The Brief

Insane hours, the toxic work environments, low pay and stringent standards — plenty of ink and film have been spent lately rehashing the stressors that come with working in the culinary industry.

Yet, for the most part, the culture has dictated that workers suffer silently, placing their well-being — and their mental health especially — on the backburner.

But after the back-to-back deaths of two prominent figures in the local L.A food scene, a couple of seasoned food pros have decided that this status-quo doesn’t cut it. They’re determined to get food-and-beverage workers into the therapy chair.

For Alyssa Noui, 38, a leading L.A. food stylist, and Kristel Arabian, 41, a food and beverage recruiter and former chef at a Michelin Star restaurant, the last straw came in February. First it was Jonathan Whitener, the celebrated chef and partner at Here’s Looking at You and All Day Baby restaurants. Whitener died at home from a drug overdose.

A couple of weeks later, Jered Standing, the popular butcher and founder of animal-conscious Standing’s Butchery, killed himself.

Noui and Arabian both had known Whitener and Standing. Their deaths, at 36 and 44, respectively, hit hard with “my elder millennial generation of people in the food space,” said Noui, a veteran of shows like Master Chef, Guy’s Grocery Games, etc.

Whitener was a “big loss to the food world,” she noted, adding how his menu items altered the foodscape. “Like, we're seeing things on that page, which were familiar but were never put together, like the chicken-fried rabbit,” a favorite from his days at another restaurant, Animal.

Meanwhile Standing’s Butchery was a once-a-week stop for Arabian, either to pick up something to cook for dinner or for a Sunday social burger. Noui called him a “dear friend.” By all accounts, Standing, a former vegetarian, was changing how chefs and insiders went about animal sourcing. He was readying a second location in Venice.

Noui said it was one of those friendships where 10 years later you laugh trying to place how you knew each other. Was it Lindy and Grundy or Salt's Cure?

“He checked all the boxes you’re supposed to, to be successful,” Noui said, adding “he was a good-looking dude with great people around him.”

“But if you're not right in your mind, you’re not right in your spirit—what do you really have?”

Channeling grief into gathering

When news broke about Standing’s death, weeks after Whitener’s, “It’s almost, you know, when someone tells a bad joke or something and the room gets quiet, and you're like, ‘Oh my God, who's going to say the next thing?’”

Arabian had met Noui through the Santa Monica farmers’ market network some years back. She remembers speaking to Noui about how their grieving community needed support.

She made a passive comment about 'everyone needing a hug', Arabian said. "'I'm like, yeah, how do we do that?"

The two organized an event which they’ve since dubbed the “F+B Community Check-In” and took over the back patio at Tabula Rasa, the Hollywood wine bar and industry hangout whose name translates to a “blank slate.”

Rather than just creating another customary eulogic Instagram post, “I channeled my grief into gathering,” Noui said. Tabula Rasa, which has a “dark, grown and sexy feeling,” is responsible for putting a lot of first-rate L.A. pop-ups on the map, including Burgers by Standing and Broad Street Oyster, according to Noui.

It was a nice place to bring out “our people” who spend most of their time in the back of those type of places, she said.

The next event was held at the quaint and cozy Now Serving, the Chinatown cookbook store run by Ken Concepcion, a former Wolfgang Puck chef at Cut. The store, which “gives cottage vibes with a sick library,” is also a haven for public discussions and meeting places for local makers and creatives.

Alyssa Noui and Kristel Arabian

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Sam Gezari

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For that first event, Arabian created a flier in Canva and went through her contacts looking for sponsors willing to donate food. But they didn’t want it to be just a grieving party, so Noui and Arabian sought another angle.

They found the Southern Smoke Foundation, a Houston-based nonprofit offering free “Behind You” therapy sessions specifically for food and beverage workers. Currently operating their mental health program in ten states, the foundation's sessions are administered locally by grad students at California Lutheran University, seeking to fulfill their curriculum hours. The non-profit also offers emergency relief grants for industry workers. The only conditions are that they work a minimum of 30 hours a week — across multiple jobs, if necessary — and that they’ve worked in the industry for at least six months.

