The Prop-Betification of Everything, with the Forefather of Prediction Markets

He is the accidental creator of a phenomenon eating our world and wallets alive. So how does James Surowiecki feel about Kalshi, Polymarket and the wisdom of the crowd, now that even the market for a missile launch can be manipulated? On the eve of the Super Bowl, he re-traces the rise of the casino in your pocket, debunks the cult of the CEO... and forecasts the disturbing possibilities when insider trading maneuvers all the way to the White House (or at least The Dark Lord of the Pentagon). • Read "The Wisdom of Crowds" https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/175380/the-wisdom-of-crowds-by-james-surowiecki/ • Previously on PTFO: "The Best Bettor in NBA History on How to Solve a Gambling Crisis https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjkwYmZjMTIyZjVmZGVkZTM0NWI1NDdi Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.

• 0:12Pablo Torre?

  Right after this.

• 0:16Speaker 02

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• 0:51Speaker 03

  I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone. And I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh. Anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them.

• 1:04Speaker 04

  Everybody, listen up.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade-in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.

• 1:23Pablo Torre?

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• 2:07Pablo Torre?

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• 2:30Pablo Torre?

  By the way, are you... what is your NHL 26?

• 2:34Speaker 05

  I don't play anymore because...

• 2:35Pablo Torre?

  You don't play anymore?

• 2:36Speaker 05

  I don't, because when the new, the next generation consoles came out, EA for some reason decided to only make the NHL game for the new consoles. And I just never, I haven't bought a new console just because I don't play enough.

• 2:48Pablo Torre?

  What was the last console you owned?

• 2:50Speaker 05

  The Xbox One was the last one.

• 2:52Pablo Torre?

  They left you behind in an outmoded technology.

• 2:55Speaker 05

  Yes, and so I have not played the game in two years, basically.

• 2:59Pablo Torre?

  Wait a minute, but the legend of you, the reason I wanted to start with this is because the legend of Jim Zerowicki is not that he used to write the financial page for The New Yorker, worked at Yale, lecturing and all this [BLEEP]. It's that you were at your peak. What rank in the world when it comes to the NHL video game?

• 3:15Speaker 05

  I can't remember exactly, but I think my highest was like 92, something like that.

• 3:19Pablo Torre?

  That's ridiculous.

• 3:20Speaker 05

  Top 100.

• 3:21Pablo Torre?

  That's ridiculous.

• 3:22Speaker 05

  I don't think Megan knows that.

• 3:24Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna say, God bless your partner Megan who is learning the depths.

• 3:30Speaker 05

  That's not gonna be a good thing. That's not good for anyone. That's not good for anyone.

• 3:34Pablo Torre?

  But there is, there is a bit of a metaphor here already insofar as you're a person who is steeped, it seems, in what was a version of a technology, of a concept, and you're sort of like watching this thing that you're as intimately familiar with as anybody, now zoom into a future that I'm trying to also understand.

• 3:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:57Pablo Torre?

  And, look, the prediction markets dynamic that I need our audience to understand and that I personally frankly need to understand better. The reason you're on this show is because I was looking through Polymarket's website, okay? And there's a section labeled FAQs, Frequently Asked Questions, and it says Polymarket versus Polling. And the subhead is, "How is Polymarket better than traditional/legacy polling?" And I'll just read this paragraph. Studies show that prediction markets like Polymarket tend to outperform traditional pollsters because participants are financially incentivized to be correct. This creates more thoughtful, data-driven predictions. Research by James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, has highlighted how markets like these can be more accurate than polls due to the collective intelligence of diverse

• 4:42Pablo Torre?

  participants. My point is that the book that I had to read in college that you wrote, The Wisdom of Crowds, it's kind of the foundational text for the thing that is taking over, not just gambling as a concept, but like now, politics and finance and the, what I would say, is almost the prop-betification of everything.

• 5:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:08Pablo Torre?

  How does that feel?

• 5:09Speaker 05

  The fact that I did not trademark the phrase "The Wisdom of Crowds" is one of the great terrible financial decisions in a lifetime of bad financial decisions, I think. No, it's, it's, the thing that strikes me, first of all, is, is kind of what took so long. So, The Wisdom of Crowds came out in 2004.

• 5:28Pablo Torre?

  It was on my Intro to Sociology syllabus, as it is, I think, at fine colleges everywhere.

• 5:33Speaker 05

  Yeah. There were already a couple of prediction markets that had, that had already been created at that point. They were smaller. One of them was a play money market, not a real money market. And even the phrase "prediction markets" was kind of just being formed. I mean, if you read the book, the phrase I use in a lot of it is "decision markets", because a lot of what I was interested in was how you could use these markets to help make better decisions within companies or within governments or whatever. But there was a lot of interest around prediction markets in the 2000s. There was a huge amount. If you go to like 2008, there's this famous open letter that was signed by like 22 of the most really important economists and social scientists in the world, included

• 6:15Speaker 05

  like five Nobel or four Nobel laureates, basically making the case for prediction markets as a tool that people should be using. But it took like more than 15 years after that for it to take off. So, part of me is just like, yeah, what took so long? The second thing is, I am very happy that this idea is gaining currency and is, you know, kind of becoming more and more popular and people are interested in it. But I do think a lot of the rhetoric around these markets is...

• 6:46Speaker 05

  Challenging and I think is kind of alienating people in a way that I think probably is not beneficial.

• 6:52Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I want to talk about all of this, but I also want to just underscore here that you are one of the sharpest thinkers on finance in America. And you had none of the cunning or the strategy.

