00:00Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick in Texas, always a hot button lieutenant governor,
00:05has tried to push hard against sports betting in the state of Texas.
00:09So Sam, it should come as to no surprise that he's trying to now get prediction markets to
00:15leave his state as well. Yeah, it's definitely not a surprise that, you know, the person who's
00:22blocked sports betting forever in Texas is also not in favor of sports event contracts, which
00:28if you listen to anybody at these companies talk about them, like DraftKings just this week,
00:32said it's pretty much just the same thing from a user experience. So what he's done is he's directed
00:38a group of senators to figure out how to close gambling loopholes that have allowed Kalshi,
00:44Polymarket and now DraftKings and Fandle with their own prediction markets to operate these
00:48sports betting products in the Lone Star State. But again, products they assert are not sports
00:53betting and are actually financial derivative instruments that are legally permissible to
00:58trade. And so the question there becomes, does what he's doing actually, will that actually
01:04matter? Will it actually have any teeth? It's one thing to say you're against something. It's a lot
01:08easier when you have to pass a bill to get in front of that and stop it that way. But
01:12if sports
01:13event contracts have been allowed to kind of persist in a lot of these states without that changing,
01:18it might not really matter what the governor cares about. So I think that's really interesting,
01:22especially with Texas, when you talk about, okay, they're not able to stop sports betting,
01:27they are able to stop sports betting in their state, but they're not able to stop these prediction
01:31markets from doing it. Does that potentially speed up the timeline where Texas is open to sports
01:36betting? You've had the governor in recent months say that he's more open to it than he has been,
01:42but it kind of is still on the fence and maybe now isn't the right time. It does now become
01:46the
01:46right time when the lieutenant governor, who is, again, really the main reason Texas has not
01:51legalized sports betting when he realizes that he can't stop DraftKings and FanDuel from operating
01:56anyway, at least until the Supreme Court does something, which you never know when that's
01:59going to be, does now kind of become the time where Texas considers legislation a little more
02:05seriously. We don't have many states left, but obviously Texas and California are the real big
02:09ones. So I think that's kind of the interesting part of this whole prediction market debate as well
02:14is just not being able to stop them and kind of speed up that timeline.
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