Existential Risks and Future Outlook

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My friend and colleague, Bobby Allen, has been covering the bananas growth of prediction markets for NPR. You know, the ones where you can bet on everything from Taylor Swift's wedding date to the war in Iran. And Bobby says this craze has kind of come out of nowhere. Like a few years ago when the CEO of one of the biggest prediction markets in the world reached out to Bobby. Like, hey, FYI might be worth like incorporating like some Cal Shi prediction markets into your coverage. And I was like, a prediction, what? What c cow she? Isn't that like cereal? The first thing that made Bobby think, Wait, this may be a really big deal, happened last December. First, he saw Cal she was partnering with CNN, meaning that CNN would be telling people the news and also telling them what people were betting on that news. And around the same time, people were actually betting on whether a famine would be declared in Gaza. Those two things colliding made me think like what is this company all about? Who's using it? Why does CNN care about it? I guess WTF, how is this a thing? Ever since, Bobby has been listening to Cal she's proponents and its detractors and trying to sort out exactly what this company is doing, either for us or to us. And we at Planet Money we asked Bobby to take us along on the ride he's been on, starting with the Cal she traders he met when he went looking for them. Where they hang out. In chats on Discord. My account isn't it's like Bobby176539, and there's like no photo. Like I look like a bot. But it's fine. Definitely not an arc. Bobby was thinking that these prediction market apps might be the next frontier of online gambling addiction. So when he first got on the Discord, he was asking around for stories of Financial ruin. And I got absolutely savage for this. Like Absolutely savage. Here walks in an N PR reporter who announces himself as an NPR reporter and asks Hey, I'm looking for someone who's like addicted to Cal she. And who like lost a lot of money. And they just utterly dragged me and were just like, who is this guy? You're calling us DGens, which is like slang for like degenerate trader. Like you're just you're just looking for a D gen. You just want to ruin this industry. Like what's wrong with you? Bobby is actually learning all of this vocabulary as he goes. He starts keeping a glossary. Degenerate traders don't know what they're doing and will lose their life savings. So Bobby's like, okay, this is not a therapy group for losers. I get it. This is where the winners brag, where the whales are. What they call the sharps. No, not sharks, sharps with a P. Doing what they call it. The very active ones are extremely savvy. And they love putting in their Twitter bio like from ten thousand to nine hundred thousand on Calchy, right? So Bobby's like How are they winning so big? He starts asking people about what they call alpha, how they're getting an edge so they can predict the future better. Like some people are buying powerful antennas so they can have a millisecond advantage listening to a press conference. And Bobby's trying to get them to talk by speaking to them in their own language. I go, Well, here's my proposed headline. Calci Bon Sharps turn to antenna maxing in search of market alpha. Which is something that would never appear on MPR.org. What was a nod to like the way they speak? And one guy says Defo a hit. Another guy says, LOL, I think I like this guy. I hope somebody talks to him. He actually seems cool. Another guy says, I just DMed him. He's in. What's your job history been like? Yeah, so I graduated a little over two years ago. So now Bobby is madly typing notes in his interviews and he meets a guy named Logan Suddith, who is twenty five, and last year quit his job at a private credit firm to do prediction markets full time. Did you why did you leave? Did you get a new job? Are you doing trading full time? Yeah, I was making more from trading on Culchi after work. I was from my job. You're kidding. Like more every month than he was earning all year at his old job, he says. Wow. Logan's alpha is just research, research, research. He made more than forty thousand dollars, for example, on predicting Time Magazine's person of the year by analyzing what they were covering the most. Hi Kayden. What's your last name? Booth. Bobby found a guy posting about his alpha on a bet about how long it would take Charlie Pooth to sing the national anthem at the Super Bowl. I saw that uh Charlie Pooth was In San Francisco like three days before. So Flew out there immediately, went outside the stadium. But I was like, Oh, this guy's a perfect example of someone who's willing Caden Booth bought a stopwatch and this device used for listening to bird sounds, and hung out on the sidewalk outside of the stadium waiting for the rehearsal to start so he could time it. And there would be 500 people sitting outside. I really thought there'd be five hundred people in lawn chairs all trying to make easy money to me, I was like, this is just common sense. And Caden did win many thousands of dollars. But Where did that come from? And what is all of this predicting doing to us? Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Mary Childs here with NPR's Bobby Allen. Hey Mary, what's up? Never would have predicted we'd be doing an episode together, but here we are. Okay. I also didn't predict it. The future's so strange. Prediction markets are obviously great for the Cadens and Logans of the world who are making a bag. and great for the companies that run these prediction markets, who are also making a bag. These companies exist though because they have convinced regulators that they're also great for the rest of us, that they're adding new knowledge to the world, making us more informed about the future. And Bobby has been asking, is that right? Today on the show, the case Calchie has been making to regulators, to the courts, and to the public as to why what looks like gambling and seems like gambling is not. We will hear why that argument has been kind of working, and no one stops them, what prediction markets could do to our future. This message comes from Avalera. What does running a business feel like with Avalara's Agenic AI platform for global tax and compliance? No hovering over the submit button, no asking for second opinions, no waking up thinking about a filing, no waiting for something to break. Because Avalara's Agentic AI handles it. Calculating, filing, validating, accurately, and audit defensibly. Automatically. Avalera, agentic tax and compliance with confidence. This message comes from Insperity, providing HR services and technology, from payroll, benefits, and HR compliance to talent development. Lear more at Insperity.com slash HR Matters. This message comes from NPR sponsor Informatica from Salesforce. Everybody's ready for AI to help with the next big breakthrough, except your data. Get your data AI ready at informatica. com slash AI. Informatica where data and AI come to life. So as Bobby enters this world of people who are saying prediction markets are the next big thing, a route to prosperity to becoming richer, smarter, happier, he's like First step towards understanding all this hype is to Most people are downloading these apps right now because of sports. It's the only place you can bet on sports in all 50 states. So that's about 80% of what's happening on Cal She. But then there's all this other stuff, like questions about what will happen in the world and pop culture and politics, whether a world leader will be top. Plus something called mention markets, capital M, capital M, where people bet on whether someone will or won't say something. Bobby gave me a little tour through betting on mentioned markets. Capital M, capital M. And I did get clearance from Mary Ann and Alex to do this. That's our processes at Planet Money. I'm not allowed to to do a lot. Okay. Under twenty K. The day we tried it, President Trump was about to give a very important speech that lots of people were watching about the war in Iran. So we decided to bet on which words he would say in the speech. Okay, fund your account. How much should I put? Fifty? Oh you're gonna make some money or lose some money. The app is very brightly colored and super engaging. There's charts all over the place. You kinda can't stop looking at the thing. Okay, deposit now. I'm gonna push the button, ready? You can literally see trades just flowing all over the screen in real time. I feel like I'm in a arcade. I mean that's that's exactly the point. Yeah, the you you see the probability of whether a word will be said or not. You're seeing like a lot of uh you know numbers going up, going down, depending on how traders are betting. Oh wow. Ninety five for Epic Fury. Is he, I don't know, nuclear? People ninety eight percent odds nuclear. That's pretty good. Um Let's root for tariff. Do you think that's a good one? A yes or a no on tariff? Yes tariff. Okay. I'm a yes on tariff. It's a low odds one. It's seventeen percent only. That's not great, but let's let's see. But I think I'm right. I think he's gonna say it. As we speak this evening, it's been just I'm hearing it. After Trump started talking, he immediately said like fifteen of the words on the list. And all these words on the list, by the way, they're known as strikes. And he even said words that I had thought were pretty improbable, like Barack Hussein Obama. Someone just someone just said on Discord, Holy Yes Fest. It's a yes fest. Oh, should we just put more money down? 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 try to goad him into saying the word tariff. Because of it will soon be roaring back like we are experiencing a very special kind of prediction market pain known as weaving. Wow, he really almost said tariff twice. This is crazy. Listeners, thank you for your faith in me, but I did lose $5 on my yes tariff bet. He never said it. Meanwhile, Bobby is a cent a millionaire after month of betting on these markets just to figure them out. Yes, and I'm speaking to you now from my PJ. It's very palatial. And your first takeaway, Bobby, on your reporting journey is this feels a lot like gambling. Uh it's a game, right? You get this dopamine rush every time you win, if you're losing, you want to chase your losses, and it's absolutely maddening. There's always another