Gambling, Creators, and the Future of Trust Online

0:00Today on The Colin and Samir Show, we're talking about a shift on the internet that has happened in the past five years. that is now starting to peek into the world of media, and I truly just can't stop thinking about it. And that is the rise of prediction markets. The rapidly growing and controversial way for people to turn predicting the future into a money-making proposition. Joel Holsinger just quit his day job to bet on the words famous people like White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt might say in public. I thought there was a very high likelihood she would bring up Thanksgiving in relation to the shutdown.

0:37From his computer, the 26-year-old makes about$3 ,000 a week, trading on the prediction market, Kelsey. She did not say Thanksgiving, so we were out$700 yesterday. That hurts, right? Actually, surprisingly for me, it doesn't hurt really much. I have had times where I've lost, for example, like$6 ,000 on a bad trade. But also the inverse of that, I've made$11 ,000 on a trade. And so, you know, it's just ups and downs. The live streaming influencer is one of millions of people flocking to prediction markets like Calci, Predict It and Polymarket, where you can wager on just about anything. I can't stop thinking about this and its implications on the creator economy, largely because one of the biggest prediction markets called Calci just signed a deal with CNN.

1:25Turning now to CNN. Genuinely, what is one of the grimmest developments in news that I have ever seen? Something literally to the stuff of my nightmares. They have announced a partnership with Kalshi, a prediction market, much like Polymarket, where they will be officially collaborating together to promote Kalshi, betting odds, and others in CNN or incorporate it into their live coverage. Just to give you a taste of Kalshi, what is it? Here is their co-founder, Tariq Mansour, talking about his vision for the betting platform. The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.

2:04And that line is wild because it basically says if people disagree about something, that disagreement can become a financial product. And this comes at a moment when attention online is getting harder and more expensive for everyone. So you have traditional legacy media companies like CNN who are struggling with ratings and capturing a young audience. You have creators who are trying to reach scale and competing with what feels like an infinite amount of content. And you have audiences who are kind of uninterested unless something feels urgent, emotional, or interactive. And that's where prediction markets step in.

2:41The same way that watching a sports game has proven to be more interesting, if you are betting on that sports game, the world and just everything that's happening in the world becomes a bit more interesting and a bit more addictive when you have money on the line. So basically, instead of watching a news segment passively, prediction markets turn news into a live scoreboard where the probability of something happening rises and falls in real time. And it gives you a pulse of what the masses are actually feeling and putting their money on. So I think this world of Kalshi and prediction markets has a lot of implications on the future of news, on the future of creators, and more importantly, the future of audiences online.

3:23Let's get into it.

3:29All right, Colin, do you think Warner Brothers will be acquired by Paramount? No, I think it's still going to end up in Netflix's hands. How much do you believe it's going to be Netflix? Like, would you put your money on that? not a gambling man, but if I had to, I would. You would. Sure. That Netflix is going to buy. Not a lot of money. So let me tell you, you can put your money on this depending on where you lie. If we look right now, I'm looking at a Calci bet that says, will Paramount acquire Warner Brothers? Now the trading volume right now is$30 ,000 into this. So that's the market size.

4:00And this was just created today. It will continue to grow. But if I bet$1 ,000 or let's say$10 ,000, I bet$10 ,000, which I can put on here, on a yes contract that says Paramount will acquire Warner Brothers, I could win$11 ,457 if that is true and that happens. So you could basically double your money? I could double my money. This to me, this world of prediction markets, I've been fascinated by it over the past week. It came into my world after CNN signed a deal with Kalshi. And I've heard about Calci and Polymarket, largely because of spending time on Twitter and seeing what people are talking about.

4:40But when CNN struck a deal, to me, I put Calci in the same bucket as like stake.com and all these modern gambling sites. So I hadn't really put much thought into it. But a major media company signing a deal with this speculative predictions market, it made me look into this. And as I looked into all of this, it made me really take a step back and understand what were all the pieces that got us here on the internet? Like what has happened in the past five years that have landed us in this place where a major media network is signing a deal with a predictions market? Where gambling and media have become so intertwined.

