Tonight I broadcast live from the Asylum Studios in Eagle Pass, Texas for a two-guest show that dug deep into the real-world impact of prediction markets and the grit of adult paranormal fantasy.
In hour one, I sat down with Christopher Gerlacher of Prediction News to unpack how platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket translate breaking legal decisions, debates, and early vote trends into market odds in real time. We explored why markets can be a sharper “nowcast” than polls, how the CFTC and states are colliding over the definition of “gaming,” the rise of sports contracts, and why responsible trading safeguards may be the industry’s sleeper issue. Chris also shared insights from the 2022 midterms, the mechanics of live odds swings, and what campaigns are really watching on election night.
In hour two, author and former Army officer Richard Spegal joined me to talk about building unapologetically adult paranormal worlds. We discussed his Eternal Nights prequel duology and Wolves and Ravens trilogy—stories that lean into moral risk, psychological fallout, and brutally real characters. Richard opened up about writing combat-realistic scenes, exploring faith and suicide with care, the challenge of celestial-lore without alienating readers, and why he centers committed partnerships over YA-style love triangles. His next book wraps the Wolves and Ravens arc soon, and I’ll have him back to dive deep once it’s out.
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(00:02:03) Cold open: fragments, poetry, and studio vibe
(00:03:43) Show intro from Asylum Studios and host welcome
(00:04:51) Tonight’s lineup and schedule notes
(00:05:58) Sponsor segment and platform housekeeping
(00:09:53) Value-for-value, feedback, and ways to connect
(00:10:23) Setting the table: money, odds, lawsuits, elections
(00:10:36) Guest intro: Christopher Gerlacher on prediction markets
(00:11:42) Host banter: pens, fidgets, and warming up
(00:12:12) Icebreakers: coffee with Alex Borrain, guitars, and hobbies
(00:15:16) Prediction markets 101: contracts, prices, and odds
(00:16:41) Do market odds sway voters? Influence vs. insight
(00:18:41) Real-time moves: debates, odds, and market reactions
(00:19:08) Gambling or finance? Hedging, speculation, and gray areas
(00:20:11) From midterms to markets: how the beat shifted
(00:21:40) Spotting shifts: early voting surges and live trading
(00:23:44) Regulators enter: who is the CFTC and why they matter
(00:25:51) Policing markets: manipulation, volume, and price integrity
(00:26:56) Courts, states, and the fight over gaming
(00:27:55) Kalshi v. CFTC and the opening for election contracts
(00:28:46) Sports contracts flashpoint: self-certifications and standoffs
(00:29:53) State regulators vs. federal exchanges: a jurisdiction clash
(00:30:42) Defining gaming: a single word driving nationwide cases
(00:33:54) Reading lawsuits: who files and what really bites
(00:34:37) What markets see that polls miss: Dobbs and durable effects
(00:36:47) Campaigns watch the tape: operatives and live odds
(00:38:41) The democratize finance arc and the everything app
(00:39:46) Are crypto prediction markets here to stay?
(00:40:57) Hearing recap: CFTC chair nominee Mike Selig on sports
(00:43:41) From sports betting lessons to platform pitfalls
(00:45:31) Responsible trading: the trapdoors and horror stories
(00:46:55) States and problem gambling funds: gaps and misuse
(00:48:47) Interviews that shifted perspective: hedging anything
(00:50:49) States vs. CFTC: the philosophical split over markets
(00:52:16) Sleeper issue: responsible trading comes to finance
(00:52:23) Takeaways for listeners: markets as a check on punditry
(00:53:09) Wisdom of crowds, with conditions: diversity and volume
(00:55:39) Who inspires Chris: Masih Alinejad and global dissidents
(00:57:31) Wrap and where to find Prediction News
(01:01:29) Break and reset for hour two
(01:05:44) Hour two open and sponsor read
(01:06:53) Guest intro: author Richard Spiegel on dark fantasy
(01:09:02) Balancing service, family, and writing
(01:12:57) Why write adult paranormal: real characters over tropes
(01:14:03) Series overviews: Eternal Nights and Wolves and Ravens
(01:16:22) Process and difficulty: writing the antagonists
(01:17:27) Faith, angels, and care with celestial themes
(01:18:48) Why moral cost matters: stress, breaks, and realism
(01:21:00) Vampire marriage as anchor: love, bickering, eternity
(01:23:49) No one wins alone: partnerships at the core
(01:24:30) Hard choices: sacrifice, strategy, and messy ethics
(01:25:22) Military lens: stakes, combat, and consequences
(01:27:18) Realism in dialogue and private truths
(01:30:37) On craft: outlines, organic flow, and living characters
(01:36:03) Broken Angel: darkest journey and writing through it
(01:38:44) What readers should want: thinking, immersion, respect
(01:40:37) Everyday inspiration: honoring the family rock
(01:41:28) Where to find Richard Spiegel and what’s next
(01:43:30) Closing the show: plugs, schedule, and support
- Wayne Rankin
- Rosanna Rankin
- Carolina Jimenez
[00:02:03]
Unknown:
One 73467321476 3278977763 tango 732 Victor 73117888732476789764376. When I have plucked the rose. Teal gray hot. Long and still for that which longer nurseth the disease. In faith, I do not love thee. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day when I have plucked the rose plucked the rose, longing still for that which hunger nurses the disease? In faith, I
[00:03:40] Unknown:
That's an interesting twist. Mhmm.
[00:03:44] Unknown:
Transmitting live from the asylum studios deep in the bowels of Southwest Texas. It's the Joe Rouge Show. The show where we talk about anything and everything, where nothing is sacred, nothing is watered down, and nothing is PC.
[00:04:04] Unknown:
Alright. Hey, folks. This is Joe Ruse, and it is great to be with you once again transmitting live tonight from the Asylum Studios, broadcasting from the pimple on the backside of Texas, the beautiful city of Eagle Pass. And, of course, as always, doing the very best we can to bring you the best quality talk radio we can muster without all the bluster. Welcome to the Joe Ruse Show. Folks, it's great to be with you. It is Wednesday, 11/19/2025, nineteen zero five hours, and this transmission is going out to the entire world through the interweb.
Folks, we got a packed show for you tonight. We have in the first hour, we have Christopher Gerlacher of Prediction News. Second hour, we have our second hour guest in Richard Spiegel, which we're excited to get to. And, we are gonna bring all of that stuff to you here shortly. Now, folks, just, just little programming note. Next week, Thanksgiving week, no shows on, Thursday and Friday next week, and then, we'll be back to our regular schedule the following Monday. No show tomorrow, as you know. That's our usual Thursday schedule. Friday, we're gonna have Bill Ottman from, mines.com, the cofounder and CEO of mines. He'll be joining us, and we're looking forward to talking to Bill too. Been on the Mines platform for a number of years, and, been really excited to, try to, talk to him a little bit about how things are going over there at the platform. So I hope you hopefully, you guys will be able to tune in for that and check it out.
Alright. We have a lot of ground to cover tonight. So we're not gonna spend too much time with our usual chitchat and how do you do's, so we're gonna get right into our sponsors. Now, folks, tonight, our sponsors are brought the show is brought to you by, of course, PodHome dot f m. PodHome is our host audio platform. So, if you're listening on the audio stream, you're listening it you're listening to it through PodHome. Pod Home is the most modern easy to use podcast hosting platform that's out there today. You can use it to publish your ep episodes, enhance your audio, automatically generate chapters, titles, transcripts, show notes. You could even set up chapter art if you wanted to. You know, you could put little pictures for each individual chapter of your show. Now for us, that's that's gonna be a daunting task because we break it up into several different chapters.
But, you know, if you if you're able to do that, hey, go for it. It's it's available to you through podhome.fn. You you could even podcast live just like we're doing right now across the modern podcast apps, like podcast guru, fountain.fm, truefans.fm, pod verse, pocket cast, pod home's own, podcast player. All of those great sites, all those great platforms are streaming our audio live. And you could also, stream your audio through your website. You could do it right there through your website as well. All you need to do is just install the HTML code that is, made available to you through Pod Home, and you'll get this beautiful player on your website. We have that. That's what we use. So we're, you know, we we we really I love it, to be honest with you. It's, it's a live player, plus it also archives your show, so you could go in there and listen to whatever whatever came up in the past.
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That's podhome.fm. Alright folks, now we all know that energy and electricity is essential. Right? And, we're a little concerned tonight because, I just ran the dogs out before we started the show, and, we got lightning, we got some storm coming through here, we got some rain coming, and we all know what happens here at the asylum when we get heavy storms like this, power tends to go out. So electricity is essential, and TNE Energy makes it affordable and personal. More than 1,000,000 customers across The US trust TNE Energy to power their homes, and earn free energy while doing it. So check out TNE Energy, tne.energy, excuse me, t n e dot energy, and explore all of the options that are available to you for your home today. So check them out.
Alright. Also, don't forget. Head over to our website, joeroos.com. Joeroos.com. And when you get over there, open up that little web form, the contact form, send us over a message, let us know what's going on, let us know any questions, comments, cares, or concerns that you might have, any issues, any complaints, maybe you have suggestion for a guest or a topic for a show, let us know. Drop a message to us, use the contact form. And if you don't wanna use the contact form, that's totally fine with me. I don't I don't like to use those things either. But you can always email me directly at info@jorooz.com. That's info@jorooz.com.
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Alright. I think we got all of that stuff covered. So tonight, what we're gonna do tonight is something very interesting. We're going to, dive into the place where money, odds, lawsuits, and elections all kinda bump into each other. My guest tonight is Christopher Gerlacher, a reporter and political analyst with predictionnews.com, and host of the Prediction Market Movers podcast. I think I got that right.
[00:10:49] Unknown:
I think you did too. Okay. Great.
[00:10:51] Unknown:
Alright. Now Chris has spent years tracking how prediction markets react to everything from federal lawsuits to CFTC decisions to real time political bombshells. He's interviewed regulators, platform founders, lawmakers, you know, basically all the people that really do watch politics, through the lens of numbers and incentives. If you've ever wondered why the odds jump every time there's a court ruling, or whether these markets actually tell us something about public sentiment, today is your day to find out. Chris is one of the clearest explainers in the game, and he's here to unpack how prediction markets are shaping politics, business, and even the election cycles.
Chris, great to have you here. I just can't find my pen. That's what I'm looking for all of a sudden here. Pen. Alright. Well, I'm happy to be here. So, you know, it never fails. Something always disappears. It does. Oh, here we go. I will. Alright. As a host myself, I'm happy to kill time until you find the pen. I got it. You know why I I pick on the pen, I I I I I hold it. It's like, it's like a fidget thing, you know. So I hold it, I tap it, I time myself. It's like, you know, when a drummer if you ever watch a drummer play, you know, they're counting time and rhythm. Well, that's what I use this thing for. I count time and rhythm. So that's just my little thing. So anyway, Chris, great to have you here. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. So I wanna ask you just a couple of questions just to kinda throw you off your game a little bit before we get into the really good stuff. Alright? Yeah. Let's do it. So, who is somebody that's past or present that you'd love to sit down and have a two hour coffee with?
[00:12:19] Unknown:
Oh, man. This is gonna be super niche. There's a, there's a, truth and reconciliation commissioner from South Africa named Alex Buren. He's the, dark blue book just above my head. And he was the cochair of the truth and reconciliation commission. So, you know, Nelson Mandela is president, and, of course, you know, he's he's his leadership is crucial to the TRC happening at all. But, Alex Bahrain is, you know, day by day, he's on the commission collecting the victim hearings and overseeing, amnesty or the lack thereof or human rights abusers from the apartheid era. And, you know, we look back on the TRC as this kind of beautiful moment of of forgiveness and reconciliation, but at the time, it was a lot more controversial than that. There were a lot of people who were like, why aren't why isn't everyone from the old regime just going into prison?
You know, why are we having this at all? But there is this big trade off between getting information about how the government worked at the height of the debt squad activity in the eighties and, you know, trying to basically trade for information because a lot of it was destroyed in the immediate aftermath of apartheid's fall. So, yeah, I wanna have coffee with Alex Borrain, talk about, you know, how we navigated those challenges and talk about what forgiveness looks like and what it doesn't look like in real life, and get, you know, real deep into some of those conversations. Well, that's pretty interesting. I I I wasn't expecting that. I was expecting to say me, but that's okay. I get it. I understand. No. Tom. I'm I'm just Tom's coffee. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. So, alright. So what's your go to,
[00:13:56] Unknown:
thing, item, drink, whatever it is to help you unwind at the end of the day?
[00:14:00] Unknown:
I've got a classical guitar down in the basement of my house. That's my, yeah. I'll try and kill an hour with that. I love the puzzle of of classical guitar. I mean, everyone's acoustic or electric usually, but on classical, you're playing the bass line and the melody on top of each other. So it's like a piano you can stick in a bag on your back.
[00:14:17] Unknown:
So I like the cool rhythmic stuff you can do with it, and I like the the challenge of it. Yeah. I'm actually familiar with classical guitar. I I've never played, but I I know people who actually do play. So, that was one of my pandemic hobbies for sure. Oh, nice. Nice. Well, that's a good that's a good way to spend your time. For sure. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So, alright. So prediction markets. Alright. Oh, and by the way folks, if you haven't checked out his podcast, you need to check out his podcast. I listened to a couple of your episodes, and, but really good stuff. A little some of it's a little technical, you know, and so if you're not really too familiar with with, prediction markets or the markets in general, this might it might be a little daunting of a task, but the way the way you break down the information on your shows really helps you understand the flow of the conversation pretty quickly, and that's that's great. And, so I would encourage anybody who's interested in this to to head over and check out your podcast. And you're on all the podcast platforms?
[00:15:11] Unknown:
Yeah. All the standard ones, Apple, Spotify,
[00:15:14] Unknown:
wherever you get your podcast. Outstanding. Outstanding. Alright. So why don't you why don't you start us off with explaining a little bit about what prediction markets are. Try to and and, you know, try to do it in a way like if you were hanging out in the backyard at a barbecue or something. You know, just, just how would you explain it to people to make it work for them?
[00:15:34] Unknown:
Sure. Prediction markets where you can bet on anything, pretty much. If you think there's an event that's going to happen, you can put money on it. And the thing that makes it a prediction market is the price of the contract. So if you're just, you know, betting on whether Trump or Harris is gonna win the twenty twenty four election, if Trump is trading at 60¢ a contract, then there's a 60% chance that he wins the election, maybe in, say, mid October. Okay. But that's, that's the gist of it. You're you're buying and selling these contracts, and the odds of an event happening are set by market demand. They're set by traders. A valuable contract is one that's probably gonna pay out and one that, traders want a lot of. That's what shoots the, the price so high. And if an event's probably not gonna happen, if you're gonna lose all your money if you trade on it, the price is real low. And so you get these cool market forces that, you know, help you forecast some of these events.
[00:16:34] Unknown:
Alright. And now, earlier before before the show, we were we were chatting a little bit, and I had asked you, and I I had mentioned to you that I wanted to ask about this on the show. Do you think that that when when people look at things like, these prediction markets, like and and especially sites like Poly Market and Kalshi, do you think that that watching how the the trend is going for each particular candidate for, speaking like an election cycle, do you think that that plays on people's minds and and kinda directs or influences people the way they vote? Or has the potential to?
[00:17:07] Unknown:
I'm skeptical of it. So if you go back we were talking about this too. 2015, 2016, Bernie Sanders is challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. He's catching the populist wave that she spends, you know, the year and a half campaigning really missing. And his ground game in those early primary states, it looks really good. He's got the volunteers. He's got the people knocking on doors, the bumper stickers, lawn signs, local media. He's visible in the states he's campaigning in. Hillary Clinton is taking a different tack, which actually worked really well for her in the primary. She, she had this really data driven approach where Robbie Mook, her campaign manager, is looking at these states, and he's looking he's trying to reel in ad spend and Okay. Spend as little as possible for the maximum number of votes. But he's not as visible. Clinton is not as visible, in those states. And I think the prediction markets are kind of a modern version of that. I think Mount Downey going on Andrew Schultz's podcast and saying, you know, Calcio's got me at 80% or laughing about it and acknowledging it. I think that's what one of the things that a strong ground game and what a lot of momentum looks like today. And the thing about those odds is they're not static. If you watch the presidential debates, the vice presidential debates, those odds move in real time. They move immediately.
So when Kamala Harris has that stronger performance, especially on, the abortion answer where Biden began to really flub in his debate against Trump, You see her odds move and improve in real time. Mhmm. So those are that's my thoughts about how it influences. Yes. It show I think it shows you a better state of the race than it does change the race.
[00:18:51] Unknown:
I gotcha. Now, now this isn't this isn't gambling. Right? So so for people who never touched a prediction market, what's the what's, I guess, the, I guess, the moment that helps them to understand that this isn't gambling, that it's entirely something else?
[00:19:09] Unknown:
That's complicated because we've moved into things from forecasting events or from hedging, against really niche risks to also offering sports. So there's a mix of contracts that are, you know, a lot more heavily for entertainment and some that queue a lot more closely to the original, you know, hedging against risk or forecasting events that are difficult to quantify. And all these markets, yes, they create forecasts. Yes, they let you hedge. They also are all powered by speculators, by gambling activity. So you still have to kind of watch yourself and reel yourself in if you find yourself, spending too much on these contracts. That's kind of a thorny issue in the industry right now, even though it's housed under finance.
[00:20:01] Unknown:
Now and what was that what was the moment that that, I guess, that you realized that that that prediction markets aren't just, like, hobbyist gambling. They're actually shaping political conversation.
[00:20:12] Unknown:
I think you can go back to the twenty twenty two midterms for me was where I was still covering the gambling industry. I used to be a sports betting reporter, and I'm looking at a site called PredictIt. It's a smaller academic platform. There are a couple of these, but, you know, they're offering these election trades kind of like what Calcium and PolyMarketer are offering. They were just doing it on a smaller website with, lower position limits to keep everything pretty small scale and and justify that it's an academic platform. But I was watching them leading up to the midterms because at that point, we'd had two presidential cycles where Trump's support was underestimated twice in a row. And twenty twenty two, Dobbs was overturned.
Abortion goes back to The States and becomes this really important issue that ranks with the economy in many polls in terms of what voters are voting on or why they're making the choices they're making. So I wanted to get I wanted to, you know, something else to check the polls. I hadn't lost all faith in polls per se, but I needed a check and something else to tell me what was going on. So that was my moment where the midterms and, of course, I covered the twenty twenty four elections as Calsy won its rights to offer commercially
[00:21:30] Unknown:
available election contracts. Okay. So that's how I've slowly came into prediction markets. Now, well, we were talking about, and you mentioned, you know, watching things unfold in real time. Right? What's the very what's the what's the, I guess, what's the first signal or the or or the first indicator that you look for in the markets to know that something that there's gonna be a big shift coming or something's about to shift big. Mhmm.
[00:21:56] Unknown:
Well, if you think something is about to shift big, you'll see a flurry of live trading activity right before a major event. So if you look at the, Jay Jones race, was he Virginia attorney general? Right? Mhmm. He he's running at about, you know, forty, sixty against him, give or take, in the day leading up to the election. The other Democrats look like they're pretty safe. There's some anti Trump sentiment. There's some economic struggles they can run on. This was still in the middle of the government shutdown, so they've got some wind at their back. Jay Jones is lagging behind all the other Democrats from that texting scandal that that broke at the October, I believe.
Early results come in around 03:00 eastern, and he jumps up to 60%. You see high early voting activity in Virginia that day. And with the new coalitions, early voting and off year elections tend to be really good for Democrats. They've got those old they've got those older voters in their base now that are that are primarily there. And as young men in particular have drifted toward the Republican Party, those older, more engaged off year voters, they tend to be Democratic voters. So, seeing them come out on mass and, boost Jay Jones, well, they were they were assumed to benefit him, and that ended up being, that ended up being what happened in the attorney general's race.
