[pensive music playing]
Today we're watching Argentina and Spain
in the World Cup Final.
We're in Las Vegas, Nevada
at the Mirage Mega Mansion.
This is a Winible
World Cup watch weekend.
Winible is essentially OnlyFans
for the sports betting creator economy.
The guys in this house have made
millions of dollars on prediction markets,
probably eight figures
just over the course of the World Cup.
I like betting on Kalshi.
Trading on Polymarket.
At the beginning of the World Cup,
you get to pick
who you think is gonna win
the whole World Cup.
So, before it started, I put 5,000 dollars
on Spain to win the whole thing.
So I put Spain to win.
[man] Like, when you wake up,
you gotta put on your lucky underwear,
take a deep breath, say a prayer.
I think prediction markets
are low-key taking over the world.
Welcome to day four of flipping
1k into ten grand on Polymarket.
Now, to an industry skyrocketing
in popularity, prediction market.
What are you guys talking about?
Prediction market app, dude.
You know, online peer-to-peer betting.
Hundred dollars on Kane to score. Done.
10K on Jake Paul
makes you 90,000 dollars?
[James] There are two major players,
Kalshi and Polymarket.
[Dustin] They really
don't like each other.
Kalshi has just posted
its most lucrative market ever.
Who will win the finals of the World Cup?
It is shocking
the extent to which prediction markets
have proliferated.
Thanks to prediction markets,
you can now bet on basically anything.
And I mean anything.
[reporter 1] From Taylor Swift's
wedding date
to the chances of an Iran nuclear deal.
We're gambling on w*r.
[reporter 2] The longtime teleprompter
operator for the president.
He's on leave now
for alleged insider trading.
The long-term vision
is to financialize everything.
This is my life. Me, just, like,
refreshing, refreshing, refreshing.
[man] This is the hyper-financialization
or hyper-gamification
of our entire lives.
-Hussein Obama.
-Yeah!
And the whole world unfortunately
has become somewhat of a casino.
[pensive music playing]
[James] I've been writing
about the prediction markets
for almost 25 years now.
The first real prediction market
that we know of was started
at the University of Iowa
in the late 1980s.
They started with a really obvious one.
How likely a candidate
was to win a presidential election.
You would buy a contract
in Michael Dukakis
if you thought Dukakis was going to win.
And that market proved
to be exceptionally good,
really better than almost all polls.
And by doing so,
they create this really powerful
kind of collective forecasting machine
that taps into what I call
the wisdom of crowds.
[crowd chanting in foreign language]
[James] The basic idea
of the wisdom of crowds
is that under the right conditions,
groups of people
can be remarkably intelligent.
So, if you can figure out ways to tap into
that wisdom of crowds,
then you can actually create tools
that will solve problems
and even in some circumstances,
and this would be
where prediction markets come in,
forecast the future.
This is how it works.
Every prediction market starts
with a question.
Let's say,
"Will the US government acknowledge
the existence of aliens by 2029?"
And that is a real market
in Kalshi right now.
So, there are two options. Yes, or no.
In a prediction market,
there are always two people
trading against each other.
So, for you to make this trade,
you would buy shares of yes at 25% odds.
Another person would have to take
the other side of that trade at 75%.
The price in the market
is always changing
and that reflects the changing opinions
of the people in the crowd.
And you can cash out your bet
at any point.
When the outcome is known,
the winner gets 100% of the payout
and the loser gets nothing.
Kalshi and Polymarket,
they make money
by taking a transaction fee.
The more people that bet,
the more money they make.
[crowd chanting in foreign language]
[Morgan] We've got all of this
enthusiasm over World Cup
and a betting bonanza.
And Kalshi did more
than five billion bucks
in trading volume this week.
Joining us, Tarek Mansour
is a CEO and co-founder at Kalshi.
When he left MIT,
he joined really the giants
of Wall Street.
Prediction markets are covering things
that are top of people's minds.
Things that are very kind of core
and front and center right now.
And so, sports have been
an amazing propeller.
