The Brief

There isn’t a ton of research into the effectiveness of making people prove they have jobs in order to access social services. But what evidence there is points in one direction: Placing work requirements on programs like Medicaid does almost nothing to increase employment or hours worked, while actively hurting people in need.

With roughly 15 million Californians relying on Medi-Cal, the state’s version of Medicaid, for their health coverage, the Golden State is staring that grim truth in the face.

A significant part of Congress’ so-called Big Beautiful Bill’s takedown of Medicaid funding revolves around forcing people to show that they’re working 80 hours each month before they can receive benefits. And with about a year left until that requirement takes effect, California policymakers are scrambling to mitigate its most toxic effects — even if they are legally required to implement the broader law.

“At the end of the day, there’s not a full workaround,” said Hannah Orbach-Mandel, a policy analyst at the nonpartisan California Budget & Policy Center. “But I do believe there are some ways that California can try to be a little creative about how the law is implemented, and people are looking into that now.”

Those possibilities include using California’s relatively high minimum wage ($16.90 an hour in 2026) to propose substituting income earned for hours worked under the new Medicaid rules, along with ways to streamline what is likely to be a nightmarish bureaucratic task of recording and verifying the information the federal government is demanding.

The stakes are certainly high enough. According to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, as many as 3 million Californians could be thrown off Medi-Cal based on the work requirement alone — a significant portion of the many millions of Americans across the country who face a similar fate. While the actual numbers will rise or fall depending upon how the requirements are implemented, the resulting strain on California’s health care system from fewer patients and more unreimbursed care could buckle it.

The work requirement derives from a generations-old Republican talking point that most people on public assistance could be working, but are either too lazy or unmotivated to do so. Research has disproven that theory repeatedly.

As of 2023, nearly two-thirds of all adults aged 19-64 on Medicaid were working full-time or part-time, according to the health policy research site KFF, formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation. Among the remainder who weren’t working, the vast majority fell into one of three categories: sick or disabled, caregiving for another person or attending school. All of those groups receive exemptions to the work requirement in the new law.

It’s no surprise, then, that the Congressional Budget Office has already said implementing work requirements for Medicaid recipients won’t move the needle on employment. During debate on a 2023 Medicaid bill, the CBO concluded that “the employment status of, and hours worked by, Medicaid recipients would be unchanged” by work requirements.

A couple of states have tried such restrictions themselves, with disastrous consequences. In the first seven months after Arkansas implemented work requirements in 2018, for example, roughly 18,000 people lost their Medicaid coverage — most of them, state officials said, not because they didn’t qualify, but because they either didn’t understand the new rules or couldn’t navigate the maze of administrative details and gave up, losing their health care access in the process.

Meanwhile, there was no notable improvement to the state’s employment numbers or to its total number of hours worked, a finding that has been confirmed by more recent research. The Arkansas requirements were halted in 2019 by a federal judge who ruled the program did not meet the objectives of the Medicaid program.

Nevertheless, Republicans enshrined such requirements nationally in H.R. 1 this year, and they are set to go into effect Jan. 1, 2027. They also further mandated that Medicaid recipients repeat the qualification process twice each year. The budget reconciliation bill says that those in the Medicaid expansion group between the age of 19 and 64 must show that they’re either working, going to school, in job training or doing community service at least 80 hours a month in order to stay eligible.

Those rules will chase people off Medicaid, which could increase death rates and lead to severe financial trouble. Many of those people, Orbach-Mandel says, will still fully qualify to receive benefits, but they either won’t know it or will get lost in red tape.

In California, 3 million people suddenly losing their health coverage means they’ll likely have no health insurance and no access to regular care, and will instead wait to see a doctor until they need to go to the emergency room — the one place where they know they cannot be denied care even if they can’t pay.

It all adds up to a massive new strain on an already overburdened health care system.

