How to Bet on (Literally) Anything

From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitrooff. This is The Daily. Seemingly overnight, America has seen an explosion of new betting platforms that have radically expanded the universe of gambling. They're called prediction markets. They let you bet on all kinds of things. Like, will The US attack Iran? What specific words will the president say? And who will be at Taylor Swift's wedding? Today, my colleague David Yaffe Bellany explains how these platforms became so wide spread so fast and how betting on everything could change the way we live. It's Wednesday, February 4. David, it's wonderful to have you here in studio. Thanks so much for having me. So we are coming to you because you cover crypto, which can often lead you to the nichest corners of the Internet. I kinda think of you as having a fringe capitalism beat. Is that fair? That sounds about right. Okay. And you've been looking into these prediction markets, which I have a million questions about. But before we get into those questions, I want you to first just lay out for people who don't know these things. What are they? What are these markets? At a really high level, a prediction market is a platform where you can bet on pretty much everything. Most people are familiar with sports betting, even the sort of advanced sports betting that we get these days, where you're betting on, like, whether a player will make a free throw. Prediction markets expand that idea into all corners of politics and culture. You can bet on whether Trump will win the election. You can bet on the date of Taylor Swift's wedding. Wow. You can even bet on whether the supreme leader of Iran will make it to the end of the month. So what it's done is sort of expanded that kind of gambling mentality to all sorts of parts of our daily existence. The idea is betting on everything everywhere all at once. Exactly. And now you've got people, especially young people, logging on to their phones the same way they might use TikTok or Instagram, and placing bets on on elections, on pop culture, really on everything. These platforms have the potential to really change the way that people interact with the world, the way they think about the world. You know, everything now has a price. Mhmm. Everything can be communicated in terms of the odds that it will happen or it won't happen. And I think we're already seeing signs that that's sort of altering reality for people. Right. And it does feel that this stuff has kind of come out of nowhere. Am I right to think that these markets went from being quite marginal to suddenly being at the forefront of a lot of cultural and political events? To some extent, that's right. Go back even two or three years ago, and no one was really talking about prediction markets. But if you zoom out a …