• 7:04Speaker 05

  That's right. None.

• 7:06Pablo Torre?

  To profit off of this thing. You were decades early on.

• 7:09Speaker 05

  None, none, none, none at all, none at all.

• 7:11Pablo Torre?

  The Polly Market's quoting you and they're.

• 7:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:14Pablo Torre?

  Eating the world. Kashi, which is by the way Arabic, it turns out for everything.

• 7:19Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 7:19Pablo Torre?

  Is also eating everything.

• 7:22Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 7:22Pablo Torre?

  And you're here with me.

• 7:24Speaker 05

  Just chatting.

• 7:25Pablo Torre?

  Just, just, just chatting about your EA Sports NHL career.

• 7:29Speaker 05

  I say, can I give you an example? The moment where I really was struck by this was Truth Social.

• 7:34Speaker 06

  In a major move in the crypto and social media spaces, entering the world of online betting with its new product, Truth Predict, which is aimed at prediction markets for politics, sports, and more importantly, crypto. Why it matters? Prediction markets like these aim to harness the wisdom of the crowd in forecasting.

• 7:52Speaker 05

  Devin Nunes, the former congressman who is now CEO.

• 7:55Pablo Torre?

  Truth Predict is.

• 7:56Speaker 05

  Is that what it's called?

• 7:56Pablo Torre?

  Is what it's called.

• 7:57Speaker 05

  Yeah. So he's the CEO of Truth Social and.

• 8:01Pablo Torre?

  I didn't know that. Of course he is.

• 8:02Speaker 05

  In his statement introducing this, he actually said, you know, it will, I can't remember the exact quote, but it was basically, it will allow us to tap the wisdom of the crowd. And I was like, oh my God. Anyway, but I, it happens all the time. So, and I'm very happy.

• 8:14Pablo Torre?

  The first line of the CBS News story, Polly Market CEO Shane Copeland is betting on the wisdom of crowds.

• 8:20Speaker 05

  Yes, exactly.

• 8:20Pablo Torre?

  Times article, again, the wisdom of crowds. Bloomberg, Kashi's analysis of prices during the NYC mayoral race doesn't back up the promise that prediction markets will aggregate the wisdom of crowds with greater accuracy. It's just, it's.

• 8:30Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 8:30Pablo Torre?

  You are being plagiarized. You just have no legal mechanism to enforce.

• 8:36Speaker 05

  And it's fine. I mean, I, whatever. I wrote the book so people would take the idea seriously and embrace them. And that's what's happened. So it's good. But it is funny nonetheless, just to like watch it happening.

• 9:07Pablo Torre?

  So there is way too much happening right now. And reality itself has never been more contested. Which is, you know, a hell of a combination. We're watching the federal government killing American citizens in Minnesota, while millions of new Epstein files are finally getting released. And also, the most-watched television show in America is happening on Sunday. Super Bowl 60, Seahawks-Patriots. And now, thanks to the rise of legal prediction markets, there's a way to bet on all of this. As if everything, suddenly, is sports betting. Which explains why prediction market companies like Polymarket and Calci are each worth tens of billions of dollars, apparently,

• 9:51Pablo Torre?

  while promising a better way to forecast this reality. And actually predict what's gonna happen next. Is the United States going to invade Venezuela?

• 10:02Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 10:03Pablo Torre?

  Or will Caroline Levitt, the White House Press Secretary, will her press briefing last 65 minutes?

• 10:11Speaker 03

  Hold on, and thank you all very much. It's great to be back with you.

• 10:15Pablo Torre?

  And, very conspicuously, and this speaks to the whole, like, "What the [bleep] is really happening here?" dynamic, she left the room seconds before the press briefing hit 65 minutes.

• 10:26Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 10:28Pablo Torre?

  And so if all of this just feels apocalyptic to you, I get it. But what I wanted to do here was understand how we got to this point. And maybe even predict where we're going. So I did something that is increasingly unpopular in the world of prediction markets. I turned to an expert, my friend Jim Surawiki, an enormous sports fan and brilliant financial writer who authored "The Wisdom of Crowds", the book whose legacy has now reached into all of our pockets, literally and figuratively, while leaving one of the, you know, top 100 EA Sports NHL players in the world behind.

• 11:09Speaker 05

  So the central thesis of it is that, under the right conditions, groups of people can be remarkably intelligent, and actually even smarter than the smartest person in the crowd. The simple example of it would be something like the jelly bean experiment. So, there's this famous experiment that was done in the 80s by a finance professor named Jack Trainor at Columbia Business School. And what he would do in this finance class was, he would just show his students a jar of jelly beans, and just ask them to guess how many jelly beans were in the jar. And what he found consistently was that the group's average guess was always very good. So it was typically within like, about 2% of the number of beans in the jar.

• 11:50Speaker 05

  And, the guess was better than all but one person in the room. So, that's the basic premise. And, it's an idea, I think, that really underlies markets generally, and that you've seen in operation in other places. But, a couple things. One is, the key phrase in that definition is like, "under the right conditions." So what does it take? Because, obviously, there are tons of examples, everybody can think of, where markets are terrible, they have bubbles, or look at meme stocks, or whatever it is. And so my argument was, that you need diversity of information and opinion, people who have lots of different ideas, lots of different pieces of information they're drawing on. And you need them to be, relatively speaking, like, independent of each other.

