5/5/26: Polymarket Exec Caught On Hot Mic, Fox Praises Eric Trump Corruption, MTG Says MAGA Is Dead

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2:09Turning now to gambling. Loathe to cover clavicular, but it is in this particular case actually relevant to our coverage. This was the Polymarket executive who was caught on a hot mic speaking with the kick streamer LooksMaxer. Let's take a listen. What's your position? I'm CMO. Yeah, I'll hear it. So, yeah, I'm CMO. Bro, he's the guy. I'm telling you. You don't need to hear those titles. I'm 28, 29. You have to understand, bro. Hold on. Got some. Got some. I'm going to hold that. I'll take it off. Interesting. Interesting. So that was the Polymarket CMO saying, you have to understand, bro, and then saying, oh, hold on, because realize that he was live and he was on a hot mic.

2:56Now, we don't really know what they were talking about, but it's a fun and a catchy way of actually feeding some of you your vegetables who have been doing a little bit too much Polymarket betting. Let's put the next one up there on the screen. Why almost everyone loses except a few sharks on prediction markets. Wall Street Journal analysis shows only a small number of accounts on Polymarket and Calci, often pros using data-driven algorithmic trading, take home most of the winnings. And they specifically point to the fact that on Polymarket, 67 % of profits go to just 0.1 % of accounts. That means less than 2 ,000 accounts netted a total of nearly half a billion dollars.

3:42Journal analyzed 1.6 million PolyMarket accounts that have traded since November of 2022. There are at least 2.3 million total accounts on the site, meaning just 0.1 % on PolyMarket take home 67 % of the profits. On CalShe, losers vastly outnumber winners. Spokesperson Elizabeth Diana said that there are 2.9 unprofitable users for every e-profitable one based on data from the past month. So a three to one lose to win ratio. She said that the number is subject to change as the exchange grows. Total trading volume on both platforms has now rocketed to$24 billion in April, up from$1.8 billion a year earlier.

4:28$24 billion traded in a single month on these platforms, who, by the way, they claim is not gambling. However, the statistics on this bear out in the exact same way that they do in every casino in the world and on every sports betting. Yeah. Very, very few people will actually make money. I believe that the sports betting number is 5 % of accounts will ever take profit. The vast majority will either break even or lose. And most of the losers are so big that they lose the vast majority. They're called gambling addicts. And then, yeah, in every casino in the world, you know, a few sharks, they do their best to make sure that they're not allowed to, you know, play blackjack or something like that.

5:09Everybody else is allowed to play at a losing percent. And every once in a while, somebody will win. But to be honest, looking at this data, you are better off shooting craps and like betting even the dumbest bets on the table than you are sports betting parlays and or playing on like trying to do political or event market predictions. You're just not going to win. Just recall from our previous coverage that one of the ways they identify people who are like dumb and going to lose a lot of money is whether or not they're doing parlays. Yeah. Just so you know, like next time you're thinking about like, oh, they offered me, you know, this deal.

5:44And I think that all these are going to hit. They're not going to hit. Like you are not the shark. You are the loser. You are the chump who's getting manipulated and is going to lose your money ultimately. You know, maybe not. Maybe you'll have one day where you win. But over time, you are going to just feed money into this system. The other thing that's funny is they they love to pitch themselves. It's like, oh, it's the wisdom of the crowd, blah, blah, blah. But if the crowd is overwhelmingly losing and getting it wrong, then how wise is the crowd? By the way, it is the wisdom of the crowd. That's the secret, okay?

6:14And without disparaging everybody. Look, honestly, gambling has been the most blackpilling thing I've ever covered. I have never seen so many millions, tens of millions of people piss their money away willingly and with the knowledge that they will lose. I tell them they'll lose, and they tell me I'm wrong. Yeah. Well, it's no different. Like you said, it's no different than like, you know, if you're going to the casino or for like the day traders out there who don't really know what they're doing. And they, you know, the people who are winning on Polymarket very much like the people who win in the market in general, like they're doing algorithmic trading.

6:50They have sophisticated ways of sort of like poaching arbitrage opportunities, et cetera. They're not approaching this the way that you're approaching it. And again, it's a very small handful of people and they even lose also sometimes like that is not you. But the difference is just to have it all so readily available so that it's done at scale is such a disaster. I mean, we've long seen like lotto tickets as a tax on poor people. And this is the same thing. You get people who are, you know, want to have the dream of I'm going to be able to make it. I'm going to be able to be financially comfortable and not be so stressed all the time.

7:25Like this is going to be my path because there's no other path that I can figure out that is available to me. And so you're creating a false hope and impression among people. And this is effectively what our country has amounted to at this point is these bets on either crypto or fan duels or polymarket that, oh, this time you're going to hit the lotto. No, no, you're not. Let me read the intro for this journal. This is a prototypical example, exactly what I'm talking about. John Peterson, 33, couldn't find work. The former outback steakhouse line cook was recovering from a car crash and running out of money.

