We Can Now Bet on Almost Anything. Should We?

from Machines Like Us · host James Surowiecki

Human beings have always loved to gamble. Archeological records suggest we’ve been doing it for the last 12,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age. But for as long as we’ve been playing games of chance, we’ve worried about what they might be doing to us. For thousands of years, everyone from Aristotle to George Washington condemned gambling, an ancient anxiety that ran so deep it became something like a moral consensus. And then that consensus evaporated. In the span of a decade, both Canada and the US legalized sports betting. Now anyone with a smartphone and a credit card can wager on basketball, hockey, or American cornhole. But it turned out that was just the beginning. A few years later came “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket that let you bet on, well, just about anything: whether the US will invade Cuba, the odds of James Comey being sent to prison, and whether Jesus Christ will return before 2027. That last one, by the way, is currently sitting at 3 per cent on Polymarket. If betting on missile strikes, military coups, and political prosecutions feels kind of gross, I’m with you. But James Surowiecki thinks we should give prediction markets a chance. Surowiecki is the author of The Wisdom of Crowds, a book he wrote more than 20 years ago, where he argued that large groups of ordinary people are actually better than experts at making predictions. It’s become something of a foundational text for these markets: the idea that they can crowdsource knowledge, aggregate what millions of people believe about the future, and use that signal to make better decisions. So I wanted to have James on to make the case for prediction markets, and to see if he could make me feel just a little less squeamish about a world where you can gamble on everything. Mentioned The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki (Doubleday, 2004). Francis Galton, “Vox Populi,” Nature 75 (1907): 450–451 — the–ox-weighing experiment. The 1986 Challenger disaster and Morton Thiokol’s stock: Maloney & Mulherin, “The complexity of price discovery in an efficient market,” Journal of Financial Economics (2003). Kalshi (prediction market platform). Polymarket (prediction market platform). The 2024 “French whale” (Théo), who used neighbour polls to bet roughly $85M on a Trump win — CBS–News / 60 Minutes. The Polymarket trader’s well-timed bets on the June 2025 US strikes on Iran — CNN– The market on the length of a Karoline Leavitt White House briefing Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and the earnings-call “mention markets” — Tec–Crunch. The market on Maduro’s removal and the ~$400K Venezuela payout — PBS–NewsHour. The Zohran Mamdani NYC mayoral market — DL –ews. The market on Bad Bunny’s first Super Bowl LX song — Pol–market. DARPA’s Policy Analysis Market (the “terrorism futures” proposal, cancelled after backlash in 2003) — CNN–(2003). The 1979 Iranian Revolution as a US intelligence failure — Nat–onal Security Archive, George Washington University. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What this episode covers

Human beings have always loved to gamble. Archaeological records suggest we’ve been doing it for the last 12,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age. But for as long as we’ve been playing games of chance, we’ve worried about what they might be doing to us. For thousands of years, everyone from Aristotle to George Washington condemned gambling, an ancient anxiety that ran so deep it became something like a moral consensus. And then that consensus evaporated. In the span of a decade, both Canada and the US legalized sports betting. Now anyone with a smartphone and a credit card can wager on basketball, hockey, or American cornhole. But it turned out that was just the beginning. A few years later came “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket that let you bet on, well, just about anything: whether the US will invade Cuba, the odds of James Comey being sent to prison, and whether Jesus Christ will return before 2027. That last one, by the way, is currently sitting at 3% on Polymarket. If betting on missile strikes, military coups, and political prosecutions feels kind of gross, I’m with you. But James Surowiecki thinks we should give prediction markets a chance. Surowiecki is the author of The Wisdom of Crowds, a book he wrote more than 20 years ago, where he argued that large groups of ordinary people are actually better than experts at making predictions. It’s become something of a foundational text for these markets: the idea that they can crowdsource knowledge, aggregate what millions of people believe about the future, and use that signal to make better decisions. So I wanted to have James on to make the case for prediction markets, and to see if he could make me feel just a little less squeamish about a world where you can gamble on everything.