“That burden ends up falling on a lot of hospitals, like safety-net facilities,” Orbach-Mandel said. Many of those hospitals are already struggling to survive financially. The combination of fewer Medi-Cal patients and higher unreimbursed emergency room costs could drive them to discontinue certain services or face possible closure, as hospitals in Willows and Inyo County recently have discussed.

The Medicaid takedown is an almost perfectly Trumpian gambit: It helps to finance massive tax cuts for the nation’s richest individuals at the expense of some of the most vulnerable Americans, many of whom voted for Donald Trump. Republicans championed the work requirements mostly as a way to kick people off Medicaid.

That they will do — an estimated 6.3 million nationally, though some estimates run many multiples higher than that. California’s total may run higher or lower than the Newsom administration’s 3 million estimate as well, in part because there is no guidance yet on how the requirements are to be administered or monitored.

Orbach-Mandel said the state is ultimately responsible for gathering and producing the relevant documentation. Much of that work will be farmed out to California’s cash-strapped counties that could be saddled with building out the verification process.

Clarifying how that process should work is one way the state could ease some of the administrative effects of the new requirements. In terms of keeping more people eligible for Medi-Cal, the state’s minimum wage may come into play.

Orbach-Mandel said that one idea being tossed around is using the statewide minimum wage in a calculation of what California workers’ output is actually worth. Since that wage is higher than most other states and way above the national minimum of $7.25 per hour, California might argue that its Medicaid enrollees can prove a certain amount of earnings, rather than have to document the 80-hour work requirement.

Since federal implementation guidelines are still lacking, no one is certain what the final rules will be. It’s also possible that Congress ultimately postpones the start of the program, especially given Trump’s miserable approval numbers — and the fact that his approach to health care is the lowest-rated component of those.

Put simply, Trump’s coattails aren’t what they used to be. The Medicaid work requirements are looming, yes — but for many of the president’s longtime Republican loyalists in Congress, the 2026 midterms are going to happen first.

Copyright 2025 Capital & Main

Bits of conversation drift out of Aladdin Used Books as people lined up at the register with stacks of books.

The bustle of activity is bittersweet as the Koreatown bookstore will close its doors at the end of January after 13 years in the neighborhood.

Jina Lee, store manager, said declining sales at the Koreatown branch led to the decision to close the store. In recent years, staffing at the 5,000-square-foot store on the third floor of Madang Mall dropped from six to two, Lee said.

“This was a happy place for everyone,” she said, “but we were struggling.”

On a recent January afternoon, the shop looked lively as customers took advantage of the clearance sale on Korean and English books, CDs, DVDs and other media.

Koreatown resident Jin Lee wishes he visited the bookstore more often.

“It would have been great if it had been this crowded all the time,” Lee said. “But nowadays, people don’t read paper books and prefer devices, so it’s hard for all bookstores.”

Some customers traveled from as far as Orange County and the Inland Empire to visit one last time.

Minjung Kim, who moved from Koreatown to Fullerton five years ago, still made trips to the bookstore after she moved away.

“It’s the only place that sells this many new and used Korean books,” she said.

Each visit to the bookstore was important to David Artiga of Pomona, because it gave him a chance to connect with friends over literature.

“I feel like this is really negative for the community,” he said. “The importance of having a well-versed society, keeping in touch with literature and art is so important. And now this place is just going to be gone.”

South Korea-based Aladdin Used Books opened its first U.S. brick-and-mortar store in Los Angeles in 2013. The store carries around 50,000 new and used books, with a majority in Korean.

Customers will still be able to order books through Aladdin’s website after the store closes.

Ken Derick, a Koreatown resident, walked around the store aisles with a stack of books.

“It’s like we’re kind of moving towards a new technology, like everything’s virtual and online,” he said.

Longtime customer Anthony Kim said he’s enjoyed looking for gems in the English-language shelves.

“My Korean ability is rather limited but I’ve always enjoyed browsing their English language sections,” he said. “And now that I have a niece and nephew, their children’s book section has always been a great place to pick up new books for them.”