7:58Calci promised a quick way to fix that. he took out a variable interest loan and started betting. At first, it worked. Peterson turned$2 ,000 into close to$8 ,000 by betting on daily snowfall totals in Detroit, where he lives. He parlayed that into$41 ,000 by trading on sports using a strategy he developed with the help of AI. Then he placed his most audacious bet of all, 41 ,000 that a celebrity would say a particular word on TV, he lost it all. And this is a classic casino strategy. One of the reasons why casinos don't care when you win is they know that 95 % of you are so dumb that you will keep playing to win even more and thus lose all of it.

8:49This is like tried and true. When you win, they're like, oh, you want another drink? You want something? Oh, let me comp you a night. so you can keep staying here. Why do you think they do that? Out of the goodness of their heart? It's math. The more you play, the more you lose. Period. End of story. The best thing this idiot could have done is been taking his$41 ,000, walked away, and oh, I don't know, maybe get a job. Not to be all boomer Republican, like get some bootstraps or something, but for real here. You took out a variable interest loan. First of all, variable interest loan. Oh my God.

9:23Who's still doing that? Then second of all, you start betting with your variable interest loan? Brother, do you have a plan at all? And let me guess, whenever he was up, he didn't pay off his variable interest loan, at least to make sure that he was only betting money, which while he was in the black. Like, what are we doing? This is, I don't know. Like, I look at this, and I know this sounds deeply paternalistic, like I do with all things whenever it comes to vice. Like, I'm sorry, bro. Like, in your own interest and in all of our interests, we can't allow this shit to happen. Like, period. Because guess what?

9:54But Peterson, if you were$41 ,000 just lost and you already took out a variable interest loan, dude, we all know this story. Like unemployment, welfare, something. Like, you know, and guess who's going to pay for that? Us. Lotto, you talked about. What's the justification for Lotto? Oh, it pays for the schools. Raise the property tax. Okay? That's better off. Yeah, because, I mean, what you're effectively doing, again, tax on poor people. Like the people who are least able to pay are the ones who end up losing money there and spending, you know,$1,$5 at a time. Whatever. And so, you know, there's two groups that can probably.

10:28You've got the ones that are like very sophisticated and have whatever algorithmic approach that works out for them. And then you have the insider traders. And there's a lot of those. Let's put D3 up on the screen. So this is Financial Times report. Huh, this is interesting. While overall the numbers of these bets that work out is very small, half, half of the long-shot polymarket bets on military action are successful. What do you think is going on there, people? What do you think is going on there? So they said this is according to a report that suggests prediction markets could pose a bigger threat than previously recognized to the security of sensitive information.

11:07Analysis by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, found that long shot bets defined as wagers of$2 ,500 or more at odds of 35 % or less on the platform had an average win rate of about 52 % when it comes to military and defense actions that compares with a win rate of 25 % across all politics-focused markets and just 14 % for all markets on the platform as a whole. And so what they point to here is that, This is obvious. If you have something where there's a specialized special knowledge held within a small group of people, which military action is a perfect example of, it's going to be ripe for insider trading.

11:55And that is what's going on here. They did just indict one guy for betting on the Maduro raid, which is good. Although, I mean, we're going to cover with Isaac the way that like this insider trading seems to be rife part of a strategy within the Trump administration. If you look at the way major bets on economic news are timed, like by Trump's truths about tariffs or war, gas or whatever is going on. But in any case, this appears to be extremely commonplace. So when you look at their numbers overall of like, oh, well, this percent of people win. We only have three losers for every one, you know, for every one winner.

12:30That's not so bad. Yeah, but that one winner was like on the special ops team that knew that the raid was going to happen. So, you know, unless you have special inside knowledge, it makes your chances of winning even lower than is presented to the public. Everything should be asked in terms of what benefit can we possibly have from this? what social utility does being able to bet on Detroit snowfall totals give the United States of America? Nothing except for a guy like John to lose all of his money. That's it. That's the only reason. Now, many would say, well, do you support the stock market?

13:04Well, first of all, I would make it a lot more regulated. But there's actually an argument for capital markets. You know what the argument is? Is that you need to be able to raise capital to be able to do different various projects so we can employ people. Now, I oppose share buybacks and all the other sophisticated financial thing. But the bedrock principle of a capital market, by the way, where companies can raise money and other people can share and set profit, in a long run, especially when index and mutual funds, which are low cost, is a social benefit to the people who take advantage of that, where it actually erases the aggregate wealth of the country and supposedly creates a feedback loop.

