Prediction Markets Want to Financialize Everything w/ Jathan Sadowski

Polymarket and Kalshi are everywhere. But what are they doing to society? Jathan Sadowski joins Paris Marx to discuss the rise of prediction markets and their negative social effects as they push the global economy closer toward the financialization of everything. 

Jathan Sadowski is an Associate Professor at Monash University. He is the author of The Mechanic and the Luddite and co-hosts This Machine Kills.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Jathan wrote about Kalshi trying to bring about the financialization of everything in Fast Company.
• The NYT reported on the use of classified information by a US soldier to place a bet on the capture of Maduro.
• Wired just reported on how the US is using AI to spot insider trading.
• Polymarket users sent death threats to a reporter.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

There's this real ideological aspect that is trying to justify the prediction market as more than just a degenerate way to gamble, but as a way to filter out the noise and figure out what the ground truth is and feel smarter for having gone to Calci to get all of your opinions and predictions about the world.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Jathan is an associate professor at Monash University, the author of The Mechanic and the Luddite, and a co-host of This Machine Kills. He wrote an article recently about prediction markets like Calci and Polymarket and how they are affecting the society that we live in. And I feel like as we hear more and more about these companies and this type of betting or gambling, that it was a good opportunity to have Jason on the show to explore the wider consequences of this, right? You know, we hear the stories about insider trading being done on these platforms, you know, people who have information and then trade on it and, you know, make money from major world events in a way that is becoming increasingly concerning, right? But we also see these platforms increasingly integrated into the news and entertainment shows and various other media that we encounter. And so what happens when we're seeing this everywhere? What happens when everything is something that can be bet on, that can be gambled on, where there's an expectation that you could be turning a profit off of who wins an Oscar or whether, you know, the United States invades a country or who wins a certain election or any of these things, right? You know, obviously there was some like black market or side betting on many of these things in the past, but it wasn't so formalized and institutionalized and really promoted as this thing that is regular. This all comes about since the legalization of these practices in recent years, which has made sports betting explode. But now we see this kind of broader betting throughout the economy, throughout the society. And that is obviously having impacts, right? It's having impacts on the way that people see the world. It's having impacts on the way that people see one another. And obviously, there are a lot of companies making a lot of money off of this, but for that to happen, a lot of people also need to be losing a lot of money. And that has broader social consequences. And so I wanted to talk to Jason about all of this to understand what is really happening, what the impacts of these platforms are, where they actually come from, and whether there are opportunities to rein them in. And one of the things that he talks about very clearly is how we are increasingly seeing the financialization of virtually everything, whether it is through the cryptocurrency markets, which obviously took off, you know, in a major way uh in the early years of the pandemic. They were around long before that. Um, but yeah, obviously, sports betting is something that has become very common. Now, these prediction markets, it feels like everything is something that you can now make money on, place a bet on, and that has real consequences. And so I wanted to talk to Jathan to understand those. And I think he gives us a great analysis of what is going on here and how it is really detrimental to a healthy society to allow these things to continue, to allow this practice to continue to entrench itself and to allow everything to be financialized in the way that things are going right now. So it's a great conversation, and I think you're really going to enjoy it. And of course, if you do, make sure to leave a five-star view on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making Tech Won't Save Us every single week, so we can keep having these critical, in-depth conversations about the tech industry, how it affects the world, our politics, and so much else. You can join supporters like Lily in Toronto and Gia in Sydney by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Jathan, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

It's always a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

I always love having you on the show. Of course, you know, big fan of TMK, your podcast with Ed, but you also do a bunch of fantastic work beyond that, you know, as an academic and just looking into the many ways that this tech industry is affecting our lives and our world. And I feel like in you know, the past year, people have been hearing a lot about these prediction markets, you know, the polymarkets, the calcies, these platforms that seem to arise, you know, uh out of nowhere all of a sudden and then take over. And now we're hearing about them all the time. I wanted to dig into all of that, but maybe you could start us off by telling us what prediction markets actually are. Like what are these things that we're talking about all the time now?

