Polymarket and Kalshi Have a Problem with Nepo Baby Insider Trading - The Story
TechStuff
iHeartPodcasts
4.3 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2026
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What do frat boys, nepo babies and the Super Bowl have in common? Prediction markets. Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Katherine Long tells us how information from Jeff Bezos's stepson sparked a bet worth nearly a million dollars, and how a rumor loosely tied to Mark Wahlberg's daughter sent $24 million into a single market. And why college kids are betting in the first place.
Kalshi and Polymarket have been quietly making themselves at home on college campuses, paying fraternities for new sign-ups, handing out branded beer pong sets, and recruiting influencers to spread the word. The pitch to students: this is just a fun way to make money off what you already know. With over $10 billion in monthly trading volume and almost no regulatory oversight, Polymarket and Kalshi are no longer a niche corner of the internet.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. |
| 0:20.0 | Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Oz Veloshen, and this is The Story. |
| 0:24.0 | We've talked a bunch about Polymarket and Kalshi on this podcast, so-called prediction markets. |
| 0:29.9 | And recently they've had quite a run. |
| 0:32.6 | Mystery traders on Polymarket have made big payouts, waging on events such as strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities |
| 0:38.5 | last year, the removal of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from power before the end of January |
| 0:44.2 | this year, and the exact date of the beginning of the aerial war on Iran, February 28th. |
| 0:51.9 | Just last week, two senators introduced a bipartisan bill, bluntly called the |
| 0:57.3 | Prediction Markets Are Gambling Act, that would ban prediction markets from creating contracts |
| 1:02.8 | around sport. |
| 1:04.3 | Our guest today is Catherine Long, an investigative reporter with the Wall Street Journal, |
| 1:09.4 | who recently wrote a fascinating story |
| 1:11.3 | about how prediction markets have overtaken college campuses and about the intersection of insider |
| 1:17.3 | trading, nepo babies, and frat boys. Welcome, Catherine. Hey, good to be here. What a great triumvirate. |
| 1:24.5 | I mean, I hadn't exactly conceived of it until you put it that way, but I think |
| 1:27.6 | you're right on the money there. So take a step back, though, and when did you become interested |
| 1:32.0 | in Kalshi and Polymarket? And when did they kind of take the world by storm? I feel like I'm |
| 1:36.7 | hear about them all the time, but I can't really put my finger on when it started. Yeah. So, |
| 1:41.0 | I think people really started becoming aware of Kalshiium polymarket around the 2024 election. A lot of trading activity on polymarket around whether Donald Trump would win that election. Obviously he did. The traders in polymarket predicted it correctly. And I think that caused a lot of people to perk up and take notice of the platform when before maybe they had heard of it vaguely, but not spent a lot of time looking into it. |
| 2:06.2 | I remember in the like Nate Silver days, like there was always this idea that like betting markets were better than pollsters in terms of telling you what was going to happen in future. |
| 2:15.5 | And that was like a thing that was talked about for a while. |
| 2:18.3 | And then I guess in 2024 election, like it became gospel. Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, like, |
... |
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