• 12:31Speaker 05

  So, they can be influenced, to some degree, like, they can see the price, or whatever it is, but they're not necessarily following each other, the way you sometimes get in markets. And the idea is that if you have those things, and then you have a mechanism to kind of aggregate all that information and all that knowledge, then you oftentimes can arrive at these just like, amazing judgments. But, prediction markets was a kind of new, and I thought sort of interesting way, to try to tap the knowledge. But like, another example is obviously sports betting, right? Sports betting, whether it be the odds on horses at the racetrack, or in a slightly more complicated way, the point spread, that actually generally reflects the collective wisdom of all bettors as well.

• 13:14Speaker 05

  So, these were all different ways of thinking about, like, how can you tap the wisdom of a large group of people?

• 13:22Pablo Torre?

  But it is interesting as you look at, okay, what are people actually using Polymarket and Kalshi for?

• 13:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:28Pablo Torre?

  The answer is more than 90% sports.

• 13:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:31Pablo Torre?

  Last week, there was a new record for trading volume on Sunday, $543 million. 93% was sports trading volume.

• 13:39Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 13:40Pablo Torre?

  And that was on Kalshi. And so the notion that all of this is another way to bet on sports.

• 13:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:48Pablo Torre?

  It seems hard to escape that, yes, the way that you envisioned the prediction market had these socio-political functions, but in reality, it's a bunch of dudes doing the thing that they were doing on FanDuel and DraftKings and everything else.

• 14:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:07Pablo Torre?

  But in this way, they're doing it because it's less regulated, I guess?

• 14:11Speaker 05

  So the regulation question is really interesting. What these markets have, prediction markets have done when it comes to sports betting, I think it's fair to say is they have followed a strategy somewhat similar to Uber and Airbnb, which is kind of, we're going to do it and then you can try to stop us, basically. The way sports betting is regulated in the United States is primarily regulated at the state level. So there are some states in America, even today, where you can't bet on sports. So what the prediction markets have done is they have basically said, what we are offering is not gambling in the strictest sense.

• 14:55Speaker 05

  We are offering these, what they call, event contracts. And an event contract is a contract where you are betting on the outcome of an event. I just said betting, maybe speculating, whatever you want to call it, right?

• 15:09Pablo Torre?

  But this illustrates the head of the needle they're trying to dance on.

• 15:12Speaker 05

  Yes, exactly. And as a result, we are regulated at the federal level, at the national level, by the Commodities Futures and Trading Commission, right? And the Commodities Future and Trading Commission has this weird provision where if you're a recognized exchange, and Kalshi is, and Polymarket now is,

• 15:32Speaker 05

  You've provided evidence that you're reliable and you're not going to go under and leave everyone hanging and you can facilitate trades in an efficient way and all this kind of stuff, right? If you do that, you can self-certify that you're going to offer these event contracts. And then basically the CFTC has to step in after you do that and say, no, no, no, you can't. And if they don't step in, then they basically have kind of, it's almost as if they've given you tacit approval effectively. And so that basically is what they've done. The Biden CFTC tried to stop Kalshi from offering event contracts in elections. And Kalshi won a court case. They

• 16:17Speaker 05

  basically got a stay and they basically said, no, you can keep offering them. You can offer them for the 2024 election, which they did. And then Trump won and its CFTC has been far friendlier to prediction markets than Biden's was.

• 16:31Pablo Torre?

  Crypto and these other gamified casino in your pocket genre of stuff.

• 16:38Speaker 05

  But on the state level, states are stepping in and have tried to step in and say like, no, you can't do this. The most successful state is Massachusetts, which just won. And the reason that decision was important was because that decision basically said regulating gambling is a state power and Congress never meant to take away that power.

• 17:00Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I mean, that was just last week.

• 17:01Speaker 07

  The state attorney general accuses this site of offering sports betting without getting a license. And while Kalshi is facing legal action from other states, Massachusetts is the first to actually stop operations. It's expected to appeal.

• 17:14Pablo Torre?

  This is what the Suffolk County Superior Court Judge Christopher Barry Smith in Boston said, quote, "There is no real question that licensure and the consequent oversight of sports waging operations in the state serves both public health and safety and the Commonwealth's financial interest." And so

• 17:30Pablo Torre?

  This was the latest development in what feels like an attempt to curb what has been this unstoppable gravitational almost force.

• 17:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, but I think when it comes to today and it comes to where prediction markets have gone, I think the main reason prediction markets have embraced sports betting is because that's where the money is. Like, that's the main reason they are there. It's a logical place for them to go. Prediction markets are really well suited to forecasting sporting events, the outcome of sporting events. But I think the main reason is that it's just a much more stable and reliable form of revenue generation, right?

• 18:11Pablo Torre?

  Right, right, right. And look, I've talked to now like really high-end sports bettors, gamblers, and they love the prediction market.

• 18:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:22Pablo Torre?

  Not least because on any sportsbook, they get banned as soon as they demonstrate that they're any good at this.

• 18:28Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 18:28Pablo Torre?

  We've talked on this show before with Harold Valverde, who is saying to everybody how insane it is that you could be truly blacklisted from doing the thing because they're gonna lose money by having you be a customer.

• 18:42Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  The moment you show an ability to win, you will be limited and you'll be shown the door.

• 18:48Pablo Torre?

  And so in this case, that is not a concern.

• 18:51Speaker 05

  It's not a concern.

• 18:51Pablo Torre?

  And can you explain just the basics of why?

• 18:54Speaker 05

  The nature of these exchanges is they are what are called derivative exchanges, right? So, everything on these exchanges is structured as a contract. There is a buyer and there is a seller. So, if you want to, let's say right now in Kalshi, the Seahawks are favored to win the Super Bowl.