Valerie Laguna perused the shop’s CD section, a bygone experience in the era of streaming.

“I really like their CD collection and their literature collection they have in English,” she said.

“I was so sad about it, I immediately texted my friend,” she said. “I’ve gotten so many of my favorite books and my favorite CDs from this place. I feel like losing a place like this is just so sad and makes a huge dent in the community and culture.”

Less than a mile away on Western Avenue, Happy Bookstore owner Jung Jae-seung said it has been difficult for bookstores for some time now. His Korean-language bookstore is also struggling in an era when so many people have abandoned print media.

“It’s really about how long printed books can survive,” Jung said. “From that point of view, it’s hard to be optimistic.”

South L.A. or South Central? More than 20 years ago, that question came with high emotions for some residents who were sick of the stereotypes they saw in media coverage of their neighborhoods.

So in 2003, the Los Angeles City Council renamed the collection of communities south of the 10 freeway in an attempt to cut ties with the connotations of poverty and crime that some believe came to represent South Central after the turbulence of the 1980s and ‘90s. Today, you see South L.A. on official documents, maps and even historical and cultural districts.

Even though city officials moved to wipe away the old name, some locals never stopped calling the area South Central — a name that for them represents history, resilience and Black and Latino culture.

“I think it will always be South Central for its residents and for the people that were born and raised here,” said Evelyn Alfaro-Macias, a social worker who was raised in Historic South Central and whose office is on Hoover Street. “It means home. It means culture. People should respect the name South Central.”

What and where is South LA, anyway?

By the early 2000s, television news and pop culture had given South Central a reputation for violence and chaos that some were eager to shake.

Helen Johnson, a resident of Vermont Square, helped lead the campaign to change the name.

“I think the media can make you or either break you,” 72-year-old Johnson told reporters in 2003 after the city council approved the name change, according to the L.A. Times. “This is what you’ve done to us. You’ve broke us.”

Supporters of the change included then-Councilmember Janice Hahn, who is now a county supervisor and said at the time that the South Central name had become “mostly derogatory.”

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, who was working then as executive director of the nonprofit Community Coalition, said the area’s image problem wasn’t just about its name.

“If the media paid a little more attention to covering positive things in the community, that will also help,” Bass said, according to an L.A. Times report.

The LA Local has reached out Bass and Hahn’s offices, as well as L.A. City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson.

The exact borders of South Los Angeles, or the area formerly known as South Central, are fuzzy.

The South Central name originally only applied to the neighborhood around Central Avenue south of downtown Los Angeles, but it spread west as populations grew.

City planning documents today designate a strip of neighborhoods between Interstate 110 and Arlington Avenue as South Los Angeles and tag the Central Avenue neighborhood as Historic South Central. Others, including academics and the city tourism board, use a map of South Los Angeles that stretches to the border of Culver City.

This is what the community told us

Some businesses in the area adopted the South L.A. name, notably South LA Cafe, the coffee shop that has grown to five locations and become a local institution.

More recently, some groups have made a concerted effort to embrace South Central, like the South Central Run Club or South Central Clips, an Instagram-based group that sells skatewear-inspired “South Central” apparel. (Even South LA Cafe today sells some merch with the South Central name.)

Several locals told The LA Local the official designation never changed anything for them.

“It’s South Central for me. That’s where my roots are,” April Brown said. “When you go anywhere across the country, across the world and you say South Central, they know exactly what you’re talking about.”

To Emily Amador, the name change erases the history of South Central, including “the Black migration that occurred, redlining that created what we know today to be South Central and the demographics, which are here today, which is Black and brown and undocumented.”

Ulysses Alfaro, who was born and raised in the Historic South Central neighborhood, said he uses South L.A. with people from out of town but South Central with locals.

South L.A. is a geographic designator, he said, but he considers South Central to be an identity: “That’s where the grinders are, the hard-working people that work their butts off, their asses off. The ones that keep the city running.”

