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Besides the Bad Bunny vs. Kid Rock faceoff, arguably the biggest headline to come out of Superbowl LX was the sheer volume of money being traded on prediction markets, online exchanges where anyone 18 and older can bet on event outcomes. Fans exchanged a whopping $1.5 billion on the winning team alone through prediction platforms like Kalshi and PolyMarket. But these markets aren’t just limited to sports: During the game itself, more than $100 million changed hands every three minutes over which song Bad Bunny would drop first in the halftime show.

John Herrman, New York Magazine tech columnist and our guest on last year’s episode about the future of the internet, has been all over how prediction markets are creeping into just about every area of life. And in our 2026 culture predictions episode (with zero dollars on the line), he forecast that politics is next — bringing all the sponsorship, gamification, and corruption risks we’ve already seen with the rise sports betting.

John joins us to discuss how, in his words, prediction markets serve as “a new way to narrativize the world.” We explore what prediction markets have in store for politics and the historical conditions that have converged to make prediction markets so popular, from young people’s flatlining economic prospects to having a former casino owner as our president; why prediction market true believers see markets as the most effective way of adjudicating reality, and how the prediction market “sharp” — or whale — became an aspirational career path for young people in the 2020s, not unlike Wall Street traders in the '1980s or the influencer in the 2010s.

Follow John on Bluesky

Read “Screen Time” at New York Magazine’s Intelligencer

More by John:

“Gambling Ate Sports Media. Is Politics Next?”

“What Good Are Prediction Markets If Nobody Can Agree on What Happened?”

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