"That's Just Corruption": Sen. Chris Murphy on the Prediction Market Crackdown and Profiteering in Youth Sports

Kalshi and Polymarket have created a Wild West for sports, war and politics in a shamelessly unregulated era. But the U. S. Senator from Connecticut (and Huskies homer) tells Pablo that it's time to turn back the clock on insider trading, as leagues are "knowingly corrupting" the game. And that a return to the roots of rooting for our home teams (and families) requires Congress protecting against a profit-driven idea of America. • Previously on PTFO: The Prop-Betification of Everything, with the Forefather of Prediction Markets https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/Njk4MGZkMjAyYzYyYmY3MmU1NDg4OWJk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out, presented by eBay Live. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're going to find out what this sound is.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  If the NBA and NFL get in bed with these prediction markets, they are knowingly corrupting the sport.

• 0:16Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

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• 0:52Pablo Torre?

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• 1:35Pablo Torre?

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• 2:00Pablo Torre?

  United States Senator from the state of Connecticut, Chris Murphy, how obnoxious of a UConn homer are you in your own estimation?

• 2:08Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm pretty obnoxious. I mean, Dan Hurley is, you know, kind of like a godlike figure and I think everybody understands that.

• 2:17Pablo Torre?

  You went to law school there, yes?

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I didn't go undergrad, but I went to law school. But I grew up in Connecticut. My parents grew up there. So, yeah, I was a junior in high school when Tate George hit that shot to beat Clemson to send UConn into the Elite Eight game. And like, since then, it's just been a dream. You know, we don't have a lot in Connecticut since the Whalers left, so UConn is what we got.

• 2:43Pablo Torre?

  You have Sue Bird winning games unto eternity. You get Ray Allen, Rip Hamilton, you get Karam Butler in that whole era, right? Like, late 90s, early 2000s. You've been spoiled as we enter the Sweet 16, right? So just to do the accounting here, for your partisanship on Friday, tomorrow, in the Sweet 16, the one seed UConn women, perennial powerhouse, play number four North Carolina at 5:00 PM Eastern. And then on the men's side, the top seeded UConn Huskies play number three Michigan State at 9:45 PM Eastern. Give us a picture of Chris Murphy when he's, you know, rooting for the Huskies.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  I generally like do it on my own. I'm not great company for these games because I tend to get a little bit too wound up. I have like a weird ritual now where I get so, I get like just so anxious that I sort of have to watch the games on a little bit of tape delay so that I can like fast forward through some of the tougher moments and then rewind and watch it again. So, yeah, I'm generally watching them on my own, maybe with my 14-year-old who's a big UConn fan, and I use the tape delay as a way to kind of address my... Anxieties.

• 3:58Pablo Torre?

  As a way to self-regulate, which is a theme of this entire conversation, I dare say, how does one regulate when you know what the excesses of such contests might be? I just want to get the numbers, by the way, here in front of you because this whole tournament, it's a high watermark economically and perhaps the opposite when it comes to what you have described as something afflicting the soul of sports, which clearly you have perhaps unhealthy amount of love for, but the amount being gambled legally here in America, and this is not just sports betting, but also now prediction markets, which we will, of course, get into, you've been instrumental in attempting to regulate those, we're talking about about four and a half billion dollars.

• 4:39Pablo Torre?

  And so what comes to mind when I mention, you know, an amount that's apparently on par with the GDP of Suriname?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, listen, first of all, I just think there's a lot of lives being ruined. Addiction gambling is a huge problem, especially amongst young boys today and young men. And I just think we have to recognize that. I think it's a, it's connected to a larger crisis that's happening amongst men and young men who are losing a little bit of their sense of identity and purpose in the world. They're trying to find new outlets for energy, trying to find new outlets for risk-taking, and that often comes through sports betting. I think for the non-better, though, it's fundamentally changed the product in many ways. So like my favorite show historically to watch, especially at the end of a long day, has been SportsCenter.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  SportsCenter is just a betting show now, right? I mean, almost half the content on that show is about odds and about how to bet on the games tomorrow. And so I've stopped watching it in part because, you know, it just doesn't seem for me any longer. And then as the numbers get bigger, I just do think the opportunities for corruption are harder to avoid and more of these games are going to be rigged. So I don't know, it's, for me, it's changed the experience for the worse, and I think we don't really understand yet, you know, how many, you know, lives ultimately get harmed when the bets are that big.

