Gambling, Creators, and the Future of Trust Online

**Colin** (0:00)
Today 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.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:14)
The rapidly growing and controversial way for people to turn predicting the future into a money-making proposition.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:22)
Joel Hulsinger just quit his day job to bet on the words famous people, like White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt, might say in public.

**Joel Hulsinger** (0:32)
I thought there was a very high likelihood she would bring up Thanksgiving in relation to the shutdown.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:37)
From his computer, the 26-year-old makes about $3,000 a week, trading on the prediction market Kalshi.

**Joel Hulsinger** (0:45)
She did not say Thanksgiving, so we were out $700 yesterday.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:50)
That hurts, right?

**Joel Hulsinger** (0:51)
Actually, like, surprisingly for me, 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.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:04)
The live streaming influencer is one of millions of people flocking to prediction markets like Kalshi, PredictIt and Polymarket, where you can wager on just about anything.

**Colin** (1:15)
I can't stop thinking about this and its implications on the creator economy, largely because one of the biggest prediction markets called Kalshi just signed a deal with CNN.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:26)
Turning now to CNN. Genuinely, what is one of the grimmest developments and news that I have ever seen? Something literally 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 and incorporated 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.

**Joel Hulsinger** (1:59)
The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.

**Colin** (2:04)
And 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. The 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. Let's get into it.
All right, Colin, do you think Warner Brothers will be acquired by Paramount?

**Samir** (3:34)
No, I think it's still gonna end up in Netflix's hands.

**Colin** (3:36)
How much do you believe it's gonna be Netflix? Like, would you put your money on that?

**Samir** (3:40)
Not a gambling man, but if I had to, I would.

**Colin** (3:43)
You would? Sure. That Netflix is gonna buy it?

**Samir** (3:45)
Not a lot of money.

**Colin** (3:46)
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 Kalshi 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, and 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.

**Samir** (4:21)
So you could basically double your money?

**Colin** (4:22)
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 Kalshi in Polymarket, largely because of spending time on Twitter and seeing what people are talking about. But when CNN struck a deal, to me, I put Kalshi in the same bucket as like steak.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.