[00:23:25] Unknown:
Alright. Now, we also talked a little bit before the show about regulators, lawsuits. I mentioned to you CFTC, drama. Yes. You know, you've you've covered, the the big fights between, prediction companies and and the and the CFTC. First of all, explain who the CFT is, the CFTC is, and, and the role that they take in the prediction market.
[00:23:53] Unknown:
Sure. The CFTC, it's a regulatory agency founded in 1974. We've had derivatives in this country since after the civil war. Traders would or farmers, you know, their harvest can go really well. It can go very poorly. In the era of railroads, they were really subject to local markets, and that could wreak havoc on the prices they could sell at. So derivatives gave them a way to get some price stability. They knew they were gonna make a certain amount of money at the end, of their season. They add some cash that could come in, if they made a correct prediction on a traditional derivative, if, you know, the harvest just was a disaster or something rotted in storage or something went wrong in the middle of of of all these issues.
Fast forward to the seventies and eighties. It's not just agricultural products anymore. You can have a derivative based on, the weather. So you get national hurricane index futures, these really exotic, derivatives that don't have to be just on agriculture or commodities or metals or any of those things anymore. Once you hit, like, the mid eighties with, like, crop yields, you know, you're looking at contracts that are asking, you know, whether this acre of land is gonna produce this much corn. And you've moved far away from money at this point. And you get to the 2 thousands, that's where you get the yes, no, will these events happen type of contracts.
So the CFTC oversees the older traditional derivatives, but they also see these more exotic contracts. And the type of contracts that are traded on prediction markets fall under that CFTC umbrella. And then you what was the second part of your question? I got lost in financial history.
[00:25:45] Unknown:
Well, it was, what the CFTC was and then, and and the role that they play in the prediction market. So they're watching for fraud and manipulation.
[00:25:54] Unknown:
If you look at some of the midterm markets now, something on, like, I don't know, the Arizona fifth district house race in 2026. We're a year out from the midterm, so there is not a lot of money in any of those markets. So if you make one big trade, you can just shoot the price up up and down just very abruptly. And in a low market, or in a low volume market, you can do that because you have all the money. In a large market with a lot of trade volume, prices move based on what traders are willing to pay for it. You can't just become the market black hole and suck the price toward what you want it to be.
The CFTC watches markets for dishonest ways to try and set a market price instead of having a price set by the market.
[00:26:41] Unknown:
Okay. So, so what what's the what's the disagreement, between prediction companies and the CFTC? Is it, is it just control? Is it ethics? Is it, you know, bureaucratic inertia? You know, what what is it?
[00:26:57] Unknown:
Well, they're it's not so much the prediction market companies and the CFTC. It's more against the states and the prediction market companies with the CFTC sitting over here on the sideline. So and to I'll go back to '23. Kalshi did sue the CFTC in 2023 so that it could offer political contracts. It said, look. This is not prohibited in any of your regulations. It's not prohibited in any of your laws. Elections are serious events with financial consequences. We should be able to offer contracts on them. And the then chair of the CFTC said, no. You can't. This is gaming. This is just election betting, but housed under finance.
Kalshi won that lawsuit. The judge sided with them saying, well, elections aren't games, so their election contracts cannot be gaming, which is prohibited, under something called the special rule. One of the laws, one of the regulations the CFTC has to follow. So that's how you get election contracts initially. Fast forward to Christmas, Christmas weekend twenty twenty four, crypto.com self certifies, sports contracts. So they create a filing saying, hey, CFTC, we're gonna start offering this product. And the self certification lets the CFTC either just let it happen or they can come from behind and say, no. We're gonna review this and and stop this. Well, the CFTC tried to stop it five days before Trump took office.
They asked crypto.com to take the sports contracts down, and crypto.com just flat out said no. There's gonna be a new CFTC in five days. They they should make this decision. And after Trump takes office, after there's some regulatory clarity there about allowing sports contracts, Calshi launches their sports contracts. They launch contracts on the winner of the Super Bowl. And later, they would go on to offer contracts on game point spreads, game winners, some over unders. They just introduced NBA player props. And there's another industry that worked very, very hard to offer those types of transactions.
In 2018, the Supreme Court says, hey, states. We're overturning PASPA. You now have the right, if you choose, to regulate sports betting. So since 2018, states have been one by one regulating sports betting, deciding to legalize it, create a regulatory framework around it. Mhmm. And, traditionally, the gambling regulator you're subjected to is your state. So now you've got these two opposing forces. You've got the prediction market platforms housed under the CFTC, 50 state access, offering sports contracts. You've also got these states saying, hey. We've been regulating gambling for decades, and we've been regulating sports betting since 2018.
You're offering an identical product that we're offering, and we can't tax you on it. What are you doing? So that's the zero sum game that's getting played out between state attorneys general, state gaming commissions, and these prediction market platforms.
[00:30:07] Unknown:
Wow. That that's a lot. It is. It's the best. That that is that is a lot. It ate my summer. I'm sure it did. I mean, it just yeah. I got a headache just from that. I can only imagine when you really get because you get you really dive into this stuff a lot more detail than what you just gave us. There's so much more in the background that that that we don't really the average person doesn't understand. So, you know, for for so for people who don't speak regulator, you know, what's the biggest misunderstanding about why prediction markets keep ending up in federal court?
[00:30:43] Unknown:
One of the biggest disagreements is about one word in federal law, and that word is gaming. After the financial crisis, there is an amendment to, the Commodity Exchange Act. It's a federal law. It's been governing these types of contracts since 1930. So burial law, and it just says, hey. There are certain things you cannot offer event contracts on. War, terrorism, assassinations, gaming. And the CFTC wrote a rule saying, we're just gonna prohibit all of these categories of contracts. So there's a statute and there's a rule. Everybody seems to agree that we don't want gaming on federal exchanges. Okay. Here's the problem.
Nobody defined gaming.
[00:31:28] Unknown:
Right? Well, that that would help, wouldn't it though?
[00:31:31] Unknown:
It would. They tried. The CFTC proposed a rule and never passed. And this was in the twenty twenties, I believe. But there is no single definition of gaming. And so, you have some lawyers who say the, the CFTC has already reviewed these contracts when they made this rule. There are other largely CFTC lawyers who say, no. The CFTC still has the option to review these contracts. And if they don't do anything about it, they're on a regulated exchange. They're legal. They're fine. Leave them alone. The states can't touch them. So that's that's probably the big crux of the issue right now that it's being played out in state courts, but it's all over this one fairly minute point that could go all the way to the Supreme Court. Gaming.
[00:32:19] Unknown:
Defining gaming. That that's ridiculous.
[00:32:23] Unknown:
Well, the other thing too, and I was a little bit surprised that there was no, like, CEA amendment in the government shutdown funding bill and the continuing resolution. Because we I mean, we cover the court cases because they're they're public, and, each one tells you a little bit about what could potentially happen in, you know, six months, a year, whatever it is. But there's also congress. And Donald Trump junior is he's an adviser to Calcium Polymarket. I don't know what the details of that are. CBS morning just tried to ask, and we just know that he advises. So we we don't have details there. But Okay. If I am Calshe, if I am Polymarket, I want, you know, I want to kind of wrangle the Republicans in Congress while I know that there's a Republican majority in Congress to amend the CEA to allow for sports contracts.
So you could I mean, I wouldn't be surprised to see that kinda sneak its way through, not just a Republican controlled congress, but one that Trump still has a very powerful grip on. I'm not saying that's what's happening, but Yeah. No. I get you. Yeah. If I'm but if I'm on the prediction market platforms, I just want congress to make this, legal issue go away. Because if Congress says sports contracts are fine, then the courts say, well, we we know what Congress' intent was now.
[00:33:42] Unknown:
Well, then and that makes sense. Or arcane issues go away as well. Yeah. No. That makes sense. Now, when so when a new lawsuit drops, what's the first thing that you look for, or you look to understand about how serious it really is?
[00:33:55] Unknown:
I'm looking at who is bringing it. So is it, you know, a state gaming commission saying, hey, you're violating state law, and whether it's an argument that has gained traction in other courts, or is it something like the statute of end cases, which is an old law that comes, I think, originally from English parliament that was carried over, into some early American law. But, I don't think that's those cases are gonna go anywhere. Those, in my mind, still are still at least miscellaneous. They haven't gotten any traction. You know, those are not the things imperiling sports contracts.
So who's bringing in in just the high level structure of it still can tell you a lot even at this early stage.
[00:34:38] Unknown:
Right now, you mentioned earlier that, you mentioned PredictIt earlier, and, and and you covered the the twenty two midterms using predicted. What did those markets show you, about voter sentiment that traditional polling, you know, didn't or wouldn't?
[00:34:59] Unknown:
It shows you what an event is that can realistically move the odds and, you know, when a news event really is gonna move the electorate. So if you go back to early well, mid twenty twenty two, there was the leak of the Supreme Court case, the draft opinion that was gonna overturn Dobbs, turn abortion back to the states. Right. That shot through the markets, very hard. That was a big push for, you know, more democratic turnout and greater democratic victory in the midterms. So odds of them flipping the house, and I believe the senate as well both went up. When the opinion actually dropped, the markets didn't move.
Right? The effect was done. The the right. So that's where you get to see what an event is that actually moves voters and what doesn't. And there's this great line. There's a book called Shattered Over Here. It recounts Hillary Clinton's campaign and and how she lost, and there's this great line near the end of it. It's in the context of Trump's, Access Hollywood tape. And, you know, at the time, a a lot of mainstream news is asking, oh, is this gonna be the thing that finally breaks Republicans from him and syncs him with voters? And the line that these authors write is I'm paraphrasing, but it's like, voters can tell the difference between what offends them and what affects them.
And I have not stopped thinking about it. And I think that's something you can see reflected in not only Trump's ongoing immunity to scandal, but also you can see it in the markets. You know, is the next PR scandal or the next political story going to realistically affect his odds or the Republican party's odds in a way that breaks from, you know, the the pattern of, the previous news stories.
[00:36:48] Unknown:
That's a lot too. You know, it, like Yeah. And and I'm I'm I'm a little slow on responding because, you know, this is this is new to me. You know, I I know the basics of the whole thing, so I'm a little slow on on picking it up, and responding to it because I'm thinking I'm trying to digest everything you just threw at me. And I'm I also noticed too, I I just saw your article here. We're gonna come to that one. We're gonna go into some, we're gonna talk about some sports, sports betting and state level stuff in a little bit, but I saw your piece here on prediction news, so I'm gonna bring that up in a little bit. And so that kinda distracted me also. Sorry. Now, let's see.
I I guess talking about the campaigns and political strategists, do you think they're paying attention to these markets behind the scenes even if they wanna admit it to it publicly?
[00:37:33] Unknown:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, Trump's team was watching Kalshi on election night, and, one of my, folks I talked to on the podcast is Damon Thayer. He's a Republican from Kentucky, former senate majority leader, in the Kentucky state house. And, you know, as an operative, he he was even paying attention to what the odds are saying because it's another check on the political polls. Maybe the pollsters wait something inaccurately or they're working with an old assumption that just doesn't track, but the prediction markets are right up to date. You don't have have to wait three days or a week to conduct a poll. You can just wait and see what the odds are today. Yeah. You may start to go figure out why that's the case. That's a separate project, but you always have up to the date information when you have a prediction market in front of you. Now you mentioned earlier, you talked about, crypto.com
[00:38:26] Unknown:
or that, they filed this, the sports contract contracts, with the CFTC. When that happened, what what was, I guess, what did that moment signal to you about where these markets are going?
[00:38:42] Unknown:
There is a long standing mission in, at least, modern finance to democratize finance. You you hear this phrase all the time. You follow Robinhood, crypto folks. You wanna give lots of people access to every financial tool you can, every market you can. And this was an inevitable crossover between something that, you know, gambling platforms traditionally offered, more for entertainment. But the end goal, not necessarily for one company, it's not necessarily something that happens in the next four years, But the end goal of the industry is this kind of everything app where you can have your serious stocks, bonds, investments, you know, on one hand and just right next to them have your sports wagers, your sports trades, your more entertainment fun markets. Just putting everything in one place.
So that to me was this big step in this larger overarching project that the industry is pursuing even if a lot of the players are doing so tacitly.
[00:39:47] Unknown:
Now do you do you think, or do you see crypto based prediction markets becoming the normal? Or, do you think the regulators are gonna eventually cut that off?
[00:39:55] Unknown:
No. Prediction markets are here to stay. They I mean, even the last CFTC chairman, he just drew a line at a certain subject of event contracts. He obviously wasn't gonna let sports pass, and he was blocking, the political markets. But, I mean, he approved Calsy's clearing house, I think, months before they went into court together. And while the lawsuit was active and, you know, Calsy still grew during that time. So, you know, even the people who are thinking about guardrails for prediction markets aren't necessarily anti prediction market altogether. And you're seeing, you know, not just Republicans and Trump's team being enthusiastic about prediction markets. Richie Torres, progressive Democrat out of New York in the house. He was praising prediction markets as well for their accuracy over the polls and for showing Trump's lead earlier than the polls did or just showing them at all.
So prediction markets probably have a bright future even if there are future guardrails on it or even if, like, the prop bets go away. You'll still see a place for them in a lot of traditional political reporting as well.
[00:40:58] Unknown:
Alright. Now, I wanna I wanna talk about sports betting because, like I said, I I I saw your article here. I'm gonna pull this up. I'm gonna screen share this. Let's talk about this particular article for a little bit. So, the CFTC chair nominee Mike Selig deferring to courts on sports contracts. So give us give us the rundown on this.
[00:41:16] Unknown:
Sure. So this guy, Mike Selig, he is the second person Trump has nominated to chair the CFTC. And, obviously, the CFTC is about to have this really big expansion of its responsibilities. There's that crypto legislation working through congress, the couple of crypto bills that are on the way through, and they're gonna make the CFTC regulate those products. So that's a big project they have coming up. Additionally, the CFTC has to oversee some of its most prominent, companies under its purview offering sports contracts and getting into lawsuits with large portions of the country and states and tribes alike over the this issue of gaming. And the CFTC has not weighed in yet on how they feel about sports contracts. There have been some little things here and there, but no one's taken a strong position or filed a friend of the court filing to say, hey. We, the CFTC, sign off on this, and the states need to back up.
So one of the interesting things is, what does Mike Selleck think about sports? What does this guy wanna say about them? And he just kept saying over and over again, it's for the courts to decide. He's gonna follow the courts. So he is he spent his hearing not getting embroiled in that controversy, which does I mean, it tells you a little bit. There's an old letter he worked on as a lawyer arguing that, sports contracts should not be prohibited by the CFTC because sports contracts are not gaming. In his view, gaming seems to be just the traditional gambling games, roulette, you know, slots, those kinds of things.
So he, he if you like sports contracts, you should probably feel pretty good about Mike Selig. I've heard his last name pronounced Selig and Selig, so I I'm switching too. But That's okay. Yeah. I know. One of those names I've largely read and and not heard, but, that's kind of the big unanswered question that we're waiting for him to answer as CFTC chair.
[00:43:22] Unknown:
Alright.
[00:43:23] Unknown:
But he's looking good. The last guy, I think the the Winklevoss twins seem to, have lobbied to have him removed from consideration. So that was a whole piece of drama too. Brian
[00:43:34] Unknown:
Brian Quintenz. Quintenz. Yeah. There he is. Alright. And so, folks, if you wanna check out the article, this is on predictionnews.com. This is, this is Chris's article, and, you should definitely check this thing out. I gotta read it a little bit more detail later. Like I said, I I didn't see it until I was talking to you here just now.
[00:43:53] Unknown:
I didn't write it until about, you know, 02:00 my time. So I I think that's probably
[00:43:59] Unknown:
01:00 my time. It was late in the afternoon, anyway. Yeah. Well, yeah, I'm an hour behind you. So Yeah. Alright. Alright. So, now, you you know, you started out by covering sports betting. What lessons did you get from that? Or what or I should say, what lessons pop up again and again in prediction markets today? Lessons in terms of Lessons from that world in sport in the world of sports betting. What what what pops up again and again in the prediction markets today? Mhmm. What have you learned?
[00:44:34] Unknown:
I think one of the most dangerous things for prediction market platforms is not The States, it's not the tribes. It's being slow to react on problem gambling, problem trading, that family of issues. There was a case in and I don't remember the year of this. I think it was in the nineteen nineties, but I could be wrong, in New Jersey. Woman left her kid in the car, went to go play slots for a few hours,
[00:45:02] Unknown:
came back, and and the kid died in the car. It was this horrific I do remember that. Yeah. That was that was a horrible story. Yeah. I remember that. Yeah. And
[00:45:10] Unknown:
that came up decades later when New Jersey had gaming expansion on the table. So those stories, they affect people. They have staying power. So if Kalshi or Polymarket has to worry about, you know, something like that Robinhood trader who was 19 and killed himself because he saw this big drop in his portfolio value. Those are the kinds of trapdoors lying in wait for platforms making these rapid expansions into casual trading. Mhmm. I mean, on the one hand, the I mean, yes. You get the forecast. You get the hedging utility. You get these, you know, this ability to, you know, hedge risk on anything.
You also have people who use these platforms as gambling platforms even though that's not what they're actually for. That's not their intended purpose. So I I think if they get pretty not necessarily aggressive, just proactive on, you know, a little prompt saying, hey. You're trading more than your usual volume or, you know, do you wanna take a break? Do you wanna stop? And, you know, taking some of those proactive steps. And Kalshi's got a help section where you can set trading limits, time limits, and those kinds of things. So there's already a suite of responsible gaming tools and responsible trading tools, but the CFTC is probably not gonna make them do that as first priority. So if the industry voluntarily keeps up with this issue and is proactive about this, I think they can avoid those trapdoors looking for them.
But that that is a a strong lesson from, gambling expansion and, you know, state gambling proper is that these types of horror stories have, you know, the kind of negative PR that literally last decades.
[00:46:56] Unknown:
Now you now you've you've dug into, state spending on responsible gambling. Yes. To you, what's what's probably the most surprising thing that you uncovered about how states use, or in a lot of cases, waste, those funds.
[00:47:12] Unknown:
How little of it goes to problem gambling?
[00:47:15] Unknown:
There you go. This was one of, I think it's one of my last,
[00:47:18] Unknown:
big stories when I was covering, the gambling industry proper. But, there's this great, report that that's come out a a few years ago. And, this is an organization that I mean, they take surveys from people within the state government and the state house who's actually allocating and spending and and tracking the actual expenditures. Right? And there is an enormous difference between the money set aside for problem gambling programs and the money spent on it. Now some states do very well and spend, you know, 95 something percent of you know, they get within a rounding error of what they should be spending it on. Other states, they'll pay for the billboards and the helpline, but then they'll go fill in some budget gap they have in the general fund, and that money effectively just disappears.
It solves some balance sheet issue, but the number of states like Kansas that'll look like they're putting aside a lot of responsible gambling money on paper and then just fill in their balance sheet elsewhere, that's, that that does undermine the, at least, state commitment in certain states, to, you know, their commitment to addressing problem gambling.
[00:48:28] Unknown:
Alright. Now now over over the course of your career, right, you've interviewed regulators, founders, analysts. People basically see the world, differently, in in all different ways. Which interview really changed your perspective the most?
[00:48:48] Unknown:
It was probably, Tarek Mansour's interview. I interviewed him twice, I think, in 2022 and 2023, but fairly early on. It's between Calshi launching and in between the big mainstreaming of prediction markets. And the way he looks at the world, he looks at everything as, you know, something you can hedge against in your portfolio. He used to work at, I think, Citadel. And I think during the, you know, twenty sixteen election, there would be big investors coming to these big financial firms saying, hey. You know, we don't know who's gonna be president yet. We wanted we want our portfolios to do well no matter who's president. How can we come out ahead whoever wins?
