Polymarket Fakes Creators Winning Bets & Fed Legend Alan Greenspan Dies at 100

0:01AI is uncharted territory, and many leaders are trying to navigate through without a guide to help them. That's why Morning Brew created The Intelligence Shift, a new podcast with PwC. It's all about how AI is fundamentally changing different industries. Host Dan Priest is joined by a top-tier roster of industry leaders who share real stories and real lessons learned. Get guidance from industry experts. Listen to The Intelligence Shift wherever you get your podcasts.

0:32Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Polymarket's been exposed for a very sketchy, perhaps illegal, viral marketing scheme. Then Instagram wants you to watch reels on your TV. It's Tuesday, June 23rd. Let's ride.

0:57everyone's got that loud friend the guy or gal whose voice seems to pierce through the air alerting everyone in a square mile of their presence but they've got nothing on joseph mcgrail bait up the australian air conditioner cleaner and honorary town crier was crowned by guinness world records as the loudest person ever he shouted the word now at 122.4 decibels on par with the volume of a chainsaw airplane taking off or an ambulance siren blaring close to you it's not necessarily a matter of practice because you can't for this kind of thing mcgrell bait up said his cry of now destroyed his voice for the next several days this is the type of dude who somehow ends up as your upstairs neighbor in new york city his origin story is hilarious he He became competitively loud, the AP wrote, when he was appointed the official, not honorary, the official town crier of Canberra in 2017.

1:50He makes announcements at community events, school events, car shows. So he is gainfully employed as a town crier. And he also now has a membership in the Ancient and Honorable Guild of Australian Town Criers. I'm glad that there is an honorable one and an ancient one because these people need a place to show off their talents. I'm just curious how he settled on the word now. Like, is that just the vowel structure? You don't have, like, I was thinking if you started with a P, then maybe you're expending too much energy. How? On the, but you're expending too much energy on that particular syllable and that consonant.

2:24So now, like the N, you can burst off your tongue there and just go with the bit. You stretch your vocal cords as big as they can go with now. The previous record was, ironically, quiet, which seems a lot more difficult to say. So I think he settled on the right word. And now a word from our sponsor, ServiceNow. Toby, what if there was something that could do work for you? Heard that one before. AI was supposed to handle the parts of work I hate, but it just describes the problems back to me generating more work. Yes, and ServiceNow's AI specialists don't do that. They can actually do work since they aren't a tool.

2:58Think of them as digital teammates who can actually do the work. They can resolve cases, process requests, closed loops without generating extra work for you. When you can truly delegate to AI, you can get back to the work only you can do, the work that requires a person with ideas and judgment and, you know, a pulse. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. That's servicenow.com. Polymarket has been up to some very shady stuff. The prediction market has been paying creators, mostly college age, to film themselves placing fake wagers on the platform in the hopes of going viral. That's according to the Wall Street Journal, which published a wild investigation into Polymarket's duplicitous scheme to become ubiquitous on the Internet.

3:40These reporters reviewed more than 1 ,100 videos made by 10 creators paid by Polymarket, though there are more than 100 total. In these videos, 70 % appeared to place a bet on a website that looked like Polymarket but wasn't. Remember, this is all for show. And 10 % of those videos included fake or outdated footage that suggested they won their bets. In those clips, traders were portrayed as winning$900 ,000, but in reality, they would have lost more than$166 ,000. Not only were these creators filming themselves placing fake trades, but they didn't disclose in their post that Polymarket was funding the whole thing.

4:16Only when the journal reached out did the account's ad, quote, Polymarket partner to their bios. When asked about the whole thing, Polymarket said in a statement, it was, quote,

4:36This is crazy, Neil. A crazy story. I'm just going to give an example of this happening on an individual creator level. So there's this college creator, George Makihara. He posted a video of himself winning$100 ,000 because Trump supposedly said the word McDonald's during a speech. But here's the issue. Trump never actually said McDonald's that month. And actually, the reaction footage that he was supposedly watching happened two months prior. So it was a completely fabricated market that actually, if you had bet on that, you would have lost. So that's when the red flag started to come up. People said, this is literally an alternate reality.

