NEXT.io Podcast

Todd Haushalter: Lawsuits, Deepfakes & the New Blackjack. The Unfiltered Truth.

NEXT.io Podcast

Show Notes

🎙️ NEXT.io Podcast #265 with Todd Haushalter, Chief Product Officer at Evolution. Todd Haushalter, Chief Product Officer at Evolution, sits down for an unfiltered conversation covering everything the industry is talking about — lawsuits against Light & Wonder and Playtech, why he thinks AI deepfake live dealers are "dead on arrival," and what Evolution's monster 2026 game roadmap looks like. ⏰ Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro & Sponsors 01:34 - Todd & Pierre: back together 03:28 - Two years at Evolution: what's really changed 04:46 - Suing Light & Wonder over Lightning Roulette 06:25 - The Playtech dossier: how industrial espionage works 13:55 - Is Evolution becoming a value stock? 19:12 - AI-generated games: threat or noise? 20:34 - Deepfake live dealers: why Todd calls it a catastrophic failure 36:20 - Brands vs. AI slots: who wins when games are infinite? 44:26 - The Hasbro deal and the brand-first strategy 52:19 - Competition in live casino: is the iron grip loosening? 58:48 - Aviator: the most impressive success story in iGaming 01:03:51 - Acquisition rumours and Evolution's M&A strategy 01:14:01 - The $2 billion share buyback explained 01:19:18 - Cybercrime in Asia: what can actually be said 01:22:10 - European regulatory headwinds and revenue pullbacks 01:28:01 - Prediction markets: where does Evolution fit? 01:34:13- The investment case for Evolution right now 01:42:20 - Todd's 3 predictions for the next 3 years

🔔 SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhXvQfFm7GE&list=PLo43Fota-gt1sMzujpavaGmRbTiRXETKE

CONNECT WITH ⁠NEXT.IO⁠ ✩ Website: ⁠https://next.io/⁠

This episode of ⁠NEXT.io⁠ is brought to you by: Pragmatic Solutions – Leading iGaming platform technology ⁠https://pragmatic.solutions/⁠

Pragmatic Play – Industry-leading content provider ⁠https://www.pragmaticplay.com/en/⁠

Sponsored by: Hard Rock Games: ⁠https://www.hardrockgames.com/⁠ Creedroomz: ⁠https://www.creedroomz.com/

More from NEXT.io Podcast

Oct 8, 2026

🎙️NEXTPredict Podcast #5 with Rebecca Kossnick, Co-founder & CEO at Hypernatural Before Kalshi. Before Polymarket. Before prediction markets were on the front page of every newspaper, Meta built one. In 2020, a small team inside Facebook launched a product called Forecast. No real money, just points and public reputation. Every forecast was made public. And it was, by any measure, remarkably accurate. Rebecca Kossnick joins Pierre on the NEXTPredict Podcast to tell the full inside story and to explain why Meta is now building a second one, called Arena. ⏰ Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 01:04 - Welcoming Rebecca Kossnick 01:30 - How Forecast got started inside Facebook's team 03:30 - Launching in April 2020 and the first wave of users 07:29 - The status problem Forecast was solving 10:52 - The challenges: explaining probabilities to users in 2019 15:47 - The grand vision 18:30 - Why Forecast didn't survive 23:48 - Hypernatural: the AI video company Rebecca and Taylor built next 25:43 - Where prediction markets and AI video collide 27:36 - Opportunity or problem? 30:18 - Where does Rebecca see Hypernatural in three years? NYC Summit - NEXTPredict October 22 - 23, 2026 at Convene 30 Hudson Yards. 🎟 Get your tickets here: https://nextpredict.io/summits/the-worlds-prediction-markets-summit/ 🔔 SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/409DefE06IKPhZzhDIDpH3?si=06a0ceb6be594746 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/es/podcast/next-io-podcast/id1515442333?l=en-GB CONNECT WITH NEXTPredict ✩ Website: https://nextpredict.io/

Sep 24, 2026

🎙️ NEXT.io Podcast #268 with Michael Pedersen, CEO of Swivel Gaming

Sep 22, 2026

🎙️NEXTPredict Podcast #4 with Chuck Todd on the 2026 Midterms, Prediction Market Blind Spots & the Future of Political Forecasting Chuck Todd spent three decades at NBC News as political director and moderator of Meet the Press. He now runs The Chuck ToddCast independently. He is also the official ambassador for NEXTPredict New York, taking place October 22-23. In this episode, Pierre sits down with Chuck to do something very few people are qualified to do: speak to both the political reality and the prediction market picture at the same time and point out exactly where the two come apart.

Sep 14, 2026

🎙️NEXTPredict Podcast #3 with JB Mackenzie, General Manager & VP Futures & International at Robinhood. Two years ago, Robinhood launched one prediction market on one election night. Today it's their second biggest revenue line — bigger than crypto, bigger than equities. Over 2 million customers have traded a prediction market on Robinhood, and the industry has gone from 3 CFTC-regulated exchanges to over 22 in the same period. JB Mackenzie, VP and General Manager of Futures and Prediction Markets at Robinhood, joins Pierre on the NextPredict Podcast to go under the hood on how this happened — and where it goes next. ⏰ Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 00:34 - JB welcome 01:47 - The Sunday in London that started it all 03:09 - When did this stop being a feature and start being a business? 04:49 - Why Robinhood chose not to vertically integrate 09:23 - From 3 exchanges to 22 11:19 - The crypto.com and OG partnership explained 16:22 - The customer is the secret sauce. 18:21 - It feels like a Sprint but it's a Marathon 19:52 - Prediction markets: now Robinhood's second biggest revenue line 22:26 - "Prediction markets wasn't the plan" 24:23 - Sports is the headline. 27:17 - Will prediction markets replace the insurance industry? 30:29 - The #1 thing holding prediction markets back 33:31 - The midterms: Robinhood's election hub explained 35:04 - Where does this space look in 2029? 36:02 - Prediction markets as financial education

Sep 3, 2026

🎙️NEXTPredict Podcast #2 with Jan Czarnocki, Chief of Staff and General Counsel at Elastics In this episode of the NextPredict Podcast, Jan Czarnocki — Chief of Staff and General Counsel at Elastics, and one of the first angel investors in the company — shares a ground-level view of what prediction markets actually look like from the inside. Elastics is building an AI-powered trading terminal for prediction markets, designed to give serious traders one place for research, execution, automation and portfolio management across Polymarket, Kalshi and beyond.

See all episodes →