And they put together some, you know, a pile of stocks that should do well if Trump wins, something that should go up if Clinton wins. And, you know, they short a lot of them would short the S and P five hundred. Stock's gonna do worse if, Trump becomes president. When Trump became president, S and P five hundred went up. Yeah. So they were just flat wrong. So you can't really predict with great reliable accuracy how, you know, how markets are gonna react to different events. Direct's insight was, well, just trade on the event itself. Will this happen? Yes or no? And you can do that on anything.
It is the next natural step in derivatives as they become more exotic, as become more retail friendly, as they allow you to hedge against new risk. And that's really at the core of Kalshi's mission is to, you know, offer a way to offset any risk no matter how niche. The more niche, the better in their view. Right? Yeah. And that's where you get that zero sum game with states because the states have seen how far they've come in saying you know, they're saying, hey. You're offering what we're offering. What gives? And, Kalshi, not unreasonably, says, well, you know, the CFTC has kept letting different companies offer products to bring in new traders and hedge new risk for decades. Why would they stop at us, and why should we stop? Yeah. No. Okay. That's philosophical, you know, more interesting, I think, underpinning of the actual issues in court. But No. I gotcha. I did like talking to him a lot.
[00:50:58] Unknown:
Yeah. That's good. We all have our favorites. I know. We all do. We we're not allowed to admit that though as hosts because, you know, you know, you know you know what I'm talking about. You're a podcast host yourself. You can't admit that you have favorites, but we all do. So look looking ahead, what's what's the, I guess, what's the sleeper issue in prediction markets? You know, the thing that no one's talking about right now, but everyone will be talking about maybe a year from now.
[00:51:21] Unknown:
Oh, I think I do think it's that responsible trading fault line. I think, the finance industry has not had to directly confront this because I mean, who are the big financial traders? They're big companies. They've got entire teams looking at, you know, how are you hedging risk? How are derivatives performing? You know, if one goes up, is the other going down? And are we actually remaining level? The retail trading and the expansion of it throughout the two thousands, that is recent. And as you bring in more regular people who may not be educated about how to use these to offset risk or to, you know, earn interest on or who just wanna use it as their own, you know, gaming platform, they're, you know the responsible gaming conversation has come to finance. And I don't think finance has had to be ready for that in the past, but like I said earlier, they have to look at Square in the face or the backlash is gonna be real ugly against them. Okay.
[00:52:18] Unknown:
So what do you what do you hope that the audience takes away from this conversation today?
[00:52:24] Unknown:
The political prediction markets are a great way to track the race, I think. They're a great way to punch through punditry or at least narrow down which pundits seem to be talking in the right direction and have their finger on the pulse of where the electorate is. I mean, it's so easy to, you know, look at a poll and look at a favorite candidate and just tell the story that you wanna tell or create the poll that you wanna create. There are people of all political persuasions betting in these markets and who are making these trades. And they've all got skin in the game. You know, they're the ones who lose money if they're wrong. There is a strong motivation to win here. And so the prediction markets are a really good check, even if you like the pun that you listen to or you don't. I think they're really good reference points. They're gonna be really valuable going into 2026.
[00:53:10] Unknown:
Alright. Here here here's the here's the favorite question of every podcast host. Is there anything we haven't covered today that you wanna share?
[00:53:18] Unknown:
The the only thing I'd add this is something that drives me crazy in the industry. A lot of peep another one of these phrases that gets thrown around is wisdom of crowds. You get a bunch of people together. They're all suddenly right just because they're in a group. And, I mean, we've all seen group think before. You can you can get a dumb crowd together and then you have group thing. That's not helpful. So there are four way or four things you need for a wise crowd. You need diversity of opinion. Do You have a lunatic on one side. You need somebody else to cancel that guy out. Right? And you do that at scale, and that's where you get your accurate forecast. You need people who are making their own decisions independently. You don't want a bunch of copy trading. Otherwise, you heard.
And you want people bringing in their local knowledge. So, you know, if you're in Suburban Denver and you see a lot more Trump support than the polls are revealing, then, you know, you should be trading on that, and and that helps move the price as well. And finally, you need a way to bring all of those insights together, and prediction markets do that naturally. They're the platform for that. So when you hear people, at least on prediction market Twitter or x talking about, you know, the importance of trading volume and the wisdom of crowds, You know, you wanna make sure they're referring to markets where there is a lot of trading going on, where there are a lot of different participants coming together from all over the country and now all over the world, in in recent months.
You you don't want just a little bubble of an exchange with with some tiny number of traders.
[00:54:45] Unknown:
Alright. Now so who's somebody that you respect right now, and what are they doing that inspires you?
[00:54:54] Unknown:
It's gonna be anybody inside or outside? Anybody.
[00:54:57] Unknown:
Alive or dead? Alive or dead. Alive or dead. Well, if they're if they're dead, that means they're not doing anything right now to inspire you unless, you know, being dead inspires you. I don't know. No.
[00:55:08] Unknown:
No. I, I had a pretty good year. That that that would not that would not inspire me. I'm thinking about, Masia Linejad right now. She's do you know her? No. I'm not familiar. Okay. She is this, incredible Iranian journalist, and her she's fighting for women's rights in Iran. Okay. And she just won her court case a few weeks ago against two hitmen who came to her apartment in Brooklyn. And the only reason she's alive today is because she didn't answer the door when they knocked.
[00:55:39] Unknown:
Okay.
[00:55:40] Unknown:
And that was about two years ago now or that was in 2022. So three years ago. She has this attempted attempt on her life from the Iranian regime hiring, like, Eastern European assassins. And just a couple weeks ago, both those men got twenty five years in prison. Oh, wow. And she celebrated, and it was a great day for dissidents all over the world. That's huge. And the next thing she did was fly to Spain and meet with the opposition leader living in exile from Venezuela. And then she flew to Berlin for this World Council of Dissidents, where all these people from all over the world gathered together, who are fighting against authoritarianism back home in their countries. Wow. And they're all getting together in Berlin and basically swapping notes and inspiring one another. And, I mean, that's the kind of stuff that gets me excited. So watching, you know, people like Masi Linejad just live and fight. I mean,
[00:56:30] Unknown:
how could you not wake up in the morning when you can see what she's doing on earth? No. You know what? I I don't know who she is, and I would love to know more about her. So I'm gonna I'm gonna check her out a little bit. And, you know, that's that's that's a great story. That that's an amazing story. Like, like, why but but do do you like, why did she not open the door? Like, did she have an idea that this was,
[00:56:51] Unknown:
a hit? Or It looks sketchy and, I mean, there have been kidnapping attempts from the Iranian regime as well, in previous years. So she's been I mean, she's been living under threat for a very long time. I see. Yeah. Lydia Cacho, journalist from Mexico, also amazing, incredible human rights worker. I know her name. Yeah. Oh, yeah. She's great. So, yeah. People like that who are who are fighting the good fight in against, you know, governments that we're we're obviously hostile to and who are hostile to us, but it's cool to see that, you know, countries are a country's people are not just their
[00:57:25] Unknown:
governments. They're also some of their greatest dissidents. Yeah. That that I agree with you. That's very true. That's very true. Alright, sir. So, where can the audience go to find out more about you and follow your work? Yeah. Check out predictionnews.com
[00:57:37] Unknown:
if you wanna cover our reporting. We're also ramping up our political reporting using prediction markets to tell the story of the midterms coming up this year, so you can watch for that. You can follow me on x at Gerlacher c. You can follow, our site at prediction news, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel at prediction news if you want that real inside baseball look at prediction market industry. Awesome. Well, I am following you on x.
[00:57:59] Unknown:
So I'll be looking for you on, you guys gotta do a rumble channel. You gotta you gotta do a rumble channel, dude. I'll pitch it to Spencer. Go for it. Go for it. I'll, throw me in on the call. I'll help you out. Check it out. Alright, my friend. Christopher Gerlacher, thank you so much for spending the time here with us tonight. Really do appreciate it. You're welcome. Anytime you wanna come on, just reach out to our producer, Angela, and she'll help you get set up. And, you know, anything new that you wanna talk about, just let us know, man. I'd love to have you on. Again, this was really informative to me. Again, you know, it it's this is not something that I that I know a lot about,
[00:58:34] Unknown:
but I learned an incredible amount tonight from you, and I I do appreciate that, sir. Thank you. Well, thanks for having me on, and, I mean, I'm grateful to anyone who lets me get in the history of derivatives and finance.
[00:58:45] Unknown:
Alright. Well, we'll we'll do more of that in the days coming. So, yeah, just let us know anytime you want. Thanks, man. Alright. Thanks, brother. I appreciate you. God bless you. Have a great night. Yeah. You too. Alright, folks. Chris Gerlacher. This is, this is the one thing about our show that I love. You know, we we have a diverse group of people that come through here, and, you know, I I and I I don't say it frivolous. I don't just throw it out there. I learn something new from just about every guest that comes on the show, and, it it's it's a it's a it's a treat for me to have folks like him on the show. I'd love to learn new things, and, man, we got 207 episodes here in the books, and, man, you know, I I think I might be putting Google, up to, up to a challenge soon. I know a little bit about everything, a little bit I need to know about everything. Alright? Alright. So here here's what we're gonna do. Our our next guest is waiting in the wings here, so we are going to take a short break, and when we come back from this break, we'll bring in Richard Speegle, and, we will get to, talk to him about his his books, his series, and, Richard, from the bio that I've seen so far, you know, he's, he's a very, very interesting man to talk to. He has a lot of experience behind him. He's a veteran.
He's currently serving, and, we'll talk to him about that when we come back. But folks, in the meantime, don't forget, this is a live show, weeknights, 7PM central time. Saturdays, we do special shows on Saturdays, so we don't have a specific time for those, so we announce those as early as we possibly can. And of course, our Sunday show, it's at 2PM central time. So make sure you check us out. We are all over the place. Follow us on Rumble. You could follow us on YouTube, x. I think we're on Twitch still. I'm not sure. We we can't connect to it right now, but we've we've been on Twitch. Facebook, you can find us on Facebook at Joe Russo, and, we look forward to seeing you guys there. So make sure you follow us, like, subscribe, and share. Important to like, subscribe, and share. Alright. So please do that. The the liking the the the liking the shows and this and the, the sharing the shows helps with the algorithms, helps helps us get found. We've had a nice flurry of of, new subscribers and followers on the Rumble platform, so we appreciate that. We had picked up a couple on YouTube as well, so we appreciate that. And also, don't forget the audio side of this whole thing. We are available to you on all of the audio platforms, Apple Podcast, Amazon, Spotify, iHeart. We're on all of them, plus all of the modern podcast apps like Pod Homes, Podcast Player, Pocketcast, Podverse, True Fans, not OnlyFans, True Fans, and, Podcast Guru found that all these great platforms. So find us. You could find us very, very easily.
Alright. So with that said, we're gonna take a break here. When we come back from the break, we'll have Richard Spiegel with us, and, just stay with us. Alright? We'll be back in about, two, maybe three minutes. Alright? Alright. We'll be back. Alrighty. Hey, folks. First hour is in the books. You believe that? That went by fast. And tell me the truth, it didn't didn't Chris look like, Owen Shroyer? I thought he did. Folks, welcome back. This is Joe Russo. Welcome back to the show. Gonna get started here momentarily with our second hour guest, Richard Spiegel. And we're gonna talk about his books, his background and his history.
So we're excited to get to him. But folks, of course, you know, before we do that, let me tell you about Pro HVAC Solutions. Pro HVAC R Solutions leverages over thirty years of expertise in providing premier HVAC sales and service rep service and repairs, specializing in both residential and commercial installations. Our team of skilled technicians is dedicated to providing efficient heating, ventilation, and air conditioning solutions for your home or your business. With a focus on quality workmanship and customer satisfaction, Pro HVAC Solutions ensures your comfort all year round. Just contact Pro HVAC r Solutions today for reliable HVAC services tailored to your needs.
Just head over to prohvacrsolutions.com. That's prohvacrsolutions.com. And when you get over there, make sure you let them know. You heard it right here on the Joe Ruse show. Alright. Well, with all of that said, now tonight here on our second hour, we're gonna be stepping into a world where, magic, where mystery, and the darker corners of your imagination collide. And our guide is someone who knows those shadows very well. Tonight's guest, Richard Spiegel, is a storyteller who doesn't shy away from the moral risk or emotional consequences. He's the mind behind the Eternal Night series and the Wolves and Ravens trilogy, worlds built for adults who want paranormal fantasy that doesn't sugarcoat the truth. Richard is also an officer in the Pennsylvania National Guard with deep roots in the legendary eighty second airborne division.
Beyond the supernatural worlds in the military discipline is a husband, a father of four daughters, and a writer who finds meaning in the quiet moments that become echoes in his story. We're gonna talk about the craft, the shadows, the military influence, the adult paranormal market, and whatever hidden truths pop out along the way. Richard Spiegel, welcome to the show, man. Great to have you. Thanks for having me. That was, that was a hell of an intro. Well, you know, we do the best we can here, sir. And by the way, thank you for your service, sir. Captain, if I'm not mistaken. Correct? Yes. I did actually retire that this past February. Oh, okay. Alright. Well, we'll have to we'll have to get on our producer here and make sure we correct those notes for the later no. I'm kidding. No. She does a great job.
Oh, man. But, again, thank you for your service, sir. I really do appreciate, you know, your sacrifice and your willingness to put your life on the line for us in our country. God bless you for it. And, you know, and a lot of times, you know, people should thank your family too. You know, because they have to deal with the the time away. They have to deal with the training. They have to deal with the the moving around, and and, you know, things constantly in flux. And I don't I don't think enough people do that. I don't know I don't know if enough people actually thank the families for their service, because it is part of your service.
Yeah. I think my wife's had it worse than I have. Yeah. To be honest. Yeah. No. I'm sure. I I know quite a few folks that are are are active duty military, travel all over the place, and it's, you know, from one place to another, you know, it's not it's uprooting every so often. It's it's a lot. It's a lot to deal with. So again, so thank you again, sir, and thank you to your family. And, you know what? What's the most recent what's the most dad moment you've had recently?
[01:09:11] Unknown:
Well, about an hour ago when I was on another podcast, the baby came in the room wanting candy. And, I mean, everybody knows I'm doing this, but apparently, she escaped. So she was on my lap screaming on camera for about fifteen seconds.
[01:09:26] Unknown:
Yeah. Moment there. That's weird. Before I got her out. I gave her a quarter and she ran away. Oh, good. Good. Well, inflation. Right? It used to be a nickel or something like that, but inflation. I I know what you're saying though. My my kids, I have two kids, two human children. They are they are adults now, so I don't have to worry about them coming running in and interrupting the show. They're they're they're living quite some distance away, but I do have two French bulldogs. And, and my boy, Charlie, it he just seems to know when the show is about to end, because he comes to the door of the studio here, and he starts barking, he starts huffing at the door, and starts whining and crying, and, so I I understand. I I got you. That was my that's my dad moment right there.
So, what what's a book or a movie or or a song that's changed the way you think about life?
[01:10:21] Unknown:
That's tough because I'm not really into there's there's a lot of books from, David Weber. Okay. A lot of, science fiction novels. He's probably one of, like, my favorite authors. Reading reading his books as I was kinda growing up and Anne Rice.
[01:10:38] Unknown:
Oh, I love Anne Rice. Yeah.
[01:10:40] Unknown:
Kinda changed the way I thought about, like, the supernatural and stuff like that.
[01:10:44] Unknown:
Yeah. Awesome. That's awesome. Now, again, military, you I know you said you're retired, but you're balancing a writing career, fatherhood, and up until February, your military career. How have those worlds shaped each other rather than competing?
[01:11:04] Unknown:
Well, unfortunately, the writing world is kinda a lot of times, it's the only one there is. And, the one of the biggest problems I have is remembering that the real world is even there. Alright. Well, one of the reasons I'm retired it took them over twenty years to figure it out, but the military decided I was too crazy to be in the military. So I got medically retired, But it definitely helps with the creativity. Okay. And it it has been a challenge trying to now that I'm back and, you know, the family and stuff like that, being able to actually be a husband and a father while I've got all this stuff in my head that I can't get rid of.
So, again, my wife is the superstar because she's the one that kinda takes care of me too.
[01:11:51] Unknown:
Outstanding. Outstanding. Now you said that, adult fantasy readers were being underserved. Now, what made you say that? What made you decide that, okay, fine. I'm gonna do this all myself now.
[01:12:07] Unknown:
Every single book you can think of as being popular is young adult. Every one of the highest grossing authors in the last ten, twenty years, young adult. Well, grown ups need entertainment too. I wanna read a book that's complicated. I wanna read a book that is not afraid to get into, like, the nasty corners of, like, the mind and stuff like that and couldn't find any. So I just started writing them. Alright. Nope.
[01:12:36] Unknown:
I mean, I got yeah. If if if, I just had a quote in my head and just flipped out, just regarding that thing, you know, if if if if if no. It'll it'll come back to me. My age is catching up to me. So, you know, I got I got I have I have I have a birthday tomorrow, so I'm I'm hitting 55 tomorrow. The memory is becoming like Swiss cheese. So Thank you, sir. Thank you. So when when you think about the when you think about, the paranormal fantasy space for adults, what do you think readers are hungry for right now that they aren't getting from mainstream work?
[01:13:13] Unknown:
Easy. Real real characters. And then that's every genre. Real characters. Characters today are all fake, which is why everything flops. People don't wanna be pandered to. They want real characters that can grab them and let them get immersed into the world that they're reading or viewing or whatever. And if the characters aren't real, it's not gonna work. It's writing one zero one, but everybody today is doing it wrong. I I don't I honestly don't understand
[01:13:40] Unknown:
it. Yeah. I also think a lot of people tend to rely a little bit too much on AI for some subject matter. I'm not saying they all write AI books, but they tend to to rely too much on the AI stuff, and you could tell sometimes when it's an AI generated thing. There's just there's just no feeling there. Even worse. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So let's let's get into your books a little bit. Alright? Let's, give us a brief overview of of the books, of the series, and and and give us an idea of where these ideas started for you with these books.
[01:14:16] Unknown:
Well, the the first series that I that I was writing was Eternal Nights. I started writing that because I've always been a a fan of vampires. I mentioned Anne Rice before. I read all of her books when I was really young. And since her, there's been nothing. It's just been a bunch of, I'm sorry, garbage. And so I wanted to I created a universe like that, and I came up with some characters that I thought would be compelling, and I just let things fly from there. I wrote the redemption and origins are actually a prequel to the main eternal night series, which is gonna be science fiction. Okay. That takes a lot of research.
So in order to have something in between, I started writing wolves and ravens, which is a fantasy trilogy, and I actually ended up having a whole lot of fun with that. And that kinda got way out of control, but, that's kinda what my writing normally does. And, the the conclusion to that is actually gonna be live in a few weeks, and then I'll finally be able to have the first science fiction book out next spring, hopefully.
[01:15:26] Unknown:
And so so right now, there are what? There are four books in the series?
[01:15:30] Unknown:
Well, four books total. There there's two in one and two in the other. The the Eternal Nights books are two parts of a prequel. Okay. And then Wolves and Ravens, I have book one and two out of three.
[01:15:42] Unknown:
Okay. I'm looking at your website right now. Actually, I just pulled it up. Let me let me do this. Let me
[01:15:48] Unknown:
Oh, yeah. My publisher did a great job with that website. Oh, yeah. So this this is the series you're talking about right now. The, Yeah. That that that's what I've got out so far. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. And and when is so much better than the website I tried to make for myself. That turned out to be garbage.
[01:16:02] Unknown:
Well, it is it is a pretty sight. Like, I I was I was looking at it earlier today, and I like the fact that you have trailers for the books on there too. That that's that's really helpful.