SPEAKER_00 5:01

Yeah, for sure. I mean, they're they're kind of a weird and counter and counterintuitive thing to exist at all, right? I mean, even the prediction aspect of calling it a prediction market is very, you know, we'll we'll dig deeper into that. But that is itself a misleading name for what they are. I mean, that really comes out of like neoclassical economics, kind of efficient market theory, a lot of the libertarian obsession with like collective wisdom and wisdom of the crowds. And so, like, that's where a lot of the kind of ideology around prediction markets and some of the structures of practice and you know, this idea of prediction markets have been around for a very long time. You know, we now know about it because of Calci, because of Polymarket, right? Those are the two main big platforms. But this idea of prediction markets has been around since at least the 90s, you know, even earlier than that, but really kind of formalized in the in the 90s, the early 2000s, um, as a way of trying to take advantage of this idea that there's there's a you know, there's a lot of dispersed and and diffused information out there, and it's not well aggregated. You know, people there's asymmetries of what people know, what people are sharing. Um and the idea is that markets provide an incentive for people to kind of put their money where their information is, right? So rather than keeping all this information in your mind that might be useful for predicting the outcome of world events or of market trends, you know, for a company, right? You create a kind of market system where people can essentially buy contracts on whether an event will happen or not, or the outcome of some event. Um, and so, like, you know, the this idea of kind of prediction markets, right, has been around for about 40 years, but we there's a lot of instances of these smaller internal markets. So, like Google, for example, has run multiple different internal prediction markets for employees to make wagers on events. Uh, and these these could be things around, you know, placing bets on product release dates or maybe placing bets on what their competitors might be doing as a way to aggregate information within Google. Lots of companies have done this. I mean, DARPA, the you know, the Pentagon's advanced research agency, uh experimented with what they called future map or future markets applied to prediction, um, which was start they started developing it in May of 2001 uh as a way for anonymous speculators to take out futures contracts on the likelihood of events like assassinations, coups, terrorist attacks, conflict in the Middle East. Um, and you know, I I don't think that they successfully predicted uh 9-11 only a handful of months later. But, you know, that once once it was publicized that DARPA was essentially letting people place bets on assassinations of world leaders and things like that, you know, it was publicized in 2003 that this prediction market existed. It faced really swift and public backlash with senators like Ron Wyden uh leading the charge and calling it uh future map quote a fantasy league terror game. Uh and so the idea here of like prediction markets as somehow degenerate or immoral has has been around for about as long as the idea of prediction markets uh has been around. But but now it's really broken into the mainstream because of these platforms like Calci and Polymarkets. So it's like they didn't I they didn't originate the idea of placing bets on the outcomes of events, but what they did is they scaled the idea to in a in an unprecedented way, where now we can all do that about essentially anything and everything. And now I'm happy to get more into the kind of details around how it works, around these event contracts and things like that. But let me know how deep you want to go into uh the the mechanics of these markets.

SPEAKER_01 9:29

Totally. No, I I think that gives us a great kind of like historical setup to where this comes from, right? And and I do want to dig into the types of things that you're talking about, but even hearing you say that and talking about the history and talking about how you know it has been used in tech companies and in the military and in these other, you know, kind of organizations, it it you know really stands out to me that there's obviously a commercial push for something like this. You know, there's obviously an opportunity to make money by allowing the uh betting or you know, to create these contracts on these different markets and you know, you're betting on real-world events or things that might happen or what have you. But then there's also this ideological piece as well that assumes that, you know, this is a way that we should organize society, that this is something that is positive, that it comes out of this kind of certain political way of seeing the world that is probably not reflective of how everybody sees the world, but is certainly how some people see the world.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

Yeah, for sure. And I think the the ideological aspect of this, that real at the core of prediction markets is a a pretty extreme libertarian ideology that markets are the single best way to aggregate information and make decisions in the in the world, right? Because when when you hear the proponents of prediction markets, when you hear the CEOs of you know, Pollymarket, Shane Coplin, um, or the the co-CEO of Calci, Tarek Mansauer, um talk about what they are trying to do with this, it is, you know, it's it's the bombastic kind of claims that we expect from tech CEOs, but it's the bombastic claims that are really based in a hyper-libertarian market a radical market um view. And so, for example, I think one of the reasons why Calci in particular came to a lot of people's minds and and started and people started writing about it, including me, right? I I wrote a piece for Fast Company about prediction markets. Um was because late last year at the Citadel Security's Future of Global Markets Conference, so you know, one of these kinds of uh Wall Street events where the the masters of the universe can all gather in one room and tell each other how great they are and learn about what they should be investing in in the coming fiscal year, right? Um and on stage there, the uh Tarek Mansauer um was you know was talking about prediction markets, talking about Calci, talking about the rise of this new kind of way of doing financialization and speculative returns. And the moderator Molly O'Shea asked uh asked him, quote, Tarek, you've mentioned multiple times that you think prediction markets will be bigger than the stock market. What is it going to take to become a $1 trillion asset class? Uh and in response, Mansauer said, quote, you know, Calci is everything in Arabic. The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion. And I think if you do build a general purpose exchange that can resolve differences of opinion on anything, like the total available market is quite massive. So it was that quote there, this idea that the the vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion. That obviously became, you know, a very headline-grabbing claim, but it speaks to, I mean, yes, it's it's absolutely absurd, right? It's an absurd thing to to to say it all. Um, but it speaks to the the idea, the ideology underpinning this, right? That that everything not only should be subjected to or available to financialization, but everything should be financialized, right? And if it's not financialized, then you're leaving money on the table. That's that those are those are potential assets that are uh not brought into existence, right? Um, and so it's it's that ideology there, but also the you know, the kind of grand ambitions here, because we have to also understand that Calci, Polymarket, last year was a boom year for them, right? Like they they they attracted huge amounts of venture capital from our favorites, like Andreess and Horowitz and and others, and and saw their valuations skyrocket, right? The their their valuations, right? Polymarket went from, I think, a $1 billion valuation to a $9 billion valuation. Calci went from like one or two billion at the beginning of the year to $11 billion by the end of the year. These are huge jumps, and those are coming off the back of Calci alone went through three venture capital rounds last year. And the latest round was a $1 billion VC raise, right? And so, but with that, as we as good tech won't save us, listeners know once venture capital gets into the game, the imperative to scale quickly, to dominate everything, to talk about, you know, trillion dollar asset classes and total market cap, you know, total available market and financializing every difference of opinion, right? This is this is what happens when the speculative capital of VC gets into these kinds of platforms. They rapidly explode and they set their sights on world domination. I don't think that that's actually what's going to happen, but I think falling even somewhat short of that goal is still a terrible thing and something that we should be paying very close attention to.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

Totally. And it feels like as they have taken off, you know, we've been seeing them discussed in so many different areas, right? Uh, you know, it's like anything anytime something happens, part of the discussion becomes what happened on these on these markets, or did someone trade potentially inappropriately on these markets? And it's just feel it just feels like they become such a central part of the conversation, you know, uh, I think for the worse, and such that we see a you know, Substack kind of integrating Polymarket into their platform. We see CNN putting Calci on their platform. We saw Google News uh integrate polymarket into their platform and then kind of roll it back after after they got criticism. Like, what do you make of how quickly this has just seemingly gone everywhere?

