Jeff Probst is pissed about the prediction markets getting their fingers in Survivor

This is per Variety, which notes that Probst was responding in real time both to news that a total of $32.7 million wound up being bet on Kalshi on the outcome of Wednesday night’s Survivor 50 outcome, and that the prediction market had sent users a push notification, minutes into the finale’s debut, that the season’s eventual winner was running at 97 percent odds of victory. (A New York Times piece from back in March noted that Kalshi’s odds were naming some weeks’ outgoing contestants over the course of the season with better than 90 percent certainty, which either speaks to the incredible predictive power of the public consciousness or, y’know, some bullshit.) “Clearly, if 90% of the people are voting for somebody, there’s a leak,” Probst noted, adding that the markets are “incentivizing people to lie, cheat and steal to get ahead.”

Kalshi and Polymarket, which give users the ability to bet each other on the outcomes of, basically, anything, both claim to regularly police for insider trading, with Kalshi stating that it specifically vetted its Survivor bets—despite the fact that the eventual winner was running at 80 percent odds before the season had even debuted. Kalshi’s policies (and U.S. law, for that matter) state that profiting off of non-public information is strictly against the rules; that being said, both companies have suggested that it’s none of their business if a bunch of users see an anonymous poster put a rumor up on Reddit, decide to believe it, and bet accordingly. (In a statement in response to Variety‘s story, a Kalshi spokesperson tried to go the “Hey, who does it actually hurt?” route, stating, “If the market volume on Survivor is any indication, this isn’t something that’s stopping people from caring about Survivor.” The spokesperson did add that Kalshi will try to be more diligent about, say, sending out possible spoilers to everyone watching the show literally as it airs.)

Probst, for his part, sounds pissed, if also resigned, to the human nature of it all. “They have figured out a way to capitalize on [the show]. It doesn’t sit well with me as a human. I get it—they built a great business. They don’t care.” Everyone involved in filming a season of Survivor is, of course, required to sign an NDA about anything that happens on the show (with specific language about prediction markets having been added to the messaging surrounding Survivor 50). But Probst sounds pretty pragmatic about what he’s up against here. “We went and made our show in a vacuum, and we keep it very tightly contained, but if you are foolish and naive enough to not think that somebody might leak it, that’s your problem. If the idea is that Survivor needs to do a better job of managing our spoilers, you just don’t know anything about humans. That’s ridiculous. You’re telling me there’s a way I can make money by sharing information I have, and I might not ever get caught? Of course, people are going to do that. And if I found out somebody on our show bet on this, they’d be fired.”