In short: Named alongside Kalshi as having seen IBKR's phantom product and launched it "for real money" — "now they are way ahead of us of course."
18:22So we actually came out with it, but we came out with it with phantom money. So it wasn't real, but it was real enough for the guys at Kalshi and Polymarket to see it. And they said, "That's a great idea," and they came out with it for real money and so that's what happened, and so now they are way ahead of us of course. — And when Kalshi came out you tried to buy them. — That's right, because they went to the CFTC and they got licensed and I said what a stupid thing
In short: Named in the same breath as the sports books — "or on Polymarket or Kalshi. And this is the mentality. We've created a gamblers mentality… I try to be generous and call it speculation. But yet these people think they're investing." Prediction markets are lumped with gambling venues, and the complaint is the same asymmetry: a professional minority running models takes the overwhelming share of the winnings.
18:22We've created a gamblers mentality. Not an investing mentality. A gambling mentality. I try to be generous and call it speculation. But yet these people think they're investing. And so their expectations are skewed. The history that they're relating to is skewed and this is part of the problem. So I'm a little bit long-winded.
In short: ICE bought 17% for $1 billion in late 2025 and added $600 million in March — for the crowd-sourced pricing and volume data around economic indicators and events, not the sports wagering, since information and connectivity services are ICE's second-largest revenue line. The commentary is pointed that Polymarket's Strait-of-Hormuz speculation "haven't facilitated any real-economy needs," unlike the new hedging contracts the crisis will require.
The other big prediction market — and the one that matters to Horizon Kinetics because ICE owns 17% of it, having paid $1 billion in late 2025 and another $600 million in March.
ICE didn't buy it for the sports betting. Selling information is ICE's second-biggest business after trading, and a live market where thousands of people bet real money on economic and political outcomes produces a genuinely new dataset — crowd-sourced odds and volumes on events — that professional traders will pay for. The commentary is otherwise unimpressed with what these venues do: letting retail traders speculate on Strait of Hormuz headlines helps nobody in the real economy, whereas the Middle East's new oil export routes will require dozens of genuinely new hedging contracts — business that goes to the regulated exchanges.
Full passage: premium transcript (PDF).
In short: Named with Kalshi as the prediction-market operator whose SEC-enabled perpetual futures spooked the listed exchanges (the misread "threat to the moats"); context for the CBOE buy and the prediction-market/gambling culture riff, not a stance on Polymarket.
3:49For example, in the last couple weeks, you've seen a major correction in a lot of the exchanges here in the US, CBOE, CME, ICE, the big ones here in the US. What precipitated that? Well, they were very highly valued because we've had a bull market and so CBOE and some of these other things really got ahead of themselves, and then some rules were passed by the SEC allowing for these perpetual futures I think for Kalshi and Polymarket that people interpreted as a threat to the moats for these exchanges. However on further analysis it doesn't appear that that's really the case, which we don't have time to get into.
In short: Fail of the week — "prediction markets is a fancy way of saying gambling," a "highly addictive product." He cites a WSJ investigation that Polymarket paid creators to film fake trades on look-alike copy sites and hid the sponsorship; calls it deceptive and urges channels to drop it.
Polymarket and Kalshi are "prediction markets" — apps where people bet real money on the outcome of future events. Carlson's "fail of the week" is a blunt warning: he calls them "a fancy way of saying gambling," a highly addictive product that can wreck people's finances, and he wants to discourage their use.
His sharper objection is the marketing. He points to a Wall Street Journal investigation finding that Polymarket paid mostly college-age creators to film fake trades and fake winnings on near-perfect copycat websites (one was a misspelled "poiymarket.com"), told them not to disclose they were paid, and used a network of clippers to make it all look organic. He calls the campaign deceptive and borderline a scam, and urges other channels to drop Polymarket and Kalshi sponsorships.
29:05I think that we're going to get earnings reports in the future of Google continuing to win, growing like crazy. It's going to prove that their AI models being smart is one thing, but also the infrastructure is the real moat here. Now, finally we move on to the fail of the week, which in this case we are highlighting Polymarket.
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Verbatim excerpts from the public transcripts (auto-pulled at each mention's timestamp, lightly cleaned). Timestamps link into the video; "source page" opens that commentator's full analysis at this row. Click a mention's header line to expand it (one open at a time). For personal study — not investment advice.