I mean, it's massive.
I mean, 30 to 40 billion dollars
in volume.
The growth has been incredible.
A lot of people watch sports,
so it's an easy way
to kind of understand what this is
and get educated
about prediction markets.
A big chunk of the users
essentially convert to other things
like the economy,
politics, weather, culture.
If you're not making money
watching Love Island,
you're doing it wrong.
You know, it's interesting.
When we started the company, it was 2018.
This was a time where, you know,
you saw the sort of first wave
of misinformation, polarization,
the country being driven to the extremes.
You will not resist us!
[Tarek] Social media
was supposed to be a solution to that,
but it ended up adding fuel to fire.
I am over it.
The beauty of prediction markets
is the incentive structure
is the opposite.
The incentive structure
in the system is truth.
It's a truth that's coming
from people with skin in the game.
And, you know--
And you think about it, right?
Like, you sit sometimes
at a dinner table at Thanksgiving,
and everyone has all these crazy takes.
And you're like,
"Hey, let's put ten dollars on it."
And all of a sudden,
they get a lot more careful, right?
The person that was so certain
about their belief and their opinion,
all of a sudden
they're not so sure anymore.
It's objective. It's mathematical.
It's statistical in a way that
all the other mechanisms are not.
And I love math.
[indistinct chatter]
[Tarek] I grew up in Lebanon
with a single mom and I lived, you know--
The way I describe Lebanon
is a very volatile country.
In this sort of complex,
constantly evolving dynamic environment,
I found math to be a refuge.
And prediction markets
are a bit of an application of that.
You want the people
that are doing the research.
You want the people that are like
very "sharp," or well-informed, or smart.
And imagine if society,
we basically tackled a lot
of our big questions by thinking more.
[birds cawing]
[reporter 1] We can think about Spain
and climbing Mount Everest.
But you have to deal with that lot first
and see where you can go.
[reporter 2] Look at the scene here.
-Another Capri Sun?
-[Isaac] Yeah.
I just get nervous
and I like drinking Capri Sun.
[laughs]
[Isaac] We're a bunch of people
who bet and trade on sports for a living
and always trying to make
as much money as possible.
In terms of placing this bet,
yeah, you know,
you just get probably way too comfortable
with moving around large amounts of money.
Since prediction markets started offering
sports trading, I've made mid six figures.
I remember not that long ago when
if Datian lost 100 bucks,
it would be pretty devastating.
And now I think it would probably
take 30 times to maybe even register.
[producer] And that's worth it
to you guys?
Making a million dollars
in like two weeks?
That seems pretty great to me.
[reporter] and he celebrates
like LeBron James.
-[man] Wait. Belgium just scored.
-[Isaac] Yeah, we f*cked-- We missed it.
The prediction markets are faster
than the streams,
so Belgium scored
before we actually got to see the goal.
You've made so much. This is crazy.
Datian just made
like 50,000 dollars on that goal.
Look at him. Doesn't even feel a thing.
The way it works, you have market makers
and then you have market takers.
And in the vast majority of cases,
the market makers are sharp or smart,
and the market takers are not smart
in the sense
that they are making losing trades.
I mean, Datian used to work
at Jane Street.
The people at Jane Street are
often described as mathematical.
They're problem solvers
in the most advanced way.
[Isaac] I mean, yeah, we're all
only able to make money
because people smarter than us
haven't entered these markets yet.
Describe your perfect counterparty.
I think it's just, like, someone
who randomly, like, place orders
and has, like, zero information.
Yeah, someone who just
logs in and just wants
to bet on anything that they see.
They're not making a sophisticated choice
as to what they're trading.
They're just buying or selling
whatever it is that's in front of them.
It's a fancy way of saying
that he wants to be
against the 19-year-old
who's randomly firing off.
[pensive music playing]
[indistinct chatter on TV]
[Daniel] I'm 19 years old.
I work as a chef and
I like to bet on Kalshi.
[reporter] used to scoring really well.
[Daniel] I think I've always been
a little more impulsive
and maybe adventurous than,
you know, my peers.