SPEAKER_00 16:11

Yeah, I mean, it is really crazy, I think. And we can't understate how uh how how wild it is that these formal partnerships are really taking off, right? I mean, it it did it did really strike me that like when CNN, you know, last December signed a deal with Calci to bring it, quote, real-time probability data into the network's TV broadcast and digital platforms, you know, the this the idea here that like if you thought gambling was ruining the integrity of sports, right? And that and we have to also understand that all of the reason why these platforms exist, the reason why they've taken off as mainstream consumer products, all comes down to a 2018 Supreme Court case which legalized sports betting in the United States, right? So up until 2018, sports betting was i illegal, right? There was a federal law um that barred betting on football, basketball, baseball, and other sports in pretty much all states. And that meant that you you had to go to bookies, right? You had to kind of do it in these black markets, you had to go to Vegas, you know, and so it really limited the available the ability of this kind of betting to explode. But when that Supreme Court in 20 case in 2018 struck that down, it's you know, CalShi was founded in 2018, right? So it's like immediately you see this influx of, you know, of sports betting, right? FanDuel, um, DraftKings, right? You know, ESPN announced that it's gonna integrate DraftKings into all of its platforms after ESPN tried its own hand with ESPN debt, and then was like, well, you know, we're just gonna have DraftKings, right? So already you start having this kind of like, how is this affecting the integrity of sports, right? And there's a there's already been a number of cases of you know insider trading, of you know, players, you know, uh affecting their performance in games or the outcomes of games, you know, and and so there's already been really high profile cases of this very clearly and predictably, uh, you know, causing lots of corruption uh in in sports.

SPEAKER_01 18:28

And even on the sports side of things, like the the athletes getting criticism and and even threats from fans if they kind of play in a way that causes them to lose money, right, by making these bets.

SPEAKER_00 18:41

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Because what happens when you're no longer just a rabid fan, but you're also a rabid fan who has a lot of money on the line because you've you not just because you've bet on the outcome of a game, but because you've placed this insanely complex multi-parted parlay, right? And that's what's that's what you see here as well is this really rapid intensification of betting. You know, all of this is tied into prediction markets because prediction markets are fundamentally sports betting uh platforms that also just do other stuff, right? But like I think this intensification of gambling through the platforms is a really key aspect. So, like with a parlay, right? You're not just betting on one event, like the outcome of game, which which sports team wins the game, right? But you're betting on specific events in the game. Is this player going to get um within this range of rebounds? You know, are they going to, you know, are are they gonna pass the ball this number of times, right? Like it becomes this thing where it's like every any kind of metric becomes a point of betting, right? And you create metrics for the purpose of betting on them. And and the way this is becoming integrated into ESPN means that when you're watching the game, you're getting like live updates on the outcomes of potential parlays or potential betting events. Uh, you're getting, you know, expert commentators talking about the betting outcomes and probability events uh within games, right? It is completely changing the nature of the thing itself. It's not just an added data stream or an added entertainment product to the game. It is changing the game. And so what happens when you start seeing these prediction markets integrated into things that are, you know, arguably more important than sports, right? Um when CNN starts, you know, giving you live uh odds on the veracity of what its anchors are reporting on, right? Or as we've seen as well, when you know a number of cases here where people in the government, you know, are using confidential information to place bets and make huge amounts of profit. I mean, literally right before we started reporting or reporting, recording, the New York Times reported uh a story that they discovered who made the $400,000 bet on the outcome of uh Maduro being captured, right? And this was a huge headline, you know, the US invades and Venezuela, captures Nicholas Maduro, and like you know, hours before this happened, someone went on to a prediction, uh, went on the polymarket and placed a huge bet about the outcome of this and made and ended up making $400,000. And everyone's saying, well, obviously this is insider trading, right? Because like no one knew this was going to happen except for people in the actual operation. And then New York Times reported just before we started uh the episode that they discovered it was a A U.S. Army soldier, a master sergeant who is stationed at Fort Bragg, who made the bet using classified government information and then attempted to obscure the source of uh, you know, uh on the obscure who he was on these platforms and the source of his, you know, sudden $400,000 windfall. Um, and you know, they they found all that out, right? But this is like this is coming off the back of, you know, the White House has recently issued warnings to staff against insider trading because there's all these suspicious trades happening on prediction markets, on oil futures, on stocks, right? That are all so clearly based on classified information from within the government. And I found it really interesting that uh a rare moment where uh the Trump TMK uh Zivin diagram uh overlaps. Where so I'm gonna quote here from the New York Times where they say, quote, asked about concerns that federal employees may be engaging in insider trading on the war in Iran through prediction markets. President Trump said on Thursday that, quote, the whole world unfortunately has become somewhat of a casino. And you know what? You you gotta give it, you gotta hand it to them. This is what we've been saying on TMK for a long time. We've done a number of episodes talking about what we're calling the world casino or the great degeneracy. Uh, is that like it is undeniable that the world has become a casino now because these speculative logics of gambling, importantly, they're not speculation in the way that we think of like hedge fund managers and Wall Street tycoons doing speculation as professionals. It's gambling, it's speculation in the way that you think of someone wearing flip-flops and a Hawaiian t-shirt walks into MGM and speculates, right? It's just gambling. And that is what, you know, that is like the underlying logic now running through so much of the economy, so much of politics, so much of society. Is this kind of rebounding to speculation as the best and only way forward?