5:14What is going on? Wall Street Journal dove a little bit deeper and saw that this was not an accident. It was actually a conscious choice and marketing tactic by Polymarket. Yeah, I mean this thing goes levels deep. First of all, like I said, they made these not only were they simulated trades But they made them on simulated sites. They created these dupes of polymarket.com One of them was polymarket.com. Well, actually the L in the middle of the poly was actually an uppercase I So they this one this goes down layers so they could make these fake trades and the other thing that they that is key to this entire scheme is paying a third-party vendor another marketing company to make these videos go viral because on their own they necessarily wouldn't have gone viral but they're getting these lower wage uh people uh overseas to just clip these uh clip these videos and then send them a nuclear across the internet so that people uh so that people see them and it worked because these were huge videos by the way this is modern marketing whether you like it or hate it because again, we've spoken about this on the show before, but a streamer discusses a Polymarket trade live.

6:25Creators then make videos of themselves doing it. There's this underground network of clippers that boost it to the algorithm of virally. Some people can do this legitimately. Others like Polymarket were doing it illegitimately, but I do think that is a peek into how these internet native companies are getting their product out there. We have spoke about the fact that it seems like every viral moment suddenly has like a Polymarket or a Calci logo on the bottom of it. This is just how the world operates right now. Wall Street Journal peeled back some of the layers to show that it's not operating legitimacy.

6:58The biggest one is that you have to disclose a paid partnership when you are receiving money for promoting a product. But I do think it's an unfortunate window into where the marketing world is heading. Yeah. I mean, for Polymarket, the founder, Shane Copeland, has said that they want to be impossible to ignore online. Virality is everything. And you have to look at this in the context of its rivalry with Calci. So these are two of the probably the two biggest prediction markets. Polymarket is not actually available to U.S. users. When this industry really got going a few years ago, Polymarket had a huge lead over Calci.

7:33But Calci is making up a ton of ground. Last month, Calci had about double Polymarket's trading volume. And so if virality is the currency for both of these companies and they're fighting for market share, then both of them are trying to go viral online. Polymarket is cutting a few corners to do that. It just seems a little short-sighted because if you want to be viewed as a serious financial – a part of a serious financial infrastructure, but then simultaneously you are doing this on the background, you are kind of shooting yourself in a foot a little bit. Like, why would you, in your fight with Calci, in your argument that it needs to have a bigger role in finance, would you do something where it kind of undermines all of that progress that you're trying to make?

8:16So it feels like a short-sighted versus a long-term goal. Those are a little mismatched right now. And we'll see whether regulators like the CFTC begin an investigation because this is also a gray area that could possibly be violating some marketing laws. Moving on, former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, the most influential central banker of modern times, has died at 100. Often described as a maestro, Greenspan orchestrated the economy through boom times of low inflation and low unemployment, celebrated widely for his policy instincts and mastery of data. He was also just a larger-than-life figure, earning the type of celebrity status and name recognition you wouldn't normally associate with a central bank official.

8:57Needless to say, if Morning Brew Daily had been around in the 90s, you'd hear Greenspan mentioned as much as we say AI now. One of the reasons Greenspan was so prominent in public life was his longevity. He served as Fed chair for 18 and a half years, the second longest tenure ever. He was first appointed by Reagan in 1987, then reappointed another four times by four different presidents of both parties, including both Bush's and Clinton. To sum up just how popular Greenspan was, when John McCain was running for president in 2000, he was asked whether he would keep Greenspan on as Fed chair, he replied, quote, not only would I reappoint him, but if he died, we'd prop him up and put sunglasses on him as they did in the movie Weekend at Bernie's.

9:38But since Greenspan left the position in 2006, his star has dimmed a little because of what happened two years later, the financial crisis, America's worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Critics say Greenspan's hands-off approach contributed to the disaster by enabling Wall Street to take riskier bets that eventually blew up the housing market and the rest of the economy with it. Either way, Toby, this guy leaves behind a monumental legacy. BBC called him the architect of the modern American economy. He created something that was called the Greenspan put as well, which became a very central concept to modern finance.