• 6:04Pablo Torre?

  Well, sports gambling came in and everything, of course, got turned over in various ways, many of which you just mentioned. And then the prediction market as a concept emerges. And so we're kind of Dealing with these multiple fronts, but prediction markets is the one that this week, as we're talking, it's been kind of like prediction market week in Washington. And I want to get to the bill you recently introduced titled the Bets Off Act, which attempts to make really material changes to the way prediction markets like polymarket like Cal she can operate. But just big picture here, Senator, why do prediction markets as a concept concern you especially?

• 6:39Speaker 01

  You know, there are lots of prediction markets on events where you don't know the outcome. And then sports is right on that list. But the bets these days, the prediction markets that exist these days are on events where the outcome is knowable. For instance, you can place a bet on what a particular celebrity is going to say on a, you know, evening talk show, a late night talk show. Well, those talk shows are taped at 5:00 P. M. And so there's hundreds of people, including all the guests who know what that celebrity said. There's bets on whether the United States is going to go to war on a Friday or a Saturday, whether there are people inside the White House who know the answer to that question. So there are just a ton of bets on these prediction markets that are rigged by inside

• 7:23Speaker 01

  information and the markets make it seem as if these are on the level bets when they really aren't. So to me, that's just corruption and we shouldn't allow for there to be fundamentally rigged prediction markets or betting markets available to ordinary consumers. That seems to be the primary problem. But I also do just worry, you know, like I worry about sports, that everything just becomes commoditized, that we kind of just can't enjoy something for the sake of it, that we can't look at an issue like war as a moral issue. Now it's just something that we can make money off of. And I think that that cheapens life a little bit when nothing has inherent value any longer,

• 8:08Speaker 01

  where value is just connected to your ability to monetize it. That's not what like sports was for me growing up and as a fan. It was about a real attachment to the team, a belief that when that team did well, I was doing well, but not in a monetary sense, in more of like a spiritual sense. There's a purity to sports that I think gets lost when everything just becomes a bet.

• 8:33Pablo Torre?

  A big question that I contemplate a lot as I watch sports, as I watch the news is, who is this good for? If it's a rigged casino economy, who's getting rich? And you've now invoked the name of our Lord and Savior in a couple of different ways. And it just reminds me that on Polymarket, there was literally, there is literally a market on will Jesus Christ return before 2027? And the real rub here is not merely that market. It's the spinoff market, which you can also bet on, which is, will the odds on will Jesus Christ return before 2027 exceed 5%? Which I think just speaks to the whole notion of we're now dealing with, of course, derivatives of the thing that already was kind of apocalyptic.

• 9:16Pablo Torre?

  And of course, you can manipulate all of this stuff by putting more money in, which is to say that, yeah, when money is now the mechanism through which predictions and to listen to these companies, truth are being adjudicated. Yeah, it's sports, it's war, it's politics. It's all kind of being treated the same way in a tragically unregulated era. Senator.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and when I say spiritually, I don't necessarily mean that word in the religious sense. I just mean that like, there's a purity and a goodness. You know, when we view sports purely through a fandom lens. And I think that there's something important when we look at a question of war and peace purely through a moral lens. I do think it just becomes corrupted when all of that gets monetized. It cheapens the experience or the debate for us. And I think we do like, I mean, this sounds like a little bit too apocalyptic, but I think we die a little bit inside when everything just becomes about dollars and cents. So yes, I think it's time for us to regulate these markets. I think that there are some markets we just shouldn't offer,

• 10:21Speaker 01

  like whether there's going to be a famine in the Middle East or not, or what somebody is going to say on a talk show. And on the sports side, I just think that states should be able to put basic regulations around these markets. And they can't do that for the prediction markets. They can do that for, you know, DraftKings and other sort of mainstream betting sites. But they can't do that for Calci and Polymarket. And I think that we should have basic regulatory structures around betting markets. Allow people to do it, but make sure that there are some protections.