Ask Logan Sudeith how many bets he places in a week and he'll laugh. It's a comical line of questioning for the 25-year-old former financial risk analyst, who estimates he clocks about 100 hours a week on prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket. After a while, understandably, some of the bets blur together. What are his net profits, though? That's a number he's got at the ready.

"Last month, I made $100,000," said Sudeith, who does most of his trading from his laptop while bed-lounging in his Atlanta apartment. He's executing so many orders on the sites, he says, that he has no time to cook. So he DoorDashes every meal.

"My last salary was $75,000 a year, so I left my job to trade full time," he said

Some of his biggest hauls in recent months include lucrative stakes on Time Magazine's person of the year ($40,236), the most-searched person on Google last year ($11,083) and a wager on the New York City mayoral race ($7,448). And of course, a couple thousand here, a couple thousand there on questions like, how many times will a sports announcer say "air ball"? And will President Donald Trump use the phrase "drill baby drill" at an upcoming press conference? (Traders had $500,000 on the line on this market.)

"I'm not a fan of Trump, though I do spend most of my day listening to him and tracking what he is doing," said Sudeith, noting that whatever candidate in the next presidential race is the most friendly to prediction markets has his vote. "I could be a single-issue voter. If they're super-super heavy anti-prediction markets, it would be hard for me to vote for them."

The boom of online prediction markets is being driven by the Sudeiths of the world. He's one of millions of traders logging on every day to services like Kalshi and Polymarket to place high-dollar and incredibly risky bets on the outcome of the world in real time, whether it's an award host's turn of phrase to the number of migrants the U.S. will deport this year.

Much like previous financial crazes around meme stocks and NFTs, true believers view prediction markets through a stick-it-to-the-man prism. It's a movement against the elite establishment, they say, whether it's the mainstream media, pollsters or government agencies. This growing group of renegade traders maintain that core truths emerge only after thousands of people express their opinions with their pocketbooks.

"Markets are the most efficient way to get to real information," Sudeith said. "If you're watching on election night, I think you'll know who the winners are before the news can report it."

While the industry may position itself an alternative to the mainstream, the mainstream is embracing it.

CNN and CNBC have struck deals to incorporate Kalshi prediction markets into coverage. The Wall Street Journal's owner, Dow Jones, is partnering with Polymarket, as did the Golden Globe awards this year, with announcers updating viewers on Polymarket odds before every commercial break.

Founders of the prediction markets apps say they enable people to turn their opinion into a financial hedge against things like inflation or a government shutdown, yet skeptics say that is twisty and self-serving logic.

"They are gambling sites no different than FanDuel or DraftKings, a corner bookie or a casino in Las Vegas," said Dennis Kelleher, chief executive of Better Markets, a nonprofit that pushes for Wall Street reform.

Kalshi says 'there's no house'; not all agree

Traditional gambling often means wagering against "the house," where the casino acts like the banker, extracting fees and maintaining a competitive edge.

Prediction markets like Kalshi say they're different.

Here's how they work: A staff member creates "a market," often after one has been suggested by a user, like what will President Trump say at his next Oval Office briefing?

Then anyone can propose a "strike," the lingo for a term that's being bet on, whether, for instance, Trump will say "Greenland," or "Minnesota," or some other word or phrase.

Kalshi staff pick what terms will be bet on for both sides of that "yes" and "no" wager.

In order to work, however, there needs to be money on both the "yes" and the "no" side of the market, so Kalshi relies on institutional partners, like the hedge fund Susquehanna International, or everyday users with large enough portfolios to front the cash. This is called being a "market maker." Kalshi provides financial perks and data access to traders who do this.

But because traders are competing with other traders, Kalshi argues there is no house involved in these transactions.

Several federal lawsuits against Kalshi have challenged this notion, claiming that the Wall Street firms that Kalshi taps are indistinguishable from a traditional "house."