SPEAKER_01 24:19

Dude, there's so much I can respond to in there. But just to pick up on what you said about the great degeneracy, it's very funny to me to think about us talking about degeneracy in this moment, where at the same time as like seeing everything happening with the Trump administration and this and the tech industry and the way that they're kind of changing society, we also see all these people like it feels like more interested in the Catholic Church because the Pope is like a critic of AI and like is very outspoken on that. It's like, what kind of weird moment are we in right now?

SPEAKER_00 24:54

I know it's it's a it's it's a decline of morals for sure. You know, I call it the Great Degeneracy as an allusion to the Great Depression because I think these things are very much tied into each other, right? Because like the I think like one of the reasons why we see this Great Degeneracy, and really this has been happening for the last six years. 2020, I think, was the real kickoff of the Great Degeneracy. It, you know, not coincidentally, it was caused by, you know, catalyzed by COVID, right? Where you end up with this society where the bottom falls out for a lot of people, right? Like, you know, their their economic capabilities are tightly constrained, their horizons are shortened, right? For a lot of people, uh their their lives become a lot worse and have not really become meaningfully better in the next six years, right? Like, so you end up with this great, you know, a great depression, a kind of a long depression, right? It's an economic recession coupled with a mental health crisis, coupled with unemployment crisis, coupled with all of these things that has, you know, that have ultimately made people feel like they have less ability to get ahead, less possibilities for upward mobility. Um, you know, they're having to work harder to get less. Um, you know, and I and we've we've seen this happen across a number of different ways, right? Like, you know, I think this is linked to what you know, Corey Doctor calls inshidification, right? Because we see how you know platforms and companies have so clearly decided that consumers are able to be exploited from and extracted from a lot more readily. Like, you know, things don't have to be good, right? Because you don't have any other choice, you know. Um, and and so what happens when we see recessions is that we see all we always see uh a corresponding rise of vices, right? People, you know, deaths of despair, right? People use drugs and alcohol a lot more. There's mental health crises, as people have, you know, depression and anxiety, um, but there's also a rise in vices, right? People turn to gambling and violence and other kinds of things as ways to, if not get ahead, then at least deal with the fact that they don't really feel like they have any other horizons or possibilities. Or because they, you know, and I think a lot of the turn to gambling is because people are seeing this as the only way forward, right? It's like the only way that I can uh you know feel like I can pay my rent for the next week is to turn my current rent money into three times rent money, right? Like it's this idea that the only way to get out of the K-shape economy, right? So-called, because there's vast divergences and some a small group are going rapidly up while a large group are going rapidly down. And so they're diverging. And the only way that seems like to get out of the K-shape economy is to gamble your way out of it. And we saw this in COVID and 2020 with the rise of Robinhood, right? So, you know, stock trading, you know, from your phone. People are unemployed, they're sitting around, they can't leave their house, they don't really have any opportunities to make money any other way. And so people start getting on Robinhood and they become addicted to it. And it becomes a big story, right? And you have meme stocks. But importantly, you also have people making incredibly complex options, uh, trades on their couch, things that they have no idea what's actually going on, right? Like these are you know trades that would be normally only available, accessible, knowable to professionals on Wall Street. Now you can do it from your phone and lose money in ways that you never knew was possible, right? And so you have that, and you have the corresponding rise of apps like FanDuel and DraftKings with that 2018 court case, which you know, 2020 hits. It's just like perfect, just enough time for these platforms to get up and running, and then uh COVID hits, and now everyone's doing sports betting, right? And so what happens with the prediction markets is you have Silicon Valley saying, Well, we see, you know, we're we're kind of trying to tie together Las Vegas and Wall Street here. If FanDuel's is Vegas and Robin Hood is Wall Street, well, Calci is stepping in and saying, Well, we can we can do this, but to for everything, right? And so people start getting on to prediction markets, uh the fact that like this this recession that we're in, this you know, is just continuing to extend further and further out, right? Nothing seems like it's gonna get better in any any uh foreseeable future, but I think it has just caused this real intensification of speculation, of gambling, of vices, of people turning to these things as ways of making quick profits. With that as well comes a corresponding investment into these platforms, right? It's not surprising that venture capital firms would be investing huge amounts of money into Robin Hood and Calchi and DraftKings because ultimately, you know, these forms of investment are liquidity extraction machines, right? Like the point is not to produce value in society, the point is to produce uh liquidity events in society. Um, and what better way to produce a liquidity event than liquidizing the content of people's wallets, you know, and so that's I think that's what we see happening here. And then this corresponding rise of all these formal partnerships and these formal integration of these markets, you know, that follows the money, right? Places like CNN and ESPN and all these other companies, you know, and all the people doing insider trading, right? They're just following money, right? Like they're all saying, well, these prediction markets have a lot of money, a lot of valuation, a lot of investment. Maybe we can get some of that. And I don't think there's a whole lot of care or concern about things like integrity or accountability or even sustainability, like financial sustainability. Everyone is just making short-term financial partnerships and decisions right now. And we're we're we're we're left having to figure out what are the consequences going to be and who's gonna clean up the mess.