10:13Basically, investors came to believe that the Fed would step in with interest rate cuts or a liquidity injection whenever markets crashed. And markets did crash under Greenspan. But the result is investors basically believed that the Fed would come in and socialize any losses that would happen. And some people said that that led to over exuberance and excessive risk taking. Greenspan had this very central belief that markets would do well. They would cleanse themselves. They would operate well under less oversight. But if you look back on his tenure, maybe he did get over in front of his skis a little bit.

10:51It did lead to the exact fomenting of the conditions that led to the financial crisis. But the Greenspan put is something that without him, who knows what the market would look like now because it was just so central to that key moment in time when he was managing the Fed. Yeah, we saw that maybe after COVID when Jerome Powell was leading the Fed at the time, took out the bazooka and did everything they could by injecting liquidity and lowering interest rates to near zero to keep the economy afloat. and that worked. One of my favorite things about Greenspan is that he was also central to developing offbeat economic indicators.

11:27We've talked about the lipstick index and these other ways of looking at the economy because maybe unemployment or job growth or GDP isn't the way isn't the best way of seeing what's actually going on in the economy. So he developed a couple of these. One of the most famous ones is the men's underwear index, where if you're trying to see what's going on in the economy, whether people are getting a little anxious, it's you look at men's underwear sales because if you're a little stressed financially, you're just going to keep wearing the same pair. But if you're feeling good, you might shell out for a new one.

11:55And the other one is the cardboard box indicator. He really was clued in on the prices of liner board, which is the raw material for cardboard to see whether how the economy was doing because maybe high demand for shipping boxes was an early indication that manufacturing retail activity was going up. I thought it was fascinating that he had a deep friendship with Anne Rand, which, by the way, I thought they existed in different moments in history. But no, they hung out a lot. They were part of each other's inner circles. And her philosophies on markets absolutely influenced how Greenspan saw the world.

12:29She believed that free market was a moral social system, that if you leave markets alone, trade aligns with human nature and rational self-interest. That was Anne Rand's thought process. You can see it in Greenspan's policies as well. He truly believed financial institutions would regulate themselves, which, again, sounds naive at this point. But he thought that banks wouldn't want to destroy shareholder value. They would want to protect their reputations. Markets would become the self-correcting entities. But as a result, you know, that led to, again, the conditions that had Bear Stearns blow up and eventually the housing market blow up as well.

13:06So his legacy and his kind of central thought on the market is absolutely something that was challenged later on in his life. But at the time, again, I can't stress enough how he was viewed as this maestro who just guided the economy through multiple periods of massive boom times that we'd never seen before. Moving on, A24, the studio behind basically every movie that isn't a sequel or a superhero saga, is taking an investment from Google. Google is forking over$75 million for its first ever ownership stake in a movie studio to develop AI tools alongside the minds that brought you Moonlight, Marty Supreme, Uncut Gems, and Backrooms.

13:45At first glance, the two appear to be odd bedfellows. The movie industry doesn't exactly love AI and its job-threatening potential, so the A in A24 stands for artificial, one pessimistic Redditor commented on the deal. but A24 and Google's DeepMind AI unit framed the tie-up as more of a research partnership designed to come up with new workflows and techniques for filmmaking, not replacing creatives. The news comes at a time where Hollywood is on a bit of a hot streak. Toy Story 5 just had the biggest domestic opening since a Minecraft movie, which means the domestic box office is sneakily off to its best start since before the pandemic.

14:23A24 contributed to that total with the surprise smash horror hit Backrooms, which brought in$300 million worldwide, which is why, Neil, I think we're seeing some trepidation about this investment. A24 is the most successful independent film studio of the last decade, so to hear their name in conjunction with AI tools was disappointing to some. Yeah, A24 seemed to want to get ahead of the potential criticism. Scott Belsky, who's an A24 partner, said that the new tools that they might develop with Google DeepMind, quote, won't look anything like the prompted generation type of AI that people feel uncomfortable with.