• 19:13Pablo Torre?

  Yep, right now it's 68% Seattle.

• 19:15Speaker 05

  Exactly. What the market is saying is there's a 68% chance to win. And what that means is if you want to buy that contract, you basically pay 68 cents and if you win, you collect a dollar, right? If you make 32 cents, about 50% on your investment roughly, right? But when you do that, someone has to be on the other end of the trade, right? There isn't a house in the same way as if you go to DraftKings, when you make that deal, DraftKings is on the other end of the deal. That's not the case in these prediction markets.

• 19:45Pablo Torre?

  So the premise then, just to spell it out, is the operator, Polly Market, doesn't give a If you're good at this because they're not actually losing the money.

• 19:55Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 19:56Pablo Torre?

  Someone else who took the opposite side of the bet.

• 19:58Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 19:58Pablo Torre?

  Sold you the contract.

• 19:59Speaker 05

  Is losing the money.

• 20:00Pablo Torre?

  That's who's liable.

• 20:01Speaker 05

  That's who it is. So they have nothing at stake in the outcome, right? Now, in theory, if a sportsbook is doing its job really well, it shouldn't have that much at stake either, right? Because it should be laying off its bets and it should also be adjusting the point spread so that it has, relatively speaking, an equal amount of money on both sides. And then it just collects the commission, right? The 4.5% commission in the middle.

• 20:25Pablo Torre?

  The vig.

• 20:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, the vig. In practice, it's harder to do that at a sportsbook. And so a lot of times, you'll sometimes read like stories in ESPN where people at the sportsbooks are like, "Oh, we really lucked out when, you know, X, Y, or Z happened because they had taken in too much money on one side of the bet." So that does happen. Polymarket, Kalshi, prediction markets generally, they don't, in theory, have to worry about that. So as a result, where sportsbooks do, it seems like online sportsbooks do pretty clearly ban very successful sports bettors. Every successful sports better I know has talked about this happening. It does not happen on Polymarket and Kalshi because in theory, they don't care. Like, what difference does it make to them?

• 21:09Speaker 05

  They just want the volume and they just want people to be trading and people to be offering contracts or buying contracts. And so that's one reason, I think, why, you know, really successful or big bettors are gravitating to these things.

• 21:31Pablo Torre?

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• 22:05Speaker 02

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• 23:17Pablo Torre?

  So in The Wisdom of Crowds, how big a section was prediction markets?

• 23:21Speaker 05

  Prediction markets, as I said, like, to me, they were most interesting at that point as a kind of proof of concept. So there were not many prediction markets that were running at the time, but the ones that existed gave us pretty good evidence that under the right conditions, these things could be very valuable. And so that was really where I talked about them. And then there was this like really interesting, from my perspective and from other people's perspective, very sinister experiment that the U.S. intelligence community wanted to run involving prediction markets.

• 23:54Pablo Torre?

  Wait, what was that?

• 23:57Speaker 05

  So in 2003, the intelligence community started to set up a program that it called Future Map. And as part of it, it was going to set up this thing called the policy analysis market. And the idea behind this whole project was that they were going to set up two different kinds of prediction markets. So one of them were going to be internal prediction markets inside the intelligence community. These would be relatively small markets. They would probably be open to like 20 or 30 people. They'd be open to analysts. And they would ask questions that the intelligence community wanted answered, but they would be open to people who were maybe experts in the field, but also people who are maybe experts in adjacent fields.

• 24:41Speaker 05

  And the idea was, there's maybe stuff people know that for whatever reason, because of bureaucracy or whatever it is, is not really getting to the decision makers. And so we want to try to see if we can use these markets to tap into that. And then the other one, and this was the one that created the uproar, was going to be a market in Middle Eastern politics and economics. It was going to be open in theory to the public. And it was going to offer markets in things like assassinations. Well, it's not clear that that was ever actually on the table, because I think originally what they had in mind were much more mundane things, like what will happen to Jordan's

• 25:24Speaker 05

  GDP in the next two years, or how stable they would find some measure of stability for Syria's government, or how likely is it that the House of Saud will fall in the next five years, or whatever it is, right? And they would offer up these things. But when they set up the site, they included things like missile launches. And so people were like, oh my God, they're asking us to bet on assassinations and

• 25:50Pablo Torre?

  Terrorist attacks.

• 25:51Speaker 05

  Terrorist attacks and the like.

• 25:52Pablo Torre?

  Coup de tat.

• 25:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. And so there was this massive uproar. Two senators kind of said, look, this is a nightmare. How can you allow people to bet on this stuff? It's da-da-da-da.

• 26:04Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, this is July 28, 2003.

• 26:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:07Speaker 04

  So on that note, we have discovered something that is going on at the Department of Defense, a relatively small program run by Admiral Poindexter, that is almost unbelievable. They believe that having the markets People in the market system betting or buying and selling futures contract. They will be contracts. They will be able to develop information about what might or might not happen in the Middle East in the future. This betting parlor on the internet will include wagers, for example, as the the examples on the internet site that put up by the Department of Defense would include. Will Mr. Arafat be assassinated? Will there be missile attacks from North Korea? Will the King of Jordan be?

• 26:51Speaker 05

  And then there was one other problem with it, which was that the guy who was sort of in charge of the the whole sort of division that was going to be running this was John Poindexter, whose name doesn't really mean anything to people anymore, but he was seen as sort of this like dark lord of the intelligence community.

• 27:09Pablo Torre?

