There's this real ideological aspect that is trying to justify the prediction market as more than just a

degenerate way to gamble, but as a way to filter out the noise and figure out what the ground

truth is and feel smarter for having gone to Kalshi to get all of your opinions and

predictions about the world. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Jathan Sadowski.

Jathan is an associate professor at Monash University, the author of The Mechanic and the Luddite,

and a co-host of this machine kills.

He wrote an article recently about prediction markets like Calci and Polly Market and how they

are affecting the society that we live in. And I feel like as we hear more and more about these

companies and this type of betting or gambling, that it was a good opportunity to have Jathan on the show

to explore the wider consequences of this, right? You know, we hear the stories about insider

trading being done on these platforms, you know, people who have information and then trade on it

and, you know, make money from major world events in a way that is becoming increasingly concerning, right?

But we also see these platforms increasingly integrated into the news and entertainment shows

and various other media that we encounter. And so what happens when we're seeing this everywhere?

What happens when everything is something that can be bet on,

that can be gambled on, where there's an expectation that you could be turning a profit,

you know, off of who wins an Oscar, or whether, you know, the United States invades a country,

or who wins a certain election, or any of these things, right? You know, obviously there was some

like black market or side betting on many of these things in the past, but it wasn't so formalized

and institutionalized and really promoted as this thing that is regular. This all comes about since

the legalization of these practices in recent years, which has made sports

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