The Dispatch Podcast - The Rise of Gambling in the U.S.

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

Steve Hayes is joined by Jonah Goldberg, Megan McArdle, and David French to discuss the growth of prediction markets and the differing goals that Israel and the U.S. may have in the war with Iran.The Agenda:—The harms of sports betting—Fantasy football podcasts and gambling—Monetizing insider trading—How does gambling affect sports?—The libertarian argument regarding addiction—Mismatched aims for the war in Iran—Tension between the U.S. and Israel—NWYT: Can a vegan candidate win in Texas? The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—click here. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Many promotions are available both in-store and online, though some may vary. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we'll take a long look at gambling and prediction markets in America. What's led to their rise? How prevalent are they? And what's the government role in regulating them? Also, Iran. Are there differences in the objectives of the United States and Israel? And if so, how much do they matter? And finally, not worth your time. Can a pro-vegan candidate win statewide in Texas? I'm joined today by Dispatch co-founder Jonah Goldberg and Dispatch Control, David French of the New York Times and Megan McArdle of the Washington Post.

Let's dive in. Welcome, everyone. We are recording this on Thursday morning, March 19th, the day that the NCAA men's basketball tournament really gets underway. Across the country, we have tens of millions of Americans who have filled out brackets to take part in March Madness, as has been the case for decades. but when I go to CBS Sports homepage for March Madness, I've got many more options than I used to have. In the upper right-hand corner of the page, I can choose watch for streaming to watch the games.

I can choose fantasy or I can choose betting. And if I click on betting, my options are betting news, betting apps, sportsbook promos, draft kings promo code, bet 365 promo code, bet-3-65 promo code, bet MGM promo code, fan dual promo code, fan-dict sportsbook promo, DFS apps on and on it goes, including a link to casinos. 20 years ago, gambling in the United States was mostly limited to Vegas, Atlantic City, Indian reservations, and neighborhood poker games.

Now it's everywhere and easily accessible on our computers and phones, and we can bet on virtually anything. Horse races, basketball, blackjack, cornhole elections, military strikes. McKay Coppins has a... terrific piece in the new Atlantic. And he reports that in 2017, Americans legally bet $4.9 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to at least $160 billion. David, I'll start with you. Why has betting taken off this way? And where was the public debate about whether this ease of access to betting is good for the country? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, the first part is easy to answer is that it's a lot of fun for people. And the way that betting has evolved,

when betting first became more legalized on a widespread basis, I would be what you might call betting curious. I hadn't thought it through fully. It wasn't one of those issues that was front and center on my radar screen. I had agreed with the Supreme Court decision that sort of laid the groundwork for all of this. There were some real problem, legal problems to the framework before. And I remember a friend of mine gave me, I did a miniature, tiny version of the McKay Coppins experience where he was, you know, given $10,000 by the Atlantic to just sort of gamble it away and just see how the experience goes. A friend of mine, you know, did one of these like bed-MGMs or draft kings, like invitations where I got the free $120. And, you know, I thought, you know,

But I'm more into basketball than the average person. I'm exactly the kind of person who should clean up at this. And I think within three bets, it was just 100% gone. But the experience was fun. You're monitoring several games at once. And the prop betting aspect when you're betting in real time in the real moment about, is this pitch going to be a ball or a strike, sort of introduces almost a slot machine effect while you're watching. And so, you know,

it's challenging for people. It's fun for people. And it's easy to see why they slide into it. And for me that I did, my, my quick realization was very similar to McKay's, which was, no, I'm not the kind of person who could do well here. I am exactly the mark. I am the one they're making all the money off of, which is the person who pays, you know, close attention to sports, who really loves sports, but is not anywhere like a bookmaker or a real expert. I'm exactly the person I have enough, you know, sports ego to think I've got real insight into the game when really all I am is just a fan. I have a fan level inside into the game and just would get blown out constantly in betting. But some of the stuff, I mean, we, I'm sure we'll

dive more into McKay's story is that fascinating is how the system is really rigged to do this to you. I mean, this is what it is. The house is going to win here. But yeah, absolutely it is, it's spreading because it's a lot of fun for people at the same time. I think most of America was like me. This was just not a front and center issue. You were vaguely aware, you know, that there are these changes happening in gambling, but it was never like big front page news. We had a million other things going on to worry about politically. And it just kind of spread in a very stealthy, quiet way in a lot of ways around the country. And we woke up one morning to this just completely changed sports landscape that has got really negative radiating effects across the country.

Yeah, I mean, just my own experience with fantasy football, I've been doing fantasy football, I think, for 25 years. And forever, I would listen to a fantasy football podcast. There was some advantage in sort of the pre sort of hyper-internet days to being able to compile your own statistics and you can do your own analysis. And that could prove an advantage just in your little home league. Now, of course, it's everywhere. And the thing that struck me over the past decade, really,

but really over the past three, four, five years in particular, is it's almost impossible to listen to a fantasy football podcast. podcast that's pure fantasy football. Oh, yeah, right. That doesn't immediately get into betting and parlays and odds and prop bets and all of these things that I'm just, I just have never been interested in. Jonah, you may not remember this, but the first time you and I met in person was gambling at your house, a poker game.

Well, I remember you being at my house for poker games. I also remember meeting you at the blackjack table when we were both in Vegas to Yucca Mountain stuff or something. But that's the first time I met you? Yeah, that was later. Yeah, you had me to your house with your little homeboy poker game. This was like in the pre-NRO days. And you had me over. It was sort of a friend of a friend. And I think you had me over once and I was such an easy mark. I mean, I lost so badly. I did not know what I was doing that you kept having me. And I was like, man, this is great. These guys must really like me. And I don't think that. That was the reason you kept inviting me back.

We can do the, you know, it's funny, like on the odd couple, they're like six episodes changing when they first met. We can do memory lane on this offline. Look, I like gambling. I've always like gambling. It is good that I don't follow sports very closely in work because it's a good filter to keep me from betting on it. I am deeply intrigued by polymarket stuff because I think I'm pretty good at predicting

how things are going to go sometimes with various things. Can you explain in late? terms, what's polymarket? Yeah, so polymarket and this thing, Calci and Mortacom, they basically let you bet on anything and everything. Like, there's a guy the second coming. Lots of people are betting on that in all sorts of ways. But what's the name, Alan Cole, guys written for the dispatch, bet basically all of his non-retirement savings, all of his money, that Doge would not lead to less federal spending. And he won like $320,000.