[01:16:11] Unknown:
Oh, yeah. I send them all sorts of stuff, and they upload it for me, so there's a lot of content on there, a lot of behind scenes videos.
[01:16:19] Unknown:
And, so when when is the, when is book three coming out?
[01:16:23] Unknown:
Hopefully hopefully before the end of the month. Oh, I'm sorry. The the re unfortunately, the relaunch for Wolves and Ravens, the timeline didn't match the relaunch for Eternal Nights, but it it should be in a couple of weeks.
[01:16:36] Unknown:
Alright. Now what's the hardest part about writing this genre? And and and I'm I'm sure you I'm sure it had some challenges to it. And how'd you push through those challenges?
[01:16:48] Unknown:
The the write the writing itself is actually incredibly easy because I'm living in these worlds. I would say the hardest part is when I'm writing from the other side because the good guys and the bad guys both get their perspectives. They're they're they're both in the story, and I go to the extreme in both directions. So when I'm writing the antagonists, I have to write people and creatures that are doing horrific things, and I have to write it in a way that makes sense. And it's it's not easy to do that, when you're because, again, they're they're for adults. I I tackle all sorts of things up to and including rape, crucifixion, suicide, and I have to write these things in brutal detail in a way that actually makes it right for that perspective of that character.
And that's not easy. Also, in wolves and ravens, since that's pure fantasy Mhmm. I'm able to go, like, angels and demons and stuff like that. So and especially with the third book, there's a lot of stuff happening in, like, let's say, the celestial realm. Well, there's a lot of religions out there, and I don't wanna offend a part of the audience. So writing these chapters in a very careful way that I don't either agree with or contradict a religion is tough. That is that is hard.
[01:18:18] Unknown:
Yeah. I I I could understand that. The one thing about my show is, you know, we we don't hold back. We we just if if I offend you, just turn it off. You know, that's all. I I don't really care what you think. You know, just, you know, if if I if I have to say it, I say it like I just did, you know. But, but I understand where you're coming from. Yeah. I, you know, you don't wanna isolate people, and I I get that. You know, I do. I do. Especially when trying to sell books. So Yeah. You know, that that that helps. The one now your stories aren't afraid of shadows.
Moral cost, emotional fallout, why is that important? Why do you include all that?
[01:18:58] Unknown:
Because it's real. And we lack real characters today, you know. The the good guys save the world with a smile on their face, but that's fake. You know? Nobody's immune to stress. You know? People suffer for what they're doing, and it beats them down. And some of my my books are meat grinders and it especially, origins, the second part of the eternal nights prequel. You know, the main characters are a married couple of vampires. Mhmm. And that book starts out, you know, everything's fine. They've got their new life going on. Everything's lovey dovey. And that whole book is just a meat grinder. And as the book goes on, you can see changes in the characters. They're not talking to each other. They're yelling at each other. There's more foul language as, like, the stress keeps building up.
The female character gets the brunt of it, and she has a psychotic break. And I don't wanna spoil anything, but it gets real psychological after that. And that's what happens to real people. Yeah. You know? I mean, there's mental and behavioral health issues out there, and I explore all of them because, like I said, nobody's immune to stress. I think it's fake to have
[01:20:09] Unknown:
characters that are just perfect all of the time. Yeah. No. I agree with you. It it it makes them more relatable.
[01:20:14] Unknown:
Yeah. Exactly. That's also why I I say a more mature audience. I I think anybody would enjoy it. It's just a lot of the concepts won't make as much sense unless somebody's got a little bit more life experience.
[01:20:29] Unknown:
Yeah. No. That makes that makes a lot of sense too. Now I earlier today, I checked out the, the trailer. I love the fact, like I said before, that that you guys have you have trailers up on the website for for the books. That's that's a great idea. I like that, and, and the one that I did watch was about the husband and wife vampires. And it's a that's a fascinating concept. I I love the idea of that, and and these two characters are going through, I think in the clip, it said that they were around for almost a thousand years or so.
[01:20:59] Unknown:
In the yeah. In in the prequel, they're about 900 years old. Okay. In in the real series, they'll be over 2,000.
[01:21:08] Unknown:
Right. And and and the the sense of the whole thing is that they're they're they're they're working together through this, through this eternity that they're spending together, and and I love that. I think that's a great idea, like, I I wasn't expecting that when I when I saw the trailer. So it's it's it's fascinating. I love the idea of that, and I I I'm looking forward to actually reading the book. I'm gonna I'm gonna purchase the book this week, but, I'm I'm really looking for I'm really interested in this. This is this is a great idea for storytelling, and the way that they narrated the story, I'm assuming, I mean, you wrote that, or or did somebody write that?
[01:21:44] Unknown:
I I had as much of a hand as I could Okay. In in, like, the scripts and stuff like that. Okay. The actual creation of the trailer, that was all the publishers. Well, they did a great job, and
[01:21:55] Unknown:
it really caught my it really catches your interest. It's it's a different perspective. It's a different view on this, and I think that yeah. I think it's I I think it's a great idea. So I'm looking forward to reading that one. I'm I'm rambling on it now, but that.
[01:22:08] Unknown:
Well, it's also very relatable. Exactly. Because, I mean, you do wanna have relatable characters. And what do we have in common with a 900 year old vampire with incredible powers and immense wealth? Make them married. Mhmm. Like like the way, and and, again, like I said, like a like a young adult audience, it's not the kind of romance that they're into because they love the love triangles and stuff like that. But it's it's something that, you know, a little bit of an older audience can appreciate. Like, they might be, like, incredibly powerful vampires, but they bicker Right. Yes. Before all the time. And in in in redemption, that's a that's a lot of world building. There's a lot of characters in that book. In origins, the entire book focuses around five people, and that's if you count the bad guys.
And all they're doing is just bickering.
[01:22:58] Unknown:
Like, all of the horrible situations they find themselves in, they just will not stop irritating one another. And I think, that's that's marriage right there. And I'm sure exactly. And and I'm sure it's comical along the way too, you know. So Oh, yeah. So so but but the thing is is and the point you make is, you know, in the young adult series books, I mean, they they're looking for the for those romantic triangles. They're looking for those inter they're looking for the conflict that takes place between multiple, interests, for each other.
This is about this is companionship. Yes. You know, this this is this is what this is what a marriage really is. It's companionship. It's it's it's working through difficult situations and times together, and and I think it's a great idea. It's a it's a it's a novel way to approach it. No no pun intended on the novel.
[01:23:44] Unknown:
Well, I'm I'm very I'm very big on no matter what the situation is, nobody wins alone. Mhmm. So none of my books have a single protagonist. They're either married like they are in eternal nights or in wolves and ravens. They're it's still a couple. Like, they support each other. There's, like, a whole family behind every victory because they they hold each other up. Like, nobody's perfect. You have to have somebody to play off of. Sure. Yeah. I yeah.
[01:24:11] Unknown:
Now what what what what's one I guess I don't know if this is the right word for it, but, was one dark or or morally messy decision your characters face that that you're proud of?
[01:24:31] Unknown:
Morally messy. Or dark Or I think sacrificing other people to win. Okay. It's more in, in wolves and ravens where the main characters, like, the raven queen, so she's in charge of, like, a whole lot more. And wanna in, like, the final battle of the second book, the her entire battle plan is based off of sacrificing hundreds of her own people as bait for the antagonist. Because while the antagonist is taking time slaughtering people, he won't be moving, and they can bring down more,
[01:25:09] Unknown:
I don't wanna spoil it. But Okay. Yeah. That's fair enough. But that that's that's good though. I like that. Now, like we said earlier, you know, you served the military, 80. How did the military shape the way you think about story, about stakes, about consequences, and and things like that?
[01:25:34] Unknown:
I think the biggest difference, after my active service was no longer having any pretense. I don't know if I should blame the military or maybe it was just my age because I I was 18. Okay. So when I left active service, I was, like, 23. So I can either blame the military or I can blame the fact that I was finally an adult. I don't know. But there's no, no pretense, no need to, like, sugarcoat things because, again, it's fake. So just being real about everything. And then it's nice to have that experience to draw from so, like, the fight scenes and action scenes are a little more accurate and realistic.
[01:26:14] Unknown:
Now does you you talk about realism. The the like, how do I I don't think I could phrase the question. You talk about you you mentioned realism, in the in the fight sequences, you know, and I'm I'm assuming that you're drawing from that from from your your training, your combat experience, if any. But does your sense of realism, duty, moral ambiguity ambiguity, you know, slip into your characters?
[01:26:47] Unknown:
Oh, yeah. At at least little bits here and there. I my characters are not mouthpieces for me. Okay. So, like, you know, my characters are all very narcissistic and opinionated, but they're not necessarily my opinions. They're just the characters. But, the the idea of being realistic with every single thing that they do, that's extremely important to me. And I have a unique a unique viewpoint, both from the military experience, being able to make the action sequences brutally detailed and realistic, but also with the mental and behavioral health. I mean, with my own struggles, I'm able to take when the battlefield turns to the psychological and it gets really, really dark, it's real. Mhmm. And I've I've had people comment to me that they were terrified, but loved how it ended, but they were terrified in the leading up to it because of just how brutal it was. Well, I think And and and in wolves and ravens, it goes so far as to, like I I explore suicide, especially in the book that's coming out because it's just so far off the walls.
Like, I explore suicide multiple times in a way that I don't think most people would agree with, but it's true.
[01:28:10] Unknown:
Yeah. Well, I I think that I was gonna say something about it too, and it just slipped my mind. But, I think the realism if you if you if you can generate that type of a response from somebody from from the written word, where people actually feel what these character I mean, that's that to me is is, that's a gift. It's a talent to be able to do that. And, you know, I I I can only think of one time in a in a book that I've read, and this this is a gothic novel, it's an old you know what I'm talking about? You know, Dracula, the original Dracula, Bram Stoker's Dracula, where I read that and I was scared. You know, and, you know, and that's a that's a talent. That that's that's something, you know, you're making people think, you're making people feel through your words. Excuse me, my coffee came up.
The, it's it's it's it's I'm looking forward to reading this, you know, just based on your description of it alone. I'm I'm really looking forward to reading this, and I'm hoping that, you said it's coming at the end of the month?
[01:29:18] Unknown:
Well, the fifth one will be at will be at the end of the month. Okay. The rest of it it's funny that it's funny that you mentioned Dracula. There are some interesting reveals in origins that I actually found amusing to do. But when when you're going with realism, I mean, it must be hard because nobody does it, but it seems incredibly easy. You just you make characters, and you just make them real. They talk real. They think real. Like, I've been criticized for insensitive dialogue. Well, this dialogue is private. You just happen to be reading the story, but the characters don't know you're there. And do you think a husband and a wife that are 900 years old give a crap about political correctness? Yeah. I doubt that. Private conversation.
Yeah. And the thing is those same people who criticize the insensitive dialogue, they tell me how much they love the book. They have no idea that those that that negative thing actually, underline the realism for that. Like, you see things and your main characters, they go stupid for five minutes because they have to for the plot to happen. All of a sudden, they get dumb and they make stupid decisions. Mhmm. But characters drive the plot. So you just let them exist, and the story grows organically.
[01:30:34] Unknown:
Okay. Yeah. And that actually leads to a question that I had for you about your character development. So when you're planning out these books, how do you how do you decide, how do you build a character? How do you put them together? What what's the process behind, creating this whole world? Like, what kind of research do you do? You you know where you know where I'm going? It's it's it's a it's a very detailed process. I I know that because I've I've hosted other other authors, you know, over the over the period of time. And, you know, everybody has a very unique way of doing it. And so what's your process? What's your method for for building this world and and these characters?
[01:31:11] Unknown:
Being insane? I you're you're gonna hate the answer, but No. I'm not gonna hate the answer. Look. Obviously, it's fiction. It's all coming from me somewhere, but it's just there. And, like, I I created the original universe. I created some of the original characters. And ever since, I've just been writing down what they do. I I see it in my head. They they grow organically, and I just write it down. There's like, if you think about all of the artists that we celebrate over the last several hundred years, one of the things they share in common is they were all nuts. Mhmm. I mean, we we see and hear things differently than most people, and you can put it down on the canvas or a block of marble or a blank page to let other people see it.
And as far as the character development, when your characters are real, you don't have to do that. They do it themselves. It's all organic. With the exception of redemption, with that with that book as an exception, no book I've ever written has come out the way I planned it. I spent so long planning Origins. And when I sat down and wrote it, it just didn't go anywhere like what I planned. But I but I loved it. It was better. All my plans went out the window. So I I don't know. I just write stuff. And you don't find that frustrating that when you're writing and and you come up with this this whole plan, this whole layout of where where you're gonna go, what direction you're gonna go, and then it just changes on do do you find that frustrating at all? No. Only because well, when it happened with Origins, it was like a three day span where I was typing, and I don't recollect much of what happened in that three days. It was just over, and I read it, and it was wonderful. And ever since then, I just stopped. Like, I do not do any of the things that I think an author is supposed to do. I have a vague idea of how I want things to end up, but I just write.
And the characters, they find their own way there. And if they don't, I change the plot. You never force characters to obey the plot. That's the opposite of what you're supposed to do. But that's what everybody does these days. My characters just figure stuff out, and then and the antagonists are the same way. So I'll have things like, alright. I want this to happen. But the main characters, they don't fall for it. Or the antagonist, they don't fall for it. Okay. So so, like, you don't you don't outline
[01:33:42] Unknown:
the chapters of the book and and and you you just basically sit down in front of the computer and just write. And however and however it lays out, it lays out.
[01:33:53] Unknown:
The it's like I mean, it's horrifying sometimes. I can't I can't make it stop, like, just the stuff in my head. If I could hypothetically sit down and write uninterrupted, I think I would have to write almost 3,000,000 words to catch up with where my brain is. Wow. All that stuff's already figured out. It just happens. I I I don't know. If I had an explanation, I wouldn't be crazy. You just tell the story. Yeah. I I just I just tell the story, and and it's you're emotionally invested. I mean, I'm emotionally invested. I mean, I'm the one who wrote it. I know what happens. But I read I can read my manuscript, like, a 100 times, and I'll still, like, start crying my eyes out at certain parts. Wow. It's just that that's what happens when the characters are real.
[01:34:49] Unknown:
Wow. Yeah. It makes me think, like, you know, that that that like, you said it earlier too that that a lot of artists over the over the years, over the centuries, you know, probably crazy in a lot of ways, insane. But I was thinking like, you know, Mozart. Right? Yeah. He would write music like it's completely finished with no no corrections, no edits, no changes to it. Almost as if it was completely, played out, written out in his mind, and he's just copying what's on his mind. That that's kinda what I'm getting with you at this point. You're saying something similar to that that these stories are just completed basically. You know you know where you're going with it, and you just sit there, you just transcribe what's going on in your mind.
[01:35:42] Unknown:
Yeah. Exactly. It's, I mean, I still have It's fascinating. I make typos constantly. Well, yeah. Yeah. So it's like, yeah.
[01:35:54] Unknown:
I was gonna say something, but I completely lost it. I don't know what happened. That's alright. I I I go through it too. It's it's like I said, it's Swiss cheese it's becoming Swiss cheese more and more every day. So without spoiling anything, for the for the next book that's coming up the upcoming project, what's the most exciting thing about it for you right now?
[01:36:16] Unknown:
The the third book, Broken Angel for Wolves and Ravens, that was the hardest book I've ever written, including all the ones that haven't been published yet. Because I can if I sit down and type, I can do a 150,000 word manuscript in five weeks. It's not difficult. But it took over a year of active writing to finish Broken Angel because of how well, I mentioned the celestial thing, so that was complicated. But then things just get so dark and, I mean, I guess it doesn't spoil too much because you've got the stuff written on the back cover anyway. So, I mean, if you read the back cover of the series, you're gonna spoil stuff if you don't read the books in order. But the, the main protagonists in wolves and ravens is the raven queen and, her wolf protector. It's a male and a and a female. But, arguably, the main protagonist for the entire trilogy is an angel. She has a very tiny part in the first book. She's a main character in the second book, and the third book is all her.
But she is a mess. Okay. She's so full of anger and hatred and rage. She blames everybody. Every decision she make makes things worse. And in Broken Angels, she's kind of faced with the truth, and she realizes that everything that's happening has been all has been all her fault from the very beginning. And it was just difficult to write that because of how dark it gets. And, you know, so like I said, suicide comes up, and then and these are angelic characters. Mhmm. You know, we think of things like self sacrifice is a positive thing, but at what point does self sacrifice become negative? When self sacrifice crosses into self mutilation, when self sacrifice crosses into suicide because the brain is so broken that you act that she actually believes that creation is better off with her burning in hell.
That's the hero. So it's it's a bit of a, of a journey in that book. And there were times when I just had to stop. I had to stop writing. I had to turn everything off, and I had to calm down. And I would go weeks before going back to the book. It it was it was hard to write. Wow.
[01:38:39] Unknown:
Man, I'm telling you, you you you're spinning a story here, dude. I'm I'm really looking forward to reading this stuff. I I really am. So, so, what what's what's what do you hope the takeaway is from from our conversation tonight? For the audience.
[01:38:55] Unknown:
Yeah. What do you hope the audience walks away from this conversation with? Oh, oh, oh, oh, I thought you meant takeaway takeaway from you. I was like, well, meeting new people. I guess, well, just that if you want entertainment that makes you think and that's actually real, you shouldn't be afraid to want that. You know? You shouldn't be afraid to say, this is all crap. I want something better. I actually had so called professionals, tell me that my books were too cerebral for their genres was how they phrased it. I was like, so you just called the audience stupid. Mhmm. I mean, that's what?
I mean, you're telling you're telling me that you think people are too stupid to understand the books. That's underestimating the audience. That shows you that all this crap that's been shoveled out there for people just isn't smart enough. People people want to think. They they want to be interested, immersed in something completely real to them. Mhmm. And that's what I that's what I try to offer. Right? I want I don't want people to like it. I want people to be emotionally invested. But I want them to to love what's happening. I want them to hate some of the scenes and some of the chapters because of how disgusting and horrific they are, but it's what the stakes are.
[01:40:19] Unknown:
Alright. Is there anything that we haven't talked about tonight that you wanna talk about?
[01:40:24] Unknown:
No. Not really. Okay.
[01:40:27] Unknown:
Alright. Alright. So, so okay. Then who is somebody that you respect right now, and what are they doing that inspires you?
[01:40:37] Unknown:
My wife. Beautiful. The way she's able to manage everything with all the kids that we have and how much we
[01:40:46] Unknown:
have. I know I said it earlier. You have we have four kids. Right? Yeah. I have four daughters,
[01:40:51] Unknown:
and I'm not as much help as I could be. And my wife is like the rock that holds everything together.
[01:40:58] Unknown:
You know, you're you're like the, like, the third person that I've interviewed. I I because I ask everybody that basically the same question, and they're like the third person that that that referenced their wife on that one, and I think that's beautiful. And that that's that's wonderful, and I'm glad you guys have that kind of understanding and partnership with each other that that you could work together like this and and balance it all out. That and that's a beautiful thing. Alright. So, Richard, where can the folks go to find out more stuff about you, about your work? Plug plug away, sir. Plug away.
[01:41:29] Unknown:
Well, my website, wwwrichardspiegel.com, that's the the website you you showed that. There's a lot of content there. My Instagram is richard spiegel books, but the content there is just things that we're funneling from the website. So that's really the best place to go. Alright. There's gonna be a lot more videos uploaded to that, and all the links go to Amazon anyway. Alright. Outstanding.