14:58They're framing this as just a way to make movies cheaper and more efficient, very similar to the line that Ben Affleck was taking because he developed this AI company that they eventually sold to Netflix a few months ago. And they're just saying, look, we have these tools available and there's a lot of busy work that goes into just actually making the movie. We're not gonna use it for the creative process at all, but we might as well use these tools and bring it to Hollywood in a way that makes all of our lives easier and we can make movies at a lower price. It's interesting from A24 though, because they have this reputation as being this great place for emerging filmmakers to make their debuts.

15:34They resonate heavily with young audiences. It's one of the only studio brands that audiences seek out because of the brand name itself. And yet here they are kind of engaging with AI, which is clearly something that their audiences tend to dislike. Kane Parsons, who directed Backrooms, which is the studio's highest grossing film by a long way, called AI genuinely harmful and a signifier of cultural and economic rot. So even though they're trying to, you know, heads their bets and saying, we're not going to use it to replace creatives, it feels like a weird deal for them to strike for sure. Yeah, let's zoom out to the box office though, because you mentioned that.

16:13I do want to emphasize just how much people are going to the movies this year. It's a truly great movie year. AMC just reported that had its busiest weekend of 2026 after Toy Story 5. So that opened to$160 million, the biggest opening weekend box office performance of the year. They also said that was the sixth movie title in the past three months to open to more than$75 million. You had Backrooms, Mandalorian and Grogu, Devil Wears Prada 2, Michael, Super Mario Galaxy movie, and Project Hail Mary. So we're on pace potentially for$10 billion in box office revenue this year. We haven't got there, not even close, since COVID.

16:51I mean, regularly before the pandemic, we were seeing with all these superhero movies coming out, we were regularly getting over$10 billion in box office revenue. Right now, near the midway of the year, we're at 4.46. So for the first time in a while, movie theater owners are saying, wow, you know, thank you, A24. Thank you, all these studios, for giving us some good product. People, young people want to actually go to the movies. It's crazy because that is multiple genres that are working. Like Michael and Devil Wears Prada 2 and Backrooms, those are all very, very different. The audience is right there, which is why you're seeing this robust box office.

17:26Also, looking ahead, the pipeline looks very strong. There is a big superhero movie coming. Spider-Man, a brand new day. That will make a lot of money. The Odyssey as well, Supergirl, and then Moana has another. I actually don't even know if it's an animated or not. I think it's a live action. It's a live action Moana coming. So this is going to be a very good year for movies and continue to be a very good year for movies. All right, we're gonna take a quick break and come back with Tobey's Trends right after this. Neil, I want to tell you about something I personally love very much. Is it me, your good friend and co-host?

17:59No, it's not my work friend and co-host. It's Spectrum Business, which keeps businesses of all sizes connected seamlessly with fast, reliable internet, advanced Wi-Fi, phone, TV, and mobile services, all backed by 100 % U.S.-based support. Spectrum Business offers tailored connectivity solutions with packages built for your business budget. In fact, millions of business owners rely on Spectrum Business to keep them connected. So whether your business is big or small, visit spectrum.com slash business to learn more. That's spectrum.com slash business. Restrictions apply. Service is not available in all areas.

18:35Neil, it feels like every week there's a new AI model making headlines. And somehow I'm expected to keep up with all of them. Fair. But Minimax's new M3 is one worth paying attention to. Their open-weight model combines frontier-level coding and AI agent capabilities, a massive 1 million token contacts window, and native multimodal understanding. M3 is built for coding, agent, and visual understanding, helping developers and businesses build more capable AI products and automate complex tasks. It's available today through APIs and leading AI platforms. To learn more and start building with M3, visit minimax.io.

19:13That's minimax.io. There's two types of people in this world. The ones that entertain and the ones that observe. No, there are investors white-knuckling through market dips and those patiently letting time do its thing. Wealthfront is for them. Their high-yield cash account makes building long-term wealth effortless. In fact, new clients get a three-month 0.75 % boost over the base rate, up to 4.05 % APY on up to$150 ,000. And when you're ready to invest, transferring to their expert-built investing accounts is a breeze. Claim the limited time offer at Wealthfront.com slash morningbrew. This is a current Wealthfront client testimonial creating a conflict of interest.