A lot of my friends I grew up with, like,
you know, didn't want to do
crazy things as much.
[producer] Crazy things like what?
Gamble away all their rent.
[laughing]
-We've been undefeated.
-So Kalshi is the sauce?
Thank you Kalshi.
[Daniel] When the Knicks made the finals,
that's when I would say started the peak
of how much I was putting into the Kalshi.
I started with 1,000 dollars,
you know, went up and down,
and then I borrowed
another 1,100 from my roommate.
Yeah, and I lost it all, pretty much.
[Timothe] Kalshi.
I don't understand,
but this is going very well.
[Isaac] Gambling can be
incredibly dangerous
and problematic for a lot of people.
It's especially true for young people.
I mean, we just saw Timothe Chalamet
on TV saying,
"Sign up for Kalshi, it's great."
And one of the things
that is most dangerous, in my opinion is
an influencer saying
how they paid their rent
by guessing the weather
or some person on YouTube
talking about how easy
it is to get rich quick.
[grunts]
The more people you expose to that vice,
the more people who are going
to have serious problems.
[reporter] will be Spain against Belgium
in Los Angeles this Friday.
[Daniel] Tonight, I'm lucky.
We can see it, the final screen,
which isn't much, you know.
Now my portfolio is 300 dollars
and it's pending payout.
It has been
the cause of significant stress
like I haven't paid my rent for a month
because of this specifically.
You know, I can say, "No, it doesn't
have that much of a grip on me,"
but clearly it does a little bit.
As of right now, I have 57 dollars
in my checking account.
[producer] Did you ever consider
putting limits on your Kalshi account?
Yeah, there's a limit
on my Kalshi account.
It's whatever I have
in my checking account is the limit.
[birds chirping]
[Dustin] All right. I'm going
to hit the button in three, two, one.
My name is Dustin Gouker.
I'm the host of this podcast,
The Event Horizon.
We're here to talk this week
about prediction markets.
Over the course of the World Cup,
Kalshi has had the biggest days
it's had in its history.
I don't think even I had a sense
of how big this would be for Kalshi.
Prediction markets are the fastest
growing industry this side of AI.
I have no doubt about it.
These companies have
gotten big really fast.
Everything is disrupted by this.
It's like, it's changed
how we view the world.
Polymarket kind of dominated
for the early 2020s.
They're crypto native
and mostly unregulated
offshore until recently.
Kalshi was doing this totally differently.
We spent four years getting regulated
before we launched a single product.
We have more than a thousand markets
across politics, entertainment, culture.
[Dustin] But the billions of dollars
we're hearing are not
on real-world events
that really matter.
Sports are about 85 to 90%
of trading volume at Kalshi
right now as we sit here.
It may not be legally gambling,
but what is happening is
a 100% just gambling.
Kentucky's Attorney General is suing
the prediction market platforms.
accusing them of facilitating
ill*gal sports betting.
[Dustin] That's what all
these court cases are about.
Because gambling has always
been the purview of the state.
A year and a half ago now,
Kalshi said, we're going to offer this,
but we're going to do it
under federal law,
no different than other exchanges
where you can buy a stock
or sell a stock.
We don't have
to worry about state laws.
We are legally
under the federal government
and that's it.
Whether something feels
and looks like gambling
doesn't necessarily make it gambling.
Speculation exists
in all financial markets.
There's this patchwork
state-based solution
where every single state is
like some sort
of weird backdoor lobbying.
[Dustin] The CFTC started off
just being very hands-off.
Then we got a new chairman
of the CFTC, Michael Selig,
and they became not just hands-off,
but an active proponent of the industry.
[producer] Why is he doing that?
I have to say this in a way
that won't get me in trouble. Let's see.
Some people will argue that
it has to do with corruption.
Some people will say
it's just deregulation.
I'm not here to pontificate on that.
It's hard to, like, separate the fact
that Donald Trump Jr.
is an advisor to both Kalshi
and Polymarket.