SPEAKER_01 31:45

Definitely. I think you're spot on with all that, right? And especially if you think about people engaging in these markets more and more, right? Uh as you were saying, it feels like, you know, the honest person can't get ahead. It feels like the stock market kind of rebounded, you know, since the pandemic, but regular people are still struggling through the after effects of all of that, now worsened even further because of the wars that Donald Trump uh is starting and, you know, how that is causing oil prices to go up and the price of everything else to go up. Feels like people can't get ahead. So of course, you're going to turn to betting, you're going to turn to these platforms that, you know, offer the fantasy that, you know, putting your money into this is how you're going to get ahead, how you're going to succeed. And then you have these other parts of society just buying into it because that is the thing that is popular right now. They but they're probably getting some money from partnerships in order to do this. Um, and they're cash-strapped anyway, so they're going to do it. But I did want to ask you, right? Because you were talking about how you know the platforms like Calchi and Polymarket are directly related back to the sports betting that we have been talking about for a number of years, right? As you're saying that we have seen very integrated into sports as a whole. And now we're seeing these broader betting markets being integrated into, you know, news and current events and all these sorts of things and entertainment news and all this kind of stuff too. Why does it take so long for these types of markets to become more popular, right? You're saying that, you know, calcium polymarkets started in 2018 and 2020. We start to hear a lot about the sports betting platforms then, and we're hearing about crypto. Why is it that Calci and Polymarket, do you have an idea of why it takes a bit more time for them to, you know, really go mainstream, I guess?

SPEAKER_00 33:21

Yeah, it's a really good question. And I think a lot of it comes down to as well that sports betting is still most of the the kind of trade flow on these prediction markets like Calci and Polymarket. So like they have markets for anything and everything that you can imagine, right? Um, you can you can buy event contracts on the outcomes of the Golden Globes, which also had an official partnership with, I believe, Poly Market. Uh, you know, you can you can buy contracts on culture, on politics, on climate, right? There's there's endless markets on temperatures in cities around the world, right? So it's degenerate. Right. It is just straight up degeneracy where you can place a mark uh a bet on what the high temperature for today in Paris is going to be, right? Like it it it there's nothing useful about that. No matter how you try to like turn over your twit twist yourself into knots, being like, oh no, there's like a socially useful function to having these markets. There's nothing useful about that kind of stuff. But why why did it take a while to we and we'll get into that because I do want to get into that and get into some of the the epistemic claims around like Calchi and Polymarket, the CEOs there talk about how you know they're they're arbiters of truth in in society and stuff. We'll get into that. But parking that for now, why did it take a while to get up and running? I think is a great question because it did not take long for sports betting to get up and running. There is a built-in kind of fan base uh for that, right? But I think the the thing that really allowed polymarket and calci to to become so popular uh it was the election, the the 2024 election. So there are there are moments where the trade flow and calci and polymarket really take off outside of sports betting. And those moments are high profile elections, right? And so what we saw was you know that there is a huge amount of interest and use of the platforms, especially around the presidential election. You know, and then there's always a bit of lag, right? And so like these mark, these, these, you know, Calci polymarkets see their user base jump way up in 2024 because of the opportunity to bet on the outcome of a highly contentious presidential race, um, plus you know, other races that are going, you know, going as well in the US. You know, it's like it's all pretty much largely in the US. And so that huge jump in user base and the opportunity to, again, make a quick buck by putting your money where your ideology is and being like, no, I know who's gonna win, and I I'm I you know, I'm gonna put some skin in the game and make and try to make some money off of it or whatever it might be, right? There's a bit of lag where you see this huge jump in users in 2024, and then that leads to this huge investment in 2025 into these companies, right? But at the same time, you see with the uh the jumping of uh prediction markets. I mean, we we'd be remiss to not also uh talk about that, like, you know, you you can't talk about the great degeneracy without talking about crypto, right? And like the the the way that crypto is really hung in there long after, I mean, like the whole Web3 thing was an outcome of the great degeneracy, right? It was really about like how do you just create purely fictitious, speculative assets and FTs, you know, it's on the blockchain, it's you know, crypto. Like, how do you create these like just purely speculative, fictitious, tradable assets online and then like create a whole economy based on that? And that's what Web3, you know, decentralized finance, that's what it was all about, right?

SPEAKER_01 37:27

Hold up there, Jason, because you know, it's it's just early days. I I don't know if I can take this criticism of uh the blockchain.

SPEAKER_00 37:34

I know I love that it's always early days. Like, you know, uh crypto is gonna be old enough, you know, crypto is like old enough to drink now, and it's still like, oh, it's uh it's early days. It's early days, still forming. Um, but but the only one that has, you know, all those things died away for the most, you know, for the most part, except for crypto. Crypto hung in there because it hung in there as a tradable asset that was also tied to an ideology, right? Like the the Trump administration really tied themselves to crypto in a in a big way. So obviously, I think you know, listeners of this podcast would know about you know, like WorldCoin, you know, financial and the Trump coin and all of these kinds of like legalized bribery metrics and stuff, and the fact that like all of the Trump sons are basically you know all paid crypto shills. Don Jr. is also on the advisory boards of both Calci and Polymarket. So I didn't know that. Yeah, so there's there's direct tie-ins here between the kind of the ideology, the right-wing ideology, the pro-market ideology, the Republican Party, and these highly speculative forms of gambling, whether it's crypto or it's it's prediction markets. And so the rise of prediction markets and the mainstreaming of prediction markets, uh outside of sports betting, I think we can really tie directly back to the 2024 election and specifically tie it to the the Republican Party. And I I I think if Trump had not won, my my prediction would be that prediction markets would not have had such a boom year in 2025 if Trump had not won in 2024.