One suit filed this month in the Northern District of Illinois highlights that the company itself has a separate entity, Kalshi Trading, that supplies cash on the opposite side of trades.

"Thus, Kalshi users are betting against the house exactly the same way it would in a brick-and-mortar casino," wrote lawyer Russell Busch in the complaint.

Kalshi denies this. Company spokeswoman Elisabeth Diana told NPR that market makers merely price bids and asks and do not have a competitive advantage.

"Market making is completely different from being a house because a house has monopoly pricing power, whereas market makers compete with thousands of other market makers to take bids," she said.

The Trump family invests in prediction markets. The administration is taking a friendly policy stance

While the Biden administration sought to rein in this industry, Trump's regulators are breaking down barriers to allow it to flourish.

More than $2 billion is now traded every week on Kalshi, an amount the company says is 1,000% higher compared to the Biden years.

Polymaket, which was forced in 2022 to shut down in the U.S. for operating as an unlicensed betting site, recently won the Trump administration's blessing to re-launch in the U.S.

The Trump family is also getting in on the action. The president's son, Donald Trump Jr., is on the board of Polymarket, and his venture capital firm invests in the company. He is also a "strategic adviser" to Kalshi. Truth Social, the president's social media site, is planning to launch its own prediction market called Truth Predict.

The explosive growth and permissive regulatory environment has ignited a debate about the underbelly of an industry that essentially turns many features of modern life into potential monetary wins and losses. Fears persist that when elections, politics and foreign invasions become a gamble that insiders could abuse their access for profit and market odds could influence what actually happens.

Donald Trump Jr. speaks during The Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas on May 27, 2025.

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Then there's the most prosaic, but perhaps more immediate worry: That the prediction markets gamify trading with slickly designed apps, one-click checking account deposits and constant push alerts, catering to compulsive online bettors. They're not unlike other app-based trading platforms, but now almost anything is a potential betting opportunity, which economists and other financial experts say can enable a new generation of gambling addicts.

While individual bets on Kalshi are not public, the app has a leaderboard showcasing top profit winners.

That offers hope to some traders who turn to Discord and Reddit to discuss how losses have set them back.

"I'm down 2000 this week when I was up 1200 last week," wrote a Kalshi trader who goes by Educational_Pain_407 on Reddit. "Lost it all and keep trying to claw it back. So I don't know what to tell you but right now I don't have enough to pay my bills in my bank account so I can't bet even if I wanted to."

There are three federal lawsuits against Kalshi seeking class action status alleging the apps have sucked young traders into gambling addiction.

Officials at Kalshi have said if traders "lose their shirt that's on them," and even the Reddit user behind on his bills concedes it's a matter of personal responsibility: "Live and learn and pay for your mistakes. The consequences of being an adult," he wrote recently.

While online sportsbooks and gambling are nothing new, the rapid speed, volume of cash and ease at which transactions flow across prediction market apps set them apart from other forms of betting, according to legal and financial experts.

"Like sports betting, these platforms can be addictive. It is the adrenaline rush that the target demographic is chasing," said Melinda Roth, a visiting professor at Washington and Lee University's School of Law who studies prediction markets. "I do believe this is a looming public health crisis."

Decoding the lingo: 'Mogged,' 'Fudded,' 'PMT'

Evan Semet, 26, is another diehard prediction markets trader who left his salaried position in finance as a quantitative researcher after he started raking in six figures a month on Kalshi."I don't feel the need for another job at the moment," he said.

His first golden ticket came via bets on the number of Transportation Security Agency screenings that happen across a certain period on Polymarket.

Semet said he set up a dedicated server through Amazon Web Services to host statistical models that he runs to help him decide where to place bets.

"It was pretty modelable," he said, noting that he leans on the finance savvy he gleaned at a trading firm to make money on predictions. "Most day traders draw some shapes on a chart and think it has some statistical significance but it's really just astrology," he said. "They're old-school gamblers going off of intuition. I try to be driven by statistics."