Certainly, the president,
his family has a vested interest
in the success of prediction markets.
And we have a CFTC
that is being very friendly now
towards prediction markets.
[pensive music playing]
[Michael] There's agreements
and walls that are put in place
such that we're not dealing
with any members
of the president's family
when it comes to policy.
We don't engage
with the president's family
on any of these types of issues.
So in my belief and understanding
there is no sort of conflicts of interest.
The prior administration
didn't like the prediction markets.
I mean, that was very clear.
They sought to ban the product
with respect
to political prediction markets.
The courts threw it out
and then we saw the gates open.
Prediction markets
are absolutely exploding.
Events in pop culture and tech
and sports and climate
and the world and literally
anything you can think of.
[Michael] I've been in the seat
for about six months now
and there's no clear rules
of the road yet,
but we're trying to put those in place
as soon as we can.
[producer] What's your message then
to states who are trying to limit
prediction markets?
The law is clear.
The law provides that the CFTC
has exclusive federal
regulatory authority
over these markets
because they are national markets.
To any state that seeks
to circumvent federal regulation
and replace federal law with state law,
we will see you in court.
An exclusive interview
is Polymarket founder
and CEO Shayne Coplan.
bounced around this sort
of startup tech crypto scene for a while.
This NYU dropout crypto bad boy.
He's now a billionaire.
I think that when people think
about prediction markets right now,
all they think about is sports.
I love sports, but
I didn't start Polymarket
for it to be a sports site.
I found myself in a lucky position.
It was during the pandemic.
I was broke.
I was living in the Lower East Side.
And I was like, when
are things gonna open back up?
When people talk about the vaccine,
when's it gonna be ready?
When's shelter in place gonna be over?
Are things gonna go back to normal?
And I was like, this idea
of information markets is the perfect
this is the perfect use case
in the perfect moment.
And I think because of a mix
of my nerdy passion of markets
and this sort of like academic literature
about what today we think
of as prediction markets,
plus maybe just enough creativity
and being so broke
that I had nothing to lose.
The triad of that, I was like,
"Screw it, I'm going
to go build this thing."
You know, when Polymarket really
glowed up and became a thing,
it was all about politics.
I think the real watershed moment,
the inflection point,
was during the first debate
between Biden and Trump.
With the COVID
[stammers]
[Shayne] When Biden started
stumbling with his words,
the Polymarket
for him dropping out was skyrocketing
and the Polymarket
for him winning was tanking.
And someone said to me,
it was like a really funny quote.
They were like, "Shayne, there's really
two things that can happen here."
"Either he'll drop out and you build one
of the most important sites in the world
or nothing's gonna happen
and you've lost all credibility,
no one's ever gonna take Polymarket
seriously again."
I was like, "Okay." Like, you know
Like, let's see what happens.
We are coming on the air at this hour
with breaking news
President Biden has just announced
that he is ending his re-election bid.
[Shayne] When he dropped out,
that was a moment.
[reporter 1] Just a stunning
announcement from
And then Election Day was
this crazy moment where
the way that the market moved that night
and called Trump winning
when the TV stations were still talking
about, "Oh, it's neck and neck."
At the very end, we find a tie nationally,
49% for Harris, 49% for Trump.
[reporter 2] Harris having
the slight edge over Trump
in the latest national poll, very slight.
Polymarket was spot on the entire time.
That was one
of the most gratifying moments ever,
just because the idea worked.
The idea worked.
And from that moment on,
there was the level of credibility
that Polymarket had
and the way people thought about it
had just changed entirely.
[James] So prediction markets
have gotten very popular,
but there hasn't been a steady evolution.
[reporter 3] Another exotic idea
from the Pentagon's
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
DARPA.
A futures market, if you will, in terror.
[James] In 2003,
the intelligence community
was planning on launching public markets
in geopolitical events
called "the policy analysis market."
It was going to be open to anyone.
The hope was that
the collective judgment of that market
would yield some useful information
for the U.S. intelligence community.
What they mostly wanted
to forecast were things
like the political stability of regimes
or what was going to happen
to oil in upcoming years.