market marry the next hour it just goes and goes and goes and goes and goes. And this feels like gambling experience? Bobby is definitely not alone. As he is following the story, he's reporting on all these lawsuits where lots of states are also accusing Calchy of being gambling. Some of them are trotting out a very basic definition, which in Miriam Webster is the practice of risking money or other stakes in a game or bet. In their early ads, Cal She even portrayed itself like gambling. They were kind of cute about it, how they phrase it. They were basically like Bet on the NFL, legal in all 50 states. And important note, all the existing online sports betting apps are currently categorized as gambling. And as Bobby gets deeper into this giant fight with the states over whether Cal she is gambling or not, He realizes The whole existence of these prediction apps depends on the courts agreeing with Calchy that these yes or no questions about the future are. 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. So I started digging into that. I really wanted to understand the argument that Cal Shi' CEO and co-founder has been making from the start in defense of these prediction marks. And that means I finally write him back and say, Hey, hey, Tarek, uh sorry I missed your message two years ago, but um here I am. I think I'm ready to talk now. Can you well? I mean I guess you can. Yeah. Yeah, that works. The first thing Tarek Munsor always says about why Cal she's not gambling. least not like a casino. is that there is no house. He says Cal she doesn't win when betters lose. Instead it makes money every time people bet, a little percentage of every bet. So their incentive is to have as many bets as possible. And then the next thing he's always claiming is just because you're speculating about the future doesn't mean you're gambling. I always say this. Speculation. is not equal to gambling. Because if speculation is equal to gambling, Than our entire financial market. Is gambling. Yeah, but but I mean if the comment section on NPR stories is any indication to Artic, I mean, many people think this is gambling. I mean, they say you're putting up money, you might win some, you might lose some, it's an uncertain outcome. That's gambling. To me, I know my customers and I know what they're trading. And why they're excited about this is because at the end of the day, they're trading the same way they trade in the stock market, but in this case they're trading on things that they care about and they can relate to. And Tarek is always saying that it's better than regular financial markets. He says on Cal She your average individual trader is on a more even playing field with all the seasoned professionals. Like the hedge funds and all these guys have all the information and You know, there's no way to really beat the market in those places. But people have opinions about politics, they have opinion about culture, they follow and track the economy, they follow and track sports, and this is a mechanism for them to express those opinions. The idea that prediction markets are basically democratizing the world of trading is a talking point Tarek has honed over the years. Because from the start, he had to convince the federal government that betting on all sorts of crazy stuff on Cal sheet was not gambling, but something else. Technically, swaps. But Tarek often compares it to futures trading because, well, people are betting on future events. Right. Oil futures have a ton in common with betting on the Rotten Tomato score for the Double Ears Prada too. Yeah, that's uh currently at 87%. Interesting. What's really helped me understand Tarek's argument was to go back in time and look at all the ways Tarek has made his case that Calchie should exist. It started way back when he was an intern at Goldman Sachs, around 2016, when he says he kept hearing about customers who wanted to bet on big world events. They were all trying to figure out what was going to happen to simple questions about the future. It was basically will Brexit happen or not. And will Trump win the election or not? The answers to those kinds of questions, like will Brexit happen? mattered to them because they affect the market and the price of assets. And investors wanted to be able to bet on which way things would go. So target thought. Okay. We have a market to price companies. We have market to price commodities, like physical things that you can touch that are important to the economy. Currencies, interest rates, like debt. And what if we built one two price simple questions about the future? Okay, well, what is the simplest way of creating that is like Uh let's just make it a yes or no questions where you can buy yes if you think an event is gonna happen and no if you think it's not. Right. So you know Tarek in his past life was you know a buttoned up Wall Street type. Not exactly Gordon Gecko, but you you know what I'm talking about. And so he really wants to make betting markets The next thing in the long line of futures, starting with grain futures, the very first futures to be traded almost two centuries ago. Which by the way, people also thought was gambling at first. So Tarek goes to the regulator of