There's someone who bet that guest appearances of Lady Gaga and other developments during the Bad Bunny halftime show in the Super Bowl. And there's no way this person could have just randomly guessed that, oh, I bet you that so-and-so comes out and so-so, whatever. It was obviously a security guard's brother or a security guard or someone in Bad Bunny's entourage or a PR person who called it for. Anyway, the point is that it's turning all of it. of life into places where you can monetize insider information.

And I think it's a very good example. There are a bunch of examples. I just gave this big speech, the title of which was, The Revolution will be group chatted. But there are all sorts of ways. AI is probably the most discussed in which the institutions, formal and informal of modern liberal democratic capitalism, were built up around technologies that are now phasing out.

And, you know, we'd like to talk here a lot. If we had a jar, we had to put a dollar. Every time one of us said something about how Congress doesn't do its job, we could have a really nice dispatch happy hour. Maybe at the new polymarket bar that is opening in D.C. called the Situation Room. I think it's just a pop up. I think it's probably just this weekend.

It's a three-day bar. Yeah. Maybe we'll go there and bet it all. But my point is that the Supreme Court paved the way for this. I can't really gainsay the court's reasoning. But rather than say, oh gosh, we are now on our way to insert gambling into every nook and cranny of American life and potentially ruin collegiate and professional sports in the process, Congress instead basically, broad brush hooks, took money from casino

lobbyists to do nothing or less than nothing. And I never thought gambling should be made illegal. but we were better off when it was contained essentially in a few discrete geographic locations so that if you went, if you wanted to have a big blowout gambling weekend, you went to Vegas or you went to AC or maybe you went, I think we're on too many Indian reservations, but that's a more complicated thing. But you didn't live with it day in and day out. Every waking moment wasn't a prop bet opportunity. And I think this is going to end disastrously. It's going to ruin a lot of lives. it's already ruining lives, and it's cowardice on the part of Congress that it hasn't done anything about it.

Megan, you are probably the purest of pure libertarians in this group. What should libertarians, what should small government conservatives think about the proliferation of gambling and about government's rule? Well, some disclosures. Number one, I like gambling, but I don't like gambling very much. When I started dating my husband, he became extremely worried because, There was a period when online poker was legal in the U.S. And I was playing a lot of online poker. And he was becoming increasingly frantic and unable to contain it.

And he didn't say anything. And finally, he was like, I am extremely worried about your gambling habit. And I was like, honey, come look. Was he worried about the time or was he worried about the money? He was worried that I was going to lose all our money. And I was like, honey, come look. And I was playing the micro-stakes tables. It's the one and two cents bets.

I think it had a cap bet of 25 cents. And I was like, here's the $4.50 I won net last month. Here's the $12 I lost the month before. That's where it all starts, Megan. Yeah, no, I don't. This has always been true of me. The first time I ever gambled, I went to Atlantic City with a guy I was dating who had the same name as his grandfather and whose grandfather had been a compulsive gambler who lost the family business. We got comped.

It was great. But then we went and I played Blackjack for the first time. And again, I like playing Blackjack at the five. dollars tables, which is why I no longer played blackjack, because they basically don't exist. Right. I like taking $50, $75, $100 and being like, this is what I would have spent on cocktails and like going out tonight. And instead, I'm going to spend it at the tables.

And when it's gone, I'm leaving. But we were playing. We won a bit. And there was a woman there who did not look like she was having fun. She looked exhausted. She was wearing, she also did not look like she could afford to lose the money. She was losing. She was wearing like denim overalls.

and he told me when we left the table that, and I had fun. Like, I learned, you know, people were coaching me how to make where to hit and so forth. But when we walked away, he said he'd been talking to the dealer during a lull when they were, you know, changing the money over or the card decks or something.

And the dealer said she'd been there for 48 hours and had lost like $30,000. Oh, man. And this is one of the problems with gambling is that there's a real power law is that most people who gamble or like me. They gamble on a set budget. They have a little bit of fun and then they stop when they're losing money. I cannot imagine. I really like having like a tiny stake in what's going on,

the tinier, the better. If it's four cents, that's better than 10 cents. But I really, I cannot emotionally access the excitement some people feel at the idea of losing money they can't afford to lose. Right. And I have like, I don't do sports at all. My husband, my husband, spend also doesn't do sports, once referred to someone non-ironically told someone I was the sports not in the family because I watched the Olympics. And like so, but I once won a ton of money on a Super Bowl pool at the office. It was like a $100 pool. I worked only with guys because I was in IT at the time. And I, my boss needed to fill a like two squares. And so he pressured me into taking the two squares. And so I took them. I had no idea where.

I was doing. I didn't have any choice of the numbers because the others were all taken. And I won. And it was great. And then I was like, I know this is how it starts. And I, in fact, was never again tempted to bet on a Super Bowl pool because what the hell do I know about the Super Bowl? But so that said, I think we should keep this in perspective. $160 billion sounds like a lot of money. It's about what Americans spend every year on their pets. So a lot of money. Well, yeah, but also no. We're not worried. that pets are going to bankrupt Americans and, like, ruin their lives.

It is going to harm the small number of people who will become compulsive and unable to stop and will lose money they can't afford. But, like, those stories tend to get blown up out of abortion. Most of the people who are betting are probably just going to bet some money, maybe lose a little more than they should, but not necessarily more than they would lose by going to bars or buying a beagle. And so this is actually not that big a threat. I think it tends to get apocalyptic because it's new to Americans, but this is really common abroad. And in fact, there was a guy on Twitter the other day

who was like, why have Americans gotten one-shotted by gambling? And I actually think we might be a little more prone to harm from this, both because Americans are selected. We are the errors of people who have unusually high-risk appetites. That's how they got here. They were like, yeah, I should definitely, like, hop on a ship, go far from everywhere I know, probably somewhere I don't really speak the language. Let's see how that goes. Most people won't do that

and those people are back in Europe. But that said, we also don't yet have the social technology to handle this, right? You know, as with anything, when things are new, like, so with addiction, actually, there's a really interesting phenomenon where you get waves. If you've noticed, like when I was growing up in the 80s, cocaine was the big drug, right? And I was fortunate because I really am phenomenally addicted to stimulants. However, I did not have cocaine money, and for that I will forever be grateful. But cocaine kind of rose a lot, you know, the crack epidemic, but also, you know, normal cocaine. And then it kind of burned out. Why did it burn out?