But when they went to work
and kind of advertised the market,
they also talked about things like,
whether or not there would be
a m*ssile attack from North Korea
or betting on assassinations.
There was this just
massive backlash against it.
The federal government
is encouraging people to bet on
and make money from atrocities
and t*rror1st attacks.
You're gonna make money
if terrible things happen.
Why are we potentially creating
an incentive for people to,
like, go out and try an assassination?
It is a tragic waste of taxpayers' money.
It will be offensive to almost everyone.
Can you imagine
And the amazing thing is, as soon as
there was any pressure, they folded.
I mean, the whole thing
was over within, like, two days.
I think the main thing
that has changed, honestly,
is that we are just much
more comfortable with gambling
than we were 20 years ago.
So when you give people the chance to bet
on pretty much anything,
it gets complicated really fast.
And it seems like there
are three big issues,
let's call them
the "Dark Side of Prediction Markets."
The first one is insider trading.
A U.S. Special Forces soldier
who helped to plan the January capture
of Venezuelan President Nicols Maduro
has been indicted.
Now pleading not guilty.
Authorities say he won
more than 400,000 dollars
using classified information
to win on Polymarket.
[reporter 1] Polymarket says
it referred the suspicious bets
to the Department of Justice.
The second problem
is the problem of people
gaming the things that are used
to measure the outcomes.
This involves tampered weather data.
France's national forecaster
has filed a police complaint
after detecting
suspicious temperature spikes
at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport.
Somehow the equipment was tampered with,
maybe a lighter, maybe a hairdryer,
to give this five-degree Celsius spike
in the reading.
[James] Third, and I think
by far the most consequential,
is when the existence
of a prediction market,
actually changes what people do.
There was a Kalshi market
on whether or not
George Santos would show up
at the State of the Union address.
I'm going to be there
for the State of the Union
in the gallery, guys.
Santos had reportedly made a bet on Kalshi
on the "no" side of the contract.
That is, he would not show up.
[reporter 2] During the address,
he posted, "Watching State of the Union
from an airport TV
was not part of the plan."
By skipping the speech,
sources say he pocketed
tens of thousands of dollars.
I do think going forward,
they're just gonna have to figure out
how to manage this.
[pensive music playing]
[Robert] All right, so where are we
on requesting materials
from the traders in Georgia?
He keeps spamming our inbox.
Because the account is frozen?
Yeah, yeah.
I suspect that that person's
just nervous also
that there's an inquiry
into their activity.
Any regulated financial institution
is going to face
people who come to commit financial crime,
whether it's money laundering,
whether it's insider trading,
market manipulation, etc.
So I lead our investigations
and the enforcement actions
that we undertake.
Our team's grown quite a bit
in the last year.
We have about 15 to 20 employees,
individuals who are just focused
on surveillance.
We have individuals
who are surveilling for fraud,
and then also a legal team.
We've hired surveillance analysts
from the FBI.
We have people
with backgrounds at the CFTC
and the Department of Justice.
There's been a significant increase
in our investigative and referral efforts
over the last six months in particular,
just as the exchange has grown.
Our surveillance algorithms
are running over every single trade
happening on the exchange.
When they demonstrate
some anomalous behavior,
whether that's a very well-timed trade,
a pattern of very well-timed trades,
a very significant price jump
that occurs right after an unusual trade,
all those things might trigger
a trade that comes across my desk
or the surveillance team's desk.
So, then
There's probably a 100, 150 each quarter
that are meaningful investigations
that may lead to some finding
of wrongdoing or disciplinary action.
And we've made dozens of referrals
to law enforcement.
Any new product or evolution in technology
leads to really smart bad actors
figuring out how to game that system.
And the key is to try to stay
one or five steps
in front of them at all times.
You won't always succeed at that.
[birds chirping]
[Caleb] This is one of the big things
that I spoiled myself with.
This is paid for by prediction markets.
With the press of a button,
you can go from a sunlit room
to what becomes total darkness.