  He was the head of the DARPA unit.

• 27:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, he was the head of the DARPA unit.

• 27:12Pablo Torre?

  The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is.

• 27:15Speaker 05

  DARPA is this like super cool, right?

• 27:17Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, sci fi, but real.

• 27:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, like investing in all these like really amazing technologies and and actually quite good. Basic research and da, da, da, da. But Poindexter had been involved in like Iran contra and all this stuff. So he was.

• 27:30Pablo Torre?

  The perfect name also.

• 27:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, Poindexter, everything about it. And then this was also obviously the Iraq War. And anyway, so it was all this like perfect storm of this is a disaster. And so the Senator just came out and literally DARPA shut it down the next day.

• 27:44Pablo Torre?

  This is Ron Wyden, the Senator from Oregon, saying.

• 27:48Speaker 07

  The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque. It's a bizarre plan.

• 27:55Speaker 05

  One of the things that bothered people about this was that the US government was running it. The US government is very interested in these questions, right? The US government wants to to gain more information about this kind of stuff. And I honestly think a potential assassination or a missile launch, those are not things that one would expect prediction markets generally to be good at because they really depend on the knowledge and judgment of a few people typically, right? So the only hope you have of getting forecasts of those things right is if you have an insider trader who's like, I'm just going to leak this information to make a lot of money by doing it, right?

• 28:28Pablo Torre?

  Well, let's let's talk about that because what is the ideal prediction market topic?

• 28:36Speaker 05

  Sports is actually a good prediction market topic because there are events that are in the future that have a clear outcome. So it's, you know, at some point the rubber is going to hit the road. You're either going to be right or wrong. Forecasting them well involves a lot of different moving parts and people have lots of different pieces of information about it. Some are relevant, some are not, some are misguided, some are not. But collectively, what usually happens is that the market arrives at a pretty good forecast of what's going to happen. Not in any sense like a perfect forecast, but over time, forecasts are usually pretty good. So in politics, I would say, or economics,

• 29:16Speaker 05

  I would say similarly, bigger market questions, like things like, you know, what's GDP going to be going forward, or the course of interest rates, how do we think the market will react to that? Those kinds of things where you have lots of diverse pieces of information and not information that's concentrated in the hands of one or two people.

• 29:38Pablo Torre?

  I just want to jump in to clarify that what you're saying as ideal are these topics where the collective wisdom of all of these participants who would put money on the outcome as they see it, that helps describe reality.

• 29:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 29:54Pablo Torre?

  More accurately than just asking an expert or something.

• 29:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. And just to say one thing about, to go back to the policy analysis market, it's maybe a little niche, but I think it's relevant here. I think one of the reasons why the intelligence community was interested in this was that the intelligence community has had a lot of big failures, right? So 9/11, most obvious one, but even failures about things that you might have thought they would have done a better job of forecasting, like the revolution in Iran in 1979. Like, that's a classic one. It's like, that's a big event, a massive public uprising that led to the Shah falling, right? And the US intelligence community pretty much missed it. It just was not ready for it when it happened. And I think if you're in the intelligence community, you have to ask yourself like, whoa, why?

• 30:41Speaker 05

  How did we miss this? Like, what did we not know? And some of it is, oh, maybe we didn't have enough... People on the ground, although that seems implausible. And so I think that the idea was maybe you could use these tools to tap into knowledge that people have that just wasn't getting to the decision makers.

• 30:59Pablo Torre?

  But I want to distinguish now between polling and a prediction market. Because the whole question of like, you could have asked more people is what polling is.

• 31:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:07Pablo Torre?

  But this, there is something, and this brings us, I think, directly to sports and sports betting. There is something that I think when I'm watching sports debate, which I at times participated in.

• 31:17Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 31:18Pablo Torre?

  Where it's like, if you guys really felt this way, you would have the courage of your convictions and you would put money on it.

• 31:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:23Pablo Torre?

  Otherwise, we're just talking.

• 31:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:24Pablo Torre?

  And we're not really meaning as sincerely as we could demonstrate what we say.

• 31:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:30Pablo Torre?

  And so with a prediction market, the fundamental dynamic, which is the thing that makes us all very uncomfortable, is money.

• 31:37Speaker 05

  There is money, yeah. So let me say a couple of things about this. So I think one of the challenges with polls versus prediction markets has nothing to do with money. It has to do with the fact that people in polls are generally asked, what do you think? Or what will you do, right? They're not actually usually asked, what do you think will happen, right? So there are exceptions, but generally speaking, that's what a poll is. Now, as it turns out, you know, you can do things to massage polls to get a good answer. But I do think just the simple change of asking people like, what do you think will happen? Actually can make polls more accurate. And I'll give you a concrete example of this. In the 2024 election, there was this famous thing that happened in the prediction market in Polymarket,

• 32:19Speaker 05

  which was that there was this French guy who was betting literally millions of dollars on Trump to win. Okay? And he kept buying more, like.

• 32:29Pablo Torre?

  And he had pseudonyms.

• 32:30Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so it became clear at some point, Polymarket revealed there was this big trader. They called him the French whale. And so initially, a lot of people thought that he might be doing it just to try to manipulate the market, right? So, and that's something we can talk about, like that there's some concern that people will manipulate these markets to try to make it seem that a candidate is more popular or more likely to win than they actually are. And so there was this initial concern that that's what was happening. But it turned out that that was not. Not in fact what happened. What happened was he really thought that Trump just was going to win and had a better chance of winning. And one reason he thought it was that he had commissioned polls of his own of Americans in swing states. Like the one I remember was in Pennsylvania.