Because people watched other people. I had a friend who OD'd and had a heart attack and died at the age of 21. And a lot of people saw stuff like that. And they looked at that and said, no thanks. And you're now seeing the same thing with the opioid epidemic, where people are not, young people are not initiating. because they have seen the devastation that it reeked on their elders. And gambling is a bit like that, too. You know, like right now, this is all new.

You're going to see some horrific stories. But those are going to serve, at least for a while, is a bit of an inoculation. It's not going to stop everyone. But there have always been people who flew to Vegas and lost their house and so forth. That has always been a thing that was true. Or worse, gambled with, you know, local illegal operations

whose collection mechanisms left something to be desired, let us say. But people will see that and then they will think, no, I should not do this. I'm enjoying it too much. And they will tamp it down. That's not to say it will totally solve the problem. But the problem, I think people are freaking out because of the growth numbers. But this is not something where it's just going to continue forever until sports gambling consumes the entire U.S. economy and bankrupts everyone in the country. That's not the most reassuring defense, I have to say. Well, but like, I mean, drinking is like this. Should we ban drinking?

Because I will go out on limb and say many, many more people will wreck their lives one way or the other with alcohol than they will with sports gambling. Because the ways that you wreck your life with alcohol are much more permanent, right? You destroy your body and you are permanently damaged and or you get in a car and you hit someone and kill them. Or you get into a fight and you damage someone else's body permanently. Like alcohol is incredibly associated with crime. It's incredibly associated with all sorts of other pathologies. And it's not good for you. But we look at this when we say, yes, this is bad.

People should not drink to excess, but it's a manageable problem. We also spent the vast majority of American life banning gambling without the problems of prohibition. I mean, we've banned gambling not in total, like we've had Vegas, we've had Atlantic City. But we've spent a very long time with this under much more degree of control than it currently is. The issues isn't just how many people are addictive gamblers. It is what is gambling doing to the sport itself. The atmosphere of threat that athletes are under now is absurd. Just absurd.

The incentives for athletes to cheat, especially in prop betting, are skyrocketing. We've had multiple arrests. We've seen those, yes. Yeah, we've seen. We've had multiple arrests. arrests are still investigations ongoing. So, you know, the prohibition argument, you know, one of the key reasons we repealed prohibition was because we tried it. It was horrible. We'd actually tried less widespread gambling our whole national life without the problems of

prohibition. I mean, there's a reason there are a lot of movies about people being chased by gamblers for gambling debts by people who want to break their legs or worse. Right. That's not just something the movie's made up. That is a thing that was pretty common under illegal gambling. And as was corruption of sports, I mean, the Black Sox are the most famous example, but there have been point-shaving scandal, I believe, in the 70s in college basketball. These things have happened over and over. I think the decline of the mob sort of, for various reasons, left a vacuum. And one can argue that vacuum was good. And now we have sports gambling filling that. And it's bad, but I think you do have to offset it against, well, some people are enjoying this, right?

Like, it's the same with alcohol. Yes, it has social costs. We think the social benefit is that people like drinking and it brings joy and gladness to their life. And, like, I wouldn't ban drinking even if I thought we could get away with it. Yeah, so maybe this is just me showing my scars from 20 years of being the pro-drug war guy at a magazine that called for the end of the drug war and arguing with libertarians about all this. I find the argumento ad alcohol technique of limited utility insofar as you're absolutely right. It works insofar as an analogy to all sorts of things.

People will say our friend Catherine McGowan Ward, who I've argued with about this for years, will bust out the alcohol argument and say, well, and so therefore we should legalize heroin. and or therefore we should legalize fentanyl, you know, and all drugs and all that kind of stuff. And part of my response to that is, is that alcohol has been part of Western culture for 5,000 years. It is very difficult to take out. We tried. It was disastrous. That doesn't mean that regulation of vice of any kind is equally disastrous or the same thing.

And one of the things I would say about this gambling issue is we spent. enormous amount of time talking about the dangers to children and dangerous to adults about being permanently online, about being way too plugged into our phones and distracted and thinking that the online world is the real world. And now we are on the cusp of monetizing all of it in a way that they can tap into even deeper reservoirs of addiction. And my problem with the libertarian argument about almost everything having to do with issues of addiction, whether it's gambling addiction, drug addiction, any kind of addiction, is that it is the most fatal weakness in libertarianism, qua libertarianism, insofar as the whole point of the philosophy is to assume everyone is a rational

actor and is making rational decisions. Now, you, because you're you, can get addicted to online poker and never go more than a 10-cent bet. And that is why you are literally a better person than me. But I mean, there are other reasons, too. We should be clear. Like one reason. You're talking about how terrible alcohol is, I am drunk right now. No, but the thing is, most people can't do that, right?

Most people cannot. I don't, maybe even most people can. But this has always been my point about, like, legalizing heroin is that even under the rosiest scenario possible. You are admitting that a non-trivial number, somewhere between, I would say, two and ten percent of the public, will be consigned to a miserable and chemically enslaved life that will end prematurely in sorrow. And you can say, well, yeah, but the 90 percent, they really have a good time with heroin. Okay, so let me actually say, as you know, I do favor legalizing fentanyl. But my argument is that.

are not the same as my husband's esteemed boss. She makes other arguments. I'm not trying to drag her into this too bad. I do. I would be fine with banning fentanyl. My argument for banning fentanyl is actually that the stuff is so potent that the supply problems

of not knowing what you're getting and the contamination are so deadly that I think there's an argument for just legalizing it so that people don't get too powerful doses. So they're working with known doses of clean stuff

but if I thought you could ban it safely, I would because I do find opioid addiction to be a kind of uniquely destructive thing. And it isn't worked into society. And we don't have, by the way, I mean, one thing is there's an interesting thing someone told me, I have not personally verified this, but it seems broadly true just like from intuition,

that basically alcoholism, it gets worse as you get farther from the Mediterranean. And that's because wine comes to the Mediterranean, it's stronger than the very low ABV beer that people are. And what you get is that people are phenomenally addictive to alcohol, and you develop genetic resistance to it. And so this is like allegedly why Jews and Italians have very low rates of alcoholism,

where my own people being quite far from the wine clobacco, and having discovered distilled spirits somewhat later have a much higher and also true like in the Nordics, very high rates of alcoholism. It's one possible reason for why Native Americans and Pacific Islanders have such high rates of alcoholism simply because they didn't have the genetic exposure so they have a more hereditary tendency towards alcoholism, obviously exacerbated by other things like poverty and so forth. So look, I basically agree with you that, fentanyl's way worse than alcohol. And I actually wouldn't be averse to regulations that try to add some friction.