[01:41:54] Unknown:
And, Richard, what I'd like to do is I wanna get a copy of your of the book, the new one that comes out. And, when I get a copy of that, I'm gonna go through it, I wanna read it, and then I wanna have you come back on again, and we can talk about the book, specifically that book. Because I gotta read through with you first, otherwise the third one's not gonna be as good. Well, I'm I'm gonna get them all eventually, but you know, but I wanna I wanna set up with you in advance here that you're gonna come on and we're gonna talk about at least the last book, since that's the most recent one. We'll we'll mention the other ones, of course, but I I I'm really interested in this third in this in this next book that's coming up because you you touched on a couple of issues that are that are, important to me as well in this. And, particularly, the suicide issue.
So, that's why I'm looking forward to talking to you about that specifically. So let's let's make it a point to do that. You come back on, we'll go through the book together, and, we'll we'll we'll, we'll book you for the full for the full show. This way, there's no time limits.
[01:42:56] Unknown:
Alright? Yeah. No. I I love talking to people that have actually read this stuff, because they don't have to worry about spoiling things. Yeah. No. Of course. Yeah. I I get it. I get it. And, and,
[01:43:05] Unknown:
no normally we try to, but, sometimes things pop up short notice, and we're we're not able to get it all in. But, but Richard, thank you so much for being here tonight. I do appreciate it. I wish you the best with all of the projects that you're working on. And again, thank you for your service, sir. Thank you to your family, and, God bless you, man. Have a great night. Alright. Thanks. It was nice meeting you. Same here. Same here. Talk to you in a bit. Thanks. Alright, folks. Richard Spiegel. So make sure we check out his website, make sure you check him out on socials, and, check out his books, man. I could honestly, you know, he he really told a great story with this, and it really peaked my interest, and I'm definitely gonna check out these books here, and and and get caught up. This way, when we do have them back on again, when the next book comes out, we'll be able to have a more detailed conversation. This is more like a how do you do, how do you get to know you type of conversation that we had. So, and I hope you enjoyed it. I hope it was something that you found interesting and you were able to get something out of it. Alright. Well, with all of that said, what do you say we, what do you say we start to wrap this baby up tonight? Folks, don't forget to head over to our website, joeroos.com, joeroos.com.
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One 73467321476 3278977763 tango 732 Victor 73117888732476789764376. When I have plucked the rose. Teal gray hot. Long and still for that which longer nurseth the disease. In faith, I do not love thee. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day when I have plucked the rose plucked the rose, longing still for that which hunger nurses the disease? In faith, I
[00:03:40] Unknown:
That's an interesting twist. Mhmm.
[00:03:44] Unknown:
Transmitting live from the asylum studios deep in the bowels of Southwest Texas. It's the Joe Rouge Show. The show where we talk about anything and everything, where nothing is sacred, nothing is watered down, and nothing is PC.
[00:04:04] Unknown:
Alright. Hey, folks. This is Joe Ruse, and it is great to be with you once again transmitting live tonight from the Asylum Studios, broadcasting from the pimple on the backside of Texas, the beautiful city of Eagle Pass. And, of course, as always, doing the very best we can to bring you the best quality talk radio we can muster without all the bluster. Welcome to the Joe Ruse Show. Folks, it's great to be with you. It is Wednesday, 11/19/2025, nineteen zero five hours, and this transmission is going out to the entire world through the interweb.
Folks, we got a packed show for you tonight. We have in the first hour, we have Christopher Gerlacher of Prediction News. Second hour, we have our second hour guest in Richard Spiegel, which we're excited to get to. And, we are gonna bring all of that stuff to you here shortly. Now, folks, just, just little programming note. Next week, Thanksgiving week, no shows on, Thursday and Friday next week, and then, we'll be back to our regular schedule the following Monday. No show tomorrow, as you know. That's our usual Thursday schedule. Friday, we're gonna have Bill Ottman from, mines.com, the cofounder and CEO of mines. He'll be joining us, and we're looking forward to talking to Bill too. Been on the Mines platform for a number of years, and, been really excited to, try to, talk to him a little bit about how things are going over there at the platform. So I hope you hopefully, you guys will be able to tune in for that and check it out.
Alright. We have a lot of ground to cover tonight. So we're not gonna spend too much time with our usual chitchat and how do you do's, so we're gonna get right into our sponsors. Now, folks, tonight, our sponsors are brought the show is brought to you by, of course, PodHome dot f m. PodHome is our host audio platform. So, if you're listening on the audio stream, you're listening it you're listening to it through PodHome. Pod Home is the most modern easy to use podcast hosting platform that's out there today. You can use it to publish your ep episodes, enhance your audio, automatically generate chapters, titles, transcripts, show notes. You could even set up chapter art if you wanted to. You know, you could put little pictures for each individual chapter of your show. Now for us, that's that's gonna be a daunting task because we break it up into several different chapters.
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Alright. I think we got all of that stuff covered. So tonight, what we're gonna do tonight is something very interesting. We're going to, dive into the place where money, odds, lawsuits, and elections all kinda bump into each other. My guest tonight is Christopher Gerlacher, a reporter and political analyst with predictionnews.com, and host of the Prediction Market Movers podcast. I think I got that right.
[00:10:49] Unknown:
I think you did too. Okay. Great.
[00:10:51] Unknown:
Alright. Now Chris has spent years tracking how prediction markets react to everything from federal lawsuits to CFTC decisions to real time political bombshells. He's interviewed regulators, platform founders, lawmakers, you know, basically all the people that really do watch politics, through the lens of numbers and incentives. If you've ever wondered why the odds jump every time there's a court ruling, or whether these markets actually tell us something about public sentiment, today is your day to find out. Chris is one of the clearest explainers in the game, and he's here to unpack how prediction markets are shaping politics, business, and even the election cycles.
Chris, great to have you here. I just can't find my pen. That's what I'm looking for all of a sudden here. Pen. Alright. Well, I'm happy to be here. So, you know, it never fails. Something always disappears. It does. Oh, here we go. I will. Alright. As a host myself, I'm happy to kill time until you find the pen. I got it. You know why I I pick on the pen, I I I I I hold it. It's like, it's like a fidget thing, you know. So I hold it, I tap it, I time myself. It's like, you know, when a drummer if you ever watch a drummer play, you know, they're counting time and rhythm. Well, that's what I use this thing for. I count time and rhythm. So that's just my little thing. So anyway, Chris, great to have you here. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. So I wanna ask you just a couple of questions just to kinda throw you off your game a little bit before we get into the really good stuff. Alright? Yeah. Let's do it. So, who is somebody that's past or present that you'd love to sit down and have a two hour coffee with?
[00:12:19] Unknown:
Oh, man. This is gonna be super niche. There's a, there's a, truth and reconciliation commissioner from South Africa named Alex Buren. He's the, dark blue book just above my head. And he was the cochair of the truth and reconciliation commission. So, you know, Nelson Mandela is president, and, of course, you know, he's he's his leadership is crucial to the TRC happening at all. But, Alex Bahrain is, you know, day by day, he's on the commission collecting the victim hearings and overseeing, amnesty or the lack thereof or human rights abusers from the apartheid era. And, you know, we look back on the TRC as this kind of beautiful moment of of forgiveness and reconciliation, but at the time, it was a lot more controversial than that. There were a lot of people who were like, why aren't why isn't everyone from the old regime just going into prison?
You know, why are we having this at all? But there is this big trade off between getting information about how the government worked at the height of the debt squad activity in the eighties and, you know, trying to basically trade for information because a lot of it was destroyed in the immediate aftermath of apartheid's fall. So, yeah, I wanna have coffee with Alex Borrain, talk about, you know, how we navigated those challenges and talk about what forgiveness looks like and what it doesn't look like in real life, and get, you know, real deep into some of those conversations. Well, that's pretty interesting. I I I wasn't expecting that. I was expecting to say me, but that's okay. I get it. I understand. No. Tom. I'm I'm just Tom's coffee. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. So, alright. So what's your go to,
[00:13:56] Unknown:
thing, item, drink, whatever it is to help you unwind at the end of the day?
[00:14:00] Unknown:
I've got a classical guitar down in the basement of my house. That's my, yeah. I'll try and kill an hour with that. I love the puzzle of of classical guitar. I mean, everyone's acoustic or electric usually, but on classical, you're playing the bass line and the melody on top of each other. So it's like a piano you can stick in a bag on your back.
[00:14:17] Unknown:
So I like the cool rhythmic stuff you can do with it, and I like the the challenge of it. Yeah. I'm actually familiar with classical guitar. I I've never played, but I I know people who actually do play. So, that was one of my pandemic hobbies for sure. Oh, nice. Nice. Well, that's a good that's a good way to spend your time. For sure. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So, alright. So prediction markets. Alright. Oh, and by the way folks, if you haven't checked out his podcast, you need to check out his podcast. I listened to a couple of your episodes, and, but really good stuff. A little some of it's a little technical, you know, and so if you're not really too familiar with with, prediction markets or the markets in general, this might it might be a little daunting of a task, but the way the way you break down the information on your shows really helps you understand the flow of the conversation pretty quickly, and that's that's great. And, so I would encourage anybody who's interested in this to to head over and check out your podcast. And you're on all the podcast platforms?
[00:15:11] Unknown:
Yeah. All the standard ones, Apple, Spotify,
[00:15:14] Unknown:
wherever you get your podcast. Outstanding. Outstanding. Alright. So why don't you why don't you start us off with explaining a little bit about what prediction markets are. Try to and and, you know, try to do it in a way like if you were hanging out in the backyard at a barbecue or something. You know, just, just how would you explain it to people to make it work for them?
[00:15:34] Unknown:
Sure. Prediction markets where you can bet on anything, pretty much. If you think there's an event that's going to happen, you can put money on it. And the thing that makes it a prediction market is the price of the contract. So if you're just, you know, betting on whether Trump or Harris is gonna win the twenty twenty four election, if Trump is trading at 60¢ a contract, then there's a 60% chance that he wins the election, maybe in, say, mid October. Okay. But that's, that's the gist of it. You're you're buying and selling these contracts, and the odds of an event happening are set by market demand. They're set by traders. A valuable contract is one that's probably gonna pay out and one that, traders want a lot of. That's what shoots the, the price so high. And if an event's probably not gonna happen, if you're gonna lose all your money if you trade on it, the price is real low. And so you get these cool market forces that, you know, help you forecast some of these events.
[00:16:34] Unknown:
Alright. And now, earlier before before the show, we were we were chatting a little bit, and I had asked you, and I I had mentioned to you that I wanted to ask about this on the show. Do you think that that when when people look at things like, these prediction markets, like and and especially sites like Poly Market and Kalshi, do you think that that watching how the the trend is going for each particular candidate for, speaking like an election cycle, do you think that that plays on people's minds and and kinda directs or influences people the way they vote? Or has the potential to?
[00:17:07] Unknown:
I'm skeptical of it. So if you go back we were talking about this too. 2015, 2016, Bernie Sanders is challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. He's catching the populist wave that she spends, you know, the year and a half campaigning really missing. And his ground game in those early primary states, it looks really good. He's got the volunteers. He's got the people knocking on doors, the bumper stickers, lawn signs, local media. He's visible in the states he's campaigning in. Hillary Clinton is taking a different tack, which actually worked really well for her in the primary. She, she had this really data driven approach where Robbie Mook, her campaign manager, is looking at these states, and he's looking he's trying to reel in ad spend and Okay. Spend as little as possible for the maximum number of votes. But he's not as visible. Clinton is not as visible, in those states. And I think the prediction markets are kind of a modern version of that. I think Mount Downey going on Andrew Schultz's podcast and saying, you know, Calcio's got me at 80% or laughing about it and acknowledging it. I think that's what one of the things that a strong ground game and what a lot of momentum looks like today. And the thing about those odds is they're not static. If you watch the presidential debates, the vice presidential debates, those odds move in real time. They move immediately.
So when Kamala Harris has that stronger performance, especially on, the abortion answer where Biden began to really flub in his debate against Trump, You see her odds move and improve in real time. Mhmm. So those are that's my thoughts about how it influences. Yes. It show I think it shows you a better state of the race than it does change the race.
[00:18:51] Unknown:
I gotcha. Now, now this isn't this isn't gambling. Right? So so for people who never touched a prediction market, what's the what's, I guess, the, I guess, the moment that helps them to understand that this isn't gambling, that it's entirely something else?
[00:19:09] Unknown:
That's complicated because we've moved into things from forecasting events or from hedging, against really niche risks to also offering sports. So there's a mix of contracts that are, you know, a lot more heavily for entertainment and some that queue a lot more closely to the original, you know, hedging against risk or forecasting events that are difficult to quantify. And all these markets, yes, they create forecasts. Yes, they let you hedge. They also are all powered by speculators, by gambling activity. So you still have to kind of watch yourself and reel yourself in if you find yourself, spending too much on these contracts. That's kind of a thorny issue in the industry right now, even though it's housed under finance.
[00:20:01] Unknown:
Now and what was that what was the moment that that, I guess, that you realized that that that prediction markets aren't just, like, hobbyist gambling. They're actually shaping political conversation.
[00:20:12] Unknown:
I think you can go back to the twenty twenty two midterms for me was where I was still covering the gambling industry. I used to be a sports betting reporter, and I'm looking at a site called PredictIt. It's a smaller academic platform. There are a couple of these, but, you know, they're offering these election trades kind of like what Calcium and PolyMarketer are offering. They were just doing it on a smaller website with, lower position limits to keep everything pretty small scale and and justify that it's an academic platform. But I was watching them leading up to the midterms because at that point, we'd had two presidential cycles where Trump's support was underestimated twice in a row. And twenty twenty two, Dobbs was overturned.
Abortion goes back to The States and becomes this really important issue that ranks with the economy in many polls in terms of what voters are voting on or why they're making the choices they're making. So I wanted to get I wanted to, you know, something else to check the polls. I hadn't lost all faith in polls per se, but I needed a check and something else to tell me what was going on. So that was my moment where the midterms and, of course, I covered the twenty twenty four elections as Calsy won its rights to offer commercially
[00:21:30] Unknown:
available election contracts. Okay. So that's how I've slowly came into prediction markets. Now, well, we were talking about, and you mentioned, you know, watching things unfold in real time. Right? What's the very what's the what's the, I guess, what's the first signal or the or or the first indicator that you look for in the markets to know that something that there's gonna be a big shift coming or something's about to shift big. Mhmm.
[00:21:56] Unknown:
Well, if you think something is about to shift big, you'll see a flurry of live trading activity right before a major event. So if you look at the, Jay Jones race, was he Virginia attorney general? Right? Mhmm. He he's running at about, you know, forty, sixty against him, give or take, in the day leading up to the election. The other Democrats look like they're pretty safe. There's some anti Trump sentiment. There's some economic struggles they can run on. This was still in the middle of the government shutdown, so they've got some wind at their back. Jay Jones is lagging behind all the other Democrats from that texting scandal that that broke at the October, I believe.
Early results come in around 03:00 eastern, and he jumps up to 60%. You see high early voting activity in Virginia that day. And with the new coalitions, early voting and off year elections tend to be really good for Democrats. They've got those old they've got those older voters in their base now that are that are primarily there. And as young men in particular have drifted toward the Republican Party, those older, more engaged off year voters, they tend to be Democratic voters. So, seeing them come out on mass and, boost Jay Jones, well, they were they were assumed to benefit him, and that ended up being, that ended up being what happened in the attorney general's race.
[00:23:25] Unknown:
Alright. Now, we also talked a little bit before the show about regulators, lawsuits. I mentioned to you CFTC, drama. Yes. You know, you've you've covered, the the big fights between, prediction companies and and the and the CFTC. First of all, explain who the CFT is, the CFTC is, and, and the role that they take in the prediction market.
[00:23:53] Unknown:
Sure. The CFTC, it's a regulatory agency founded in 1974. We've had derivatives in this country since after the civil war. Traders would or farmers, you know, their harvest can go really well. It can go very poorly. In the era of railroads, they were really subject to local markets, and that could wreak havoc on the prices they could sell at. So derivatives gave them a way to get some price stability. They knew they were gonna make a certain amount of money at the end, of their season. They add some cash that could come in, if they made a correct prediction on a traditional derivative, if, you know, the harvest just was a disaster or something rotted in storage or something went wrong in the middle of of of all these issues.
Fast forward to the seventies and eighties. It's not just agricultural products anymore. You can have a derivative based on, the weather. So you get national hurricane index futures, these really exotic, derivatives that don't have to be just on agriculture or commodities or metals or any of those things anymore. Once you hit, like, the mid eighties with, like, crop yields, you know, you're looking at contracts that are asking, you know, whether this acre of land is gonna produce this much corn. And you've moved far away from money at this point. And you get to the 2 thousands, that's where you get the yes, no, will these events happen type of contracts.
So the CFTC oversees the older traditional derivatives, but they also see these more exotic contracts. And the type of contracts that are traded on prediction markets fall under that CFTC umbrella. And then you what was the second part of your question? I got lost in financial history.
[00:25:45] Unknown:
Well, it was, what the CFTC was and then, and and the role that they play in the prediction market. So they're watching for fraud and manipulation.
[00:25:54] Unknown:
If you look at some of the midterm markets now, something on, like, I don't know, the Arizona fifth district house race in 2026. We're a year out from the midterm, so there is not a lot of money in any of those markets. So if you make one big trade, you can just shoot the price up up and down just very abruptly. And in a low market, or in a low volume market, you can do that because you have all the money. In a large market with a lot of trade volume, prices move based on what traders are willing to pay for it. You can't just become the market black hole and suck the price toward what you want it to be.
The CFTC watches markets for dishonest ways to try and set a market price instead of having a price set by the market.
[00:26:41] Unknown:
Okay. So, so what what's the what's the disagreement, between prediction companies and the CFTC? Is it, is it just control? Is it ethics? Is it, you know, bureaucratic inertia? You know, what what is it?
[00:26:57] Unknown:
Well, they're it's not so much the prediction market companies and the CFTC. It's more against the states and the prediction market companies with the CFTC sitting over here on the sideline. So and to I'll go back to '23. Kalshi did sue the CFTC in 2023 so that it could offer political contracts. It said, look. This is not prohibited in any of your regulations. It's not prohibited in any of your laws. Elections are serious events with financial consequences. We should be able to offer contracts on them. And the then chair of the CFTC said, no. You can't. This is gaming. This is just election betting, but housed under finance.
Kalshi won that lawsuit. The judge sided with them saying, well, elections aren't games, so their election contracts cannot be gaming, which is prohibited, under something called the special rule. One of the laws, one of the regulations the CFTC has to follow. So that's how you get election contracts initially. Fast forward to Christmas, Christmas weekend twenty twenty four, crypto.com self certifies, sports contracts. So they create a filing saying, hey, CFTC, we're gonna start offering this product. And the self certification lets the CFTC either just let it happen or they can come from behind and say, no. We're gonna review this and and stop this. Well, the CFTC tried to stop it five days before Trump took office.
They asked crypto.com to take the sports contracts down, and crypto.com just flat out said no. There's gonna be a new CFTC in five days. They they should make this decision. And after Trump takes office, after there's some regulatory clarity there about allowing sports contracts, Calshi launches their sports contracts. They launch contracts on the winner of the Super Bowl. And later, they would go on to offer contracts on game point spreads, game winners, some over unders. They just introduced NBA player props. And there's another industry that worked very, very hard to offer those types of transactions.
In 2018, the Supreme Court says, hey, states. We're overturning PASPA. You now have the right, if you choose, to regulate sports betting. So since 2018, states have been one by one regulating sports betting, deciding to legalize it, create a regulatory framework around it. Mhmm. And, traditionally, the gambling regulator you're subjected to is your state. So now you've got these two opposing forces. You've got the prediction market platforms housed under the CFTC, 50 state access, offering sports contracts. You've also got these states saying, hey. We've been regulating gambling for decades, and we've been regulating sports betting since 2018.