SPEAKER_01 39:31

That's that's wild, honestly. I'm I'm still getting over the fact that that Don Jr. is is on those boards. Like I knew that they were very invested in crypto and very involved in that, but I didn't realize the connections to you know the kind of broader betting platforms and and what have you. And I think it really is interesting that you brought up the election because I feel like in my mind, that was the first time that I, you know, kind of noticed people regularly commenting on what the betting markets were saying on who was going to win the election. And it's when, you know, you really started to hear about those platforms more and the idea that because people were betting money in this certain way, that that was going to be like determinative of what the result was going to be. And then you have seen that kind of same, uh, that that same idea repeated time and again, which I think comes to what you were, what you were saying earlier about these CEOs talking about the platforms as being, you know, arbiters of truth, right? Because people are placing their money in a certain way. So obviously they wouldn't place it if they didn't believe that that was how it was going to be. And I feel like that kind of comes back to the ideology question that we were talking about earlier. So maybe if you want to dig into that a bit more and kind of how these CEOs are framing it and, you know, whether that actually makes any sense, but what they're trying to get to and talking about these betting markets in that way.

SPEAKER_00 40:46

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, there's no better way to hedge a bet than to play both sides. So I mean, being on the boards of both Calci and Polymarket, it's like no, no matter which platform wins, uh, Don Jr. uh is the winner. Um, and by extension, obviously Trump. And I I think it's very funny as well that like, you know, I I had I had that quote from Trump where he said, you know, unfortunately, the world the whole world has become somewhat of a casino. And he he went on to add, I was quote, I was never much in favor of it. I don't like it conceptually. It is what it is. I'm not happy with any of that stuff. But it's very funny he's being like, I'm not happy with the fact that the whole world is a key casino. I mean, completely incoherent to just with who Trump is, but also the fact that his son is on the on the board of these companies.

SPEAKER_01 41:37

Totally. I'm I'm not happy with it. Just forget that, you know, I ran casinos and also that my family is totally involved in all of this.

SPEAKER_00 41:45

Exactly. Exactly. I'm making a lot of money and I'm not happy about it. But to the ideology point, I think this is really important as well because it kind of speaks to like, you know, I think all of these, all these technologies, as we see, whether, you know, it's we're talking about crypto, we're talking about blockchain, we're talking about AI, no matter what we're talking about, they the technologies always feel like they need to provide some kind of moral justification and uh and social legitimacy, right? Because they want to do more, because they want to do more than just like put out a great tasting product, right? Like they want to change the world, they want to run the world, they want you to uh adhere to their vision of the world. And so that requires more than just like being a consumer's good you know provider. It requires being uh uh an ideological purveyor, right? And so you see the same exact thing with prediction markets. They don't want to just like you know make money from people betting on, you know, which uh which Democrat is going to win the election or which celebrity is gonna get a golden globe or whatever. And to be sure, I mean they make a ton of money off of this, right? Like, you know, we didn't I want the mechanics here before we get to the kind of ideology, I think is really important because it speaks to what the actual interests are when you know CEOs like Tarek Mansurer talk about you know turning everything into a tradable asset, financializing every opinion, right? Is that like prediction markets are not like casinos in the sense that like when you buy a contract, uh a yes or no contract on the out you have on the outcome of an event, you're not betting against Calci, right? Like in a casino, you're betting against the casino. Um, but instead, what you're doing is that Calchi has no real financial interest in the outcome of any event contract. You're not betting against them, but what you're doing is the company makes money by charging trade fees on every contract. Sold. So that means if people place more bets and buy more contracts, then Calci can make more money. So the platform's interest here is actually in maximizing the number of event markets, the things that you can bet on, and the volume of trade, people placing bets on their platforms. So their their financial interest is a market maximalist here. They say we don't care what actually happens in terms of these events, right? But what we care about is that more people are buying more contracts in more markets on our platform. We make more money that way. And so I think that speaks as well to then like that's that's not a good sales pitch. If you're like come and gamble on our platform, you're not, hey, hey, you're not gambling against us, but we do take a slice of every bet that you buy. And the more that you bet, the more you place, the more money. Not a good sales pitch, right? But what is a uh they think is a better sales pitch is things like saying, you know, well, Calci's actually, you know, we're like one of the main arbiters of truth in society, right? And so going back to Mansauer's vision, which he outlayed out, you know, laid out in detail at this Citadel Markets, you know, Citadel Security, future of the market conference where he was speaking. And he talks about prediction markets as, quote, an antidote to the problem of quote, living in a world where we have an abundance of information, but with no way to filter the noise and discern, quote, what's real from what's not, right? And so he really frames this as like an information glut problem, as an abundance problem, as a, you know, there's like multiple realities all happening at the same time, and no one can tell what's what's the one real reality and what's the fake reality, right? And so he really frames prediction markets, you know, this way of aggregating different opinions about the future in one place, using skin in the game as an incentive for accuracy. You know, he he uses this as a way of saying, quote, that that prediction markets like Calci, you know, he he admits, you know, to his credit, quote, won't be a source of ultimate truth. But he then goes on to say, quote, I think they're as close as it gets.

