Tonya Mosley

Because it seems like a tightrope.

There's a lot of you in this piece, of course, because you did the experiment.

But while you were reporting on this in real time and holding these active bets, there was a moment in the piece that the night the NBA indictments dropped, you found yourself genuinely wondering if the referees had rigged the game you had lost money on.

And this is notable for you because, as you write, you're not usually prone to paranoid thinking.

how do you process that?

What did it mean that gambling kind of got you there?

Let's take a short break.

If you're just joining us, I'm speaking with McKay Coppins, whose Atlantic cover story follows a season inside America's sports betting explosion.

We'll be right back after a short break.

I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.

Okay, we're going to get back to sports, but you also write about these prediction markets, and they represent something categorically different.

How did we go from a college basketball player taking a bribe to someone betting on a U.S.

military operation?

Well, I mean, the biggest concern, let's take the Maduro bet that I mentioned in the introduction.

An anonymous account wagers tens of thousands of dollars days before our forces moved on Venezuela, and that anonymous person or that account walked away with $400,000 in profit.

That is either extraordinary luck or someone knew something.

So how seriously...

Should we be taking the insider trading question when it comes to predictive markets and basically government actors?

Right.

Like how how would a platform actually discourage it?