Pablo Torre Finds Out
"That's Just Corruption": Sen. Chris Murphy on the Prediction Market Crackdown and Profiteering in Youth Sports
26 Mar 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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.
If the NBA and the NFL get in bed with these prediction markets, they are knowingly corrupting the sport.
Right after this ad. United States Senator from the state of Connecticut, Chris Murphy. How obnoxious of a UConn homer are you in your own estimation?
I mean, I'm pretty obnoxious.
Chapter 2: What are prediction markets and why are they controversial?
I mean, Dan Hurley is, you know, kind of like a godlike figure. And I think everybody understands that. You went to law school there, yes? 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 since then, it's just been a dream. You know, we don't have a lot in Connecticut since the Whalers left Connecticut. So UConn is what we got.
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 No. 4 North Carolina at 5 p.m. Eastern.
And then on the men's side, the top-seeded UConn Huskies play No. 3 Michigan State at 9.45 p.m. Eastern. Give us a picture of Chris Murphy when he's, you know, rooting for the Huskies.
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 things 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 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 and so what comes to mind when i mention you know an amount that's apparently on par with the gdp of suriname
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 connected to a larger crisis that's happening amongstā
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Chapter 3: How does Senator Murphy feel about the impact of gambling on sports?
Second, it says, in an instance where there's one person that knows the outcome of a betā 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, right? That shouldn't be a bet because only that singer knows that and the people in there know. inner circle.
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 kind of bets are fundamentally rigged, and so they shouldn't be allowed on these markets.
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?
whitewash, right? I mean, 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.
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&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., $1.5 billion worth of S&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.
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.
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Chapter 4: What concerns does Senator Murphy have about insider trading in prediction markets?
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 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.
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 frack 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. No one had tried it, but now they did, and it turns out you can totally do that.
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Chapter 5: What is the Bets Off Act and what changes does it propose?
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.
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 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.
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.
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. 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 kind of reinserts these priorities, the common good, worker health, community health, back into the calculus that these companies are making.
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