• 10:53Pablo Torre?

  For people who aren't familiar with where the bar is right now on regulation, it does, to continue the language of like, who's going to save us? It's worth noting, right? So the CFTC, which is now the regulatory agency that has taken jurisdiction under this administration of, quote unquote, "event contracts," AKA the bets that prediction markets put out, they, according to Barron's, have effectively closed their Chicago enforcement office, which was famed for its regulation. That's where the enforcement attorneys were. There apparently, according to Barron's, are now zero of those attorneys left. The SEC, for those who are not keeping up with the news literally just from this week, you have one of the top people there stepping down because apparently there is a perhaps

• 11:38Pablo Torre?

  unsurprising in retrospect conflict between how much enforcement the SEC will do as regards the president and his family. Can you describe for a layman how bleak it is right now when you speak of enforcement and corruption?

• 11:51Speaker 01

  So the Trump family are paid advisors to Polymarket and Calci. So those prediction markets, and they're obviously the biggest ones, are embedded inside the Trump family, and the Trumps are planning to open up their own prediction markets. So this is, I think, not hard to understand. The word is just out. We're not enforcing any consumer protection laws against the prediction markets. We want them to be able to get as big as possible. So the only sort of prospect here is for states to step in and regulate these prediction markets, but the Trump administration is trying to stop states from doing that. That will likely be litigated in the courts, or for us ultimately to pass legislation through

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Congress, but that doesn't seem like a very high likelihood in the near future. So yeah, I think for the foreseeable future, it's unfortunately going to be the wild, wild west.

• 13:03Pablo Torre?

  The act that you're proposing, the Bets Off Act, and Bets Off happens to be an acronym. You introduced it last Wednesday alongside three fellow Democrats, one in Rhode Island, another in Texas, another in Arizona. What would your bill do?

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Our bill would say that you can't place bets on government action. That's kind of the simplest thing that it says. And for two reasons. One, because it's just rife with opportunity for inside information. But two, you don't want people inside government to be placing their own bets and to be pushing government action so that they make money. I mean, what we know is that right before the United States struck Iran, there were a whole bunch of bets made. So we struck Iran on Saturday and on Friday. A whole bunch of people made bets that the war was going to start the next day. And it was an anomalous series of bets.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  On no other day were there a bunch of bets made that war will start in 24 hours. So that clearly doesn't smell right. But you also imagine some young guy in the Situation Room who has a bet that war is going to start on Saturday, pushing the war to start on Saturday, whether that's good for national security or not. So our bill says, first, no bets on government action. Second, it says, in an instance where there's one person that knows the outcome of a bet and controls the outcome of a bet, that shouldn't be on a market either. So is a particular singer going to appear in a Super Bowl halftime show? That shouldn't be a bet because only that singer knows that and the people in their inner circle.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Everybody else just has unfair odds in making that bet. That would still leave you a whole bunch of stuff to bet on. But our bill basically says those two bets are fundamentally rigged, and so they shouldn't be allowed on these markets.

• 14:57Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, it's worth pointing out that Kalshi this week, seemingly in response to this genre of legislation, announced that it was banning, and this is where the sports and the politics of it reconverged, they're banning athletes and politicians from trading on their markets. But based on the scope of your proposed bill, that sounds like what to you?

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Whitewash, right? I mean, it's it's it's an attempt to look like they're doing something, but they're not. I mean, let's take the example of a fairly robust betting market, which is, you know, what words will Donald Trump use in tonight's speech or tonight's press conference? Okay, so their new policy, I guess, says Donald Trump personally can't place that bet. But there's 20 people around Donald Trump who know the answer to that question and who can make bets and can make a bunch of money off of it. That should be prohibited, too. I think it's really hard to like chase the inside information. That's why, you know, my legislation is just, let's just not have those markets, because I think it's really hard to pick and choose who can and who can't place bets.