To stay tapped in, he's often toggling between multiple live trades on one screen and following a discussion among other traders on the social network Discord.

Keeping up on what's happening there requires understanding a hyper-specific type of lingo that's a blend of Generation Alpha and Gen Z slang, repurposed finance terminology and a grab-bag of other cultural influences from gaming to crypto to the gutter humor of fringe sites like 4chan.

If you've been out-maneuvered by another trader, you've been "mogged."

Advertisements by the company Kalshi predict a victory for Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral election before the polls closed Nov. 4, 2025.

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If a market has "fudded," people are selling their positions out of fear, uncertainty and doubt. A "rulescuck" is someone who is a stickler for the rules of a betting market and will try to win on a technicality.

A "bondsharp" is a well-known community member who frequently puts up money on the other side of a bet.

These are just a handful of the terms required to stay apace of the chats on Discord, where PMTs are often discussing their full port (prediction market trader, and full portfolio, of course).

"It is a good amount of terminology. It's borrowing lingo and terms from stuff I've heard at real trading firms mixed with online pop culture," Semet said.

Prediction market trading can be a compulsive sport for many of them, who admit they can be dopamine junkies. Others prefer to avoid the pressure-cooker feeling of watching a bet win or lose live.

"It's an antsy, gambling-like feeling watching it all happen live," Semet said. "It's intense, almost feels like the fog of war, trying to decide what to do," he said. "Sometimes I prefer to not look at all and see how I did later."

How predictions markets got into politics

Kalshi's big day came, as it were, on Election Day in November 2020.

That's when they got word that Trump's Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates futures contracts, greenlit it as a "designated contract market," a blessing that essentially gave the platform a license to operate as a financial exchange.

It was a long time coming.

For years before that, Kalshi's co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, former Wall Street traders who met at MIT, had been battling a skeptical CFTC, which had long rejected similar applications over concerns that an events contract platform would operate a type of gambling outside the purview of state gambling commissions. Regulators also feared the bets invited insiders to rig the outcomes of events from sports to elections.

As Kalshi hired lawyers and lobbyists leading up to their CFTC approval, another prediction market, where most are betting with cryptocurrencies, Polymarket, was exploding in growth. It, however, had not bothered to even try to receive federal buy-in. The Biden administration shut down the exchange for operating without a license. Now, Polymarket has the CFTC on its side, and is staging a U.S. comeback.

Two developments helped Polymarket's return: the company acquired a little-known derivatives exchange QCX, which had already obtained CFTC approval. And the Trump administration's CTFC and Justice Department abandoned investigations into Polymarket.

States, however, are on the attack. Massachusetts has sued to push Kalshi out of the state. Eight other states, including New York, New Jersey and Maryland, have sent the company cease and desist letters alleging that it is operating as an illegal and unlicensed sports gambling site. The motivation is clear: Gambling brings in serious tax revenue for states, while prediction markets bring in none.

For both Kalshi and Polymarket, one of the most controversial areas of prediction market trading is elections, an issue Biden-era regulators took Kalshi to court over.

Under the 1936 Commodity Exchange Act, which was updated in 2008 after the financial crisis, future event contracts cannot involve terrorism, assassinations or "games," but political betting is not explicitly banned.

Biden administration lawyers argued that placing wagers on races amounted to a game, a word that is not defined at all in the law. Election bets, the regulators contended, could turbocharge the spread of political misinformation and create financial incentives for voters to cast a ballot even when it's contrary to a voter's political views.

It also puts the CFTC in the awkward position of having to investigate news, whether real or fabricated, that moves a prediction market. Former CFTC officials told NPR that the agency has never been equipped to be "an election cop."

The federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. rejected that framing and handed Kalshi a major victory. The court also pointed out that the harm these markets would cause the government was not "concrete" enough.

