Victor Wembanyama, arguably the greatest defensive player the league has ever seen, just showed that his moral fiber stands taller than his height. He announced that he will never take money from the American Gambling Industrial Complex.
The American Gambling Industrial Complex (AGIC), also called the Complete Uncertainty Marketmakers & Speculative Trading Associates & Institutional Network Syndicates (CUM STAINS), is the people, businesses, and institutions that promote, participate in, and profit from traditional gambling and its 21st century forms, like Kalshi and Polymarket.
That makes Wemby unusual. Giannis and LeBron James, the Greatest Player Of All Time, both signed with these vice-dealers. Giannis made waves after investing in Kalshi. LeGOAT himself made the egregious decision to sign an endorsement deal with Polymarket and finesse them for bread.
Wemby stood on principle. He understands what these companies do to a brain.
Our dopamine system evolved to reward pro-social, virtuous behavior. Eating a nutritious meal, looking at your child or wife, and overcoming a tremendous challenge all trigger dopamine activity in the brain. That built the scaffolding for human achievement. It let our ancestors procreate, kill large animals to provide for their families, and sustain deferred gratification. In the past, deferred gratification meant farming: work today so you can eat tomorrow. Today it means committing to school and learning, which on average leads to higher income and a greater ability to affect the world.
Gambling bastardizes these processes.
It takes the structures in our brain meant to engineer sustained long term effort and hijacks them for short term highs, rewiring the brain to chase uncertainty. The mechanism is a behavioral concept called intermittent reinforcement. When we take part in an activity with an uncertain outcome that isn’t connected to us, our brain releases dopamine, and pleasure and euphoria follow. It happens whatever the outcome. The attempt to get one over on the future generates the feeling. Cocaine, alcohol, and marijuana do similar things. The brain physically changes too, rewiring itself to chase the next opportunity to lose money.
Instead of promoting the uniquely human abilities to focus, reason, and defer gratification, the American Gambling Industrial Complex is trying to turn you into a lizard.
Lizards focus only on what’s at the tip of their nose. The next hunt. The next kill. The next sleep. Many of them are sit-and-wait foragers. They park in one spot and strike at whatever moves past, and researchers have found that sit-and-wait foragers take in energy at a lower rate than active ones. That’s a bettor refreshing the line, waiting for the next thing to move.
They don’t care for their offspring either. Postpartum parental care in lizards and snakes is rare, and one study of the lizard Liolaemus leopardinus notes that parental behavior has been described in only about 140 of more than 9,500 reptile species.
And when a lizard gets grabbed, it drops its tail. At least 11 of the 16 lizard families do this. The tail stores fat reserves, so the escape costs stored energy, and the regrown tail is cartilage instead of bone. Gambling sells you the same deal. You drop your savings to get out of a bad night, and what grows back is weaker.
Kalshi and Polymarket are gambling. Gambling isn’t defined by an institution taking a vig from bettors. It’s defined by presenting the masses with the allure of wealth, acquired by monetizing uncertain short term outcomes. That’s the through line between Vegas, Macau, and Atlantic City, and between Polymarket, DraftKings, MGM, and the aleatores of Rome. These institutions understand that the future is uncertain, and that the opportunity for you to profit from it takes only a swipe in an app or a shake of the die. They’re patient about it, like a lizard sitting still until something moves. They are predatory systems designed to use technology and law against our own biology to harm us.
The stock market is uncertain too. Nobody knows it will go up. But it runs on finite, objective principles, like the presence or absence of capital and the flow of money. It isn’t chance, because people with will and focus have some control over the outcome. It also isn’t zero sum, and human will can exert pressure on it.
Polymarket and Kalshi differ for two reasons. First, the average person in these markets will lose money over the long term. Even DraftKings’ former president, who obviously has a horse in this race, says retail traders on prediction markets lose at “90%-plus” rates to professional market makers. Second, the markets are structured so that no one’s will can pressure the outcome. It’s a zero sum game.
The damage is already visible in their closest cousin, online sports betting. Economists Brett Hollenbeck, Poet Larsen, and Davide Proserpio followed 4.38 million US adults and found that after states legalized online sports betting, bankruptcy filings rose 25 to 30%, and credit card and auto loan delinquencies each rose about 8%. States with only retail gambling saw no such effect. The home takes damage too. A 2014 meta-analysis found that over a third of problem gamblers report being victims of physical partner violence, and about as many report being perpetrators. A 2025 working paper by Emily Arnesen and Kyutaro Matsuzawa found that legalized sports betting raised intimate partner violence on upset-loss days by roughly 9%. It’s bad for the individual, bad for their family and community, and bad for America.
Which brings us to Kyle Kuzma. First of all, that man can’t hoop. That’s why he’s been shuffled from one spot to another. He doesn’t make the right pass. He doesn’t know when to lock up. He plays like he knows what to do but not why he’s doing it, and that’s at something he’s practiced his whole life and gets paid millions for. Imagine how bad he’d be at something he hasn’t practiced at all. Not even a little bit. Like reading or writing.
Let’s talk about the reading. Kuzma is a Kalshi investor. He doesn’t have a take on gambling, he has a position. When he went after New York Governor Kathy Hochul for suing Kalshi, her press office needed one sentence: “But your motivations are pure, right?” That was the cleanest dime anybody has dropped on him all year.
He also knows exactly what a vig is. He said DraftKings’ hold on parlays “runs like 25-40%”. Apparently it’s only gambling when somebody else is taking the cut. In the same stretch, he announced a $36,000 contract on Spencer Pratt becoming mayor of Los Angeles. That’s the man explaining the difference between investing and gambling.
He recently tried to correct Wemby by writing that Polymarket and Kalshi aren’t “gambling” because they take no vig. He says calling them gambling is like calling the stock market a casino, but when the stock market goes up everybody holding it wins, and on Kalshi every dollar somebody wins is a dollar somebody else lost. That’s farcical. Selling the allure of wealth on uncertain short term outcomes is gambling, vig or no vig, and Kuzma doesn’t know what the word means. Somebody hand that man a Webster’s.
LeBron, Giannis, Kyle Kuzma, Eli Manning, Colin Cowherd, and all the rest of them folk catching a check from the American Gambling Industrial Complex are trying to destroy your humanity. These CUM STAINS tryna transition you from a human to a lacertilian. Kuz DEFINITELY doesn’t know that word.