• 16:00Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I'm thinking of, again, this week, we learned, 6:50 a.m. on the day that, of course, Trump announces formally, discussions with Iran are happening, apparently, and we're going to postpone the strikes, and the S and P 500 rose, the price of oil fell. About 14 minutes before, 7:04 a.m., when all that stuff happened, at 6:50 a.m., one and a half billion dollars worth of S and P 500 futures contracts were purchased, $192 million worth of crude oil futures contracts were sold. And I bring this up to say, I think there's a numbness among lots of people about, yeah, politics, Congress, it's all corrupt, whatever. This, though, just feels like a cartoon version of it.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but I think your point is really right. My kids were both born after I was already in Congress, and so like, they've grown up around this stuff. But I had a conversation with my oldest son a few years back about corruption, and he was sort of telling me his assumption that, you know, kind of everybody is on the take. And I was like, but wait a second, Owen, like, you've grown up in this, like, world, like, you know my colleagues, you know that they're not on the take. He's like, yeah, but I think we all just assume that you guys are all bought off. I know you aren't, Dad, but I just assume everybody else is. And I think that we have just become, you know, really anesthetized to corruption in politics, and we shouldn't.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Because it's actually not true that most people are on the take. In fact, a very small number are. And the corruption we've seen in the last year is really anomalous. And so instead of just accepting it and move on, we should stamp it out. It's a part of a broader problem in society in which we just sort of think that the people that have succeeded in our economy or in our politics, they're just supposed to get whatever spoils come their way. And I just, I just think we should expect more of our economic leaders, right? And of our political leaders. So yeah, worries me.

• 17:59Pablo Torre?

  The notion of insider trading, one of the things that any prediction market executive, if you were to ask them about this, that they'll point out is like, look, congresspeople like Chris Murphy, they can trade stocks, right? They're allowed to do that while serving in Congress. So are their spouses. What is your position on the proposed bans on trading individual stocks while serving in Congress for people like you and your family members?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  I support them. Again, I do think it's important to still recognize that, you know, brazen corruption, you have inside information and you trade a stock. It happens in Congress, but it is really the exception. But we have no reason that we need to trade stocks. We should just ban that practice. Right now, though, just to sort of compare it to the prediction markets and how that works. Right now, we can trade stocks, but we have to disclose all of that. So at least you can see, you know, whether there was a dirty deal done. But we don't, nor do our staff, have to disclose any bets we've made on prediction markets. And so at the very least, if we're not going to ban these prediction markets,

• 19:07Speaker 01

  we should do the same thing we do for stocks and make every member of Congress and every high ranking staff person have to disclose if they're making bets on the prediction markets.

• 19:15Pablo Torre?

  It does feel like documentation is the minimum that we should be expecting from frankly, our government, as well as the corporations that get to participate in American capitalism. It's just really hard for me to look at prediction markets and not see it as somehow part of this overlapping Venn diagram. With not only sports betting, but crypto with just the notion of we're going to get off of what has been a traditional pipeline of documentation. But what is then being sort of welcomed without a full understanding perhaps of the unintended consequences is the fact that we can't even tell anymore. Who are, who are the people profiting?

• 20:00Pablo Torre?

  Who is getting rich becomes something that is defended by this cloak of invisibility.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  The reality is these unregulated crypto markets, they are the place where really bad people do their financing. It's where the sex predators and the drug smugglers and the terrorists do their money. And they used to have a really hard time moving their money back when everything was, back when money was moved through transparent, visible exchanges. The same thing is happening with these prediction markets. Obviously, we don't know who's making these trades an hour before the markets open or the day before war starts. The president has his own cryptocurrency and we can't see who's putting money in his pocket.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Maybe it's just MAGA fans, but maybe it's foreign governments or oligarchs or CEOs that are buying Trump's crypto coin, putting money in his pocket and then whispering to him what they want from governments. So yeah, at the very least, just putting some transparency around all these markets would at least allow journalists and citizens to see whether it's on the level or not.

