McKay Coppins

You know, majorities of Americans now say that they believe that athletes occasionally change their performance to help gamblers.

Sports gambling has decreased the integrity of the game.

And that actually could be an existential threat to organized sports if something doesn't change.

The platforms that are used to bet on outcomes in politics, in geopolitics, in war, in culture, are different from the online sportsbooks that I spent most of my experiment using.

They're called predictive markets.

Polymarket and Kalshi are the most popular ones, but they operate slightly differently.

And

By doing so, they've managed to kind of get around a lot of the federal regulation that exists for online sports books.

Rather than taking bets themselves, they allow people to invest in predictive outcomes as though they're investing in positions in like a derivative market, right?

And so you can buy a position in a question like, will Gaza experience a famine this year?

As macabre and kind of insane as that sounds, you can invest in a position like, will a nuclear bomb be detonated by a certain date?

How many people will be deported from the United States in 2026?

Will Donald Trump declare martial law before leaving office?

These are actually all live bets that you can make on these platforms.

And what's striking about it is that in some ways they feel like the logical endpoint of the sports betting explosion.

You know, the entire American population over the last several years has basically been conditioned to get used to gambling on their phones.

And why limit yourself to sports, right?

It is making everything more abstract.

It's turning all of American life into like a Las Vegas table game where, you know, where there's always this kind of glittering mirage of profit that you're chasing when in reality it's designed to sort of demoralize and crush every regular person who plays.

I mean, it's almost impossible to see that outcome and not assume that the person who made the bet had some kind of insider information, right?