How predictions took over our lives
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It was the FIFA World Cup in Doha, Qatar. So it was in November. Which means my students were here, they were in our workroom, and they were huddled around a laptop.
Brendan Dwyer is a former football coach and now a professor of sports leadership. He's at Virginia Commonwealth University, which is a financial supporter of NPR. On this day, his students had bet on a game, but not the way Brendan expected.
They were watching Morocco and Belgium. which is a very unconventional game for these students to watch because they weren't from Morocco or Belgium. But these students were like enthralled by this game. And as the game was going on, more students were starting to gather around. And it was not a knockout round game. It was really not a semifinal or a final. It was an interesting game, but we're talking second half. It's not the last couple minutes. But each moment, they were yelling and screaming and getting upset. I found that they were getting upset mainly at the referee. more than they were getting upset at a missed shot or a missed pass or a missed play by one of the players. That's when it was like, what are you guys cheering about?
And they mentioned that they weren't betting on the outcome of the game. They were betting on the number of corner kicks.
In other words, they weren't cheering for either team specifically. They were just hoping to see more corner kicks because they'd put money on it.
So every time the referee awarded a corner kick or did not, they reacted a certain way. And that was hilarious to me, and also at the same time got me a little caught off guard, because I've never seen, one, I didn't realize you could bet on the number of corner kicks at that point, and two, the fact that these students were so enthralled, not by who's gonna win a World Cup game, but corner kicks. And the students won. They picked the over and they won the over.
What Brendan saw with his students watching the World Cup were the early signs of an exploding marketplace.
You know, this is a growing trend in sport fandom. We're not just watching the wins and losses. Now we're watching an additional game within that with the sports betting apps and now with the prediction markets. We can always find a way to up the ante. It's not just sitting back watching the game for, you know, the beauty of the game.
What happens when we become obsessed with predicting the future?
You want to make every game interesting? Step one, open the BetMGM Sportsbook. From sports betting. Kalshi lets you legally trade on anything. To prediction markets.
Prediction is literally what computers do. Prediction is intelligence.
To tech CEOs who make grand statements about how AI will inevitably shape society.
By the end of 2028, more of the world's intellectual capacity could reside inside of data centers than outside of them.
Forecasting the future has become a national pastime. But what do we lose when we model, price, and place bets on our future? Today on the show, predictions. Why humans have, for millennia, tried to anticipate what's next, and how money and financial incentives change our experiences of the here and now. So back to Brendan Dwyer. He has spent the last two decades studying sports fans and their habits around sports betting, which had been illegal in most U.S.
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