Because I do think that, like, the completely frictionless experience is problematic. So if you wanted to, for example, ban within-game betting, I would be fine with that. Just say, like, no, you can place a bet before the game and then you're stuck with that bet. You should not be, like, sitting there on your phone the whole game looking at your odds rather than enjoying the game. if you wanted to cap how much anyone can gamble in a month, I would also be fine with that. And I would also be fine, honestly, with looking at the ways of these companies,

you know, like, keep their edge by getting people who are any good at doing this off the apps, which seems rather unsporting to me. Yeah, that was the really interesting, one of the many interesting parts of the Coppins piece was how the apps ban or limit the, quote, sharps, the people who actually are who I thought I was going to be or I thought I could be, like somebody who could really game the system

and really win at a spectacular rate, those people are just throttled. And my argument would be whatever throttle you put on, you have to put it on for everyone. The limits have to be the same for every gambler. So you want to limit the guys who are like beating your line, then you're going to have to limit the guys that you were planning to rake in money from because they're idiots.

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And we're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. So just take a step back on this. Just to give people a little context on the McKay Coppins piece, as Jonah mentioned or David mentioned, the Atlantic gave him $10,000 and said, you've got a year, go gamble. And he went and gambled and he sort of walks you through the kind of feelings he has

about gambling, the habits he developed with respect to gambling, the odds, the way that gambling works. And it's a very, we'll put it in the show notes. It's a very sort of instructive piece. And I will say as somebody, I don't do, you know, I've played blackjack over the years. I don't know that I've played blackjack in the past 10, 15 years, but always low stakes, $5 tables. I dabble with fantasy football daily fantasy.

So I'm putting together teams that are not my sort of league teams, but I don't do prop bets. I don't do any of that. And I still can identify with a number of the sort of urges that he describes in the piece. And, you know, David, to your point, yeah, I did do a lot of this analysis on my own. And it helped me in my 10-team fantasy league. The fact that I did that kind of analysis, I think gave me an analysis. I think gave me an advantage for a little while.

The challenge of the problem for me in that league is now that analysis is available to everybody and it's done by people who are a lot smarter than I am about this stuff. So the advantage is gone. But I think, Megan, to your point on the sort of the sum total, I grant you that $160 billion in the whole scheme of things isn't that much. I mean, we spend more on a lot of things in our lives than $160 billion. To me, it's the, if I did the math right and we may not have, 3,100% increase from 4.7 in 2017 to 160 billion today, which suggests to me that something new is happening.

And I think, you know, we could probably strain the alcohol analogy beyond usefulness. But the fact that kids can do this and adults, because they have their phones in their pockets, and they can have multiple apps that allow them to do this, you know, when they're sitting on the toilet, when they've got a break before they board an elevator, what have you, and that these companies are constantly creating incentives for the users, the gamblers, the would-be gamblers, sort of all the time. You're constantly being fed this information that says, you should be doing this, you should be doing this more. And the equivalent would be for alcohol, I think, if you could put a tap,

on your phone. And I don't mean like an FBI camp, like a beer tag. Yes. I might have done that in the past. But I mean, it's the constant availability combined with the ease of use and the lack of friction. I mean, as with everything, you want to take away friction for people to use these devices. And I think they've sort of perfected that. Look, I think one thing we should keep in mind is that we don't actually know how much overall gambling increased because it went from being illegal to legal. Right? And so this is what statisticians call a dark number.

Fair. And so we don't actually know. It's like how many times last year was someone successfully blackmailed? Well, it happened, I'm sure. Couldn't tell you what it is because it worked and whatever it was didn't come out and they didn't go to the cops.

And so I am not going to argue that it hasn't overall increased. I assume it has increased quite significantly because it's available. But how much of this is people switching from betting with their friends to betting with professionals or betting with illegal gambling operations to betting with professionals

or flying to Vegas to betting with the networks. And the answer is I don't know. And so, while I, again, am not trying to do the disingenuous, well, maybe it hasn't increased at all. Obviously, it's increased if you lower the cost of doing something as sticking it in someone's pocket does compared to, like, hopping on a flight to Vegas, then obviously that thing almost always increases.

But I don't think we know how much, and I don't think we know how damaging it's been. Because again, like, it's just hard to measure something that isn't legal. Yeah. I want to turn back to the betting markets that Jonah mentioned earlier. The prediction markets, I guess they're calling themselves. They have become sort of also ubiquitous. And you see people betting on anything. I mean, really, it is anything.

I'm on the polymarket mention. page right now, there are bets, live bets on what Trump will say during the Japanese prime minister event. What will be said on the next all-in podcast? Gosh. What will Trump say this week?

What will Mr. Beast say during his next YouTube video? It's very easy to see just to take what will be said on the next all-in podcast where this can be abused, where you have people who are on the all-in podcast or people who are

producing the Allend podcast or people who know the people who are on the Outland podcast saying, hey, will you say this thing so that I can win my bet? And as Jonah mentioned, you know, one of the most stark examples, I'd say in the past few months was this person who bet on the guest performers at Super Bowl halftime show and hit, I think, six out of seven. No way that person was doing this by mere guessing or very little likelihood. You've also, seen sort of the polymarket bets show up in timing of Iran strikes, the apprehension of Nicholas Maduro. Somebody cashed a ticket about the fact that Nicholas Maduro was going to be taken. And I wonder, David, how much we should worry about sort of the distortive effects on

behavior well beyond gambling, well beyond prediction, well beyond betting, where it begins to drive consequences in our actual lives. Is that, I mean, Megan hosts a podcast called Reasonably Optimistic. So I take that she's reasonably optimistic. And Jonah makes fun of me for being overly pessimistic. So fair enough. But I worry about this. I worry that this could turn out to distort behavior because people are betting or cashing bets and making predictions on how people will behave. Look, I think you're absolutely right to be worried about this. I mean, what we have learned right now is that, we have a system that is almost infinitely exploitable by unscrupulous people at this moment. You know, once you combine sort of the Trump pardon power with Trump greed, you know,

we're already seeing what that can result in and sort of like the pardons for sale phenomenon and how, you know, the favor trading regarding pardons. You know, look, we're talking about people within a government, for example, who have just no lines. They have no ethics. And so this sort of idea that, well, they wouldn't distort policy to get rich, would they? I mean, of course. I mean, the question answers itself. And in many ways, this is an even more pernicious threat than just the plain vanilla insider trading that we sort of, you know, worry about with members of Congress. And there's sort of this rising clamor to ban stock trading amongst members of Congress because they're privy to a lot of information the public isn't privy to.