5:21Yes. Gambling has not been a part of my life. It is not a part of my life. I remember I, in my drive out to move to Los Angeles 15 years ago, I stopped in Las Vegas and I lost$40 in about two seconds. And I never really gambled again. But I watch a lot of TV. I watch a lot of media. And it's amazing over the past couple years, and especially this year, how gambling has made its way into the creator world. Obviously, it's made its way into the sports world. And now within CNN, it's coming for mainstream news where you can just bet on anything. Right. Earlier this year, we talked a lot about this premise of interactive media, largely talking about Twitch streamers and conversation we had with the CEO of Twitch, Dan Clancy, talking about how Twitch is so interesting because it's interactive.

6:06That maybe my desire as an audience member and in the world of creators and media that the future, the requirement is interactivity, that we should learn a lot from video games, that I want to have an impact on what I'm watching on the screen. And that also has been proven true in short form media that like the line between me watching a piece of short form content on my phone and me being able to create that piece of short form content is actually pretty blurry. And I can DM it to someone. I can comment. I can get involved. Like the creator economy unlocked interactivity with media. Or to follow the thread of video games, like you had just said, you can not only interact, you can win or lose.

6:45That is the ultimate stake. That good stories have stakes. So how do you get someone involved, engaged, interact to then either win or lose on the end? So we're going to get to this other piece of how this relates to the creator world. But I just want to bring it up that today, this was a conversation we've been having, this conversation about Kalshi. And today, something launched called Spike. Spike comes out of Harvard Business School. And it is a prediction market on short form content. So right now I'm on the get spike.app page and I'm looking at a series of TikToks and how it's structured is there.

7:25I'm looking at an edit of Steph Curry right now that's posted onto TikTok. The question is, will this hit 80 ,000 views? It's currently at 40 ,000 views and it has to hit 80 ,000 in the next five hours. If I bet a hundred bucks that this will reach 80 ,000 views in the next five hours, I win 400 bucks. This is terrible. So I can watch a piece of content. And from my level of, you know, expertise, I can look at this and say, yeah, this will reach 80 ,000 views. There's a Calci bet. What will Mr. Beast say in his next video? And there's like five words listed and you can bet on some of those words.

8:04Will he say Feastables? Will he say Beast? Will he say subscribe. That's insane. Yeah. And then there's a lot of words in there. One of them is Saudi Arabia. One of them is time. And the more niche the word, the bigger the payout is what I'm seeing. So obviously, as we bring this up, now we get into this question of, okay, should I bet on one of these words and text Jimmy and say, hey, can you say this word? Or text one of the script writers at beast and say, is he going to say one of these words in the next video, which is terrible. That is insider trading at its worst and just blatant. And, you know, I'm looking at some of these bets on Cal shoe.

8:47You have a bet like, will David Dobrik upload a video this year? And that was six months ago before he had uploaded another video. And the market size wasn't huge for that, but people won thousands of dollars on betting. Yes, that he would upload another video. There's a bet on on calci about will the outdoor boys upload a video this year after their good after his goodbye video and that market was pretty big that's a fifteen thousand dollar market around if the outdoor boys will upload again and just back to the cnn question there are calci bets on what anderson cooper will say on his show and he's a cnn host it just feels like there's so much conflict of interest it is so dystopian and it feels like it's happening so quickly So I want to talk about some of the ingredients from the internet that have gotten us here.

9:35I honestly don't know that much about Calci, but like, where did it come from? How did this happen? Because I honestly had not heard of it. I had heard of Polymarket, but I had not heard of Calci until the announcement came about their partnership with CNN. Really? Yeah. Oh, wow. I hadn't heard about it. Okay. So CalSHE was approved by the CFTC. So basically a government agency that looks after all these exchanges and it was approved and fully regulated as a US predictions exchange in 2020. So pretty early. And it basically, users can buy a yes, no contract. So you can say, yes, this will happen or no, this won't happen.

10:18And the prices are between like a penny, if not like like less than a penny to 99 cents and these settle at one dollar or zero dollars based on the outcome of if this happened yes or no and so you can you know not make life-changing money but make a lot of money doing one of these bets and then if you're doing it every day on multiple bets like you are gambling based on your predictions that are more about like the world and life and if it'll rain tomorrow and what will happen in the Oscars. Like right now, the Oscars and the Golden Globes are all over Kalashie. Sports is all over Kalashie. And these are all like prop bets in a way that when I was growing up, I remember we would say this type of stuff watching the Super Bowl.