• 21:18Pablo Torre?

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• 22:28Pablo Torre?

  The notion of cops on the beat when it comes to sports, it's worth pointing out here that, and again, you're obviously a basketball fan. I grew up an enormous fan of the NBA. I remain so despite many things that worry me, one of which is the commissioner of the league, Adam Silver, saying that, "On the one hand, we welcome the business of prediction markets. On the other hand, we would like control over how to solve for those consequences, the unintended consequences that we're talking about." He says, quote, and this is at the Sloan Conference where I also was.

• 23:00Speaker 04

  I don't think it's one that you can necessarily turn the clock back on.

• 23:04Pablo Torre?

  How do you assess perspective like that?

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Oh, I think we absolutely turn back the clock. I mean, the clock hasn't, you know, run the dial many times. This is a really recent phenomenon. And the prediction market problem in sports is a specific and acute one. Okay, if the only bet you can place is on the outcome of a game, we still acknowledge that there's, you know, a lot of randomness that happens in that game. That is not, unless somebody is really on the take, a knowable event. But Giannis is, you know, a big investor now in Kalshi, and the bets on Kalshi are not just bets on, you know, who wins the Bucks games, but bets on where Giannis is going to play next, right?

• 23:50Speaker 01

  What the trade structure is going to look like if he ends up getting dealt. And Giannis has tons of control over that. There are... Bets on who is going to be in the starting lineup? That's not a random question. That's a question that the coach and the coach's kid and nephew probably know. So if the NBA and the NFL get in bed with these prediction markets, they are knowingly corrupting the sport. I get it that they're just looking for a quick buck, but this one gets really gnarly pretty quickly.

• 24:25Pablo Torre?

  Rob Manfred, the commissioner of baseball recently, just framed his exclusive deal with Polymarket as, quote, "imperative steps in proactively managing the new and rapidly growing prediction market space," end quote. Although, of course, the follow up question is around regulation. Would you like to see the commissioners of these leagues testify before Congress about what feels to many sports fans I've talked to? Like, double dealing? Like, they're speaking out of both sides of their mouths. They want their cake, but also to eat it too, as it concerns how any of this can actually be regulated.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Of course, I'd like them to testify, because I think it's pretty clear upon questioning, you'd learn that they're just in this for the cash grab. And, you know, these are very powerful people. And so they probably do have a bit of a god complex. They think that if they can get Polymarket or CalSheet in the room, they can convince them to, you know, ban bets on things that might be rigged. I think they're naive. I think these are companies that are more powerful and more capitalized than the leagues themselves. And they're going to offer whatever bets make them money. And it's ultimately just going to lead to more corruption opportunities inside these leagues, not less.

• 25:41Pablo Torre?

  You know, the question of what has money done to the games that we love? It takes us to youth sports and to private equity. If you were to summarize for people who are not in the building, rooting at times maniacally for their kids in the American youth sports industrial complex, what has happened? Thanks to the influence of private equity, how would you begin to tell that story?

• 26:02Speaker 01

  I tell it through, you know, an anecdote. So it's my younger son that plays hockey and he, you know, plays in one of these, you know, very competitive and very expensive travel leagues. Part of the reason he plays in that travel league is that the quality of rec level hockey in the East Coast has been gutted. And so if you're a player that has any level of skill, you almost have to play in the travel leagues to be able to play with kids who are at your level. But that's a $5,000 to $10,000 investment for many families. And so it ends up excluding a lot of good hockey players from participating at the level that they should be playing at.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  But it gets even worse. In our league, which is owned by private equity, they just find all sorts of ways to squeeze every dollar out of the product. One of the ways they do that is by creating a closed circuit television system. And that's the only way that you can watch your kids play hockey. I don't, you know, I go to some games, my wife goes to some games, but I can't livestream the game for their mom or their grandparents. That's illegal in our league because they want the parents and the grandparents to buy a subscription to the closed circuit television system.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  It can be anywhere from $25 to $50 per month to buy Black Bear TV, which is the private equity backed company that owns the league and many of the rinks. So like, again, I get back to this question of like, what is this doing to us spiritually? Like, that's like one of the most important rituals as a parent, to be able to share your kids' sporting events with their grandparents. And now I can't do that unless my, I or my parents pay hundreds of dollars a year. It's just like robbing us of the things that make parenting special, that make being a kid special, as these youth sports experiences become more and more and more expensive and more monetized.

