer pong sets. Because these are the people who love gambling and are more likely to be swayed by right-wing politics. Future Roobes who will happily hand over their wallets in the hope that it'll make them extra cash and own the libs in the process. And you might be thinking, well, that's

gambling. Except it's super isn't. It's way worse. And after this last break, I will explain exactly why it's worse. You love that. You love when things get worse. Stay tuned. Shut the door. Have a seat. have a serious conversation. The other partners and I have noticed you aren't watching as many free movies and TV shows on Pluto TV as you could be. Is everything okay?

Do you need some time off? Because I mean, Pineapple Express, the entire Star Trek film franchise, and Gladiator are on there, the first Gladiator. Are you not entertained and so forth? Also, such notable films and TV shows that you've referenced personally to me in the past, such as Toaster on the Brain, three-past for a big old smooch.

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The economy? In this economy? What I'm saying is the economy is a lot right now. Like a physical lot where all of your stuff goes, goes until you pay someone to let you have it back. It's tough for individuals and it can be especially tough for small business owners. You can't control the tariffs that may or may not still be active right now. Are they on?

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No one's going to, okay, gusto.com slash more news. Hello again. How are you? Have you been paying attention? We've been explaining why this new predictive market is an obvious tool for the wealthy and powerful to manipulate just about every event. To sum all of this up, it's an industry that pretends

to offer everyday people a shot to gamble themselves into wealth. It is actually being manipulated by rich people to extract even more money and sway the outcomes of events. And you might be thinking that there's a word for that. It's casino. The prediction market, when integrated into the entirety of society, turns reality as we know it into one big casino. Biff's Pleasure Palace, to be exact.

If you don't recall, Biff Tannen is the cruel, stupid rapist that was based on our current president 40 years ago. Although unlike Biff's Pleasure Palace, this casino doesn't offer free drinks, or a magic show, or even bright colors. It's just pure gambling, mainlined into you like a dopamine drip in order to manipulate large groups of people. It's not even a slot machine, those have fun pictures.

As I already said, I like gambling. It's fun, I even like degenerate gambling. I'll play Seelow by the dumpsters. Do you wanna play Seelow? Hit me up and we'll get a Seelow game going. But gambling is absolutely an addiction. It can be very dangerous to some people and warrants regulation and a conversation

about what kind of gambling we should allow in our society. Ignoring how this particular type of gambling negatively affects society at large and potentially individuals who aren't even participating in the gambling, this so obviously hurts people with gambling addictions. That is unquestionable. But putting that aside, if you are watching this and do like gambling or know someone your worried might use these sites.

Well, it's not even good gambling. It gives gambling, even dirt gambling, a bad name. Because I haven't yet explained one of the more sinister aspects of this entire predictive market. Specifically, both Polymarket and Kalshi implement something called market makers. These are rich investors they have made deals with whose job it is to put up bets on either side of any given contract. The idea is to pump money into the site so that other people also join in. It's like hiring a bunch of hot people to hang out at your nightclub so other people buy them drinks. The idea here is to never reject someone's bet, no matter how to

stupid and to always have someone to put up money against the gambler. However, these market makers also get something out of the deal. As a new class action lawsuit is pointed out, these market makers get special privileges, such as reduced or zero fees, higher limits on stakeholder, other financial incentives, and sophisticated data and statistical models. That's right, they get special data to make their bets with. So these market makers have research teams, analyzing this data which they can use to game both Calshe and the markets at large. In fact, Calshe actually owns and operates its very own market maker, creatively called Calci Trading LLC, which buys and sells a completely unknown

number of shares on Calshe's event contracts to keep things humming along. And yes, Polymarket offers similar perks for its own market makers. So I guess it isn't gambling after all. Their lawyers were right because gambling implies there's a fair chance. This is more like sitting down at a poker table and not realizing that half the players work with the casino and know what cards are being dealt. Actually, it's even worse than that. See, the way Polymarket actually decides who wins the bet is through a separate entity

called Universal Market Access, or UMA. It's some blockchain thing that's hard to explain, but it comes down to the idea that that anyone with these digital tokens can use them to vote on whether or not something is true. So for example, that Zelensky suit thing was decided through UMA, except anyone can own these tokens. And so just like regular money, some people own way more tokens than others and can use them to hijack the outcome. That's exactly what happened when people bet on whether Ukraine would agree to a mineral deal with the US, and Polymarket decided that the country had a when no agreement had actually been made at the time.

A lot of people lost money despite correctly betting on an outcome. And this happened because someone with a lot of those UMA tokens used them to force that incorrect answer. In other words, it's not even that the odds are stacked against you, but that even if you win, someone rich enough can just say, nah, sorry, no. Because of course, there's no rules saying you can't own own UMA tokens and bet on these sites.

So going back to my poker metaphor, the dealer is also playing and can just say that they won. New rule! All cards I'm currently holding are wild! I can't stress it enough. Just go to a casino. At least they'll give you a free drink while they take your money. At least they are legally required to state their odds and rules.