11:02Like we would all bet on if it would be heads or tails, you know, and just have fun being like, you owe me a sandwich if it's a small amount of money that are like nominal things that were really funny and fun. But now this is a federally regulated predictions exchange. And the way the CEO explains it is it's the stock market for opinions. You have a stock market for opinions? Apparently you can, and it can be federally regulated. Now, the big push from the Kalshi founders is they say that markets are truth machines, meaning that these prediction markets are a more accurate depiction of the opinions of the masses than anything else.

11:43and we've actually said this quite a bit on this show that like i'll read a poll right or i'll read like some percentage of people say x and i'm always like yeah but who who who right like there's a gallup poll gallup is a is a credible source uh that i pulled a data for for this episode this is only 32 percent of americans trust mass media i think that's probably an accurate number but again I don't know who they polled. And so the suggestion here is that when people are putting money behind their opinions and their predictions, that there is a more accurate depiction of what people are feeling.

12:22Yeah. I don't, I don't know if I agree with that because you're, you're. Yeah. I'm laughing as I say it. Cause I think it's like, you're getting, it's kind of crazy. You're getting a poll from people who are hoping to make money off of, I understand they're putting their money where their mouth is, I guess, and saying, I really believe in this so much so that I will bet on it. But is it a better indication of opinion? I don't know. Across the board, I think it's an opinion from a group of people who are willing to gamble and bet. And so this is why CNN signs this partnership five years later. Because as this has become bigger and bigger and bigger, I mean, to the point where the founders are billionaires now of this company, it's a big company, that CNN believes that a couple things.

13:05One, that this is a better indicator of cultural pulse, right? If like right now, most of mainstream media is losing to new media, YouTube, social, everything like that, and creators have been more of like the voice of the people, CNN has lost touch with that. And so how do they bring the voice of the people into their show? Their belief is it's through prediction markets. I mean, the other reason has to be that gambling is a more interesting way to watch the news. If you've got money on the news, you're going to be hooked to the news the same way that if you put money on a sports game, you're going to watch the game.

13:43Of course. Now, the outward facing message is a better indication of the public's opinion. But of course. So it's basically like young people like gambling. And if they are gambling, they will tune in. Yeah, I think probably. I mean, cable news viewership is down 32 % year over year and will only continue. you. I mean, we're laughing, but I, I, unfortunately I think they are right. It is more young people like gambling right now. And it is more interesting to watch if you've put money on it. I think the challenge here is what we talked about earlier, that like the creator economy opened up the door for interactive media and, and trained an audience to say, you know what?

14:24Media is mostly interesting. If you can engage with it, if you can, if you can have a say in it, if you can play with it, if it actually impacts your day-to-day life, it's more interesting. Yeah. Don't work on something for a year, put it in a theater and make me sit for two hours. Right. Yeah. To decide if I like it or not. Yeah. How do I engage with this? Even when you're talking about movies right now and like, you know, Marty Supreme, which is an A24 movie, it's kind of the only movie I know that's coming out. And it's because they're doing a great job of like making it part of the cultural conversation on a day-to-day basis.

14:53So all this to say, like the expectation of media and media marketing is I can engage and interact with it. And I think sports betting was the first time we saw this happen in the world of media. Sorry, I'm just putting a, I'm putting a Calci bet on Marty Supreme's Rotten Tomatoes score. One sec, I'll be right back with you. Is that an option? Yeah, of course. Oh my God. You can bet on everything. The world of hot takes, like right now we're in an era of the internet that is all hot takes, right? Of course, there's literally shows built on this like Subway Takes, which is more comedic. But even something that we've been talking about, I think we said it on the show, but if we've gone from the information era of the internet, which was, hey, I can't believe I can get information like this by typing something into an Ask Jeeves bar or Google search bar, then there's the attention era, which is, huh, maybe people don't just want information.

15:51They're actually open to being entertained here. Maybe I could entertain people with content and publishing content. Now we're in what I call the perspective era, which is like without perspective, I can just get information and I can even get attention from other places. But like I need perspective. And also perspective is now being suggested as like a tradable asset. It's a crazy time. But like perspective is the whole thing. Like if I have a perspective on something that I used to share in an office with my friends, like you really believe it, go make money on it. but that that first like that perspective first happened in sports betting which was like who do you think is going to win and sports betting made sports much more fun to watch it made it more fun for people who weren't even into sports david dobrik has a big partnership with prize picks and he's done his ads for prize picks a couple of times over the past couple months where he said I don't really watch sports, but it's more fun now.