Brought to me 100% by Kalshi.
My wife would not let me spend this money
if it wasn't just like bonus money.
Back in March of 2024,
Kalshi really started to hit
the culture markets hard.
In theory, their music and movie markets,
the way that you win 'em is by using math.
So, I turned, you know,
a 10,000 dollar deposit
into over 200,000 dollars
in about six or seven months.
The most common plays
that I would do on Spotify
is who will get number one
during a given month.
June 28th
[Olivia] Talk to me, talk to me
[Caleb] I noticed some weird pricing
on Olivia Dean.
Somebody thought that there was
a more than 11% chance
Olivia Dean was going to get first.
And I thought the true odds
of Olivia Dean getting first place
naturally was zero.
This was an old song.
When I dug into the details,
I was very concerned.
The data that I was looking at
is the top 200 songs.
Most of 'em saw a drop.
Two of them were newer songs,
like newer small songs.
It's not unusual for those to go up,
but for a well-established song
to go up almost 20%
like this Drake song did,
or 7% like this Olivia Dean song did,
this is a very strong sign
that fraud was happening.
In theory, somebody is stream botting
or stream boosting.
It's just artificial,
automated ways of "listening to music"
where nobody's really listening to it.
They're just trying to run up the numbers.
So, at this point, I had 17,000 dollars
that Drake wouldn't get first place,
and I had 13,000 dollars
that Olivia Dean
wouldn't get first place.
And I was quite worried.
So, I started sending emails.
I emailed Kalshi.
I emailed Spotify
saying I was completely convinced
that the Drake and Olivia Dean streams
were being botted,
but they didn't seem
to take it very seriously.
[insects trilling]
[Caleb] Then the results come out,
and I look at who's in first place,
and it wasn't Olivia Dean.
And it wasn't Drake.
It was Malcolm Todd.
[upbeat music playing]
[record scratches]
[Caleb] Like, what? That makes no sense.
Malcolm Todd wasn't even on the radar
as a possibility.
And if you look at this chart,
you can see, boom,
just this huge spike.
So, his streams went up by 70%
in a single day.
And then they paid it out,
and then I was pissed.
Spotify removed the streams.
And they admitted
that they were fraudulent.
But then in seeing how Kalshi handled it,
how they just stopped replying,
I liquidated my Kalshi account.
So, I withdrew maybe 220,000 dollars?
[boy] Dad!
[Robert] There are individuals
who take a look at something and say,
I can conclude this is bots
and it's manipulation,
and they may very well be right.
But from a legal perspective,
you need evidence
to make that determination.
You can't just say it looks like a duck
and it quacks like a duck so it is.
We're gathering the evidence
we would need
to make that determination,
but that's pretty much the most
that I can comment on
in terms of specifics about that.
Okay, Patricio.
It's kind of the Wild West right now.
Regulation has not caught up
to what these markets are doing at all.
And as long as it's the platforms
basically policing themselves,
they're going to grow
as much as they possibly can
Gonna go and get a goal!
offer as many markets
as they possibly can,
and consequences be damned.
[indistinct chatter]
[reporter 1] It is day 11 of the US-Israel
w*r with Iran.
[reporter 2]
The strikes lighting up the night sky
and sending people rushing to shelter.
[Emanuel] My name is Emanuel Fabian.
I've been working for The Times of Israel
for around six years now.
I basically cover everything
related to the Israeli military.
I'm at this point covering
the Iranian attacks on Israel
and Israel's attacks on Iran.
On March 10th, there was, you know,
one of several missiles that day,
which struck outside the city
of Beit Shemesh near Jerusalem.
They reported there was
no injuries, no damage.
There wasn't anything particularly unusual
in the grand scheme of things of this w*r.
Much later that day,
I get kind of an unusual email,
essentially asking me
to change my earlier reporting.
And they were claiming that the m*ssile
that struck was fragments
that were following an interception
of a m*ssile.
And I respond to them and said,
"Look, residents told me
that they felt a massive expl*si*n
and a shockwave
that shook all their windows."
