I’m going to admit, sports betting isn’t really my thing. I don’t know my parlay from my parler (that’s a French joke), and I can barely keep three balls in the air at work, let alone track the balls across dozens of matches every weekend. But I’m an odd duck, since that is what Americans — and increasingly the world — do for entertainment. Nearly a majority of men in the United States have a sports betting account, and now the betting markets have opened to politics, culture and much more through prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi.Will predictions become reality — or can reality be made to conform to predictions? That’s just part of the conversation I have with Dustin Gouker. Dustin is the writer of The Closing Line and The Event Horizon newsletters covering prediction markets and the sports betting landscape.He and I (Riskgaming host Danny Crichton) talk about why prediction markets remain a small sliver of betting, how new underwriting models are taking market share from incumbents, the interface between betting and parametric insurance (because why not?), why sports will always dominate the industry, how performativity is increasingly interacting with international relations, and whether betting markets can be optimized for propaganda value.