the futures market, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC. To ask permission to be able to run an exchange, a marketplace. The whole idea of futures for farmers, for instance, is to avoid feast or famine cycles, to smooth it out. So you can buy futures to lock in future prices in case there's like a drought that knocks out all your crops. It's a way of hedging against something that might threaten your business, like an insurance policy on your crop. And also when they're doing what they're supposed to do, futures help everyone figure out how much things should cost. Or If you ask Tarek, they can help predict the future more accurately. Like they could be a tip sheet about what's gonna happen. Instead of people guessing whether Brexit was gonna happen or not, now you have a more objective source of like more objective unbiased source of signal on whether Brexit was gonna happen or not. And more noise. But Tark is trying to turn his idea into a marketplace. And in order to get designated as just another futures or swaps market in the long line of them. The CFTC says Cal she has to check a bunch of boxes. Like the market cannot be easily rigged. No insider trading. Insider trading, bad. Couchy submits lots of paperwork about this, and in November 2020, at the very end of President Trump's first term, Couchy gets a call from the CFTC informing them that they have won regulators over. In Calci's press release, they wrote that it was, quote, the next natural step in the evolution of trading on future events. But that was just a first step. Once Calchie was allowed to exist as a marketplace, the company also needed to get approval for every new market it wanted to list. Meaning if Cal she wanted to put up a market for people to bet on how much rain will fall in Chicago next week. They had to get permission. And this was just as President Trump was ending his first term and the much more skeptical Biden administration was taking over. So during these first few years, Calge was hearing a lot of this one word. Because the CFTC had rules, any market on its exchange had to be insider trading proof, and it had to have what they called public interest value. Like the way a market on oil futures or employment data or inflation might inform how corporations make decisions over travel or hiring or firing. Also, the law strictly prohibited any markets to do with terrorism, assassination, war. Gaming. And that last one, gaming, that one ended up being important for Calci. Because at first that was a real issue for Tarek. Like back then, this gaming restriction meant that he couldn't list sports. And also lots of other events that seem to the CFTC to be Games. And this was frustrating to Cal she's traders. So Tarek? decided to fight it. In twenty twenty three, Tarek proposed Calch's first election market. market for betting on what party would take control of Congress. Regulators blocked it, as expected, is that election betting is gaming. It's not allowed. And that it would open up elections to interference, among other things. But this time, Tarek sued. His lawyers argued there's no rule specifically against betting on elections. This market would do what futures do best, you know, hedge against harmful outcomes, and provide more predictive data. In their court papers, Calche referenced a whole academic experiment from the 1980s where economists at the University of Iowa accepted bets on the 1988 presidential race. And it was more accurate than polls at the time. The wisdom of the crowds prevailed. And Cauchy's lawsuit prevailed too. The course did weigh in. You know, and they agree with our legal position that these markets are legal. They are allowed. And that was a rocket booster for you guys when you guys sued your regulator and won. Yes, that was huge for you guys. That really opened the floodgates. Yes, it opened the floodgates, it majorly boosted the rocket, all of that. And here's the thing, once Calchy got permission to list election markets, they interpreted that approval to mean they could list all kinds of markets. Not just who will win a political race, but sports, the golden globes. Will Ariana Grande's streams be up on Spotify next week? And it isn't just that ruling that opens the floodgates. It's the huge political shift that comes next. Because the Trump family actually joins in on the Love Fest. Donald Trump Jr. becomes an advisor to Couchy. The CFTC's default setting changes. They go from default rejecting to default accepting, no matter how Outlandish the market is. So that's basically where we are now. This is the reality that Bobby has sorted out during all these months on Discord chats and on calls with CEOs and following all the court battles. Prediction markets are ascended. Calci is out there trying to pull in as many people into prediction markets as it can, recruiting on college campuses, advertising all over subways, but I mean every time I log on to work, I see my inbox absolutely full of lawmakers, really incense. Many people are trying to tear all of this down. That's after the break. This message comes from Apple Business. Did you know that Apple has a new tool for helping businesses like yours grow? It's call Business, and