You're offering an identical product that we're offering, and we can't tax you on it. What are you doing? So that's the zero sum game that's getting played out between state attorneys general, state gaming commissions, and these prediction market platforms.
[00:30:07] Unknown:
Wow. That that's a lot. It is. It's the best. That that is that is a lot. It ate my summer. I'm sure it did. I mean, it just yeah. I got a headache just from that. I can only imagine when you really get because you get you really dive into this stuff a lot more detail than what you just gave us. There's so much more in the background that that that we don't really the average person doesn't understand. So, you know, for for so for people who don't speak regulator, you know, what's the biggest misunderstanding about why prediction markets keep ending up in federal court?
[00:30:43] Unknown:
One of the biggest disagreements is about one word in federal law, and that word is gaming. After the financial crisis, there is an amendment to, the Commodity Exchange Act. It's a federal law. It's been governing these types of contracts since 1930. So burial law, and it just says, hey. There are certain things you cannot offer event contracts on. War, terrorism, assassinations, gaming. And the CFTC wrote a rule saying, we're just gonna prohibit all of these categories of contracts. So there's a statute and there's a rule. Everybody seems to agree that we don't want gaming on federal exchanges. Okay. Here's the problem.
Nobody defined gaming.
[00:31:28] Unknown:
Right? Well, that that would help, wouldn't it though?
[00:31:31] Unknown:
It would. They tried. The CFTC proposed a rule and never passed. And this was in the twenty twenties, I believe. But there is no single definition of gaming. And so, you have some lawyers who say the, the CFTC has already reviewed these contracts when they made this rule. There are other largely CFTC lawyers who say, no. The CFTC still has the option to review these contracts. And if they don't do anything about it, they're on a regulated exchange. They're legal. They're fine. Leave them alone. The states can't touch them. So that's that's probably the big crux of the issue right now that it's being played out in state courts, but it's all over this one fairly minute point that could go all the way to the Supreme Court. Gaming.
[00:32:19] Unknown:
Defining gaming. That that's ridiculous.
[00:32:23] Unknown:
Well, the other thing too, and I was a little bit surprised that there was no, like, CEA amendment in the government shutdown funding bill and the continuing resolution. Because we I mean, we cover the court cases because they're they're public, and, each one tells you a little bit about what could potentially happen in, you know, six months, a year, whatever it is. But there's also congress. And Donald Trump junior is he's an adviser to Calcium Polymarket. I don't know what the details of that are. CBS morning just tried to ask, and we just know that he advises. So we we don't have details there. But Okay. If I am Calshe, if I am Polymarket, I want, you know, I want to kind of wrangle the Republicans in Congress while I know that there's a Republican majority in Congress to amend the CEA to allow for sports contracts.
So you could I mean, I wouldn't be surprised to see that kinda sneak its way through, not just a Republican controlled congress, but one that Trump still has a very powerful grip on. I'm not saying that's what's happening, but Yeah. No. I get you. Yeah. If I'm but if I'm on the prediction market platforms, I just want congress to make this, legal issue go away. Because if Congress says sports contracts are fine, then the courts say, well, we we know what Congress' intent was now.
[00:33:42] Unknown:
Well, then and that makes sense. Or arcane issues go away as well. Yeah. No. That makes sense. Now, when so when a new lawsuit drops, what's the first thing that you look for, or you look to understand about how serious it really is?
[00:33:55] Unknown:
I'm looking at who is bringing it. So is it, you know, a state gaming commission saying, hey, you're violating state law, and whether it's an argument that has gained traction in other courts, or is it something like the statute of end cases, which is an old law that comes, I think, originally from English parliament that was carried over, into some early American law. But, I don't think that's those cases are gonna go anywhere. Those, in my mind, still are still at least miscellaneous. They haven't gotten any traction. You know, those are not the things imperiling sports contracts.
So who's bringing in in just the high level structure of it still can tell you a lot even at this early stage.
[00:34:38] Unknown:
Right now, you mentioned earlier that, you mentioned PredictIt earlier, and, and and you covered the the twenty two midterms using predicted. What did those markets show you, about voter sentiment that traditional polling, you know, didn't or wouldn't?
[00:34:59] Unknown:
It shows you what an event is that can realistically move the odds and, you know, when a news event really is gonna move the electorate. So if you go back to early well, mid twenty twenty two, there was the leak of the Supreme Court case, the draft opinion that was gonna overturn Dobbs, turn abortion back to the states. Right. That shot through the markets, very hard. That was a big push for, you know, more democratic turnout and greater democratic victory in the midterms. So odds of them flipping the house, and I believe the senate as well both went up. When the opinion actually dropped, the markets didn't move.
Right? The effect was done. The the right. So that's where you get to see what an event is that actually moves voters and what doesn't. And there's this great line. There's a book called Shattered Over Here. It recounts Hillary Clinton's campaign and and how she lost, and there's this great line near the end of it. It's in the context of Trump's, Access Hollywood tape. And, you know, at the time, a a lot of mainstream news is asking, oh, is this gonna be the thing that finally breaks Republicans from him and syncs him with voters? And the line that these authors write is I'm paraphrasing, but it's like, voters can tell the difference between what offends them and what affects them.
And I have not stopped thinking about it. And I think that's something you can see reflected in not only Trump's ongoing immunity to scandal, but also you can see it in the markets. You know, is the next PR scandal or the next political story going to realistically affect his odds or the Republican party's odds in a way that breaks from, you know, the the pattern of, the previous news stories.
[00:36:48] Unknown:
That's a lot too. You know, it, like Yeah. And and I'm I'm I'm a little slow on responding because, you know, this is this is new to me. You know, I I know the basics of the whole thing, so I'm a little slow on on picking it up, and responding to it because I'm thinking I'm trying to digest everything you just threw at me. And I'm I also noticed too, I I just saw your article here. We're gonna come to that one. We're gonna go into some, we're gonna talk about some sports, sports betting and state level stuff in a little bit, but I saw your piece here on prediction news, so I'm gonna bring that up in a little bit. And so that kinda distracted me also. Sorry. Now, let's see.
I I guess talking about the campaigns and political strategists, do you think they're paying attention to these markets behind the scenes even if they wanna admit it to it publicly?
[00:37:33] Unknown:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, Trump's team was watching Kalshi on election night, and, one of my, folks I talked to on the podcast is Damon Thayer. He's a Republican from Kentucky, former senate majority leader, in the Kentucky state house. And, you know, as an operative, he he was even paying attention to what the odds are saying because it's another check on the political polls. Maybe the pollsters wait something inaccurately or they're working with an old assumption that just doesn't track, but the prediction markets are right up to date. You don't have have to wait three days or a week to conduct a poll. You can just wait and see what the odds are today. Yeah. You may start to go figure out why that's the case. That's a separate project, but you always have up to the date information when you have a prediction market in front of you. Now you mentioned earlier, you talked about, crypto.com
[00:38:26] Unknown:
or that, they filed this, the sports contract contracts, with the CFTC. When that happened, what what was, I guess, what did that moment signal to you about where these markets are going?
[00:38:42] Unknown:
There is a long standing mission in, at least, modern finance to democratize finance. You you hear this phrase all the time. You follow Robinhood, crypto folks. You wanna give lots of people access to every financial tool you can, every market you can. And this was an inevitable crossover between something that, you know, gambling platforms traditionally offered, more for entertainment. But the end goal, not necessarily for one company, it's not necessarily something that happens in the next four years, But the end goal of the industry is this kind of everything app where you can have your serious stocks, bonds, investments, you know, on one hand and just right next to them have your sports wagers, your sports trades, your more entertainment fun markets. Just putting everything in one place.
So that to me was this big step in this larger overarching project that the industry is pursuing even if a lot of the players are doing so tacitly.
[00:39:47] Unknown:
Now do you do you think, or do you see crypto based prediction markets becoming the normal? Or, do you think the regulators are gonna eventually cut that off?
[00:39:55] Unknown:
No. Prediction markets are here to stay. They I mean, even the last CFTC chairman, he just drew a line at a certain subject of event contracts. He obviously wasn't gonna let sports pass, and he was blocking, the political markets. But, I mean, he approved Calsy's clearing house, I think, months before they went into court together. And while the lawsuit was active and, you know, Calsy still grew during that time. So, you know, even the people who are thinking about guardrails for prediction markets aren't necessarily anti prediction market altogether. And you're seeing, you know, not just Republicans and Trump's team being enthusiastic about prediction markets. Richie Torres, progressive Democrat out of New York in the house. He was praising prediction markets as well for their accuracy over the polls and for showing Trump's lead earlier than the polls did or just showing them at all.
So prediction markets probably have a bright future even if there are future guardrails on it or even if, like, the prop bets go away. You'll still see a place for them in a lot of traditional political reporting as well.
[00:40:58] Unknown:
Alright. Now, I wanna I wanna talk about sports betting because, like I said, I I I saw your article here. I'm gonna pull this up. I'm gonna screen share this. Let's talk about this particular article for a little bit. So, the CFTC chair nominee Mike Selig deferring to courts on sports contracts. So give us give us the rundown on this.
[00:41:16] Unknown:
Sure. So this guy, Mike Selig, he is the second person Trump has nominated to chair the CFTC. And, obviously, the CFTC is about to have this really big expansion of its responsibilities. There's that crypto legislation working through congress, the couple of crypto bills that are on the way through, and they're gonna make the CFTC regulate those products. So that's a big project they have coming up. Additionally, the CFTC has to oversee some of its most prominent, companies under its purview offering sports contracts and getting into lawsuits with large portions of the country and states and tribes alike over the this issue of gaming. And the CFTC has not weighed in yet on how they feel about sports contracts. There have been some little things here and there, but no one's taken a strong position or filed a friend of the court filing to say, hey. We, the CFTC, sign off on this, and the states need to back up.
So one of the interesting things is, what does Mike Selleck think about sports? What does this guy wanna say about them? And he just kept saying over and over again, it's for the courts to decide. He's gonna follow the courts. So he is he spent his hearing not getting embroiled in that controversy, which does I mean, it tells you a little bit. There's an old letter he worked on as a lawyer arguing that, sports contracts should not be prohibited by the CFTC because sports contracts are not gaming. In his view, gaming seems to be just the traditional gambling games, roulette, you know, slots, those kinds of things.
So he, he if you like sports contracts, you should probably feel pretty good about Mike Selig. I've heard his last name pronounced Selig and Selig, so I I'm switching too. But That's okay. Yeah. I know. One of those names I've largely read and and not heard, but, that's kind of the big unanswered question that we're waiting for him to answer as CFTC chair.
[00:43:22] Unknown:
Alright.
[00:43:23] Unknown:
But he's looking good. The last guy, I think the the Winklevoss twins seem to, have lobbied to have him removed from consideration. So that was a whole piece of drama too. Brian
[00:43:34] Unknown:
Brian Quintenz. Quintenz. Yeah. There he is. Alright. And so, folks, if you wanna check out the article, this is on predictionnews.com. This is, this is Chris's article, and, you should definitely check this thing out. I gotta read it a little bit more detail later. Like I said, I I didn't see it until I was talking to you here just now.
[00:43:53] Unknown:
I didn't write it until about, you know, 02:00 my time. So I I think that's probably
[00:43:59] Unknown:
01:00 my time. It was late in the afternoon, anyway. Yeah. Well, yeah, I'm an hour behind you. So Yeah. Alright. Alright. So, now, you you know, you started out by covering sports betting. What lessons did you get from that? Or what or I should say, what lessons pop up again and again in prediction markets today? Lessons in terms of Lessons from that world in sport in the world of sports betting. What what what pops up again and again in the prediction markets today? Mhmm. What have you learned?
[00:44:34] Unknown:
I think one of the most dangerous things for prediction market platforms is not The States, it's not the tribes. It's being slow to react on problem gambling, problem trading, that family of issues. There was a case in and I don't remember the year of this. I think it was in the nineteen nineties, but I could be wrong, in New Jersey. Woman left her kid in the car, went to go play slots for a few hours,
[00:45:02] Unknown:
came back, and and the kid died in the car. It was this horrific I do remember that. Yeah. That was that was a horrible story. Yeah. I remember that. Yeah. And
[00:45:10] Unknown:
that came up decades later when New Jersey had gaming expansion on the table. So those stories, they affect people. They have staying power. So if Kalshi or Polymarket has to worry about, you know, something like that Robinhood trader who was 19 and killed himself because he saw this big drop in his portfolio value. Those are the kinds of trapdoors lying in wait for platforms making these rapid expansions into casual trading. Mhmm. I mean, on the one hand, the I mean, yes. You get the forecast. You get the hedging utility. You get these, you know, this ability to, you know, hedge risk on anything.
You also have people who use these platforms as gambling platforms even though that's not what they're actually for. That's not their intended purpose. So I I think if they get pretty not necessarily aggressive, just proactive on, you know, a little prompt saying, hey. You're trading more than your usual volume or, you know, do you wanna take a break? Do you wanna stop? And, you know, taking some of those proactive steps. And Kalshi's got a help section where you can set trading limits, time limits, and those kinds of things. So there's already a suite of responsible gaming tools and responsible trading tools, but the CFTC is probably not gonna make them do that as first priority. So if the industry voluntarily keeps up with this issue and is proactive about this, I think they can avoid those trapdoors looking for them.
But that that is a a strong lesson from, gambling expansion and, you know, state gambling proper is that these types of horror stories have, you know, the kind of negative PR that literally last decades.
[00:46:56] Unknown:
Now you now you've you've dug into, state spending on responsible gambling. Yes. To you, what's what's probably the most surprising thing that you uncovered about how states use, or in a lot of cases, waste, those funds.
[00:47:12] Unknown:
How little of it goes to problem gambling?
[00:47:15] Unknown:
There you go. This was one of, I think it's one of my last,
[00:47:18] Unknown:
big stories when I was covering, the gambling industry proper. But, there's this great, report that that's come out a a few years ago. And, this is an organization that I mean, they take surveys from people within the state government and the state house who's actually allocating and spending and and tracking the actual expenditures. Right? And there is an enormous difference between the money set aside for problem gambling programs and the money spent on it. Now some states do very well and spend, you know, 95 something percent of you know, they get within a rounding error of what they should be spending it on. Other states, they'll pay for the billboards and the helpline, but then they'll go fill in some budget gap they have in the general fund, and that money effectively just disappears.
It solves some balance sheet issue, but the number of states like Kansas that'll look like they're putting aside a lot of responsible gambling money on paper and then just fill in their balance sheet elsewhere, that's, that that does undermine the, at least, state commitment in certain states, to, you know, their commitment to addressing problem gambling.
[00:48:28] Unknown:
Alright. Now now over over the course of your career, right, you've interviewed regulators, founders, analysts. People basically see the world, differently, in in all different ways. Which interview really changed your perspective the most?
[00:48:48] Unknown:
It was probably, Tarek Mansour's interview. I interviewed him twice, I think, in 2022 and 2023, but fairly early on. It's between Calshi launching and in between the big mainstreaming of prediction markets. And the way he looks at the world, he looks at everything as, you know, something you can hedge against in your portfolio. He used to work at, I think, Citadel. And I think during the, you know, twenty sixteen election, there would be big investors coming to these big financial firms saying, hey. You know, we don't know who's gonna be president yet. We wanted we want our portfolios to do well no matter who's president. How can we come out ahead whoever wins?
And they put together some, you know, a pile of stocks that should do well if Trump wins, something that should go up if Clinton wins. And, you know, they short a lot of them would short the S and P five hundred. Stock's gonna do worse if, Trump becomes president. When Trump became president, S and P five hundred went up. Yeah. So they were just flat wrong. So you can't really predict with great reliable accuracy how, you know, how markets are gonna react to different events. Direct's insight was, well, just trade on the event itself. Will this happen? Yes or no? And you can do that on anything.
It is the next natural step in derivatives as they become more exotic, as become more retail friendly, as they allow you to hedge against new risk. And that's really at the core of Kalshi's mission is to, you know, offer a way to offset any risk no matter how niche. The more niche, the better in their view. Right? Yeah. And that's where you get that zero sum game with states because the states have seen how far they've come in saying you know, they're saying, hey. You're offering what we're offering. What gives? And, Kalshi, not unreasonably, says, well, you know, the CFTC has kept letting different companies offer products to bring in new traders and hedge new risk for decades. Why would they stop at us, and why should we stop? Yeah. No. Okay. That's philosophical, you know, more interesting, I think, underpinning of the actual issues in court. But No. I gotcha. I did like talking to him a lot.
[00:50:58] Unknown:
Yeah. That's good. We all have our favorites. I know. We all do. We we're not allowed to admit that though as hosts because, you know, you know, you know you know what I'm talking about. You're a podcast host yourself. You can't admit that you have favorites, but we all do. So look looking ahead, what's what's the, I guess, what's the sleeper issue in prediction markets? You know, the thing that no one's talking about right now, but everyone will be talking about maybe a year from now.
[00:51:21] Unknown:
Oh, I think I do think it's that responsible trading fault line. I think, the finance industry has not had to directly confront this because I mean, who are the big financial traders? They're big companies. They've got entire teams looking at, you know, how are you hedging risk? How are derivatives performing? You know, if one goes up, is the other going down? And are we actually remaining level? The retail trading and the expansion of it throughout the two thousands, that is recent. And as you bring in more regular people who may not be educated about how to use these to offset risk or to, you know, earn interest on or who just wanna use it as their own, you know, gaming platform, they're, you know the responsible gaming conversation has come to finance. And I don't think finance has had to be ready for that in the past, but like I said earlier, they have to look at Square in the face or the backlash is gonna be real ugly against them. Okay.
[00:52:18] Unknown:
So what do you what do you hope that the audience takes away from this conversation today?
[00:52:24] Unknown:
The political prediction markets are a great way to track the race, I think. They're a great way to punch through punditry or at least narrow down which pundits seem to be talking in the right direction and have their finger on the pulse of where the electorate is. I mean, it's so easy to, you know, look at a poll and look at a favorite candidate and just tell the story that you wanna tell or create the poll that you wanna create. There are people of all political persuasions betting in these markets and who are making these trades. And they've all got skin in the game. You know, they're the ones who lose money if they're wrong. There is a strong motivation to win here. And so the prediction markets are a really good check, even if you like the pun that you listen to or you don't. I think they're really good reference points. They're gonna be really valuable going into 2026.
[00:53:10] Unknown:
Alright. Here here here's the here's the favorite question of every podcast host. Is there anything we haven't covered today that you wanna share?
[00:53:18] Unknown:
The the only thing I'd add this is something that drives me crazy in the industry. A lot of peep another one of these phrases that gets thrown around is wisdom of crowds. You get a bunch of people together. They're all suddenly right just because they're in a group. And, I mean, we've all seen group think before. You can you can get a dumb crowd together and then you have group thing. That's not helpful. So there are four way or four things you need for a wise crowd. You need diversity of opinion. Do You have a lunatic on one side. You need somebody else to cancel that guy out. Right? And you do that at scale, and that's where you get your accurate forecast. You need people who are making their own decisions independently. You don't want a bunch of copy trading. Otherwise, you heard.
And you want people bringing in their local knowledge. So, you know, if you're in Suburban Denver and you see a lot more Trump support than the polls are revealing, then, you know, you should be trading on that, and and that helps move the price as well. And finally, you need a way to bring all of those insights together, and prediction markets do that naturally. They're the platform for that. So when you hear people, at least on prediction market Twitter or x talking about, you know, the importance of trading volume and the wisdom of crowds, You know, you wanna make sure they're referring to markets where there is a lot of trading going on, where there are a lot of different participants coming together from all over the country and now all over the world, in in recent months.
You you don't want just a little bubble of an exchange with with some tiny number of traders.
[00:54:45] Unknown:
Alright. Now so who's somebody that you respect right now, and what are they doing that inspires you?