• 33:14Speaker 05

  But the thing that's interesting was he didn't just commission polls where they asked people, what are you gonna do? They commissioned what are called neighbor polls where they asked people, how do you think your neighbor will vote? And the idea is that if you do that, you get, first of all, it might be a more collectively accurate understanding of what's going to happen because you're also kind of asking people, what do you think will happen? But you also get around the problem of people might be embarrassed or afraid to say they're gonna vote for Trump. But they're willing to say my neighbor will vote for Trump.

• 33:45Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 33:45Speaker 05

  Anyway, the point is like just shifting the question in a poll can make a difference, right? So that's part of it. At the same time, I do think incentives matter. I think it does help when people have to put money or status or reputation. I'm actually not as convinced as a lot of people are that you need to have a lot of money at stake. And there's actually a lot of evidence from internal markets, inside organizations, and also from some of these smaller prediction markets that just status and reputation can play a big role and people wanna win. They wanna do better than their, you know, compatriots or whatever. Or that relatively small amounts of money can still incentivize people to render good judgments.

• 34:29Pablo Torre?

  Right. But what does that then say about the difference between a prediction market and going to a sportsbook?

• 34:35Speaker 05

  So part of this has to do with asking yourself the question, what is the goal of a prediction market? Like, why do we have them? Why do they exist, right? There's been this explosion of interest in them. They've become, and it's not just that they've become very popular. People are really interested in them. It's also that they've become much cited, right? You certainly saw that in 2024, and which was kind of what kicked all this stuff off was the election in 2024. And so you've seen this just like, okay, big boom. Now, what's interesting is that accompanying it has also been, perhaps predictably, this kind of backlash against them, right? A lot of people expressing like anxiety or Articulating the problems with them.

• 35:16Pablo Torre?

  Yes, we're all living inside of a casino.

• 35:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:20Pablo Torre?

  In which everything is bettable.

• 35:22Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 35:22Pablo Torre?

  And by the way, when we mentioned Caroline Levitt, Press Secretary of the White House.

• 35:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:26Pablo Torre?

  Doing that thing right underneath the wire, which pays off that particular market.

• 35:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:32Pablo Torre?

  It's also worth noting, in terms of just what are people saying and thinking, that Donald Trump Jr. is an advisor to not just Polymarket, but also to Calci and is an investor in Polymarket on top of that.

• 35:44Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  And the interesting thing about, you know, Don, Don has always been at the forefront of these types of spaces and new technologies. He's always been very in tune with what the American people feel and want. And he understands kind of this notion that people have been ready to fire the traditional institutions and authorities. And basically got tired of fake news, I think. And that's why they're going to Twitter and that's why they're going to prediction markets. And I don't, I can't think of anyone else who would be better to help us promote the vision of prediction markets and what they can do for society.

• 36:18Pablo Torre?

  And I just got to jump in here to say that I love the idea of predicting stuff more accurately. But the vision of what prediction markets can do for society, as the co-founder of Calci, Tarek Mansour, just put it on CNBC there, is also way less obvious to me than what prediction markets can do for someone like Donald Trump Jr. or some other well-connected insider who can turn real-world events into the equivalent of the NBA gambling scandal that we've been covering for months on this show, where someone who's about to do anything bettable, allegedly, tells a bunch of his boys ahead of time so that they could all do some old-fashioned insider trading together. Maybe even on... The Invasion of Venezuela.

• 37:00Speaker 05

  That's the one that obviously is most important.

• 37:03Pablo Torre?

  An international user of Polymarket made $400,000 with bets related to Nicolas Maduro losing power. And this was a series of wagers he made just before the news broke that in fact the United States had, you know, gone in and captured. He bet $30,000 to make $400,000.

• 37:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. And at the time, you know, the probability was very low. And of course, as he bet, the odds started to adjust. So there's this question of, okay, wait, we're essentially creating an incentive for people to leak information or to use insider information to make money. It's obviously a very big deal and a problem, right?

• 37:36Pablo Torre?

  Huge, and yet, at the same time, if another standard of success for prediction markets is their sheer ability to accurately forecast the future.

• 37:46Speaker 05

  Insider information is actually kind of more of a feature than a bug, right? Like, you want to know, like, is Maduro gonna fall? Well, if you want to know that, then it helps to have inside information that actually the United States is planning to do this, right?

• 37:58Pablo Torre?

  If truth is what the actual standard of success is, then incentivizing all of these insiders to put their money on what they think is the outcome is a way of getting to that.

• 38:09Speaker 05

  Of getting to that.

• 38:10Pablo Torre?

  But this now raises a few logical questions for all the non-Donald Trump juniors out there, who do not have a direct line to Invasion Intel. And these are questions like, are these markets infested with Donald Trump Jr.'s friends? Is Calci's stated ban on insider trading enough of a deterrent? And if it isn't, then...

• 38:34Speaker 05

  Wait, why am I trading? Why would I be willing to take the other side of a trade?

• 38:38Pablo Torre?

  But that's not even the most disturbing possibility here. Because as suggested by that objectively low-stakes Caroline Levitt example, which I like to think of as the John Tate Porter unders of prediction markets, these bets, these contracts, are also incentivizing people to do stuff that they simply wouldn't do otherwise, for the benefit of themselves, or their personal network, or their creditors. Maybe even the most powerful person in the world, himself.

• 39:10Speaker 05

  That's where it starts to get, like, very problematic, obviously, I think. If you're the president, there's a lot you can do.

