Hey, you're listening to On The Media's Midweek podcast. I'm Michael Onger.

Last Friday, Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown sued Kalshi, the so-called prediction

market platform where users can place bets on real-world events, such as the number of deportations

this year, or the winner of Survivor 50 or football.

In calling themselves a prediction market, they're misleading Washingtonians because their

advertisements talk about a way to bet on the NFL even though we live in Washington.

They publicly pat themselves on the back for being sneaky and getting around Washington's

gambling laws. But it's worse than being sneaky and getting around Washington's gambling laws.

But it's worse than being sneaky. It's a lie and it's illegal.

Washington's civil lawsuit is now one of 20 waged against Kalshi and follows on the heels of

Arizona Attorney General Chris Mays filing criminal charges against the company earlier this

month. Prediction markets generated almost $64 billion in trading volume last year, hooking not

only Kalshi's reportedly 5 million active users, but also media companies like CNN and Dow Jones,

which have partnered respectively with Kalshi and Polymarket, another betting platform,

to incorporate prediction market data in their reporting.

And in late February, after the U.S. and Israel initiated a series of strikes in Tehran,

$54 million in bets on Kalshi were spent on wering whether Ali Khamene would be out as supreme

leader by March 1st, and a single polymarket user later made over half a million dollars

predicting the death of the Ayatollah.

Prediction markets are just the intensification of a process that's been slowly transforming our relationship to our

bodies, our careers, our hobbies, our lives. Everything is now metrics, and we can't stop

counting them and tracking them and comparing them. But what do we lose out on when we become

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