[00:54:54] Unknown:
It's gonna be anybody inside or outside? Anybody.
[00:54:57] Unknown:
Alive or dead? Alive or dead. Alive or dead. Well, if they're if they're dead, that means they're not doing anything right now to inspire you unless, you know, being dead inspires you. I don't know. No.
[00:55:08] Unknown:
No. I, I had a pretty good year. That that that would not that would not inspire me. I'm thinking about, Masia Linejad right now. She's do you know her? No. I'm not familiar. Okay. She is this, incredible Iranian journalist, and her she's fighting for women's rights in Iran. Okay. And she just won her court case a few weeks ago against two hitmen who came to her apartment in Brooklyn. And the only reason she's alive today is because she didn't answer the door when they knocked.
[00:55:39] Unknown:
Okay.
[00:55:40] Unknown:
And that was about two years ago now or that was in 2022. So three years ago. She has this attempted attempt on her life from the Iranian regime hiring, like, Eastern European assassins. And just a couple weeks ago, both those men got twenty five years in prison. Oh, wow. And she celebrated, and it was a great day for dissidents all over the world. That's huge. And the next thing she did was fly to Spain and meet with the opposition leader living in exile from Venezuela. And then she flew to Berlin for this World Council of Dissidents, where all these people from all over the world gathered together, who are fighting against authoritarianism back home in their countries. Wow. And they're all getting together in Berlin and basically swapping notes and inspiring one another. And, I mean, that's the kind of stuff that gets me excited. So watching, you know, people like Masi Linejad just live and fight. I mean,
[00:56:30] Unknown:
how could you not wake up in the morning when you can see what she's doing on earth? No. You know what? I I don't know who she is, and I would love to know more about her. So I'm gonna I'm gonna check her out a little bit. And, you know, that's that's that's a great story. That that's an amazing story. Like, like, why but but do do you like, why did she not open the door? Like, did she have an idea that this was,
[00:56:51] Unknown:
a hit? Or It looks sketchy and, I mean, there have been kidnapping attempts from the Iranian regime as well, in previous years. So she's been I mean, she's been living under threat for a very long time. I see. Yeah. Lydia Cacho, journalist from Mexico, also amazing, incredible human rights worker. I know her name. Yeah. Oh, yeah. She's great. So, yeah. People like that who are who are fighting the good fight in against, you know, governments that we're we're obviously hostile to and who are hostile to us, but it's cool to see that, you know, countries are a country's people are not just their
[00:57:25] Unknown:
governments. They're also some of their greatest dissidents. Yeah. That that I agree with you. That's very true. That's very true. Alright, sir. So, where can the audience go to find out more about you and follow your work? Yeah. Check out predictionnews.com
[00:57:37] Unknown:
if you wanna cover our reporting. We're also ramping up our political reporting using prediction markets to tell the story of the midterms coming up this year, so you can watch for that. You can follow me on x at Gerlacher c. You can follow, our site at prediction news, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel at prediction news if you want that real inside baseball look at prediction market industry. Awesome. Well, I am following you on x.
[00:57:59] Unknown:
So I'll be looking for you on, you guys gotta do a rumble channel. You gotta you gotta do a rumble channel, dude. I'll pitch it to Spencer. Go for it. Go for it. I'll, throw me in on the call. I'll help you out. Check it out. Alright, my friend. Christopher Gerlacher, thank you so much for spending the time here with us tonight. Really do appreciate it. You're welcome. Anytime you wanna come on, just reach out to our producer, Angela, and she'll help you get set up. And, you know, anything new that you wanna talk about, just let us know, man. I'd love to have you on. Again, this was really informative to me. Again, you know, it it's this is not something that I that I know a lot about,
[00:58:34] Unknown:
but I learned an incredible amount tonight from you, and I I do appreciate that, sir. Thank you. Well, thanks for having me on, and, I mean, I'm grateful to anyone who lets me get in the history of derivatives and finance.
[00:58:45] Unknown:
Alright. Well, we'll we'll do more of that in the days coming. So, yeah, just let us know anytime you want. Thanks, man. Alright. Thanks, brother. I appreciate you. God bless you. Have a great night. Yeah. You too. Alright, folks. Chris Gerlacher. This is, this is the one thing about our show that I love. You know, we we have a diverse group of people that come through here, and, you know, I I and I I don't say it frivolous. I don't just throw it out there. I learn something new from just about every guest that comes on the show, and, it it's it's a it's a it's a treat for me to have folks like him on the show. I'd love to learn new things, and, man, we got 207 episodes here in the books, and, man, you know, I I think I might be putting Google, up to, up to a challenge soon. I know a little bit about everything, a little bit I need to know about everything. Alright? Alright. So here here's what we're gonna do. Our our next guest is waiting in the wings here, so we are going to take a short break, and when we come back from this break, we'll bring in Richard Speegle, and, we will get to, talk to him about his his books, his series, and, Richard, from the bio that I've seen so far, you know, he's, he's a very, very interesting man to talk to. He has a lot of experience behind him. He's a veteran.
He's currently serving, and, we'll talk to him about that when we come back. But folks, in the meantime, don't forget, this is a live show, weeknights, 7PM central time. Saturdays, we do special shows on Saturdays, so we don't have a specific time for those, so we announce those as early as we possibly can. And of course, our Sunday show, it's at 2PM central time. So make sure you check us out. We are all over the place. Follow us on Rumble. You could follow us on YouTube, x. I think we're on Twitch still. I'm not sure. We we can't connect to it right now, but we've we've been on Twitch. Facebook, you can find us on Facebook at Joe Russo, and, we look forward to seeing you guys there. So make sure you follow us, like, subscribe, and share. Important to like, subscribe, and share. Alright. So please do that. The the liking the the the liking the shows and this and the, the sharing the shows helps with the algorithms, helps helps us get found. We've had a nice flurry of of, new subscribers and followers on the Rumble platform, so we appreciate that. We had picked up a couple on YouTube as well, so we appreciate that. And also, don't forget the audio side of this whole thing. We are available to you on all of the audio platforms, Apple Podcast, Amazon, Spotify, iHeart. We're on all of them, plus all of the modern podcast apps like Pod Homes, Podcast Player, Pocketcast, Podverse, True Fans, not OnlyFans, True Fans, and, Podcast Guru found that all these great platforms. So find us. You could find us very, very easily.
Alright. So with that said, we're gonna take a break here. When we come back from the break, we'll have Richard Spiegel with us, and, just stay with us. Alright? We'll be back in about, two, maybe three minutes. Alright? Alright. We'll be back. Alrighty. Hey, folks. First hour is in the books. You believe that? That went by fast. And tell me the truth, it didn't didn't Chris look like, Owen Shroyer? I thought he did. Folks, welcome back. This is Joe Russo. Welcome back to the show. Gonna get started here momentarily with our second hour guest, Richard Spiegel. And we're gonna talk about his books, his background and his history.
So we're excited to get to him. But folks, of course, you know, before we do that, let me tell you about Pro HVAC Solutions. Pro HVAC R Solutions leverages over thirty years of expertise in providing premier HVAC sales and service rep service and repairs, specializing in both residential and commercial installations. Our team of skilled technicians is dedicated to providing efficient heating, ventilation, and air conditioning solutions for your home or your business. With a focus on quality workmanship and customer satisfaction, Pro HVAC Solutions ensures your comfort all year round. Just contact Pro HVAC r Solutions today for reliable HVAC services tailored to your needs.
Just head over to prohvacrsolutions.com. That's prohvacrsolutions.com. And when you get over there, make sure you let them know. You heard it right here on the Joe Ruse show. Alright. Well, with all of that said, now tonight here on our second hour, we're gonna be stepping into a world where, magic, where mystery, and the darker corners of your imagination collide. And our guide is someone who knows those shadows very well. Tonight's guest, Richard Spiegel, is a storyteller who doesn't shy away from the moral risk or emotional consequences. He's the mind behind the Eternal Night series and the Wolves and Ravens trilogy, worlds built for adults who want paranormal fantasy that doesn't sugarcoat the truth. Richard is also an officer in the Pennsylvania National Guard with deep roots in the legendary eighty second airborne division.
Beyond the supernatural worlds in the military discipline is a husband, a father of four daughters, and a writer who finds meaning in the quiet moments that become echoes in his story. We're gonna talk about the craft, the shadows, the military influence, the adult paranormal market, and whatever hidden truths pop out along the way. Richard Spiegel, welcome to the show, man. Great to have you. Thanks for having me. That was, that was a hell of an intro. Well, you know, we do the best we can here, sir. And by the way, thank you for your service, sir. Captain, if I'm not mistaken. Correct? Yes. I did actually retire that this past February. Oh, okay. Alright. Well, we'll have to we'll have to get on our producer here and make sure we correct those notes for the later no. I'm kidding. No. She does a great job.
Oh, man. But, again, thank you for your service, sir. I really do appreciate, you know, your sacrifice and your willingness to put your life on the line for us in our country. God bless you for it. And, you know, and a lot of times, you know, people should thank your family too. You know, because they have to deal with the the time away. They have to deal with the training. They have to deal with the the moving around, and and, you know, things constantly in flux. And I don't I don't think enough people do that. I don't know I don't know if enough people actually thank the families for their service, because it is part of your service.
Yeah. I think my wife's had it worse than I have. Yeah. To be honest. Yeah. No. I'm sure. I I know quite a few folks that are are are active duty military, travel all over the place, and it's, you know, from one place to another, you know, it's not it's uprooting every so often. It's it's a lot. It's a lot to deal with. So again, so thank you again, sir, and thank you to your family. And, you know what? What's the most recent what's the most dad moment you've had recently?
[01:09:11] Unknown:
Well, about an hour ago when I was on another podcast, the baby came in the room wanting candy. And, I mean, everybody knows I'm doing this, but apparently, she escaped. So she was on my lap screaming on camera for about fifteen seconds.
[01:09:26] Unknown:
Yeah. Moment there. That's weird. Before I got her out. I gave her a quarter and she ran away. Oh, good. Good. Well, inflation. Right? It used to be a nickel or something like that, but inflation. I I know what you're saying though. My my kids, I have two kids, two human children. They are they are adults now, so I don't have to worry about them coming running in and interrupting the show. They're they're they're living quite some distance away, but I do have two French bulldogs. And, and my boy, Charlie, it he just seems to know when the show is about to end, because he comes to the door of the studio here, and he starts barking, he starts huffing at the door, and starts whining and crying, and, so I I understand. I I got you. That was my that's my dad moment right there.
So, what what's a book or a movie or or a song that's changed the way you think about life?
[01:10:21] Unknown:
That's tough because I'm not really into there's there's a lot of books from, David Weber. Okay. A lot of, science fiction novels. He's probably one of, like, my favorite authors. Reading reading his books as I was kinda growing up and Anne Rice.
[01:10:38] Unknown:
Oh, I love Anne Rice. Yeah.
[01:10:40] Unknown:
Kinda changed the way I thought about, like, the supernatural and stuff like that.
[01:10:44] Unknown:
Yeah. Awesome. That's awesome. Now, again, military, you I know you said you're retired, but you're balancing a writing career, fatherhood, and up until February, your military career. How have those worlds shaped each other rather than competing?
[01:11:04] Unknown:
Well, unfortunately, the writing world is kinda a lot of times, it's the only one there is. And, the one of the biggest problems I have is remembering that the real world is even there. Alright. Well, one of the reasons I'm retired it took them over twenty years to figure it out, but the military decided I was too crazy to be in the military. So I got medically retired, But it definitely helps with the creativity. Okay. And it it has been a challenge trying to now that I'm back and, you know, the family and stuff like that, being able to actually be a husband and a father while I've got all this stuff in my head that I can't get rid of.
So, again, my wife is the superstar because she's the one that kinda takes care of me too.
[01:11:51] Unknown:
Outstanding. Outstanding. Now you said that, adult fantasy readers were being underserved. Now, what made you say that? What made you decide that, okay, fine. I'm gonna do this all myself now.
[01:12:07] Unknown:
Every single book you can think of as being popular is young adult. Every one of the highest grossing authors in the last ten, twenty years, young adult. Well, grown ups need entertainment too. I wanna read a book that's complicated. I wanna read a book that is not afraid to get into, like, the nasty corners of, like, the mind and stuff like that and couldn't find any. So I just started writing them. Alright. Nope.
[01:12:36] Unknown:
I mean, I got yeah. If if if, I just had a quote in my head and just flipped out, just regarding that thing, you know, if if if if if no. It'll it'll come back to me. My age is catching up to me. So, you know, I got I got I have I have I have a birthday tomorrow, so I'm I'm hitting 55 tomorrow. The memory is becoming like Swiss cheese. So Thank you, sir. Thank you. So when when you think about the when you think about, the paranormal fantasy space for adults, what do you think readers are hungry for right now that they aren't getting from mainstream work?
[01:13:13] Unknown:
Easy. Real real characters. And then that's every genre. Real characters. Characters today are all fake, which is why everything flops. People don't wanna be pandered to. They want real characters that can grab them and let them get immersed into the world that they're reading or viewing or whatever. And if the characters aren't real, it's not gonna work. It's writing one zero one, but everybody today is doing it wrong. I I don't I honestly don't understand
[01:13:40] Unknown:
it. Yeah. I also think a lot of people tend to rely a little bit too much on AI for some subject matter. I'm not saying they all write AI books, but they tend to to rely too much on the AI stuff, and you could tell sometimes when it's an AI generated thing. There's just there's just no feeling there. Even worse. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So let's let's get into your books a little bit. Alright? Let's, give us a brief overview of of the books, of the series, and and and give us an idea of where these ideas started for you with these books.
[01:14:16] Unknown:
Well, the the first series that I that I was writing was Eternal Nights. I started writing that because I've always been a a fan of vampires. I mentioned Anne Rice before. I read all of her books when I was really young. And since her, there's been nothing. It's just been a bunch of, I'm sorry, garbage. And so I wanted to I created a universe like that, and I came up with some characters that I thought would be compelling, and I just let things fly from there. I wrote the redemption and origins are actually a prequel to the main eternal night series, which is gonna be science fiction. Okay. That takes a lot of research.
So in order to have something in between, I started writing wolves and ravens, which is a fantasy trilogy, and I actually ended up having a whole lot of fun with that. And that kinda got way out of control, but, that's kinda what my writing normally does. And, the the conclusion to that is actually gonna be live in a few weeks, and then I'll finally be able to have the first science fiction book out next spring, hopefully.
[01:15:26] Unknown:
And so so right now, there are what? There are four books in the series?
[01:15:30] Unknown:
Well, four books total. There there's two in one and two in the other. The the Eternal Nights books are two parts of a prequel. Okay. And then Wolves and Ravens, I have book one and two out of three.
[01:15:42] Unknown:
Okay. I'm looking at your website right now. Actually, I just pulled it up. Let me let me do this. Let me
[01:15:48] Unknown:
Oh, yeah. My publisher did a great job with that website. Oh, yeah. So this this is the series you're talking about right now. The, Yeah. That that that's what I've got out so far. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. And and when is so much better than the website I tried to make for myself. That turned out to be garbage.
[01:16:02] Unknown:
Well, it is it is a pretty sight. Like, I I was I was looking at it earlier today, and I like the fact that you have trailers for the books on there too. That that's that's really helpful.
[01:16:11] Unknown:
Oh, yeah. I send them all sorts of stuff, and they upload it for me, so there's a lot of content on there, a lot of behind scenes videos.
[01:16:19] Unknown:
And, so when when is the, when is book three coming out?
[01:16:23] Unknown:
Hopefully hopefully before the end of the month. Oh, I'm sorry. The the re unfortunately, the relaunch for Wolves and Ravens, the timeline didn't match the relaunch for Eternal Nights, but it it should be in a couple of weeks.
[01:16:36] Unknown:
Alright. Now what's the hardest part about writing this genre? And and and I'm I'm sure you I'm sure it had some challenges to it. And how'd you push through those challenges?
[01:16:48] Unknown:
The the write the writing itself is actually incredibly easy because I'm living in these worlds. I would say the hardest part is when I'm writing from the other side because the good guys and the bad guys both get their perspectives. They're they're they're both in the story, and I go to the extreme in both directions. So when I'm writing the antagonists, I have to write people and creatures that are doing horrific things, and I have to write it in a way that makes sense. And it's it's not easy to do that, when you're because, again, they're they're for adults. I I tackle all sorts of things up to and including rape, crucifixion, suicide, and I have to write these things in brutal detail in a way that actually makes it right for that perspective of that character.
And that's not easy. Also, in wolves and ravens, since that's pure fantasy Mhmm. I'm able to go, like, angels and demons and stuff like that. So and especially with the third book, there's a lot of stuff happening in, like, let's say, the celestial realm. Well, there's a lot of religions out there, and I don't wanna offend a part of the audience. So writing these chapters in a very careful way that I don't either agree with or contradict a religion is tough. That is that is hard.
[01:18:18] Unknown:
Yeah. I I I could understand that. The one thing about my show is, you know, we we don't hold back. We we just if if I offend you, just turn it off. You know, that's all. I I don't really care what you think. You know, just, you know, if if I if I have to say it, I say it like I just did, you know. But, but I understand where you're coming from. Yeah. I, you know, you don't wanna isolate people, and I I get that. You know, I do. I do. Especially when trying to sell books. So Yeah. You know, that that that helps. The one now your stories aren't afraid of shadows.
Moral cost, emotional fallout, why is that important? Why do you include all that?
[01:18:58] Unknown:
Because it's real. And we lack real characters today, you know. The the good guys save the world with a smile on their face, but that's fake. You know? Nobody's immune to stress. You know? People suffer for what they're doing, and it beats them down. And some of my my books are meat grinders and it especially, origins, the second part of the eternal nights prequel. You know, the main characters are a married couple of vampires. Mhmm. And that book starts out, you know, everything's fine. They've got their new life going on. Everything's lovey dovey. And that whole book is just a meat grinder. And as the book goes on, you can see changes in the characters. They're not talking to each other. They're yelling at each other. There's more foul language as, like, the stress keeps building up.
The female character gets the brunt of it, and she has a psychotic break. And I don't wanna spoil anything, but it gets real psychological after that. And that's what happens to real people. Yeah. You know? I mean, there's mental and behavioral health issues out there, and I explore all of them because, like I said, nobody's immune to stress. I think it's fake to have
[01:20:09] Unknown:
characters that are just perfect all of the time. Yeah. No. I agree with you. It it it makes them more relatable.
[01:20:14] Unknown:
Yeah. Exactly. That's also why I I say a more mature audience. I I think anybody would enjoy it. It's just a lot of the concepts won't make as much sense unless somebody's got a little bit more life experience.
[01:20:29] Unknown:
Yeah. No. That makes that makes a lot of sense too. Now I earlier today, I checked out the, the trailer. I love the fact, like I said before, that that you guys have you have trailers up on the website for for the books. That's that's a great idea. I like that, and, and the one that I did watch was about the husband and wife vampires. And it's a that's a fascinating concept. I I love the idea of that, and and these two characters are going through, I think in the clip, it said that they were around for almost a thousand years or so.
[01:20:59] Unknown:
In the yeah. In in the prequel, they're about 900 years old. Okay. In in the real series, they'll be over 2,000.
[01:21:08] Unknown:
Right. And and and the the sense of the whole thing is that they're they're they're they're working together through this, through this eternity that they're spending together, and and I love that. I think that's a great idea, like, I I wasn't expecting that when I when I saw the trailer. So it's it's it's fascinating. I love the idea of that, and I I I'm looking forward to actually reading the book. I'm gonna I'm gonna purchase the book this week, but, I'm I'm really looking for I'm really interested in this. This is this is a great idea for storytelling, and the way that they narrated the story, I'm assuming, I mean, you wrote that, or or did somebody write that?