• 39:15Pablo Torre?

  Oh, but if, the whole thing is, if you see this government, this administration, as less serious about whatever integrity means anymore, which is to say that they are so transactional that they are just draining every cent they can out of their personal ability

• 39:35Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 39:35Pablo Torre?

  to access things that the public cannot.

• 39:37Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 39:38Pablo Torre?

  Then you have created this scenario where now there's a mechanism to profit

• 39:43Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 39:44Pablo Torre?

  In ways that never existed.

• 39:45Speaker 05

  Never really existed.

• 39:46Pablo Torre?

  At the expense of the retail investor.

• 39:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 39:50Pablo Torre?

  The common person who is only still waking up to the idea that there might be people who would in fact Jontay Porter a press briefing.

• 40:00Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. And so

• 40:01Pablo Torre?

  Or worse. Or worse.

• 40:03Speaker 05

  The worst is the more, is the more, is the more interesting question. Like, I don't know. You'd have to look at what kinds of markets could be offered.

• 40:09Pablo Torre?

  But you go back to the scenario, the, the whole thing that got shut down within a day.

• 40:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:14Pablo Torre?

  That you mentioned where it's like rocket launches and coup de

• 40:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:17Pablo Torre?

  But like, that's all on the table.

• 40:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:19Pablo Torre?

  And the question I think as a, as an American, you ask yourself is, are we sure that the government isn't doing things just to personally get rich on a prediction market?

• 40:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:31Pablo Torre?

  And I have personally, no confidence.

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• 41:22Pablo Torre?

  To fast forward in time, one concern I have is, we live in a society in which none of us trust that we're doing anything without a financial incentive.

• 41:33Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 41:33Pablo Torre?

  Because now there is an incentive to varying degrees, thanks to prediction markets.

• 41:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. There's this quote from the, the CEO of CalShear, maybe one of his, or the founders, who said that

• 41:45Speaker 01

  The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion. And, and I think if you, if you do build a general and purpose exchange that can resolve differences of opinions on anything, like the TAM is quite Quite massive, you know, in quite, quite a bit bigger than the current channel to stock market, I think.

• 42:06Speaker 05

  Now, I'm obviously, I'm a big fan of prediction markets and I really like the idea of creating assets out of differences of opinion when it comes to like important and interesting things where knowing is valuable.

• 42:20Pablo Torre?

  Yes, the truth is the goal.

• 42:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, where it matters, yeah, where it actually helps us make better decisions. It helps us solve problems and the like. But a world in which every difference of opinion is turned into a tradable asset, there is something about it that feels kind of just tiring, right? Like it just feels tiring and, and I think it fits with this general sense of everybody kind of being on the make, right? Everyone has a kind of hustle, right? And yeah, there's something about that. I do think there's a kind of, this is a broader cultural idea rather than like a specific thing, but I think that that vibe is something that I think is part of why prediction markets are kind of wearing people out a little bit.

• 43:02Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, and by the way, the way that these things have been marketed, I mean, on social media.

• 43:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:07Pablo Torre?

  It's been trolling.

• 43:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:08Pablo Torre?

  They have been trolling by circulating these posts that are designed for engagement.

• 43:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:15Pablo Torre?

  Which are not grounded in anything resembling integrity or truth, but are just trying to get the brand seemingly as widely consumed as possible.

• 43:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think the marketing aspect is...

• 43:27Pablo Torre?

  They're [bleep] posting.

• 43:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, I mean, certainly Polymarket has done a lot of that and the marketing is aimed primarily, I think, at, at young men, right? But...

• 43:35Pablo Torre?

  Successfully.

• 43:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, kind of right wing vibe and maybe not so vaguely, you know, like Nick Shirley, that, you know, whatever 23-year-old...

• 43:43Pablo Torre?

  The greatest investigative journalist of our time.

• 43:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, right, exactly, yeah.

• 43:46Pablo Torre?

  Who solved the problem of fraud in Minnesota by trying to get into daycares.

• 43:50Speaker 05

  Exactly, so, you know, he, one of the videos he made, not the initial video, but one of the ones that followed up, he had a Polymarket sweatshirt on and it certainly seemed like, not just that it was deliberate on his part, but it felt like a kind of weird sponsorship thing.

• 44:04Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 44:04Speaker 05

  I think it's part of why people feel, some people feel alienated from these things. Like prediction markets are this kind of... Of right wing tool for I don't know what.

• 44:12Pablo Torre?

  I would characterize their strategy as there is money available right now on this table. Let's grab it.

• 44:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:18Pablo Torre?

  And whatever reputational harms come to us are outweighed by the fact that we are, yes, hoovering up young men across America.

• 44:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:26Pablo Torre?

  To be not only our customers, but our propagandists.

• 44:33Pablo Torre?

  But speaking of truth versus propaganda, I do want to acknowledge another real world impact of the booming popularity of prediction markets here, which is that a prediction market's power to do one thing, reasonably forecast outcomes, also gives the biggest buyers of these event contracts a bonus power. The power to buy legitimacy, to set expectations by setting the market, normalizing a unilateral invasion or the outcome of an election, making all of this a patriot's propet of a different kind. Or as the author Kyla Scanlon wrote in a New York Times op ed last month, calling for greater regulation of this industry,

• 45:16Pablo Torre?

  quote, "Markets will always influence reality, but there's a difference between markets that respond to events and markets that authorize them." End quote. And I think this is worth thinking about for both high stakes and low stakes events. Because social media, you may have noticed, has numbed us to how financial incentives warp and hollow out our shared reality in pretty much every way already. But in Jim's view, a view that has been energized for more than two decades by the prediction part of the term prediction market, that same power can also tell us something else.