• 28:13Pablo Torre?

  I think a bit of the through line we're discussing here is that the demand for sports in 2026 and beyond, it remains so seemingly inelastic. It is relentless how much we care about these games to the detriment perhaps of every other competing cultural institution that we have left. But the knowledge that you can extract from that, you can frac sports to get more and more money out of it, despite what the consequences again might be to our environment, to our country, to our soul, as you put it. It raises just the question of like, how is that what you just described, what Black Bear Sports Group has been doing with hockey rinks? How is it legal? And is it in fact just the thing that, oh, wow, clever.

• 28:57Pablo Torre?

  No one had tried it, but now they did, and it turns out you can totally do that.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  We used to have an informal understanding in this country that there were some industries where you didn't want the incentive system to be money. You wanted the incentive system to be just what was right. We have no recollection of this, but the health insurance industry in this country didn't start out as a for-profit business. It was just like the right thing to do, the idea that you would pool risk so that nobody goes bankrupt if they get sick. It started in Texas where a whole bunch of teachers essentially got together and pooled the risk of hospitalization. And, you know, until about 20 years ago, health insurance was still not for profit.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  And then somebody figured out that you could make a whole bunch of money off it, and it became for profit. That was the same thing with youth sports, right? Like, when we grew up, it was inconceivable that a New York investment firm would own the league that my Little League baseball team played in. We just had like an understanding that like it was just kind of icky for certain things to be run for profit. So now what do we do? Do we come in as a congress or does a state legislature come in and say that youth sports associations can't be owned by for-profit?

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Profit entities, maybe, like, maybe that's where it's come to. But, boy, it'd be a lot better off if we could have just kept that old informal understanding.

• 30:31Pablo Torre?

  But isn't that the story of our time, Senator? The notion that some people realized shame is a market inefficiency? And that if we were to merely decide to not care about what feels like a humiliating concept, if that, in fact, were to no longer be a pain point for us, then there's yet more money to be won. That just feels like the thing underneath everything we've been talking about.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  It's a transition that's been in the works for decades. The idea that the only thing that matters in our economy is profit and efficiency. And that if a particular industry is generating profit, then it must inherently be working correctly. That's a really new idea in America. It used to be that we thought an economy should work first and foremost for the common good. We wanted people to make money because that's how you get innovation and ingenuity and hard work is something you want to incentivize. But we said first, the economy should work to just make us happy, right? To make us feel fulfilled. And second, it should work to make people rich.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  So, yeah, now I think we've gotten to the point where that informal value structure is gone. There is no shame in the private sector. Everything is commoditized. Now we have to look at legislation that's that kind of reinserts these priorities, the common good, worker health, community health, back into the calculus that these companies are making.