13:42Now, you could even make an argument that itself as bad, which I would love to listen to. But my point is just that's a long enough 100-year-old concept, which is largely proven out over the last 100 years or so, especially with a lot of bumps in the road like, oh, I don't know, the Great Depression. Well, this time around, there's no benefit whatsoever, like the wisdom of the crowd. What wisdom do you need to bet snowfall totals? Why? Have you ever met degenerate gamblers? Degenerate gamblers are people who will bet on whether an airline gate agent will use her left hand or her right hand in order to make the announcement.

14:15I'm not joking. This actually happened in the Vegas airport. That's what people bet on. That's what we're basically enabling with various different things like this. There's no social utility whatsoever. Same with whenever it comes to betting on the Maduro raid. Why? Or this guy lost all his money on whether a celebrity would say a particular word. What? Like, how can you allow this in society? And creating incentives to rig and manipulate basic facets of everyday life, like the guy who was changing the temperature at the airport. Or I always use it because it's so seared in my mind, but throwing the dildos on the WNBA court.

14:55You know, it makes every it creates another level of fakery and phoniness over all of our political and cultural life. Yeah. And then last thing here, just to give some context, when they said that the military bets of a 52 percent win rate whenever it's sized over twenty five hundred dollars. Just to give you some context, if you are a sports better and you win 52, like a really skilled 52, you are a world class sports better because you beat the big. and that means that in the long run that you're actually going to be profitable. Now, you're going to have to lay a lot of money to actually make some because you're going to lose a decent number.

15:30Or a 52 % win rate indicates that you're not as skilled better and you're actually just insider trading. So what's more likely, that you're a deeply skilled geopolitical analyst or you're just an insider trader, especially when we compare to all of the other wagers across the platform, let's say whenever it comes to sports, politics, and events. And even then, the win rates on those are garbage. They're like 14, 25%. Like genuinely, in these cases, you're better off just go to a casino. Just go piss your money in the slot machine rather than do this. You actually will win. You would win more than if you were to participate in these events.

16:05And at least there's some sort of barrier of you have to like go. Yeah, go to the casino. Be in the casino and spend time there. Sit next to the 90-year-old with a MAGA hat on an emphysema tank. Ask me how I know. Okay? So like these are real people. You should see what it does to people. All right. Anyway, soapbox over. Let's get to Isaac. Let's get to Isaac who's standing by. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year.

16:44Within probably 10 days, I put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Robert from the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. Joe and I are both lifelong Star Wars fans, so we're celebrating May the 4th with a brand new week of fun, thought-provoking Star Wars-related episodes. Join us as we tackle science and culture topics from a galaxy far, far away, such as the biology of tauntauns and wampas on the ice planet Hot, or the practicality and corporate business sense of the Sith Rule of Two.

17:20Listen to Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My mother-in-law spent years sabotaging our relationship until karma made her pay for it. Wait a minute, Dakota. How bad did it get? Well, it got bad enough that her son-in-law had to eventually arrest her himself. She moved in for two weeks, lasted for five. She left nail clippings in the bathtub, candy stuck to the furniture, and then she pressed her ear against the bedroom door and burst in screaming. She did not burst in while they were... She did. They kicked her out and paid for a hotel, and they thought, it's finally over.

17:54Days later, she called her son-in-law at work, claiming that his partner had been in some kind of freak accident and had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. He called every hospital in the city, and his partner was making coffee the entire time. She faked a medical emergency just to test whether or not he loved her son? Yeah, and she sat in the hospital parking lot waiting for him to see if he would show up. When that didn't work, she walked into the son-in-law's police station and filed a kidnapping report against him. She filed a kidnapping report against him in his own police station?

18:24And spoilers, karma's gonna show up in the best way possible. So if you want to hear how this story ends, search OK Storytime on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to podcasts. so one thing that i think we have struggled to cover as extensively as we should is the epic level of corruption in uh the trump government and with trump and his family in particular so fortunately for us uh isaac saul founder of tangled news has gone in and done the work over the past year or so compiling as much as we can possibly get about the various corrupt schemes and dealings, compiling it into one comprehensive piece to truly understand the scale and magnitude of the level of corruption we're experiencing, which is truly unlike anything we have seen before.

19:13And Isaac now joins us. Great to see you. Thanks for having me, guys. Glad to be here. Good to see you, dude. Yeah, of course. So let's put your story up on the screen here, which is the everything, everywhere, all at once corruption story. Well said. And I also want to as a jumping off point here, just to get at the level of sort of brazenness and how this has just become part of the water that we swim in with the Trump administration. This clip of Eric Trump, the president's son, appearing on Fox News and being congratulated for contracts that his company won with the Pentagon as this is a as if this is a completely like normal and above board thing.

