I’m not a sports girl. Sports have never meant much to me, but in the United States, they mean a lot. Well over 90% of the most-watched programs on the dying medium of broadcast television in recent years are football-related.[1] The biggest audience of any TV moment in American history was the end of the sitcom M*A*S*H in 1983, followed by… literally every single Super Bowl.[2]
The psychodrama of America’s tragedy in Vietnam barely measured up to Tony Romo doing whatever he did for the Colorado Springs Goblins, or whichever team it was.
Hence, it is perplexing to me that the rot of betting and gambling has insinuated itself into every major U.S. sporting franchise. It is frankly shocking. In a country with deep roots in Calvinist Puritanism, it is amazing that the likes of FanDuel and DraftKings have been able to infiltrate the deepest wells of law and political economy.[3]
Let us take a step back, though. As Will Menaker recently commented on the podcast Chapo Trap House, “the one thing, the reason that sports are so valuable, is because the whole point is that nobody knows what’s going to happen. And if there’s some suggestion that someone does, then the entire thing goes away.” And the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Pablo Torre added:
If you’re a sports fan, and you’re just like, okay, everything is more expensive, nothing is as fun as it used to be. And I can’t even trust the product anymore… when the public doesn’t believe that the rules that govern sports actually matter, the public stops to care.[4]
The ideal of athletics is that you do not know whether your team or hero will prevail. But when you see LeBron James starring in a Polymarket ad, it makes you wonder if it is all fixed. It feels like we should dig up Pete Rose and offer him an apology.[5] (Or not).[6]
Which brings us to prediction markets, such as Kalshi and Polymarket. These platforms are not specifically sports-related – you can bet on anything. You can bet on whether Speaker of the House Mike Johnson will fart two times during the State of the Union Address. It is a gambling addict’s paradise, where every Schrödinger’s Cat is an epic parlay.
The problems with prediction markets are already well-known. For example, I thought this was a myth or a rumor at first, but a Special Operations guy apparently did bet on whether Venezuela president Nicolas Maduro would be kidnapped by the United States while he was on a plane to do so.[7] The phrase “insider trading” does not even begin to describe this sufficiently.
The federal government sent Martha Stewart to prison in 2004 for much less than this.[8]
The prediction markets call to mind the evil saying of a George W. Bush official in the run-up to the disastrous Iraq War of 2003 – “We create our own reality.”[9] Prediction markets can create their own reality, as savvy players have realized: if I bet a bunch of money on Mike Collins winning the Georgia Senate race, it can move the needle in terms of voters’ perception of who’s winning or ahead. It is a pretty cheap investment with a potentially handsome pay-off.
The Silicon Valley people who promote platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket refer to them as “truth machines.” But as business professor Jo Ann Oravec has shown, the effect of these lie-detection technologies’ results could be doubtful.[10] The promoters of the tech theory is that betting markets, just like the Dow Jones or S&P, reflect the greater manifestation of individual persons’ assessment of reality – the “wisdom of crowds,” as philosophers and economists call it.[11] It is better than any pundit or business hack’s PR; it has arisen from self-seeking individuals’ idea of their own self-interest, made plainly and honestly.
Yet, a truth machine, it is not – particularly when people with lots of money can distort reality with what is purported to be conventional wisdom.
I will admit that I’ve looked at betting markets to see what the hive mind had to say about a particular politician winning election or reelection, because it did seem to be a natural outgrowth of people’s individual self-interest – a sort of “emergent property,” to borrow a term from biology.[12] With Kalshi and Polymarket, we now know that this presumption is not the case – it is a tool of vice to create a dark window around what is actually happening.
Like I said, I do not really care about sports. But these gambling platforms can warp reality for the benefit of the dishonest, and this applies to sports as much as it does to politics. Know-it-all’s have long joked that Washington, DC is Hollywood for ugly people.[13] But maybe DC is just Vegas for ugly people. Now everyone from Georgetown to Reno to Silver Lake is sitting at the same fake betting table, and the consequences of this grand game should be of concern to all of us, as so many elected leaders are willing to double down on a scratcher about the future of human existence.