• 45:57Speaker 05

  There's one other aspect of the election prediction markets that I'm interested in. Actually, there's two aspects of it, and it gets to this question of like, why are these things useful? Like, why might they be useful? Right? And so one way they might be useful would be to say, if you see like, the prediction market is more skeptical of you than polls are, it might be a way to say to yourself, okay, wait a minute, what are we missing? A classic example would be like 2016. If you think about if we had had robust prediction markets in 2016. And the market for the electoral vote in Wisconsin. Was saying, actually, we think there's a 30 to 40% chance that Trump is going to win Wisconsin. Where the polls it felt like we're saying 10% chance.

• 46:43Speaker 05

  Hillary could have looked at that and said. Huh, that's interesting. Should that change the way? We're handling the campaign in these states and that I think is like a concrete example of the ways in which. Prediction market information could be useful. Now, one of the concerns people have about prediction markets when it comes to elections. Is can manipulation create and a kind of? Image of success that in turn kind of creates success in the real world.

• 47:14Pablo Torre?

  So there's an example of this, right? 2012.

• 47:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 47:18Pablo Torre?

  In trade.

• 47:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 47:19Pablo Torre?

  One of these prediction markets. A better put a series of huge wagers on Mitt Romney. In the two weeks before the election and it made a betting line that indicated a tight race. And of course, look, I'm not saying that we have any proof that the better did this because of financial motive. But it certainly changed the perception of like, oh, Romney's absolutely in this. And this trader, you know, again, he lost.

• 47:42Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 47:43Pablo Torre?

  Four million dollars.

• 47:44Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 47:44Pablo Torre?

  But the premise was this is. Four million dollars that otherwise would have been used on like ad buys.

• 47:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 47:51Pablo Torre?

  And this would be more effective than that.

• 47:52Speaker 05

  And so this is, so there it is an interesting question. My general sense, and I think the evidence kind of bears this out is that. That kind of attempts to influence market are probably unlikely to work. First of all. Cause the market will correct relatively quickly because it creates this opportunity to make money, right?

• 48:10Pablo Torre?

  Someone else will see it and be like, I'm taking the other side of that immediately.

• 48:12Speaker 05

  If someone is making a really dumb bet in order to kind of inflate. The prospects of someone who's not really that popular. That's creating an opportunity for other people to make money and people are going to take advantage of that. And then the second thing is, I think just generally speaking, this idea of the bandwagon effect in politics. There's just not much. Good evidence for it. In other words, there's not a lot of evidence for the like, oh, they're winning, therefore I'm suddenly going to change my vote and vote for them. That's why Trump was so angry about that Iowa poll that came out, right? And why he sued about it and all this kind of stuff, right? To essentially create this bandwagon effect. Yeah, totally believe that. It makes sense, given Trump, you know, popularity, image is everything for him. But of course, Iowa voted massively for Trump and that poll had no influence.

• 48:57Pablo Torre?

  All which is, all which is fair. And I think the thing that's interesting that you just said on top of that is, a robust market

• 49:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 49:06Pablo Torre?

  will immediately address any attempt at manipulation.

• 49:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 49:09Pablo Torre?

  Which is to say that, right now, we are in this kind of in-between zone, where we're not quite there yet.

• 49:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 49:16Pablo Torre?

  For at least, an array of bets in this increasingly vast menu of bets.

• 49:21Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 49:21Pablo Torre?

  And so, it is funny that like, and this is kind of where I see the nuance and the apparent paradox.

• 49:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 49:29Pablo Torre?

  In order for these things to be healthier and less poisonous, you need more participants.

• 49:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, you need, yeah.

• 49:38Pablo Torre?

  And so that's, but it's just like.

• 49:39Speaker 05

  So you want markets, again, to go back to the wisdom of crowds. You want markets that are full of people with diverse opinions, people who are relatively speaking independent of each other, so you don't have a lot of people who are like, listening to each other in a kind of direct way, and that are liquid. So if you want to make a trade, you can make a trade. It's easy to do. And markets that don't satisfy those conditions are A, more easily manipulable, and they're also just more likely to not be right. They're just less likely to have an accurate forecast. So one thing I would say to people, because I'm sure a lot of people who are listening to this, are people who will end up, or are already, trading on prediction markets, is I do think the thing to remember, when you go into a prediction market,

• 50:21Speaker 05

  it's the same as when you invest or whatever, but is to ask yourself, what do I know that the person on the other side of this trade does not know? When it comes to these like more narrow, small markets, if you're not sure that you're not the sucker, you are probably the sucker.

• 50:38Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna say, it's the rounder's quote.

• 50:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, it is.

• 50:40Pablo Torre?

  If you can't spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.

• 50:44Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 50:44Pablo Torre?

  You know, I realized at the end here that I didn't ask you whether you've ever, have you ever bet on a prediction market?

• 50:50Speaker 05

  I think I did. I was trying to remember. I think I did make a bet on PredictIt in 2024. But yeah, I have not done it as much as, but again, probably another, well, that might actually be a good financial decision.

• 51:03Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna say.

• 51:06Pablo Torre?

  I love that at the end here, what I actually found out is that Jim Serwicky, the intellectual forefather of the thing that is eating our country, has made $0.00, it seems, on the thing that he accidentally created.

• 51:22Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 51:34Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.

• 51:40Pablo Torre?

  And I'll talk to you next time.

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