it's free to get started today. Just claim your location and control how your business shows up across Apple Apps, including maps wallet, and more. And starting this summer in the US and Canada, you'll have a new way to show up to an even wider audience of potential customers with ads on Apple Maps. Sign up for Apple Business today. This message comes from Odu. If you are currently overpaying on software to run your business, remember this number. ten thousand. That's the number of new businesses that join Odu per month. Join Odu today at Odu.com. That's O D Ocom. This message comes from Northwestern Mutual. One of the biggest money mistakes people make is putting off working with a financial professional. Northwestern Mutual will match you with a financial professional to build a plan based on what's important to you, finding new opportunities to help grow your wealth and protect what you've worked so hard for. Find a better way to money at nm.com. The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Company. Over the last month, Tarek's team of PR handlers has been pushing him into the spotlight. He's making the rounds as the public face of Cauchy and all these prediction markets. And he's essentially saying, yeah, yeah, there's this big legal debate happening, but listen to me for a second. These prediction markets are actually really important to society. Like Tart keeps saying, at a time when no one seems to trust anything, these markets can be an accurate crystal ball. A truth machine. And, he says, they are better than poles. Betting, having skin in the game, makes the wisdom of the crow even wiser. And he says, prediction markets even make people better, more engaged citizens, like the opposite of social media. If somebody has is very careful about their belief, they will make more money and do better on prediction markets than someone who has bad takes and extreme beliefs, right? Whereas that's not true for social media. Like in social media, someone who has a very nuanced smart take gets five likes. Someone who says something crazy on social media. Or racists will get three hundred thousand likes. I know all of my most brilliant tweets get no likes. So like I totally really should be on prediction my case. Oh trust me he is. Yeah. It's all for the sake of journalism, I swear. I actually think prediction markets are a force for good because the incentive structure for prediction markets is rewarding the nuanced, the unbiased. The well calibrated. Thanks. In my little mention market betting experiment with Bobby though, That is not what we found. Were we more engaged citizens when we were listening to that speech on Iran? The Korean War lasted for three years, one month, duration of war. Did not have that in my bingo cart. Oh this is the bingo cart. And essentially, This feels pretty gross, Bobby, I will say. You stop absorbing the content and you're just literally just like hearing the words as like the power screen. Like are you gonna line up three cherry? And he's over here talking about obliterating and decapitating an entire country which is full of people. Not every American can look forward to a day when we are Finally free from Now How we feel about all this is Immaterial. It has nothing to do with whether or not Cal she is legal. After months of Bobby talking to all these people involved in Calshi, not involved in Calshe, watching it, worrying about it, he has basically concluded that Calshi is. Working this legal loophole. being governed by derivatives law instead of gambling law. Like this is gambling. It's just buttoned up and in a suit. Yeah, and having covered tech startups for years now, this whole like we're not this, we're that argument is something you hear over and over. Airbnb isn't a hotel, it's a people to people marketplace. Uber is not a taxi, but a transportation network company. And now Cal she is saying We're not gambling, we're this other thing. I think that they followed the playbook of many in the tech industry. That's Amanda Fisher, former chief of staff at the SEC. I would say crypto paved the way for this, which is that the disruption. Sorry sorry, sorry, Amanda. Sorry, sorry, my dog's barking. Sorry, one second. And this is Bobby's dog, Cami, who's a good dog. I first came across Amanda dragging the prediction market bros on the app formerly known as Twitter. She's now at a very pro regulation advocacy group called Better Markets. Amanda says Cal she's path to success has taken a page from another financial sector that bobbed and weaved its way through complicated legal obstacles. 