What the end of discovery means is more than the loss of human intellect in deciding stocks on the DOW or NASDAQ. It is the foreclosing of people understanding what is happening in our own worlds – financially, socially, culturally, even aesthetically – on the grounds that AI robots can understand the world better than we do, with our stupid, old-fashioned brains. As writer Cory Doctorow said in March 2026, citing Techdirt’s Mike Masnick: “Prediction markets, far from being a means of surfacing hidden information, have become a system for distorting information.”[14] We cannot trust that interested parties who can put the fix into whatever technological outcome that they come up with should govern our fates. The price of the end of discovery is the end of our democratic will and subjective ability to understand the Earth around us, and we should not outsource it to greedy people (and their AI assistants) who care not a whit for anyone.
References
[1] Austin Karp, “Sports make up 96 of top 100 telecasts in 2025, tying an all-time record,” Sports Business Journal, December 30, 2025, https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Articles/2025/12/30/sports-make-up-96-of-top-100-telecasts-in-2025-tying-an-all-time-record.
[2] Neal Augenstein, “‘M-A-S-H’ finale broke records 40 years ago Tuesday, will another show ever top it?,” WTOP News, February 28, 2023, https://wtop.com/national/2023/02/m-a-s-h-finale-broke-records-40-years-ago-tuesday-will-another-show-ever-top-it/.
[3] Ian DeJong, “A Theology of Sports Betting: What Would John Calvin Say about the Rise of Gambling on Sports in Canada?” Christian Courier, August 23, 2024, https://www.christiancourier.ca/a-theology-of-sports-betting/; Darryl Hart, “Calvinism in the United States,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, June 9, 2016, https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/61644/chapter-abstract/539867045?redirectedFrom=fulltext.
[4] “1070 – Sportsballmer feat. Pablo Torre,” Chapo Trap House, September 10, 2026, https://www.patreon.com/chapotraphouse/posts/1070-feat-pablo-169205407.
[5] Brad Botkin, “LeBron James reportedly getting $15 million annually in Polymarket deal as NBA endorsements face more scrutiny,” CBS Sports, September 17, 2026,
https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/lebron-james-polymarket-deal-nba-endorsements/; Edward Sutelan, “Pete Rose’s gambling scandal, explained: Why MLB’s hits king was banned for betting on baseball,” Sporting News, October 23, 2025, https://www.sportingnews.com/us/mlb/news/pete-rose-gambling-scandal-mlb-hits-record-banned-betting/bef86ec38adf1cb165801853.
[6] Erik Ortiz, “Baseball Legend Pete Rose, Accused of Sex with Minor in 1970s, Faces Tainted Legacy — Again,” NBC News, August 1, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/sports/baseball-legend-pete-rose-accused-sex-minor-1970s-faces-tainted-n788551.
[7] Nardine Saad, “US soldier charged after winning $400,000 betting on removal of Maduro,” BBC News, April 24, 2026, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20832yg5p2o.
[8] “Martha Stewart on Trial for Insider Trading”, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/drawing-justice-courtroom-illustrations/about-this-exhibition/celebrity-trials/martha-stewart-on-trial-for-insider-trading/.
[9] Michael Leonardi, “‘We Create Our Own Reality’: Empire and the illusion of International Law from Rafah to Caracas,” Counterpunch, January 9, 2026, https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/09/we-create-our-own-reality-empire-and-the-illusion-of-international-law-from-rafah-to-caracas/.
[10] Jo Ann Oravec, “From Polygraphs to Truth Machines: Artificial Intelligence in Lie Detection,” Critical Humanities 2 (Spring 2024), https://mds.marshall.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1036&context=criticalhumanities.
[11] “The Future of AI and the Future of Humanity,” Wisdom of Crowds, June 1, 2025, https://wisdomofcrowds.live/p/the-future-of-ai-and-the-future-of; Tyler Cowen, “The Wisdom of Crowds of Economists,” The Economist, March 13, 2008, https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2008/03/13/the-wisdom-of-crowds-of-economists.
[12] “Emergent Properties,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, August 10, 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/.
[13] Roger Simon, “Washington Is Hollywood for the Ugly,” Politico, April 29, 2014, https://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/white-house-correspondents-dinner-roger-simon-106118.
[14] Cory Doctorow, “Goodhart’s Law vs ‘prediction markets,’” Medium, March 24, 2026, https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-03-24-degenerated-gambling-oracle-capture-9e5589443eb5; Mike Masnick, “Prediction Markets Promised Better Information. Instead They’re Creating Powerful Incentives to Corrupt Information,” Techdirt, March 19, 2026, https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/19/prediction-markets-promised-better-information-instead-theyre-creating-powerful-incentives-to-corrupt-information/.