19:54Let's take a listen to that. And the company's chief strategy advisor, Eric Trump, President Trump's son. Congratulations to you both. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having us, Maria. And as you rightly, Isaac, in the piece point out, like we spent a lot of time and you spent a lot of time thinking about Hunter Biden and potential corruption. Nothing compared to this. Imagine Hunter Biden going on MSNBC and having their congratulations on this contract you scored with the Pentagon. I mean, it's unimaginable. But before we get into some of the specific details of your piece, just talk about that climate and the environment it's created for journalists and the way that this has just become kind of a an accepted part of the way that the Trump administration operates.

20:40Yeah, I mean, there's something happening where it feels kind of like we're under a bit of a spell and I don't really know how to explain it. But I think for opponents of the president, You know, Democrats, people who didn't vote for him. There's just so much coming out of the fire hose every day. It's hard to get your head around it. And I think they don't know really where to focus or where to attack or which allegations even prosecute. And then the people who support him, I mean, the brazenness, they're being so forward about it. I mean, Trump told the New York Times, look, my first term, we tried to separate the family business.

21:13Nobody cared. I got no credit for it. So this time, I don't care. We found out nobody cared. So we're just doing what we want, basically, is how he put it. And it's true. I mean, they are literally the president's son-in-law is landing deals, raising money from Saudi Arabia while he is in the Middle East negotiating a war that we're involved in with Saudi Arabia's primary regional enemy. I mean, the thought of that a year or two ago or happening under the Biden administration was really unfathomable, but we've just become so used to it now. And it's so almost expected. I don't know if it's, you know, just the low expectations or it's the fact that it's happening so much that we've kind of numbed ourselves to it.

21:58But when you look at it all together, as I did, and you try and take it all in at the same time, it's just it's gobsmacking. I mean, reading my own writing, I have a hard time wrapping my head around it. Isaac, there's almost literally too many for us to mention. So why don't you pick a few of the examples? And again, everyone needs to go and read this. Just go read it. We'll have a link down in our description. But for those who are just listening, can you pick a few examples which you think are the most egregious over the last year? Yeah, look, I mean, the one to me that is probably the most offensive is just the whole of the cryptocurrency stuff, which is, you know, Trump launched a literal meme coin that had zero value with his name as the name of the coin.

22:43And basically, Rugg pulled a bunch of investors leading up to his inauguration and then the days after his election. And now he's soliciting dinners at the White House, at Mar-a-Lago, at his properties across the country to people who buy the most amount of coin of his Trump meme coin, which again, has no inherent value. It's just basically this social hype cryptocurrency. And he's just out there advertising it and flaunting it. And the people who are paying money to get to those dinners are not just random American fans of his. They are sometimes foreign dignitaries. They are people with associations with governments who we're making foreign policy around.

23:24They are people in industries that Trump is responsible for regulating. I mean, the overtness of it is so insane. It really is genuinely hard to fathom. And I don't mean to be hyperbolic. I am somebody, like I said, I don't have Trump derangement syndrome. I spent the four years of the Biden administration chasing the Hunter Biden story, which I thought there was a lot of smoke around and some very weird stuff happening there that was worth investigating. But what we're seeing now is just a waterfall unlike anything I can really comprehend. And then I'd say second to the cryptocurrency is the pardons.

23:56I mean, we now have what I called in this piece a pardon industry. There are people around Trump who are taking money to literally go to him and say, hey, we got to pardon this guy who paid me a million dollar fee and donated to your campaign and wants to get out of prison for Medicare fraud or for defrauding donors when he was a member of Congress. And Trump's just doing it. I mean, these are some of the slimiest slime of the D.C. swamp that he promised to drain when he first came up the escalator, you know, and now he's letting all these people off with a free pass for some of the really grossest, you know, kind of broad and low denominator D.C.

24:39schemes that you can imagine. And it's it's hard to accept. Yeah, I do want to I want to pause on the crypto part as well, because not only by the dollar amount is that the most significant, you know, the bulk of Trump's wealth at this point comes from crypto investments. It's this incredible scheme to funnel him money, to facilitate some of the some of the pardon industry comes directly through investments in Trump's or assistance for Trump's various crypto ventures. It also is direct exploitation of his own supporters, who are the ones that through buying both Trump's shitcoin and Melania's shitcoin had the rug pull and, you know, ultimately lost money in service of further enriching the very guy that they so support and believe in.

25:28So I feel like the crypto piece is what has really enabled the truly world historic amounts of corruption and graft that Trump personally himself has been able to participate in? Yeah, I would say on top of just the sadness and frustration that I feel for his supporters who sort of followed him out onto this branch before they cut it off. And Melania Trump participated in this too, as you said, with her own shit going that she rolled out. We also have, I mean, literally some of the wealthiest people and most politically influential people in the Middle East, like from the UAE, who own nearly half of World Liberty Financial, which is this crypto firm that the Trump family stood up.