And a lot of people are getting, you know, I think rightfully upset at the way a lot of people in Congress just seem to become spectacular investors when they arrive on Capitol Hill. This is that times 50. I mean, this is, I can actually impact the world. And then before I impact the world, I can bet on the impact that I know that I'm going to have in the world. It's just a recipe for catastrophe on not just a government. level, but on 17 different fronts. And so this is maybe a larger philosophical question,

but one of the reasons why I've always called myself a civil libertarian and not a libertarian, although I'm very libertarian-ish, is that a civil libertarian really is somebody who's looking at sort of the Bill of Rights and the historic liberties, those that have been recognized as sort of implicit in the concept of ordered liberty by the Supreme Court and say, this universe of civil liberties, these are sacrosanct, these are special. But we don't don't live in a world where sort of what I want to do is sacrosanct and special. Those are different things. Free speech, sacrosanct.

My desires, not sacrosanct. And so, you know, when you're talking about gambling, one of the interesting things about the McKay piece, there's so many things interesting. So he's really walking through, like, this is not something that if you're going to talk about a fundamental freedom, something that's implicit in the concept of ordered liberty, Yeah, gambling's always been with us in the way that vices have always been with us. But this is not something that any sort of classical liberal formulation of individual liberty would put aside as sacrosanct to be traditionally protected that liberty to be traditionally

protected by the state. And there's a reason why for throughout human history has been one of the most regulated activities on the planet. And it's, you know, to Megan's point earlier, we need to. never get rid of it. You know, we did have the Black Sox scandal. The question is how much of a lid are we able to keep on it and at what social cost? And we were able to, I think, have a really reasonable lid without a hundredth of the social cost of like the war on drugs or prohibition or you name it. And that lifting that lid is leading to social costs that are much greater than

the cost that we had of keeping the lid on. So we're not dealing with a fundamental freedom here by any stretch. We're dealing with more like a fundamental desire, which is different from a fundamental freedom. And so this is not something where sort of classic civil libertarian would say you're interfering with a freedom that's implicit and ordered liberty. This is, in my view, a classic space for government, right, prudent government regulation as a necessary. So can I actually ask about that? Because you bring up something that I've been thinking about with, these production markets. And I agree, there is a real insider problem here. And as David probably knows, and as I'm sure Stephen Jonah know, because they are brilliant. But as some of our listeners

may not, insider trading law is a bizarre mess. So one of the most famous cases was that the guy who wrote the hurt on the street column for the Wall Street Journal was selling what he was going to write about. And then people were using that to make money on it. But the fascinating thing is the court didn't really know why insider trading was illegal. It's never really exactly been settled what the offense was, and the court decided that what it was that he had stolen secrets from his employer, which actually opened up the possibility

that it would be perfectly legal for the Wall Street Journal to trade ahead of the herd on the street column. So it's always been a bit of a mess, but it also seems to me that the prediction markets fall within that, and that eventually probably what's going to happen is we are going to get a scandal. a real big scandal where someone has done something

in order to make one of those bets pay off and Congress is eventually just going to add those prediction markets to SEC insider trading coverage and that will be the end of that. It won't be the end of it actually because insider trading still happens and for people who do not read Matt Levine's

absolutely hilarious Bloomberg newsletter about money he just comes up with all of these stories where all of these morons like they come The funny thing about insider trading is how stupid so many of the people are where they're like, if I give my illegal activity a codename and text it, text with my friends about it, how would a prosecutor ever like see through that?

And the answer is because prosecutors are not nearly as stupid as you are. So I just expect that eventually we're going to end up with some kind of insider trading regulation on these markets. And I think that's probably better for the markets in terms of keeping confidence that it's not just a big cheat, and also probably better for society that people are not altering their behavior in an attempt to make various bets pay off. But I'm curious to hear David's thoughts, because he's the expert on the law. I'm definitely not an expert on insider trading law, but I can 100% endorse that it's a complex mess. I mean, that much is absolutely true,

which is one of the reasons why, say, for example, in the Martha Stewart case, it was actually much easier to indict and prosecute on the lying to the Fed's charge than it was to deal with the underlying, you know, sort of securities fraud or securities allegation. So I don't think there's much question that insider trading is a mess and insider trading law is a mess. I'm thinking something about, you know, as far as blanket bans on prediction market betting by government employees, like just entirely would be something that would be 100% in favor of. Yeah, like, I'm not, so at the Ed Board, we were joking about having a happy hour at the prediction market bar. And someone pointed out it wouldn't be that fun because we're not

ethically, and there's no legal rule against it, but ethically, we cannot bet on stuff we might write about. I'm not allowed to invest in stocks I might write about. And that is a good rule. And if you work for the government, you should not be able to bet on. Certainly, at least outcomes that your agency can affect. Yeah. But it does get complicated and the amount of money that these prediction market companies and certainly betting companies have that they are flooding with, I mean, there's a reason ESPN now when I go and check the schedule for Atlago Madrid, which is my favorite soccer team, and I look to see that they're playing Real Madrid next week, there are all these numbers below the

teams. I don't even know what these mean, but, you know, minus 140 plus two fit. I don't know what any of this means, but I know it has to do with betting. And, you know, ESPN Sports Center now has a segment that they call Bad Beat, which is the worst sort of getting screwed on a bet. I mean, everywhere you look on all of these sports websites, and McKay Coppins piece really makes this clear. It has been infiltrated by betting.

Our friends at Substack, which is where we first launched the dispatch and remained for three years, just struck a deal with Polymarket, the prediction betting website, and we're offering their content creators, their publishers, big polymarket money for including ads from Polymarket in their substacks. I know one person who was offered $20,000 for a single ad from Polymarket by these things. You know, if you look at the average salary of a journalist across the country is $60,000, and you think you might be able to get a third of that by running one ad from these betting things, you can understand that the incentives change pretty quickly. I want to end quickly before we turn to Iran for a moment with a story that's maybe even darker.