16:53Yeah, of course. That I have money on the line or, you know, something like that for his ads. And the, you know, the, the broad issue here is that it is really good business to have a flywheel like this. CNN uses CalShe data and promotes CalShe on CNN. That informs more people that they can put their money down on CalShe. so they watch they go to cal sheet they put money and they get into the loop the same way that david dobrik is promoting prize picks same thing happens obviously that is a recurring sponsorship for david because it's highly lucrative for people in david's audience to go see prize picks see that yeah it is more fun to watch sports huh maybe i should be betting on sports get into the the world of prize picks or even stake.com and the rise of that and live streaming people live betting on twitch streams and basically showing me that it is fun to do this showing me that i can do this and then immediately i get sucked into the world of gambling and betting yeah which is addicting which is addicting and not great money yes yeah yeah yeah i think when it starts happening at a really grand scale like cnn And then we were talking yesterday, like the issue is if you're able to bet on the news and lots of people are making bets on the news, the problem is what if the news starts responding to the bets?

18:18Right. Right. Where it's like the news, like, and that gets into the insider trading thing. It's like the news starts getting altered because of the odds of like people making things happen because of the odds. Yeah. Or being more likely to go a certain direction because of the prediction markets. I think also the news favoring the most engaged predictions as coverage is likely scenario, right? So yeah, I think - Which you're saying is not news and then like a self-filling prophecy sort of. Exactly. Yeah. So I think we saw a lot of this happen in early 2020, do you remember the conversation that people used to have of like, what if you could bet on a creator?

19:06Yeah. Or buy stock. What if you could buy stock in a creator? That's actually a title of one of our episodes from back in the day, because there was a lot of conversation around NFTs. And could you turn a YouTube video into an NFT that you could buy a small fractional share in? Yeah. Or not even the YouTube video. There was a platform. I'm blanking on the name. But there was a platform that came out and without asking creators if they could use our name and likeness, just put all of us on this NFT trading platform and all of a sudden people could buy stock in us. And it was really just a prediction market actually.

19:41It was. It was just like, do you believe in this creator and their ability to get viewership, get more popular? Yeah. And I think that laid the foundation for the appetite for this because the world of NFTs and meme coins and everything that we've seen in the crypto world even has laid the foundation for the internet being a video game and the internet being a financial video game, right? Yeah. I mean, if you really want to go back, I think it is like the stock market that laid the foundation for this. Wow, you're going deep. I'm just saying that like it was the stock market and the inability for generations of people to feel like they could engage in the stock market, which then led to like the rise of crypto, I believe, and Wall Street bets.

20:21Like remember even during the pandemic, like what happened to like GameStop or to GameStop? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And AMC. I think it was a little bit of the newer generations first off being like, wait, we can have our own speculative assets. Right. We can have control over some of this information that we have. so i think as this has started to happen like obviously what this why this matters is the amount of attention that um this is capturing on the internet now and and the incentives from the media business to ride the wave of attention and i think we're seeing a lot this year feels like it's been really underscored by this concept of traditional legacy media trying to find a way to compete with creator-led media and with the internet and like how attention moves on the internet.

21:20And I think that nets us out into a dangerous place. And I think, you know, this potentially has the opportunity to actually push more people towards creators. I would think. Like when I look at this, I can't see this partnership between CNN and Calci being something that drives more audience to CNN. I can see it driving more audience. I'm not sure it builds trust. That's a good distinction. You know, if like if people already feel whatever that metric was that you gave earlier, 32 % of people say they've lost trust in mainstream. And not to fit this like a perfect puzzle, but there's Pew Research that says 70 % of Gen Z say that they trust individual creators more than news institutions.

22:07Yeah, I think you could assume that as mainstream media takes on these prediction markets, that people who get their news from podcasters and from independent creators potentially are more likely to go that direction because it continues to feel more pure, more straight from the source. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, part of that research as well is that 40 % of Gen Z uses YouTube as their primary news source. I think what it does, though, is it begins to turn the news even more so into entertainment, which it already is. It already is. Yeah. The question, though, is that now, like, does financializing the news in this way, which, again, feels crazy to me that this is where we are.

