David Yaffe-Bellany

Thanks so much for having me.

That sounds about right.

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 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.

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.

Exactly.

And now you've got people, especially young people, logging onto their phones the same way they might use TikTok or Instagram and placing bets 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.

Everything now has a price.

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.

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 little further, what's happening now is really the culmination of a trend that started back in 2018.

Hmm.

That's when the Supreme Court overturned a U.S.