Sorry, Megan. I'm going to continue to try to force you to be reasonably optimistic about this as I take us darker and darker into these possibilities. It's a fascinating piece. We'll put this in the show notes in the Times of Israel, written by Emmanuel Fabian, who's a reporter for the Times of Israel wrote a blog post on March 10th reporting that an Iranian missile hit an open field in Israel and soon began getting emails asking him to correct the report with the people writing these emails claiming that it was just an interceptor that hit and not a missile. And I won't go through all of the details, but sort of one email, they started gently,

hey, can you correct this? It was just an interceptor. It wasn't a missile. He said, no, it was a missile. and these got ever more threatening. And eventually got to the point where he was getting real threats to change his reporting, to change what he had reported, to correct it. Because there had been a bet, Israel strikes Iran on question mark. There had been more than $14 million wagered that the date would be March 10th. And the rules of the bet stated that this market will resolve to yes, if Iran initiates a drone missile or airstrike on Israel's soil on the listed date in Israel time.

Otherwise, this market will resolve to know. And the clause that these people were fighting over was missiles or drones that are intercepted will not be sufficient for a yes resolution, regardless of whether they land on Israeli territory or cause damage. And one of the emails that he got was, if you do not correct us by one o'clock Israel time today, March 15th, You are bringing upon yourself damage you have never imagined you would suffer. This person threatened. That was the president of the United States? I mean, it really did.

Damage never before seen. Thank you for your attention to this matter. In fairness, as I'm sure you guys have all had this too. Like, I have gotten death threats for free. People make death threats against me for, like, they don't need any money at stake. It's sort of an occupational hazard. Megan, what I say before we start taping is not for public discussion. So that's very true. It's good context. I appreciate the context. But you can imagine that these things might be taken more seriously if you think you stand to. I think the betting on that in particular was $900,000 was one of the individual betters. You might really be inclined to push somebody to change a story.

So I'm actually more protective of prediction markets than I am of sports gambling. Like if you banned sports gambling, I would be sad as a libertarian, but I would not like lie awake at night. But prediction markets can actually contain some useful information, which is why like newspapers are doing deals with these folks, because you can get things like political odds. And it used to drive me absolutely insane. Patty Power, the UK gambling, like Titan, used to have odds on U.S. elections and you couldn't see them. And I tried all sorts of ways. I didn't want to bet on the election. I just literally wanted to see what the patty power odds were, but they were blocked in the U.S. because of U.S. gambling laws. That's why I use ExpressVPN.

Yes, that's right. And so that information is valuable. That said, I think to protect that information, we are going to need legal infrastructure. that is going to control things like that, right? And people, again, I think there's probably going to be a big case of someone who threatens someone and goes to jail and then people realize that's not a good way to settle their bets or several such instances, right? Where you threaten someone, you not only go to jail,

but the prediction markets realize that to clean up their act, they're going to have to ban that person for life from the sites, right? I think you will see that evolve. because every new challenge like this requires new social technology. But I do think that prediction markets can be quite useful. There are good ways of integrating information.

They're not perfect, right? The number of people they contain is limited. And also, some of them are idiots as that bet and then strategy reveals. No one should bet $900,000 on anything they don't have any control over or probably, unless they have insider information, in which case they shouldn't bet for other reasons.

But I think it is useful to have them. And so I don't want to see them put out of business. I want to see us develop the institutional infrastructure that will support clean, healthy prediction markets. We're going to take a break, but we'll be back shortly. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. Jonah, I want to spend one quick round on Iran before we get to not worth your time today.

A lot happening, a lot to discuss. We're not going to get to most of it. But I do want to ask you all to address what I think has been sort of growing quietly as part of the discussion about the Iran war and then overnight kind of burst out in the open. It's been the case for the better part of two weeks that Donald Trump has signaled he wants a quick end to this war. He said it repeatedly. He's talked about the lack of targets. He said that the war is over. The war is complete.

He's given given timeframes next week or two, three, four weeks. it seems to me Benjamin Netanyahu wants protests in the streets and keeps talking about having created the condition for the Iranians to rise up. And he wants a change in the regime, which is a much more all-encompassing end goal. It seems to me these goals are in dramatic tension. And at some point,

they're going to resolve sort of one way or the other. And then overnight, we saw Donald Trump send out a tweet blaming the Israelis for an attack on Iran's South Pars gas field and saying the United States and Qatar were not involved in that attack. And Trump basically condemns the Israeli attack, or at least makes clear that he doesn't think it was a good idea, and then goes on in issues additional threats to Iran. Do you expect that we're seeing sort of more of this U.S. versus Israel tension or am I over reading sort of reading between the lines on this?

So no, I think the tension has been there from the beginning. I think the example that you're using, it's not unfair because it's like a big news story and all that, but it is more an example of, I think, more of an example of Trump being unfair to Israel. And so far as, like, it is not particularly credible that Israel would attack this, gas field without the approval of the United States and coordination. And so therefore, for Trump to say

I knew nothing about it and those rogue Zionists, you know, went crazy and now I got to pull them back is pretty transparent clean up on aisle three stuff rather than an example of real tension. It's more example of Trump scapegoating Israel. But more broadly, it is absolutely the case that both countries have different definitions of success. The war also in Israel is generally popular. And the war in the United States is not. And just to add to the freshness of this podcast in terms of it's staying on top of the news, I watched the beginning of the Pete Hegseth Press Conference this morning, or as I've started being calling it, the Brosif McChestey podcast. And he, so there's this old rule, I mean, it's too bad Sarah's not here right now. It's nice to have David from A.O. But, you know,

but Sarah used to do a lot of calm stuff. And there's, my understanding is there's some rule of thumb that says, if you don't want people to worry about something, don't introduce it. So, like, for example, the Treasury Secretary shouldn't hold a press conference saying there's absolutely no reason to think there's a run on the banks, right? Because then people are like, holy crap, he's worried about a run on the banks, and, like, you get a run on the bank from that kind of thing. There's no reason to think that we have aerosolized typhoid and everyone's going to die this week, right?

You just don't say that, right? And Pete Hegzeth said he attacked the media, including the reporters in the room, saying they're all unpatriotic. He said that people don't understand that we have a smart president, not like those dumb presidents, Bush and Obama. And it was really high-minded statesmanship on every front. And then he said, there are unpatriotic people in the media. I'm paraphrasing, but this is the gist of it. The unpatriotic press wants you to think that this war is sliding into an endless abyss. and just don't use the phrase

endless abyss if you don't want people to start talking about how it might be you know like you could run a headline today saying Department of War denies this is going to be an endless abyss of a war you know just not great media work but he has to cater to Donald Trump right and that's the thing is like he was speaking more to Donald Trump than he was to the public

and that's one of the things that makes this war so complicated to game out is that the policymakers at the top, starting with the president, are, I don't want to say this war is entirely in service to Trump's ego, but you can't take Trump's ego and egotricism out of the equation, and he will make decisions that are not based on grand strategy or anything else other than what he thinks his narrow self-interest is. And I don't think you could say that about any other wartime president

in American history that I can think of. I mean, even people I hate it, like, you know, Andrew Jackson or Woodrow Wilson, like they actually thought that they were doing something greater and more important. And I just don't think that's how Trump thinks about this stuff. And so that means eventually there's going to be friction with Israel just to bring it back to your question.