• 32:06Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I always think about incentives, right? What are we dangling on the end of the stick? What are the carrots that we are dangling in front of every very clever entrepreneur out in Silicon Valley? Or every abjectly corrupt family member of this administration? We keep coming back to who's going to save us? And our faith collectively as a country in Congress, as we wonder who is going to put a stop to any of this, is also vanishingly small. But I assume you also wrestle with this, the impotence of the office while knowing better.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and listen, I'll take responsibility in both my roles, right? I mean, I definitely could, as a parent, have just said, you know what? You're just going to play rec-level hockey, right? We're not spending the thousands of dollars. We're not spending our weekends in Philadelphia and Buffalo. So, you know, every parent and every individual can decide to not enter that rat races willingly, at least when it comes to youth sports. But yes, the ultimate solution here is for Congress to step in and do something about this. And I do think, and I'll just tease this because it's a longer conversation. I do think that there's a real bipartisan consensus out there in America around how much profit matters in our entire economy.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  But let's just take youth sports. I don't think people on the right or the left are excited about how professionalized youth sports has become. And I think that there could be an opportunity for Republicans and Democrats to work together. Now, Congress is especially impotent right now because of what Trump has done to our entire federal government. And there's not an ability to, like, take on private equity in sports because private equity right now is so integrated into this administration. But I do think that there's a political realignment there for the taking out in America around people's frustration with the lionization of profit and efficiency and the commoditization of everything not nailed down, including Little League baseball. That's there.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  It's probably not going to be able to be capitalized upon until after Trump is gone.

• 34:26Speaker 05

  Guessing is for game shows, not your business. Workday is the enterprise AI platform for HR, finance, and IT, with AI grounded in your context to get work done and done right. It's a new workday.

• 34:50Pablo Torre?

  Why has it taken so long for the Democratic Party to realize that sports is a terrain in a culture war that is ripe to not only be metaphorically useful for all the lessons around fair play and competition and regulation, but also the reality of like this is where people feel the effects of government, whether they realize it or not?

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think, you know, maybe it is true that you're not going to put this genie back in the bottle when it comes to the amount of betting that's happening. And if that's the case, then yes, people are going to feel the impact of government's absence if these prediction markets increasingly become where sports betting happens and you have no protection on these markets from bets that are inherently rigged. I do think that you're seeing the impact of government inaction. You know, mainly we're talking about government not stepping up and acting, but that has an impact on your ability to enjoy the sports that you like.

• 35:54Pablo Torre?

  Right. Even as you tell your family to get out of the room, by and large, and watch on tape delay, because you yourself don't trust yourself to regulate your own emotions.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's right. Yeah, but I, but I have a stake in it, I guess. I mean, I guess the reason that I have such strong feelings about why Congress should step up and do something, whether it's college athletics and compensation or these prediction markets, is because I get such value from being a sports fan. Like, I hate the fact that SportsCenter is now just a betting show. It's like how I would release energy after a hard day in the Senate, is that I'd come home and I'd just think about sports. And so I get, I get such value from watching my kid play. I got value as a teenage athlete, learning how to be a great teammate, learning how to lose, learning

• 36:45Speaker 01

  how to win. So I know how much value sports can bring to a person's life, and so I don't want it corrupted by an economy that doesn't. Care about anything other than money or a government that just sits on the sidelines while these sports markets continue to crumble and atrophy.

• 37:03Pablo Torre?

  I'm realizing that things are so dire in our country that I, I find myself yearning for the motivational pep talk of some coach to come in and remind us, maybe we just need Jim Calhoun to just yell at us, just to rip into, just to rip us a new [bleep] ass [bleep] man.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, we are. I mean, listen, we are, we have become a soft culture in a lot of ways and we have moral softness now because like, we don't stand for anything as a country morally. We're willing to accept these dizzying levels of corruption and we, I don't know that Hurley's the right guy to give that lecture, but, but, but Calhoun, right, as a, as a, as a pretty diehard Irish Catholic could probably come in and give a good moral lecture to the country on what we should put up with and what we shouldn't put up with.

• 37:49Pablo Torre?

  Right. Shame may be a marketing deficiency, but as a fellow Catholic, I can validate that there is no force quite like guilt.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, there is still a part of our biology that, that responds to guilt, whether our economy responds to it or not, our DNA responds to it.

• 38:05Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, my mom is living proof of that as well. Senator, a really good conversation. Thank you so much for joining us and hopefully we'll talk on the other side of what feels like, I don't know, at times a political apocalypse.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Appreciate you focusing on this. Really great to be with you.

• 38:31Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.

• 38:37Pablo Torre?

  And I'll talk to you next time.