“In 2023, Tarek proposed Kalshi's first election market, a market for betting on what party would take control of Congress. Regulators blocked it as expected. They said election betting is gaming. It's not allowed. And that it would open up elections to interference among other things. But this time, Tariq sued. His lawyers argued there's no rule specifically against betting on elections, and this market would do what futures do best, you know, hedge against harmful outcomes and provide more predictive data.”
A Planet Money host gets surprise-roasted on her way out
“Hi, Mary. It's Daleep Singh, currently vice chair at PGIM, former deputy national security adviser for international economics under the Biden administration, former head of the markets group at the Fed, blah blah blah. Well, I'm calling because I heard you're leaving Planet Money. Too bad because I was just about to cave to that interview you've been chasing me on.”
Even big winners admit prediction markets are socially harmful
“No. So I like, okay. Maybe this is, like, bad for me to admit or whatever, but, like, I don't think prediction markets are, like, a good thing socially. I think that there is, like, an actual, like, pretty real dark side to prediction markets. These markets are only profitable for people like me because there are people just throwing away money. I think that's probably pretty bad, to be honest.”
The 'we're not gambling, we're swaps' legal loophole
“And as Bobby gets deeper into this giant fight with the states over whether Kalshi is gambling or not, he realizes the whole existence of these prediction apps depends on the courts agreeing with Kalshi that these yes or no questions about the future are like derivatives, like swaps, a regular degular financial instrument in which two parties with opposite views on the direction of some price or level agree to bet against each other.”
Prediction market traders fly across the country chasing edge
“Bobby found a guy posting about his alpha on a bet about how long it would take Charlie Puth to sing the national anthem at the Super Bowl. I saw that, Charlie Puth was in San Francisco, like, three days before. So I flew out there immediately, went outside the stadium. And I was like, oh, this guy's a perfect example of someone who's willing to literally go the extra mile to have an edge that people would think would would be unfathomable.”
Betting on Trump's speech turns citizens into slot machines
“As we were watching, the odds of every word were jumping all around, and we just really locked in. Like, the world stopped. We felt like we were looking at this through a soda straw. Did he say our word? Will he? It becomes all your brain can think about. So when Trump starts talking about the economy, Mary's basically trying to goad him into saying the word tariff.”
Prediction markets borrow the crypto playbook of legal disruption
“They use the playbook that the crypto industry, I think, started and perfected during the Biden administration, which is framing their disruption of industries as a technological disruption when I would characterize it more as just a legal disruption. They are willing to take more legal risk and break the laws and essentially take the approach of catch me if you can.”
Sinister interest: bettors now try to influence the events themselves
“I saw what some might call sinister interest in the real world recently. I was watching a mention market where people were betting on what words a Federal Reserve official was gonna say in a meeting about the crypto industry. It was on Zoom. And when the officials were taking questions from that Zoom, I saw KaoSci traders submitting questions as if they were just regular humans trying really hard to get the official to say something they were betting on. And they can get way more ick. Perhaps the most dark example, prediction market bettors threatened a journalist over his reporting on the Iran war saying that they would kill him if he didn't change what he'd written about a military strike.”