Yeah. I'm glad Jonah eventually attempted to answer the question and address the question. I started answering. After the long digression, I feel like I'm, you know, a CNN host. You just answer whatever you want to say when I ask the question. David, am I wrong to think that there are these tensions between just the goals? I mean, clearly there's been tremendous coordination on a military level between what the Israelis have been doing,

what the United States have been doing, and to tremendous fact. But with sort of distinct, if overlapping goals, you can see where that puts pressure on this. kind of a campaign. And I wonder, I think Jonah's right to make the point that he makes about this thing in particular. I do think it's virtually inconceivable that the Israelis would have done this without some, at least tacit approval, probably explicit approval from the U.S. military, if not Donald Trump himself. Should we worry about these tensions? Yeah, I think we should worry about these tensions. You know, first on this story, I think Jonah's exactly right. I think Trump threw Israel under the bus here. you know, there was an escalatory strike, the idea that Israel would have done that without the U.S.

And in fact, there was immediate reporting you saw, I believe out of Axios almost right away after the Trump posts about the natural gas strike that Israelis forces were saying, what are you talking about? This was consulted all the way through. He's throwing us under the bus after the Gulf allies got angry. But, you know, this polling you saw where the Israeli public supports us by about 80 percent. and the American public supports this. You know, you see different numbers, but let's average them out between 35%, 40%. These are the two publics are actually reflecting

the different self-interest of the two countries. I mean, Israel has been under direct missile barrage from Iran. It's been under missile barrage and direct attack by Iranian proxies. For Israel, you're talking about a country that hasn't, you know, we've had a long slow burn with Iran for 40 plus years. Israel since October 7th has been facing just direct blow after direct blow has been delivering them back times 10.

But this is a very different, very real, very immediate. It's not even imminent. It's just happening threat from Iran. And also Israel has much less to lose if you just break Iran to pieces. If you just, you know, when Syria fell apart during the Syrian Civil War, for the rest of the world, this was a giant problem. because you had the migration surge into Europe that we're still dealing with the after effects of the destabilizing of European politics. The chaos in the region was a geopolitical emergency. Not for Israel. For Israel to see Syria break to pieces was totally fine. One of their

biggest enemies, historic enemies, is just off the board, right? So if you have the Strait of Hormuz closed, if you have chaos in the Gulf, if you have disruption to oil facilities, if you have massive uprisings in Iran, refugee crisis, etc, etc. That is not impacting Israel in the same way that impacts us or the rest of the world. So you just have different incentives here. You have different strategic postures here. Now, we absolutely share with Israel a need to keep a nuclear weapon away from Iran. No question. We have our own beefs with Iran about Iran's long, slow burning conflict towards us. No question. The ability of Iran to threaten its neighbor. with ballistic missiles is a problem, without a doubt. However, we're also in a situation where the

blowback, the after effects of if the Strait of Formos is closed for a long time, if you actually do substantial damage to the entire oil infrastructure in the Gulf, there are costs at that point that are imposed that I think the American people quite reasonably say may not have been worth whatever we gained from the strikes. And so you've got just very different strategic pictures here, and then you sort of layer on top of it, the reality that, you know, I agree completely, this is a guy who's ultimately governed by his self-interest. And he's mercurial, and he's volatile. So you have a very delicate strategic situation. You have very tough military situation. And I was writing about this for today. And I basically said, the only way to

cut through this Gordian knot is a military miracle. In other words, the military right now has been performing exceptionally well. Just attaining air dominance over Iran, the level, sinking most of the Iranian Navy without any losses that we've taken ourselves and warships, etc. I mean, we have, the military has done exceptionally well. And if the military can continue to perform at a level maybe beyond what we could reasonably expect, which would mean a very rapid reopening of Strait of Hormuz, that helps out Trump immensely. But if we're talking about military performance within the historical band, even of American military capacity, we are staring a bit of a quagbire in the face unless Trump just sort of declares victory,

which presents its own set of problems. Right. Megan, last word on this to you, take that last point that David makes. If it's the case that Donald Trump makes these decisions based on his self-interest, or I think more importantly, in this case, his perceived self-interest, the more complicated this gets, the naughtier this gets, do you expect that he'll just throw up his hands and say, we won, we're done? I find it so hard to predict what Trump will do that I am tempted to just do the CNN and just answer. It's like, yes, Steve, I do think that the reverse creaming method holds a lot of promise over traditional creaming and the making of layer cakes. But that there are people here who are listening to your comments now

so that they can go to polymarket and bet on when Trump is going to announce the end to this. It's fair. I think that's a fair answer. Let's jump to not worth your time. I want to play for you a clip that Republic, I believe it was probably Republican Apo researchers resurfaced from Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Tala Rico.

This is a clip from 2022. And it's Talarico talking about some policies that he is implemented in his then campaign. We have, I think, heard more and more issues of animal welfare. I think not just because it's the right thing to do and the moral thing to do, but also it's, as all of you know, necessary to fight climate change. It is now existential that we try to reduce our meat consumption and that we try to respect animals in all aspects of society. And so I am proud to say that our campaign has officially become a non-meat campaign.

So we have, we are, we are only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses. Some of you may know big nonas. They were little nonas and then they opened up brick and mortar, some of their big nonas. But we just got our pizza from there today. And so the point is that I think all of us, not just policymakers, but everyone has to take personal responsibility. in this effort. David, I want to go to you first. You've said some nice things about James Talarico,

even as you've made clear that you have many policy differences with him. This feels to me like a potentially fatal problem to run as the pro-vegan candidate in Texas, of all places. I expect to see this in Republican ads as we get close to the election, the general election date. Can James Tala Rico survive being a militant vegan or having said these things that make him look like a militant vegan in Texas? So, you know, all these people have been just wearing me out online

because they want me to call him a heretic. And I've not called him a heretic, Steve, until now. Until now. This was the line. This is the line it is. I mean, you. You know, this is one of those things in politics where you realize, okay, is it silly that this could hurt him? Yeah, it's silly that this could hurt him.