And the army also confirmed to me that
it was a m*ssile that struck the area.
And then I started getting
a barrage of messages.
They wrote here, "If you do not
correct this by 1:00 a.m. Israel time,
you are brining upon yourself damage
you have never imagined you would suffer."
"You make us lose 900,000 dollars,
we will invest no less than that
to finish you."
It was scary at that point.
I'm married. I have a young daughter.
I didn't know what this person
was actually capable of.
At that point, it was very clear to me
that it was bets on Polymarket.
Essentially, the bet was,
"Did Iran strike Israel
on a specific date?"
You can see that the amount of money
that was bet here reached
23 million dollars.
Those who had voted "no"
were the ones trying to convince me
to change my report
and to say that it was intercepted.
But I was not going to change the story
and it was going to stay
exactly how it is.
It wouldn't surprise me
if there are many more cases.
Journalists being threatened
to change their reporting,
I don't think I'll be the last.
[pensive music playing]
[upbeat music playing]
Prediction markets are a cesspool.
Even if it is legal, right,
is there something immoral
or ethically questionable
here about betting
on geopolitical events
when lives are potentially at stake?
We haven't done a good enough job
in terms of, you know,
distilling why we do what we do.
I know that we are probably
in some, like, vibe debt, maybe,
in terms of just how people kind of
group Polymarket in
with a lot of other stuff.
It's the latest allegation
of insider trading on prediction markets.
Someone opened an account
on Polymarket
and now they can make over a million.
What are your thoughts on this?
This is just another coinky-dink.
Kalshi is proven itself
over the last few months.
We are applying these rules
no matter who it is.
If somebody is going to try to cheat,
we will catch them.
It's not some sort of offshore thing
where it's done in the shadows.
It's done right here in the middle
of our financial system.
I know what happens in this office.
I know the conversation we have.
I know what I care about
and what drives me.
And you have to kind of oscillate
between cutting out the noise,
but also understanding
people's criticism and concerns.
Maybe there's things that you missed
that other people are flagging.
And maybe they hate you, but maybe
they're actually making some good points.
This is inherently evil and bad.
Do you think Kenzie's gonna do
the splits on Love Island?
[Dustin] It feels nihilistic, right?
It feels like,
why are we betting on everything?
There's a place for prediction markets.
I think they should definitely exist.
I think they have values.
I just think there needs to be
more guardrails,
more thought put
into how this industry
-has come about and where it's headed.
-Come on!
Right now it feels like
all gas, no brakes.
When this is everywhere and you have
a completely gamblified world
people are not going to integrate it
healthily into their lives.
And I'm as guilty of that as anybody.
[Daniel] I'm kind of just letting it ride.
When everything's a market,
the opportunities for cheating
are basically endless.
That's a reality that we're
going to be facing now.
And it's going to be much
more difficult to sort of
find what's true now.
And that, I think, really worries me.
[speaker] With a couple of months
to go until the midterms,
we've already seen volume
that's far exceeded 2024.
What I'm most interested in about them
is their usefulness
for forecasting the future.
And these midterms are going
to generate a lot of interest
because there's a lot at stake in them.
And so in that way, this is kind of
one of the bigger tests
of prediction markets.
I think prediction markets
have definitely hit critical mass.
The growth in the prediction market
has been so fast because they work.
We're putting the prediction markets data
next to the news, next to polls,
next to everything else,
so people can look at everything
and make their own
independent assessment.
I think that it's inevitable
that everyone will be
looking at it to kind of understand
what will happen.
The only thing that you have to believe
to believe that prediction markets
are going to keep growing the way
they've been growing, is that there's
going to be interesting news in the world.
I feel like there's
so much work left to be done
in terms of the inventive side
of prediction markets
and what could be that isn't yet.
We're very committed to this vision
because we think it's one
of the most important things
we could be working on.
And I feel like
if I don't go and invent that
or realize that vision,
it probably won't happen.
[pensive music playing]
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Instadocs: The Prediction Games (2026)
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