Even a scratch ticket is more rewarding than this. Or heck, play Seelot with your friend Cody. Email me the location because this is a scam. And a depressing one at that. It's a supercharged transfer of wealth on top of the transfer of wealth we already deal with. Capitalism distilled down to the worst and most dystopian possible aspects.

Like, hey, here's a pressing question. Do you remember when rich people still had to make things to be rich? Cars, movies about people racing cars, the movie Cars. It used to be that the deal was you'd have to provide something to the public, some kind of good or service, to make a lot of money. That seems like the bare minimum. But as we mentioned in our episode about the stock market, a while ago a bunch of terrible people figured out how to get rich without offering anything, without giving back in any way. And this new gambling economy,

where everything becomes more financialized, where the CEO of Kalshi dreams of a world where he can monetize literally every thought in your head. This is the absolute rock bottom of capitalism. Not the fun way where that guy from those car racing movies slaps you into a wrestling mat. This is a death rattle. It gives nothing back. Not even that free drink, which I really, really want right now.

It's the process of not just giving more power to the wealthy, but to the concept of wealth. A wise man once said, Cash rules everything around me. This is indeed manifesting a world where cash dictates outcomes even more than they do now. and it'll make people cruel in the process, turning the world even more into this.

Yeah. The deadline that President Trump has set 8 p.m. has threatened to destroy a civilization. How does an investor process that? Is it a bigger upside risk or downside risk? In a society where everything is monetized and gambled on, that will be everyone. Because gambling is traditionally something that everyone

can sense to do at a specific time. You can debate the morality, of it, but I think the most important thing is that everyone involved has agreed to it and are aware of the dangers of it because when you gamble, you not only are triggering the reward system of your brain, but also, and most importantly for this conversation, your ability to feel empathy. It's a game you're trying to win where other people will lose when you succeed, and when it's tied directly to money, you can sort of see why doing it professionally isn't a great idea. To hinge your rent money on a game of poker can easily send someone into a very dark place. Now take that idea and expand it to a world where many, many people are struggling economically. You can see how quickly and easily the masses could be transformed into the audience from Running Man, right?

Where people start betting on disasters and death in order to make money to offset the damage done by those same disasters and death until they're rooting for the disasters and death. It's incentivizing doomerism, right? If you think a fascist is going to win the election and bet on that outcome, you're probably less inclined to even bother to vote. We're already seeing this sickness. Like when Polymarket just fucking flat out let people bet

on the fate of those U.S. pilots who were shot down and then apologized about it later, which I'm guessing will result in zero penalties from the courageous CFTC. Do we really want that? To normalize this? Do we really want a generation of people betting on when the next forest fire will happen? On top of the fact that they will be betting against wealthy people who have rigged the game,

ensuring a permanent generation of low-wage workers clawing at each other to eat their scraps. Well, if you don't want that, a good place to start is the CFTC's public comments portal that is currently seeking our input about the future of governing prediction markets. As of this video's release, you have until April 30th to contribute? Is it going to help? I don't know. Seems like the people in charge kind of suck and won't care about public comments unless there's a bet on polymarket about how many negative public comments they get. The good news, however, is that much like AI in the metaverse? None of this works unless we participate. We are the blood needed for this machine to work. Yes, they will pass around money for a while to try and make it look successful, pump the machine full of synthetic blood, but eventually they need our money. So let's not give it to them. And perhaps over time, this will go away the same way the metaverse is going away, at least long enough

for someone to be in charge who will actually step in and stop this from happening. Because this is not where gambling belongs. It belongs elsewhere in flashy depressing casinos, or breakrooms, or my kitchen, or my basement, or behind the false wall in my basement, or under the trapdoor in the room behind the false wall in my basement, or at Cody Betts.com,

where you can watch live streams of people named Cody fighting in an undisclosed location. But you can't bet on it. That would be bad. One could almost say, I've got a secret room, in a secret room, in a regular house, in a secret town, or a secret island. That's Benjamin Linus. That's an old song of mine about Benjamin Linus, a character from the show lost on ABC,

about a secret room. I really had nothing, so I just did that. Um, bye. Congratulations to everyone who bet I would make a reference to lost. A show I reference sometimes. Thank you so much for watching. Make sure to like and subscribe. Make sure to bet on whether or not you're going to like or subscribe.

Make sure to leave a nice comment. Make sure to also bet on how many comments you think they're going to be and if they're going to be more negative or more positive. Just get out all your fucking bets, folks. We've got a podcast called Even More News. You can listen to it on this channel twice a week and also as a podcast. And also we do a live stream once a month.

stream once a month, maybe the date's up here. Everybody in the room, bet on whether or not it's gonna be here. I know what I think, because I can make it appear here if I want to. I can make it say whatever. For a second, let's just make it say ABC's lost. Now it says Battlestar Galactica. Now it says the date. We got merch at a merch store.

Here it is. Make sure to check that out if you like those things. to make sure to the bets. We're doing a betting thing today. What else? There is a bet on Polymark on how many times I would tap the pen, and I just made millions of dollars, and I'm gonna blow it all on drugs.