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. But Amanda's take is that prediction markets are not doing the things futures markets are supposed to do. Which is to facilitate Corporations in the real economy fostering price discovery and creating jobs and creating stable markets and not for just gambling and speculation. Amanda says the fact that these prediction markets are getting rubber stamped by the federal government as basically futures trading. That's giving sports gambling apps ideas. Some of the sports gambling apps are themselves launching their own prediction markets, trying to get approval as futures marketplaces. Their execs are publicly admitting it's a way to get sports betting into states where it is not legal. So Amanda posted this week, at least they're being honest. One of the things Amanda is out there warning people about all the time is how understaffed and uninterested the current CFTC is when it comes to monitoring whether these apps are following any of the official rules. Insider trading. In the stock market, which is regulated by the SEC, where Amanda used to work. She says it's pretty easy to get caught using insider access to WinBit. The SEC has like eight times the staff of the CFTC. I would highly advise people do not insider trade in the stock market. There are a lot of there are a lot of surveillance tools and cops on the beat, at least during an administration that is uh predisposed to enforcing the law. I do not have similar confidence in prediction markets because prediction markets are partly responsible for policing their own services. There is a self-policing mechanism that was written into the rules back when futures markets were all focused on grains and soybean prices and such. It is fascinating to me the degree to which the CFTC sort of outsources regulation to to self-regulation, right? What's up with that? That's absolutely right. So in the past, markets were pretty simple. It wasn't every day that uh a financial intermediary would try to list a new type of grain future. or soybean contract. Do you think they didn't they didn't envision markets on whether the Supreme Leader of Iran would be ousted? Exactly. They were basic markets in pretty boring commodities. So when Congress and the agency set up this market, that self policing structure maybe made sense. Now, Amanda says, you have prediction markets like Cal She applying the same self-certification tool to all kinds of markets that it was not intended for. They're also supposed to be policing their own traders to make sure that they're not manipulating markets. But Amanda says she's not seeing any serious enforcement. What she hears instead is executives at these prediction markets. about enforcement when big fishy looking wind make the news. So the capture of uh Maduro in Venezuela or the Iran strikes or Uh any other policy announcement related to tariffs. People have been making suspiciously well timed bets on these kinds of events, but they are very hard to pin down as insider trading. Yeah, they really are. I mean, just this week I was reporting on these French sleuths who figured out that there was probably an insider trader on Polymarket who made a ton of money on President Biden's pardons in like the final hours he was in office, but it took them weeks to untangle all of this, and we still don't know exactly who was behind the bats. Bobby was a philosophy major in college, and he says he hasn't read Simon de Beauvoir or Kant in a long time. But during these whirlwind months reporting on prediction markets, he has found himself falling into a big existential wondering. about these prediction markets. We we we we as I stroke my chin, I've been wondering, how much are these bets on future events changing the future? When parties acting in their self interest maximize their own gain over that of the public, in philosophy and economics, this is known as Sinister Interest, attributed to philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late 1700s. And you can already see this happening. Yeah, 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 Cauchi 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 betters 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. Now Tarek has told me he's aware of the dangers and there are markets he would never list. Yes, I mean there are limits, right? Like I always say taken to the extreme things can be but like any markets that can create a A perverse incentive. We avoid what's a perverse incentive, you might be wondering. Well, maybe a bet on California wildfires. Like how far will this fire spread? That could encourage someone to set a fire. The problem is Practice. Prediction market companies themselves are the ones deciding what markets may have perverse incentives. poly market. They did have markets on the LA fires last year. So I've actually gone back and talked to all those big time prediction market sharps in the Discord chats to ask them if they were worried about all the potential reality warping and insider betting on almost any future event. And some of them are like, uh, we're not that worried about it. But others are like, I don't really see how Cauchy's claim that this is a net plus for humanity really checks out at all. They try to say, like, oh, you know, it's it's really important to have like these numbers from prediction markets to like accurately gauge things. This is Evan Semmet, who told Bobby he's been making close to $100,000 a month on Calchy. So you might think he would be pretty game. But You know. Does the general public really need something that's like one percent more accurate on like the I don't know, like whether or not someone's gonna score like over a certain number of points in a football game. Like, like what what value does that actually add? I would say like none. Like like literally not.