[01:21:44] Unknown:
I I had as much of a hand as I could Okay. In in, like, the scripts and stuff like that. Okay. The actual creation of the trailer, that was all the publishers. Well, they did a great job, and
[01:21:55] Unknown:
it really caught my it really catches your interest. It's it's a different perspective. It's a different view on this, and I think that yeah. I think it's I I think it's a great idea. So I'm looking forward to reading that one. I'm I'm rambling on it now, but that.
[01:22:08] Unknown:
Well, it's also very relatable. Exactly. Because, I mean, you do wanna have relatable characters. And what do we have in common with a 900 year old vampire with incredible powers and immense wealth? Make them married. Mhmm. Like like the way, and and, again, like I said, like a like a young adult audience, it's not the kind of romance that they're into because they love the love triangles and stuff like that. But it's it's something that, you know, a little bit of an older audience can appreciate. Like, they might be, like, incredibly powerful vampires, but they bicker Right. Yes. Before all the time. And in in in redemption, that's a that's a lot of world building. There's a lot of characters in that book. In origins, the entire book focuses around five people, and that's if you count the bad guys.
And all they're doing is just bickering.
[01:22:58] Unknown:
Like, all of the horrible situations they find themselves in, they just will not stop irritating one another. And I think, that's that's marriage right there. And I'm sure exactly. And and I'm sure it's comical along the way too, you know. So Oh, yeah. So so but but the thing is is and the point you make is, you know, in the young adult series books, I mean, they they're looking for the for those romantic triangles. They're looking for those inter they're looking for the conflict that takes place between multiple, interests, for each other.
This is about this is companionship. Yes. You know, this this is this is what this is what a marriage really is. It's companionship. It's it's it's working through difficult situations and times together, and and I think it's a great idea. It's a it's a it's a novel way to approach it. No no pun intended on the novel.
[01:23:44] Unknown:
Well, I'm I'm very I'm very big on no matter what the situation is, nobody wins alone. Mhmm. So none of my books have a single protagonist. They're either married like they are in eternal nights or in wolves and ravens. They're it's still a couple. Like, they support each other. There's, like, a whole family behind every victory because they they hold each other up. Like, nobody's perfect. You have to have somebody to play off of. Sure. Yeah. I yeah.
[01:24:11] Unknown:
Now what what what what's one I guess I don't know if this is the right word for it, but, was one dark or or morally messy decision your characters face that that you're proud of?
[01:24:31] Unknown:
Morally messy. Or dark Or I think sacrificing other people to win. Okay. It's more in, in wolves and ravens where the main characters, like, the raven queen, so she's in charge of, like, a whole lot more. And wanna in, like, the final battle of the second book, the her entire battle plan is based off of sacrificing hundreds of her own people as bait for the antagonist. Because while the antagonist is taking time slaughtering people, he won't be moving, and they can bring down more,
[01:25:09] Unknown:
I don't wanna spoil it. But Okay. Yeah. That's fair enough. But that that's that's good though. I like that. Now, like we said earlier, you know, you served the military, 80. How did the military shape the way you think about story, about stakes, about consequences, and and things like that?
[01:25:34] Unknown:
I think the biggest difference, after my active service was no longer having any pretense. I don't know if I should blame the military or maybe it was just my age because I I was 18. Okay. So when I left active service, I was, like, 23. So I can either blame the military or I can blame the fact that I was finally an adult. I don't know. But there's no, no pretense, no need to, like, sugarcoat things because, again, it's fake. So just being real about everything. And then it's nice to have that experience to draw from so, like, the fight scenes and action scenes are a little more accurate and realistic.
[01:26:14] Unknown:
Now does you you talk about realism. The the like, how do I I don't think I could phrase the question. You talk about you you mentioned realism, in the in the fight sequences, you know, and I'm I'm assuming that you're drawing from that from from your your training, your combat experience, if any. But does your sense of realism, duty, moral ambiguity ambiguity, you know, slip into your characters?
[01:26:47] Unknown:
Oh, yeah. At at least little bits here and there. I my characters are not mouthpieces for me. Okay. So, like, you know, my characters are all very narcissistic and opinionated, but they're not necessarily my opinions. They're just the characters. But, the the idea of being realistic with every single thing that they do, that's extremely important to me. And I have a unique a unique viewpoint, both from the military experience, being able to make the action sequences brutally detailed and realistic, but also with the mental and behavioral health. I mean, with my own struggles, I'm able to take when the battlefield turns to the psychological and it gets really, really dark, it's real. Mhmm. And I've I've had people comment to me that they were terrified, but loved how it ended, but they were terrified in the leading up to it because of just how brutal it was. Well, I think And and and in wolves and ravens, it goes so far as to, like I I explore suicide, especially in the book that's coming out because it's just so far off the walls.
Like, I explore suicide multiple times in a way that I don't think most people would agree with, but it's true.
[01:28:10] Unknown:
Yeah. Well, I I think that I was gonna say something about it too, and it just slipped my mind. But, I think the realism if you if you if you can generate that type of a response from somebody from from the written word, where people actually feel what these character I mean, that's that to me is is, that's a gift. It's a talent to be able to do that. And, you know, I I I can only think of one time in a in a book that I've read, and this this is a gothic novel, it's an old you know what I'm talking about? You know, Dracula, the original Dracula, Bram Stoker's Dracula, where I read that and I was scared. You know, and, you know, and that's a that's a talent. That that's that's something, you know, you're making people think, you're making people feel through your words. Excuse me, my coffee came up.
The, it's it's it's it's I'm looking forward to reading this, you know, just based on your description of it alone. I'm I'm really looking forward to reading this, and I'm hoping that, you said it's coming at the end of the month?
[01:29:18] Unknown:
Well, the fifth one will be at will be at the end of the month. Okay. The rest of it it's funny that it's funny that you mentioned Dracula. There are some interesting reveals in origins that I actually found amusing to do. But when when you're going with realism, I mean, it must be hard because nobody does it, but it seems incredibly easy. You just you make characters, and you just make them real. They talk real. They think real. Like, I've been criticized for insensitive dialogue. Well, this dialogue is private. You just happen to be reading the story, but the characters don't know you're there. And do you think a husband and a wife that are 900 years old give a crap about political correctness? Yeah. I doubt that. Private conversation.
Yeah. And the thing is those same people who criticize the insensitive dialogue, they tell me how much they love the book. They have no idea that those that that negative thing actually, underline the realism for that. Like, you see things and your main characters, they go stupid for five minutes because they have to for the plot to happen. All of a sudden, they get dumb and they make stupid decisions. Mhmm. But characters drive the plot. So you just let them exist, and the story grows organically.
[01:30:34] Unknown:
Okay. Yeah. And that actually leads to a question that I had for you about your character development. So when you're planning out these books, how do you how do you decide, how do you build a character? How do you put them together? What what's the process behind, creating this whole world? Like, what kind of research do you do? You you know where you know where I'm going? It's it's it's a it's a very detailed process. I I know that because I've I've hosted other other authors, you know, over the over the period of time. And, you know, everybody has a very unique way of doing it. And so what's your process? What's your method for for building this world and and these characters?
[01:31:11] Unknown:
Being insane? I you're you're gonna hate the answer, but No. I'm not gonna hate the answer. Look. Obviously, it's fiction. It's all coming from me somewhere, but it's just there. And, like, I I created the original universe. I created some of the original characters. And ever since, I've just been writing down what they do. I I see it in my head. They they grow organically, and I just write it down. There's like, if you think about all of the artists that we celebrate over the last several hundred years, one of the things they share in common is they were all nuts. Mhmm. I mean, we we see and hear things differently than most people, and you can put it down on the canvas or a block of marble or a blank page to let other people see it.
And as far as the character development, when your characters are real, you don't have to do that. They do it themselves. It's all organic. With the exception of redemption, with that with that book as an exception, no book I've ever written has come out the way I planned it. I spent so long planning Origins. And when I sat down and wrote it, it just didn't go anywhere like what I planned. But I but I loved it. It was better. All my plans went out the window. So I I don't know. I just write stuff. And you don't find that frustrating that when you're writing and and you come up with this this whole plan, this whole layout of where where you're gonna go, what direction you're gonna go, and then it just changes on do do you find that frustrating at all? No. Only because well, when it happened with Origins, it was like a three day span where I was typing, and I don't recollect much of what happened in that three days. It was just over, and I read it, and it was wonderful. And ever since then, I just stopped. Like, I do not do any of the things that I think an author is supposed to do. I have a vague idea of how I want things to end up, but I just write.
And the characters, they find their own way there. And if they don't, I change the plot. You never force characters to obey the plot. That's the opposite of what you're supposed to do. But that's what everybody does these days. My characters just figure stuff out, and then and the antagonists are the same way. So I'll have things like, alright. I want this to happen. But the main characters, they don't fall for it. Or the antagonist, they don't fall for it. Okay. So so, like, you don't you don't outline
[01:33:42] Unknown:
the chapters of the book and and and you you just basically sit down in front of the computer and just write. And however and however it lays out, it lays out.
[01:33:53] Unknown:
The it's like I mean, it's horrifying sometimes. I can't I can't make it stop, like, just the stuff in my head. If I could hypothetically sit down and write uninterrupted, I think I would have to write almost 3,000,000 words to catch up with where my brain is. Wow. All that stuff's already figured out. It just happens. I I I don't know. If I had an explanation, I wouldn't be crazy. You just tell the story. Yeah. I I just I just tell the story, and and it's you're emotionally invested. I mean, I'm emotionally invested. I mean, I'm the one who wrote it. I know what happens. But I read I can read my manuscript, like, a 100 times, and I'll still, like, start crying my eyes out at certain parts. Wow. It's just that that's what happens when the characters are real.
[01:34:49] Unknown:
Wow. Yeah. It makes me think, like, you know, that that that like, you said it earlier too that that a lot of artists over the over the years, over the centuries, you know, probably crazy in a lot of ways, insane. But I was thinking like, you know, Mozart. Right? Yeah. He would write music like it's completely finished with no no corrections, no edits, no changes to it. Almost as if it was completely, played out, written out in his mind, and he's just copying what's on his mind. That that's kinda what I'm getting with you at this point. You're saying something similar to that that these stories are just completed basically. You know you know where you're going with it, and you just sit there, you just transcribe what's going on in your mind.
[01:35:42] Unknown:
Yeah. Exactly. It's, I mean, I still have It's fascinating. I make typos constantly. Well, yeah. Yeah. So it's like, yeah.
[01:35:54] Unknown:
I was gonna say something, but I completely lost it. I don't know what happened. That's alright. I I I go through it too. It's it's like I said, it's Swiss cheese it's becoming Swiss cheese more and more every day. So without spoiling anything, for the for the next book that's coming up the upcoming project, what's the most exciting thing about it for you right now?
[01:36:16] Unknown:
The the third book, Broken Angel for Wolves and Ravens, that was the hardest book I've ever written, including all the ones that haven't been published yet. Because I can if I sit down and type, I can do a 150,000 word manuscript in five weeks. It's not difficult. But it took over a year of active writing to finish Broken Angel because of how well, I mentioned the celestial thing, so that was complicated. But then things just get so dark and, I mean, I guess it doesn't spoil too much because you've got the stuff written on the back cover anyway. So, I mean, if you read the back cover of the series, you're gonna spoil stuff if you don't read the books in order. But the, the main protagonists in wolves and ravens is the raven queen and, her wolf protector. It's a male and a and a female. But, arguably, the main protagonist for the entire trilogy is an angel. She has a very tiny part in the first book. She's a main character in the second book, and the third book is all her.
But she is a mess. Okay. She's so full of anger and hatred and rage. She blames everybody. Every decision she make makes things worse. And in Broken Angels, she's kind of faced with the truth, and she realizes that everything that's happening has been all has been all her fault from the very beginning. And it was just difficult to write that because of how dark it gets. And, you know, so like I said, suicide comes up, and then and these are angelic characters. Mhmm. You know, we think of things like self sacrifice is a positive thing, but at what point does self sacrifice become negative? When self sacrifice crosses into self mutilation, when self sacrifice crosses into suicide because the brain is so broken that you act that she actually believes that creation is better off with her burning in hell.
That's the hero. So it's it's a bit of a, of a journey in that book. And there were times when I just had to stop. I had to stop writing. I had to turn everything off, and I had to calm down. And I would go weeks before going back to the book. It it was it was hard to write. Wow.
[01:38:39] Unknown:
Man, I'm telling you, you you you're spinning a story here, dude. I'm I'm really looking forward to reading this stuff. I I really am. So, so, what what's what's what do you hope the takeaway is from from our conversation tonight? For the audience.
[01:38:55] Unknown:
Yeah. What do you hope the audience walks away from this conversation with? Oh, oh, oh, oh, I thought you meant takeaway takeaway from you. I was like, well, meeting new people. I guess, well, just that if you want entertainment that makes you think and that's actually real, you shouldn't be afraid to want that. You know? You shouldn't be afraid to say, this is all crap. I want something better. I actually had so called professionals, tell me that my books were too cerebral for their genres was how they phrased it. I was like, so you just called the audience stupid. Mhmm. I mean, that's what?
I mean, you're telling you're telling me that you think people are too stupid to understand the books. That's underestimating the audience. That shows you that all this crap that's been shoveled out there for people just isn't smart enough. People people want to think. They they want to be interested, immersed in something completely real to them. Mhmm. And that's what I that's what I try to offer. Right? I want I don't want people to like it. I want people to be emotionally invested. But I want them to to love what's happening. I want them to hate some of the scenes and some of the chapters because of how disgusting and horrific they are, but it's what the stakes are.
[01:40:19] Unknown:
Alright. Is there anything that we haven't talked about tonight that you wanna talk about?
[01:40:24] Unknown:
No. Not really. Okay.
[01:40:27] Unknown:
Alright. Alright. So, so okay. Then who is somebody that you respect right now, and what are they doing that inspires you?
[01:40:37] Unknown:
My wife. Beautiful. The way she's able to manage everything with all the kids that we have and how much we
[01:40:46] Unknown:
have. I know I said it earlier. You have we have four kids. Right? Yeah. I have four daughters,
[01:40:51] Unknown:
and I'm not as much help as I could be. And my wife is like the rock that holds everything together.
[01:40:58] Unknown:
You know, you're you're like the, like, the third person that I've interviewed. I I because I ask everybody that basically the same question, and they're like the third person that that that referenced their wife on that one, and I think that's beautiful. And that that's that's wonderful, and I'm glad you guys have that kind of understanding and partnership with each other that that you could work together like this and and balance it all out. That and that's a beautiful thing. Alright. So, Richard, where can the folks go to find out more stuff about you, about your work? Plug plug away, sir. Plug away.
[01:41:29] Unknown:
Well, my website, wwwrichardspiegel.com, that's the the website you you showed that. There's a lot of content there. My Instagram is richard spiegel books, but the content there is just things that we're funneling from the website. So that's really the best place to go. Alright. There's gonna be a lot more videos uploaded to that, and all the links go to Amazon anyway. Alright. Outstanding.
[01:41:54] Unknown:
And, Richard, what I'd like to do is I wanna get a copy of your of the book, the new one that comes out. And, when I get a copy of that, I'm gonna go through it, I wanna read it, and then I wanna have you come back on again, and we can talk about the book, specifically that book. Because I gotta read through with you first, otherwise the third one's not gonna be as good. Well, I'm I'm gonna get them all eventually, but you know, but I wanna I wanna set up with you in advance here that you're gonna come on and we're gonna talk about at least the last book, since that's the most recent one. We'll we'll mention the other ones, of course, but I I I'm really interested in this third in this in this next book that's coming up because you you touched on a couple of issues that are that are, important to me as well in this. And, particularly, the suicide issue.
So, that's why I'm looking forward to talking to you about that specifically. So let's let's make it a point to do that. You come back on, we'll go through the book together, and, we'll we'll we'll, we'll book you for the full for the full show. This way, there's no time limits.
[01:42:56] Unknown:
Alright? Yeah. No. I I love talking to people that have actually read this stuff, because they don't have to worry about spoiling things. Yeah. No. Of course. Yeah. I I get it. I get it. And, and,
[01:43:05] Unknown:
no normally we try to, but, sometimes things pop up short notice, and we're we're not able to get it all in. But, but Richard, thank you so much for being here tonight. I do appreciate it. I wish you the best with all of the projects that you're working on. And again, thank you for your service, sir. Thank you to your family, and, God bless you, man. Have a great night. Alright. Thanks. It was nice meeting you. Same here. Same here. Talk to you in a bit. Thanks. Alright, folks. Richard Spiegel. So make sure we check out his website, make sure you check him out on socials, and, check out his books, man. I could honestly, you know, he he really told a great story with this, and it really peaked my interest, and I'm definitely gonna check out these books here, and and and get caught up. This way, when we do have them back on again, when the next book comes out, we'll be able to have a more detailed conversation. This is more like a how do you do, how do you get to know you type of conversation that we had. So, and I hope you enjoyed it. I hope it was something that you found interesting and you were able to get something out of it. Alright. Well, with all of that said, what do you say we, what do you say we start to wrap this baby up tonight? Folks, don't forget to head over to our website, joeroos.com, joeroos.com.
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Cold open: fragments, poetry, and studio vibe
Show intro from Asylum Studios and host welcome
Tonight’s lineup and schedule notes
Sponsor segment and platform housekeeping
Value-for-value, feedback, and ways to connect
Setting the table: money, odds, lawsuits, elections
Guest intro: Christopher Gerlacher on prediction markets
Host banter: pens, fidgets, and warming up
Icebreakers: coffee with Alex Borrain, guitars, and hobbies
Prediction markets 101: contracts, prices, and odds
Do market odds sway voters? Influence vs. insight
Real-time moves: debates, odds, and market reactions
Gambling or finance? Hedging, speculation, and gray areas
From midterms to markets: how the beat shifted
Spotting shifts: early voting surges and live trading
Regulators enter: who is the CFTC and why they matter
Policing markets: manipulation, volume, and price integrity
Courts, states, and the fight over gaming
Kalshi v. CFTC and the opening for election contracts
Sports contracts flashpoint: self-certifications and standoffs
State regulators vs. federal exchanges: a jurisdiction clash
Defining gaming: a single word driving nationwide cases
Reading lawsuits: who files and what really bites
What markets see that polls miss: Dobbs and durable effects
Campaigns watch the tape: operatives and live odds
The democratize finance arc and the everything app
Are crypto prediction markets here to stay?
Hearing recap: CFTC chair nominee Mike Selig on sports
From sports betting lessons to platform pitfalls
Responsible trading: the trapdoors and horror stories
States and problem gambling funds: gaps and misuse
Interviews that shifted perspective: hedging anything
States vs. CFTC: the philosophical split over markets
Sleeper issue: responsible trading comes to finance
Takeaways for listeners: markets as a check on punditry
Wisdom of crowds, with conditions: diversity and volume
Who inspires Chris: Masih Alinejad and global dissidents
Wrap and where to find Prediction News
Break and reset for hour two
Hour two open and sponsor read
Guest intro: author Richard Spiegel on dark fantasy
Balancing service, family, and writing
Why write adult paranormal: real characters over tropes
Series overviews: Eternal Nights and Wolves and Ravens
Process and difficulty: writing the antagonists
Faith, angels, and care with celestial themes
Why moral cost matters: stress, breaks, and realism
Vampire marriage as anchor: love, bickering, eternity
No one wins alone: partnerships at the core
Hard choices: sacrifice, strategy, and messy ethics
Military lens: stakes, combat, and consequences
Realism in dialogue and private truths
On craft: outlines, organic flow, and living characters
Broken Angel: darkest journey and writing through it
What readers should want: thinking, immersion, respect
Everyday inspiration: honoring the family rock
Where to find Richard Spiegel and what’s next
Closing the show: plugs, schedule, and support