After Noui and Arabian went through the Southern Smoke Foundation offerings at the first meeting, a fishbowl was put out where attendees could share anonymously anything they felt compelled to bare, Arabian said. One person wrote, "I know that the food matters, but when will I start mattering?"

"It f—ing crushed me," Arabian recalled. Others used the opportunity to bounce around career concerns: questions related to pricing, tipping, and other ways they could come together to improve the industry or support one another.

Noui doesn’t need the Southern Smoke offerings herself. She has motion picture insurance as part of a local craftsperson union and has just a $5 copay for counseling. She couldn’t afford it otherwise, she said. Now the question is, “how do I hold the door open for more people to have access to it?”

Cutting through the stigma

Southern Smoke founder, the Houston-based, James Beard Award-winning chef Chris Shepherd, 51, says if you talk to any cook they’ll tell you the same thing: “I still hear the ticket machine in my head at night. You know, you can hear that, geeegeee, geeegeee sound. It doesn't stop.”

The foundation was originally conceived through a Houston festival intended to raise money for Multiple Sclerosis. Shepherd was trying to help a sommelier friend battling the disease. The participating chefs and organizers started speaking about opening up the mental health dimension before the 2018 festival, right after the suicide of superstar TV chef Anthony Bourdain.

Within a few days of the celebrity chef’s death, a friend of one of the festival chefs also had taken his own life. So, “with twenty-something of the best chefs in the country coming in,” Shepherd said, there was a special opportunity to have that conversation.

The profession will always be a high-pressure one, but that doesn’t mean we can’t mitigate harm where possible, he said. Beyond the obvious barriers of accessibility and affordability, there’s also the built-in cultural stigma around asking for help. Since the Southern Smoke therapy sessions are conducted via telehealth, “nobody needs to know,” he said.

Kait Leonard, 28, a freelance chef, producer and co-owner of BOH Creative, a marketing agency that works with restaurants and their staffs, decided to attend the second Check-In event at Now Serving, although she wasn’t sure if she was in the right headspace beforehand.

In 2023, a couple of months after cofounding her company, Leonard fell into a deep depression and admitted herself to the ER with suicidal ideation. She wasn’t sure if she was up for attending the meetup, but decided her presence could help someone else.

“Like 'I went to the ER for, you know, I really didn't want to be here. And that's okay'.” Ultimately, her hope most importantly was that these meetups would be a positive outlet and tool for her clients, to help create a healthier workplace. “I wish something like this existed when I was first starting to work in kitchens,” she said.

Brandon Gray, 38, chef and founder of Brandoni Pepperoni, the Los Angeles inspired pizza pop-up, has attended multiple Check-In events thus far. “A lot of trauma bonding,” took place at said events, he said, adding “everyone there has their own story, there’s a lot of overlap”.

“It’s about just figuring out how to be better,” he said. “Because it needs to be better—the people who have been cooking as long as I have, it's not fun anymore.”

Checking in about mental health

The “hospitality industry is excessive,” says Noui. But it’s important to remember that those who are drawn to it, either back-of-house or front, are those who naturally, or are conditioned to, put themselves second. It’s those inherent “masochistic qualities that everyone has,” the same ones we see “romanticized in shows like the Bear” that come “out of service — out of wanting to serve."

At Kitchen Culture Recruiting, the company she started, Arabian says she makes it a point to check in with potential hospitality candidates about their mental health, “but it’s not something you can hit chefs over the head with,” she said. “It takes trust,” from someone who’s been through it. But there are limits, she says. “I’m not a psychologist.”