Could this hurt him? Yeah, it could hurt him. I think it could. And not just because, like, Texans like meat, but also because lots of people find vegans really annoying. Not all of them, of course, you know. I compare the vegans I've known to the Crossfitters I've known. I've known many vegans and many crossfitters and some of them are not annoying. And so I'm sure if you're listening and you're in that category, you're one of those that are not annoying.

But yeah, this is one of those where you just look at it and you realize it's the whole setup, right? It's the mask. It's the, you know, in 2022, it's the mask in 2022. It's the veganism. It's almost like walking caricature. It's like one of those images that I think in politics shouldn't matter. probably will matter. I think it will, to some degree. More than Paxton's corruption and adultery if Paxton wins remains to be seen. Yeah, Megan, I mean, you know, in some ways, it's because it

sort of affirms the caricature of James Talarico that Republicans are trying to portray him in this way. And in other ways, it's just bagging on meat in Texas. It reminds me of John Kerry, when he was running for president in 2004, went to Wisconsin, was trying to be sort of, you know, one of the guys and identify with the Wisconsin folks. And he was talking about the Green Bay Packers and called it Lambert Field instead of Lambo Field. And I thought at the time, I still think I'm right. That was going to cost him five points. I mean, you can't call Lambeau Field Lambert. Also, when he tried to order Swiss cheese on his cheese steak in Philadelphia, Dude, this is what you have an advanced team for. So Tala Rico's team responded to the controversy over this by putting out a photograph of Tala Rico holding some huge, what I took to be, some kind of a beef rib, some bearded barbecue sauce. He's wearing a Texas shirt saying, this is our response to this, like, I am a meat lover. This is the Kamala Harris strategy on the they and them ads. it's too little too late.

And there's a few things to say about this. And number one is that this was predictable from the theological stuff that people were obsessing about before. So story, when my husband and I got married, it was a little challenging because he grew up Southern Methodist. I grew up Northern Methodist

slash American Baptist slash Catholic. A lot going on in this family. And we wanted to have a religious ceremony, but we also had, we're trying to find one that would not offend one of the various teams. And my parents were divorced, which complicated it further.

So we went church shopping. And like the super, some of them wouldn't marry us because we were unequally spiritually yoked, a Protestant term I had never heard before. And then, so we found a Methodist church that we were going to go look at, and I looked at this,

and I was like, this is going to be way too liberal. I looked at the website, and he was like, you can't tell from the website. I was like, I can tell. My spidey sense, right? And so we walk in the opening blessing, I am not making this up, was thank you, God, for Brother Sky and Sister Wind. Thank you for, like, cousin tree and Uncle Fire. And the worst part was there were, like, 10 very old people in this church,

and they were so excited to have a young couple come in, and, like, we couldn't just slink out the back. So we'd stay for the entire thing. But, like, the stuff he was saying, was a proxy for the sort of person who in 2022 was bragging about his vegan pizza. And here's the thing. I used to be a vegan. I like vegans just fine. I know many nice vegan, effective altruous. But vegan pizza, first of all, is like the worst vegan food. That cheese is so awful.

Vegan cheese is any kind of like fake dairy product or fake meat. I would rather eat like good tofu than bad. I will make an exception for vegan chicken nuggets, which are actually. actually quite good. But otherwise, no, on the fake meat. It has evolved a lot since Beyond Meat is actually quite good. But, like, that thing, there's going to be more of it. Like, you brought up John Kerry. And I think that Tala Rico is part of a pattern with Democrats. I got a lot of crap for saying this online, but I still think it's true. Where they pick some, like, superficial characteristic, and they think, oh, yeah, this is going to appeal to crossover voters, right? with John Kerry, it was his war record.

And they were going to do a contrast to draft Dodger Bush from the National Guard. He went off to Vietnam. And it's like he went off to Vietnam, and then he came home and he threw his medals away. And they weren't even his medals. They were someone else's medals. And what are people doing?

This is a Democrats' idea of what will appeal to more conservative voters. Tim Walts is in this category. Right? Where Democrats were like, oh, man, he's been hunting. And people who grew up in small towns, they know the liberal high school teacher. This is a stock character. And it does not mean they identify with that person.

They might like him fine, right? Lots of people like that person, but they don't think, like, I want to vote for that person. And this is another example of they're like, he's a seminarian. And if you don't know anything about denominations in the U.S., the fact that he's a Presbyterian seminarian seems really like, oh, wow. evangelicals love that crap, but evangelicals know what denomination he's from, and they understand their theological divide between themselves.

I mean, conservative, or even moderate evangelicals, they understand where he stands in the landscape and that they are not on board with his theology. And it's just part of a pattern of picking someone who has some weird characteristic that makes you think you can make this person code as a normie-to-normy voters. No. No, you cannot. There's no shortcuts.

Jonah. So, first of all, to David's points, you know how you can tell somebody is a vegan or a crossfitter. They tell you. But more broadly, I agree with Megan entirely about this. I wrote my call. I've been using this. I took out from the mothballs an argument I originally made about West Clark in 2004 about the Johnny Bravo thinking. There was a Brady bunch where Greg Beatty was going to have this, offer this fantastic solo career as Johnny Bravo, and he thought it was because they loved his music and all that kind of stuff. It turned out he

just fit the costume. And there is this thing in American politics where the Democrats do it, Amy McBride, you know, when you talk about coding, Waltz literally said at Harvard IOP that he was picked because I knew how to code talk to white working class people to give them the permission structure to vote for Kamala Harris. And it was like, dude, if you can speak that way fluently, you are not who you're pretending to be, right? I think the Telarico thing will definitely hurt him. I think Steve's obsession with it is in part driven by his own priors

about the importance of meat products in his life. And he is projecting upon a lot of other people that they will be as horrified. But in this case, I think he's right because we're talking about Texas. And I still think Tala Rico could win if Bill Paxton is the nominee. And Ken Paxton? Especially because Bill

I'm sorry, Ken Paxton's dead. Well, he could definitely win if Bill Paxton's the nominee. And so other than that, I just subscribe to everybody else's comments. Well, we appreciate the Uncle Fire references. I'm going to be thinking about that service for a long time. Thank you all for joining us.

We have not solved anything. The gambling problem. We will returning to that. I think it's a fascinating topic. Thank you three for the time and thank you all for listening. Finally, if you like what we're doing here, there are a few easy ways to support us. You can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And as always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at roundtable at the dispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones from Uncle Fire. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And a big thank you to the folks behind the scenes

who made this episode possible, Noah Hickey and Peter Bonavitcher. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.