19:55Client experiences vary. Wealthfront brokerage is not a bank. Base APY as of January 30th, 2026 and subject to change. Details in the episode description. So after a long day at work, you might find yourself plopping down on the couch, making some popcorn, turning on the TV to watch Instagram content. That is the photo sharing app's vision, a vision I want to talk about on today's edition of Toby's Trends. Pull out your phone right now and give Instagram a scroll. Chances are you'll come across a horizontal video amidst the more common vertical videos. That's exactly Instagram's intention and it's why yesterday it announced it's testing out horizontal content on its pre-existing Instagram for TV app.

20:37Instagram VP Tessa Lyons has called TV the next frontier for the platform and it's actively encouraging creators to make content that looks a lot like normal TV. That means nudging people towards longer form videos, episodic content, and serialized storytelling. By testing horizontal video formats specifically designed for larger screens, it runs directly against the vertical video trend that has dominated social media since the rise of TikTok. But Neil, Instagram on TV feels definitely a little weird. Scrolling IG feels like a distinctly small screen activity, but when you realize that Instagram is competing for the same eyeballs Netflix and YouTube and HBO are, the vision becomes a little more clear.

21:16Last year, the writer Derek Thompson wrote an essay called, quote, everything is television. And that seemed to be very prescient. He said at a couple data points here, more than 80 % of the time spent on Facebook, more than 90 % of the time spent on Instagram is spent watching videos and not actually doing social media. Most of that time is actually spent watching videos from creators that you have never met and you don't even know. Meanwhile, podcasts are also moving in the quote television direction. Consumption of video podcasts is growing 20 times faster than audio only ones. If you wanna know the biggest podcast platform on the planet, it's not Spotify or Apple, it's actually YouTube.

21:57So it's very interesting to see these social media companies move to their maybe logical endpoint, which is USA Channel. Everyone is moving into everyone else's territory. That's another way of framing it because YouTube already dominates TV viewing. It just passed Netflix and in US television viewership, which is crazy. Netflix just added a vertical video clips feed where you can watch short form video content. And they're also making a big push into video podcasts. TikTok has its own micro drama business where it's creating its original content. Instagram obviously is moving into TVs as well.

22:32So the distinction between the social media company and just traditional media company has completely blurred a long time ago because everyone, as I said, is fighting over those same eyeballs. So you gotta be everywhere, everywhere all at once, little A24. Everything, everywhere, all at once. You got it. But what do you think? Like you're the Toby's Trends whisperer. Like, do you think eventually, maybe not now, but in a year or two, it won't be crazy to go sit on your couch and then fire up the Instagram app and see what's going on? I think right now, part of the reason why horizontal video is so in is because one, it interrupts your pattern scrolling on social media.

23:11Because if you're seeing a lot of vertical videos, when you come across a horizontal one, you just pause for a little bit and say, oh, this is something different. Also, horizontal feels more premium right now. It feels more associated with things like TV or movies. We are currently in this age of cinematic social where people are putting much more time into their videos. They're longer. They have like these narrative arcs. Like you come back to these accounts week after week to watch the same thing. So right now it is definitely the trend de jour on social media. Will that ever actually translate into plopping down your couch?

23:46Maybe, I don't know. It's pretty easy to watch on my phone right now, but clearly people like unwinding with content on their TV. I never thought that podcast would be a popular thing on TV, but now they are. So all this to say, I definitely think it is something that is happening on your phones. It remains to be seen if it will translate to your TVs. Let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Remember when SpaceX was a bigger company than Amazon and Microsoft? Well, it's not anymore. Shares plunged 16 % yesterday for their worst trading day since going public after falling another 8 % combined over the previous two trading sessions.

24:25The three-day sell-off has raised more than$600 billion in market value after the company's blockbuster IPO 11 days ago. Remember, SpaceX price shares at$135 opened at$150, then roared to$225, briefly becoming the world's fourth most valuable public company. Now the stock is back near$155, barely hanging above its opening price. Why the drawdown? Investors seem rattled by SpaceX's first-ever bond offering where it's looking to raise$20 billion to fund its AI ambitions, which raises questions about future debt costs. There's also growing concern that upcoming lockup expirations could unleash a wave of insider selling and pump up the stock's tradable share count, which is still small right now.