SPEAKER_01 46:22

It also really stands out to me when you look at it that way, like it really reflects this other ideology that you see in Silicon Valley, where it's like, we don't need to rely on the experts. We don't need to rely on the mainstream media and you know those traditional forms of authority. We can just rely on, you know, kind of like the decentralized, marketized forces of society that will deliver us the truth without needing these uh these people who are who are powerful above us or or whatnot.

SPEAKER_00 46:51

That's right. It's a hundred percent, a hundred percent right. It's a it's a technocratic, anti-elitist, uh, you know, uh, which very much ties it again into the Republican Party, right? Like this is the kind of anti-elite, anti-establishment, anti-media, you know, um, you know, all of this is very much tied into this idea that, hey, you should do your own research, right? No one, no doctor can tell you what treatment is best for you, right? Like no news anchor can tell you what's real, right? You should do your own research. And one way to do your own research is to go to a prediction market where you have, you know, as they say, right, that like, you know, Mansauer goes on to say that, quote, going to these markets to find an unbiased sort of uh or unbiased source of truth will be a quote, new consumer habit. So, like, this is so they really talk about it in this exact way of like, this is an unbiased source of truth. It's as close as it gets to ultimate truth. You know, uh it's not a person telling you what to think, it's the vast aggregate, it's the collective brain coming together and giving you the one true reality. There's this real ideological aspect that is trying to justify the prediction market as more than just a degenerate way to gamble, you know, but as a way to filter out the noise and figure out what the ground truth is and feel smarter for having gone to Cal Shi to get all of your opinions and predictions about the world.

SPEAKER_01 48:28

Dude, it's it's so wild to hear that. But like, you know, you're not surprised that this is the way that they're selling it, especially when you think of like who these people are, how they operate, the way that we've seen the tech industry sell these sorts of things in the past. But also, like, if your uh business model depends on maximizing the number of trades, then of course you are going to want to financialize everything because that means that there's a ton of things that you can trade on and then you know take your take your fees and whatnot from. I'm wondering, you know, there has been a lot of discussions about obviously people losing money in crypto scams and in trading cryptocurrencies, and of course the losses that you see in sports betting and how that is, you know, actually affecting people as they get addicted to these platforms. Are we seeing those similar stories and issues with, you know, these this kind of broader betting on platforms like Calci and Polymarket?

SPEAKER_00 49:21

Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, earlier you brought up that, you know, with the sports betting, there there have been cases where people placing bets have threatened athletes and have gone after them, you know, trying. And this is the thing, right? Like sports betting, prediction markets, these are not neutral intermediaries. These are not unbiased sources of truth. These are not just like outside observers on the outcome of some event, right? Like they are fundamentally changing the things that they are placing bets on and creating markets about. The observer effect here comes into account, right? That like the observation of a phenomenon changes the phenomenon. Um, and and we see this is that as these platforms become bigger, as the trade flow on these markets become bigger, and I mean some of these markets can be enormous, right? We're talking like hundreds of millions of dollars on major sporting events running through Calci. We're talking, you know, currently there's a nearly $100 million market on the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee. Um, like the market volume here is gigantic. And if you've got a lot of money in play, then that's motivation to go and do something, right? To make sure that event comes out in your favor in some way, whether that's, you know, you have insider information or you're more proactive. And we've already seen these cases, right? Where um there there was just just recently, you know, just last month, there was a a polymarket uh event contract riding on the question of whether Iran had or had not succeeded in striking Israel with a missile, right? And now the determination of of how these outcomes comes into play also is a very content can be very contentious, right? Because poly market, calci, they are the arbiters of ground truth here, right? They determine if an event has happened or not happened. Um, and so you know, there there can be a lot of contention around where they're what source they're using as their data for that event, or what parameter is the trigger for whether an event happens or not happens, and the contention here, or users start getting very legalistic around like the definition of specific words and the in the way that the event contract is worded, because people have money on the line, right? And so they get a little fervorous and crazy about it. And so in this case, though, there was a case of Emmanuel Fabian, who is a Times of Israel journalist, um, who was, you know, as the Financial Times reports, quote, had was offered bribes, then death threats in order to change his reports that an Iranian missile had struck near Jerusalem on March 30th, right? And so, you know, as uh the FT goes on to say, quote, without his consent, Fabian found himself forced into the perilous role of refereeing which side had won the bet. And so you already see this, right? Journalists are getting death threats because their report, because they're the source of truth for some event contract. And so people placing the bets are saying, do not report this or I will kill you, or you need to report this or I will kill you, right? And so so you start seeing this, this is already happening. This is completely, again, predictable, foreseeable, that if people have thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars running on you know, the event of you know, a news report, that's a lot of motivation to go change what the news reports.