Arabian remembers her first time working in the kitchen as a cook, after feeling pushed by her family to become a pharmacist. For the first time, it felt like she was doing what she was supposed to be doing. She’d go on to work back-of-house for approximately ten years reaching the level of executive chef. In her last chef role she was working as executive sous chef at a bakery and pizzeria. But after working in front of a wood-burning stove for as much as 110 hours a week, 14-16 hours a day, seven days a week, she developed a chronic illness and had to leave. The safety net just wasn’t there.

While any job can be anxiety-producing, “cooking is one job that has so much “machismo and bravado” around it that physically, “when you become ill, it is life-changing,” she said. Rather than seek out another chef job, she became a front-of-house and back-of-house recruiter. She remembers saying, “Until I find a really great job for myself, in the meanwhile, I'm going to make sure that chefs are taken care of.” Fourteen years later, she says, "I’m still trying.”

Noui has been workshopping her own community resource tool. She bought a phone number that she’s calling the “My Chef” line, 855-My-Chef-8, which she also had printed on pens. This hotline can be used for everything from finding someone to fill a job, like a chef, stylist, or dishwasher or for accountability checks.

Ultimately, Shepherd says it's important for people to know there is help. He's not a fan of all the emerging depictions of extreme kitchen conditions put out there today. “There's these new TV shows that glorify this [toxic workplace elements] when an industry is trying to get away from it…I think it’s wrong. Unless at the end of it you say, ‘hey, you know what? Therapy is available.’”

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

Community volunteers say one of the first lesson they learned during ICE raids is to make as much noise as possible.

When they see people being detained by ICE, they use their voices, megaphones and, most effectively, whistles to signal danger.

One workshop being held in Downtown L.A. today will teach people how to use this tool.

Make some noise

Rain Skau is an organizer with the L.A. chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, he said the idea to hand out whistles came from community organizers in Chicago where they’ve been using them to alert neighborhoods of ICE presence.

Skau said his group had already been doing outreach to businesses across the city on how to better protect their workers from immigration raids, but they wanted to do more.

They plan to give out these kits in their future outreach.

The back and front of hotline cards included in the whistle kits.

The cards details what to do and who to call when a person has been detained or is being detained by ICE.

A hotline card with information on who to call when a person has been detained by ICE.

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Rain Skau

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DSA-LA

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A hotline card with instructions on what to do when encountering a person being detained by ICE.

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Rain Skay

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DSA-LA

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“This wasn't something that we were doing previously. We want to make sure that people have whistles and they have the hotline information,” said Skau.

The whistles are 3D printed and come with a phone number to advocacy group Unión del Barrio’s community hotline to report ICE sightings and those who might have been detained.

Amplify

Skau says there are two specific whistle patterns — one to alert people if ICE is nearby. The other to signify when someone is being detained.

In that event whistle-blowers are also instructed to “form a crowd, stay loud, and stay nonviolent.” 

But Skau said they’ve mostly been telling people to whistle as loud as possible, no matter the pattern, to raise awareness.

Jack Bohlka organizes Home Depot Patrols for DSA-LA, he said the whistles are tiny but mighty.

Jack Bohlka (center) poses with other members of DSA-LA during a recent "Know Your Rights" business walk.

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Jack Bohlka

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Jack Bohlka

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“It's a whole lot better than trying to yell. It's instantly recognizable, they're very effective,” Bohlka said.

Jack Bohlka's personal whistle he uses for Home Depot patrols.

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Jack Bohlka

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Jack Bohlka

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Spreading the sound

Some 300 people signed up for today's workshop, more than Skau and Bohlka anticipated. They had to end RSVPs early to keep attendance manageable. But Skau says more workshops are in the works (check their Instagram for new events).

Participants today will assemble and take home whistle kits with instructions on how to use them, what to note if someone is being detained, and who to call during a raid.

DSA-LA said lately immigration enforcement agents have changed their tactics, targeting specific areas, striking quickly and leaving. It’s part of why Skau thinks getting whistle kits to as many people as possible is critical.

“So that if you just happen to be walking down the street," Skau said. "And you see something happening right in front of you, you're not just standing there shocked and aghast, and unsure of how to respond."