22:44does it make creators the more trusted news source or is it inevitable that even creators over time will start to get pulled in the same incentive structures well that's the conversation we were having this week which is so weird now that this spike announcement came out today that we saw that they launched this prediction market for short form videos and their viewership but samir and i were talking last couple of days and saying okay well let's look at what happened with ESPN and Disney. Originally, they were very much against gambling. They weren't going to integrate it into their broadcast.

23:16It wasn't going to be a part of it. Got to a point where, you know what? This is the way of the world. This is what's working. This is a good opportunity to gain eyeballs and also some money. Fine. We have ESPN bets. Gambling's fine. Kalshi, CNN, they embrace gambling. Is this the new model that is required to get people to tune in? And, you know, imagine you're watching Dancing with the Stars or Beast Games Season 2. You know what would make you care a lot more about watching? If you had money on the line. Yeah. And you could bet on which character, which person you think is going to win at the end.

23:58So extrapolate that to YouTube videos, short form, TikToks, viewership, outcomes. especially if there's no regulation and you have websites like calci and spike now that allow you to do it i don't know if everyone will do it but it does seem like it it opens the door to a group of people who are more invested literally in these forms of content yeah i think with spike which is again just to just reiterate it is the market for betting on the performance of short form video which is totally crazy i can't say this stuff without laughing because it feels like 15 years ago when we started on the internet i could have never guessed that this is where it feels like black mirror yeah but um as i signed up i was granted 10 000 tokens to play some bets we should play some bets you know the craziest thing well that's what's frightening too is that like as i look at that prediction market yeah i feel relatively confident yeah i feel i honestly look at some of this and i'm like i know if these will hit.

25:03I actually am worried about you. Yeah. No, I do. You don't have to worry about me. I'm worried about you. You don't have to worry about me. I think this is really bad. I think, I think getting into this guarantees you a spot in a CoffeeZilla video. You know what I mean? Like there is a, there is a spot to be had in a CoffeeZilla video about all of this largely because again, if I'm betting on if a video will hit a hundred thousand views or not, like the creator can also put like a paid spend behind it and get viewership there unless this is tracking. Yeah. What did they say in the announcement?

25:35On LinkedIn for Spike, a lot of people in the comments were saying, what about the fact that you can just put a paid spend on any video and ensure that it gets a certain level of views? And the founders just said, stay tuned more on that. They were like, oh, whoops. Yeah. I mean, you'd have to structure this as like segmenting organic views from paid views, but I don't know, man. I think there's a deeper dive into this, but if we just like zoom out right now and say, what does this deal with, with Kalshi and CNN, or even the existence of prediction markets, tell us about the current state of media and maybe where it's going in 2026.

26:20If we were like, let's boil it down into maybe three things that you can gather from this. about where media is going. Or where media is and where it's going. Because I think the reactions from traditional media, the reason to even talk about this is like the signal that it tells you about audiences and the signal that it tells you about the state of media. I mean, I think what it says is that we are at this point where it's about attention by any means necessary. Right. For a lot of people. I think like for a lot of creators, attention by any means necessary, if you look at like the lengths that creators need to go to, on streaming and on YouTube at times to get people to tune in and attention by any means necessary for some of these major corporations.

27:02That's not to say that good storytelling isn't also, you know, always garners attention, but on this more analytical strategic side, that's where you're seeing moves like this. Yeah. I would, I would actually define that as scaled attention, meaning the bar, what you need to do to get scaled attention is a very, there's a very high bar to get my attention if I'm looking for mass attention. And all these companies like CNN, they're looking for mass attention. The reality is the positive about the independent creator right now is you could get 50 ,000 views of video and be talking to a very specific niche and like make a good living doing that.

27:42Even if you look at some of our past few episodes, we talked about like the birdwatching documentary that Owen Reiser made. You know, he's pretty happy that he put a Venmo link in his description. He made$75 ,000 in the first couple of weeks. He'll probably make a hundred thousand dollars making that doc. Like the independent creator can be pretty happy at a reasonable level of economic success. The, the, the company like CNN or like the big, big creators, they have no choice because of the structure that they built to then reach a very big audience. And I think what's required to reach a very big audience now is a level of tension and stakes that are so high that they have to have an impact on my life.