The Trump administration dropped the appeal, unleashing what is expected to be an unprecedented torrent of prediction market cash into this year's midterm elections, which is raising alarms among those pushing for stricter regulations on this industry.

"AI, deepfakes, and other nefarious activities to attack candidates could easily impact the betting activity and odds, as well as the actual outcome of elections," said Kelleher of Better Markets. "They don't really care who wins or loses. They only care about the volume of bets and driving that volume as high as possible."

Regulators appear unprepared. The CFTC usually has five commissioners but currently only has one. Meanwhile, Kalshi's board includes former CFTC Commissioner Brian Quintenz, who was among the officials who gave the platform its federal approval in 2020.

Former CFTC Commissioner Kristin Johnson, who left the agency in 2025, said that lack of commissioners comes on top of high levels of turnover among the most senior staff lawyers.

"We're essentially asking the CFTC to get involved in engaging and policing an element of our democratic process that we really haven't thought carefully enough about," Johnson said.

Insider trading scrutiny grows

Before a U.S. operation ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, one trader on Polymarket banked a nearly half-million-dollar profit on a bet Maduro would not remain president for long.

While the trader's identity remains a mystery, speculation continues to rattle around the internet about whether the person had insider information. The episode has renewed scrutiny on how the companies ensure bets aren't rigged.

On Discord, when traders see a large bet placed that immediately stands out as an outlier, cries of "the market is insidered" are common. Proving it is another matter.

As is often the case on the platforms, open-shut evidence of insider trading is elusive. Kalshi requires a government-issued ID to sign up in order to trace any possible market manipulation back to a real person. Polymarket does not, but it has yet to publicly re-launch its U.S. app. Internal and third-party surveillance tools, the companies say, are on the lookout for unusual activity.

Congress has begun to take notice. Following the Maduro trade, Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-NY, and 30 other Democrats, sponsored legislation banning federal officials from using prediction markets to trade on policies or political outcomes using non-public information.

Being up against an insider is always a risk, said full-time prediction markets trader Semet.

"There's always going to be someone who has more information than you, unless you're the insider," he said. "There are certain accounts that miraculously have every single Google and OpenAI release date nailed perfectly, and it's like, all right, just don't fade those people," he said using the slang word for voting against another trader.

When asked if he thinks Kalshi and Polymarket are doing enough to combat insider trading, he gave a blunt assessment: "F*** no," Semet said. "I really don't think they care."

"Tailing," or making a bet joining in on a suspiciously large bet is common on the platforms. Bloomberg on Monday reported on a new tool that allows traders to get alerts when anomalous transactions occur so they can potentially cash in on what could be a winning wager.

From the vantage point of these traders, nearly everything has a trading implication.

And that kind of thinking can fuel conspiratorial theories about why something did or did not happen.

Take, for instance, a recent White House press briefing in which press secretary Karoline Leavitt left the room seconds before hitting 65 minutes. To most, that was unremarkable.

Yet on Kalshi, that looked like a secret message, because many thousands of dollars in bets were at stake that she would cross the 65-minute mark.

The chatter about Leavitt was mentioned on CNBC, which got the attention of traders on Discord, who wondered if this or another incident will ever lead to a PMT, prediction market trader, testifying in Washington about rigging the markets.

"PMT getting called before Congress," wrote a Discord user, whose handle is "permanent resident of hell," they added: "Let's get a market on it."

Topline:

Why it matters: Caruso has long been rumored to be eyeing a run for California governor or for L.A. mayor.

Why now: But in a statement released on social media, Caruso said, "After much reflection and many heartfelt conversations with my family, I have decided not to pursue elected office at this time."

He called it a "difficult" decision.

The backstory: Caruso ran for L.A. mayor in a self-funded campaign costing some $100 million against Karen Bass in 2022.

Last year, former Vice President Kamala Harris — another high-profile politico said to be interested in the state's top job — announced she would not be joining the race.

Deep dive: Who’s running for California governor? Here’s a look at the current field of candidates