SPEAKER_01 53:11

Yeah, maybe we should have placed a bet on uh that happening. We would have, we would have made some money. But I I think that that's just wild to hear about. But as you say, it's it's not wholly surprising, especially when we've already seen it happening. But you know what happens when people have money tied up in things, and especially when, you know, some of the people who have money tied up in things uh in these things are going to be pretty desperate, right? Uh, you know, are going to uh really need that money and hope that this bet was going to come through uh so that they can pay bills or or what have you. But I was wondering, you know, as we wrap our up our conversation, what does it say about our society that gambling is becoming so pervasive, is making its way into so many different aspects of society. What does that tell us about where things are going? And are there real opportunities and even efforts to try to rein this back, to try to shut it down so that this doesn't keep extending and the effects that we're seeing don't keep getting worse and worse?

SPEAKER_00 54:08

I I mean, I think what this tells us and what really shows is that you know, financialization is a predatory logic here, right? Like this idea of financializing everything, making everything not just marketized, but subjected to these forms of speculation, uh, of you know, financial engineering, of value extraction, you know, assetizing uh everything into a tradable event or commodity, right? Like, you know, the financialization is a predatory logic here. It's not, it's not just one of many ways of organizing the world, right? Like financialization is a logic premised on we're the one and only way to organize the world. It's its goal is to eliminate other competing worldviews, right? Its goal is to re-engineer society into a casino where, you know, the the gambler doesn't win, right? But the the hedge funds win, the markets win, the platforms win, the the already wealthy win, right? Like, you know, the the deck is always stacked against you unless you are at the top of the the casino, right? Unless you're in the penthouse. And I think this is a this is really important, right? Where it's like, you know, I think a lot of the concerns here are about, well, how do we kind of rein this in? How do we take, you know, how do we uh soften the worst impulses of you know insider trading or perverse incentives and you know these kinds of things, right? But that that is a that is it's too soft of a response to an ideology, a logic, a technology, you know, that is explicitly about total financialization, total re-engineering of society, total capture of all value, right? Like if your goal is totalizing, if your ambition is to subsume everything within you and you know, either consume or destroy anything that you're anything in your pathway, right? Then the response to that can't be uh, well, you know, it would be nice if we just made it a little bit more gentle or you know, or restricted certain people from engaging in these markets, right? Like, you know, prediction markets don't magically escape all of the social problems and perverse incentives that plague other real markets just because people are betting on the future instead of like buying widgets at a store or something like that, right? There's nothing unique about turning events or opinions into tradable assets. It's all the same problems, right? A world of total financialization where every opinion is a tradable asset, where the market is this ultimate arbiter of what's valuable and true. It's also a world that creates an endless barrage of incentives for arbitrage, manipulation, collusion, corruption, exploitation, all in this uh pursuit of profit extraction, of liquidity extraction, right? Like, you know, uh that to me is prediction markets are a uh are an outcome of this broader logic, but I think that they really encapsulate all of its worst impulses in this like really easy-to-see way because it is also it tries to sell you this ideology, you know, built on a century of economic theory that tells us, you know, efficient markets use price signals to reflect relevant knowledge in society, right? This goes back to Hayek, you know, Friedrich Hayek and talking about how, you know, he you know talks about how markets are the most powerful information processor that humanity has ever created and this way of aggregating these hidden facts. And then we get this kind of smuggled through to us by, you know, like business reporters talking about the wisdom of the crowds and you know, collective wisdom and kind of distilling this theory into and and and showing us and telling us, look, this is this is how it, this is how it is, right? The invisible hand of the market is also a collective brain uh and you know, this arbiter of truth. But we have to understand that these ideologies, that these kind of mechanics that underlie these markets are also the kind of the phantasmagoric dreams of libertarian architects, right? That like they don't actually match up to reality. Because if a century of economic theory tells us that markets are efficient ways of discerning what's true in society, well, more than a century of capitalist reality tells us the actual markets are structured by irrational behaviors, information asymmetries, power hierarchies, right? All of these things that make it impossible. You know, to you you can't be a rational agent in a market if you're really just another imperfect person, swayed by biases, heuristics, falsehoods, whatever, right? You it's impossible to be uh to do your due diligence as a good consumer in the market. If every other buyer and seller in the market is incentivized to lie, cheat, and conceal information against you if it benefits them, right? Like you can't just, it's impossible to maintain this kind of fair standing in some marketplace of ideas, right? This idea that prediction markets are the arbiter of what's true and not. If people vote with their dollars, and the more dollars you have, the louder your voice and the more powerful your values, right? Like all of these realities of how markets actually operate do not comport with the theory that underlies prediction markets, which is why we're constantly seeing stories about all the failures and corruption and arbitrage and manipulation that is coming out of sports betting, prediction markets, right? All of these platforms is what we're seeing here is uh a theory falling apart before our eyes. In rejecting the theory, we also have to reject the predatory logic of financialization that keeps trying to push it upon us.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:20

Dude, it's it's so well said. And, you know, it it tells listeners exactly why these platforms need to be not just opposed, but like need to be completely pushed out of society. And the whole idea that they present for how society should be organized needs to be gone along with it. Um, Jathan, it's always great to get your insights on all of this. You know, it always really helps to put things in perspective. Um, and I think at a moment where we're seeing these platforms just, you know, kind of take off and go everywhere, we need this kind of perspective so we understand what's happening and why it's so wrong. So thanks so much for taking the time to come back on the show. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:56

Always happy to be here, Paris.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:59

Jason Sadowski is an associate professor at Monash University, the author of The Mechanic and the Luddite, and a co-host of This Machine Kills. Tech Won's Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla Houston. Tech Won's Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.