November 11, 2025 • 11 mins
In this episode, Kevin Cirilli and Dustin Gouker go beyond sports to explore the exploding world of polymarkets — where people bet on everything from elections to Elon Musk’s next move… even whether we’ll confirm extraterrestrial life. As decentralized betting platforms blur the lines between gambling, speculation, and information trading, Kevin and Dustin unpack what this means for society. Can crowdsourced wagers predict the future better than experts? What happens when belief itself becomes a market? From alien odds to AI forecasts, this is a provocative look at the new era of prediction — where data, dopamine, and democracy collide.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Did you know that you can place a bet on
whether or not there are aliens? Yes, you can. Hello Future,
It's me keV and this is a dispatch from the
Digital Frontier. The planet is Earth, the year is twenty
twenty five. My name is Kevin Surreali, and today I'm
talking about prediction markets, what they are, how they are
impacting our society, the technology behind them. And there's nobody
(00:31):
better than to talk about betting big on aliens. Then
my good friend Dustin Galker. Dustin is really the expert
journalist in the nation when it comes to polymarkets and
Calshi and all the other prediction markets. And today we're
going to explore just how crazy this betting is and
how you can bet truly on everything. Dustin, how come
(00:52):
people want to bet on aliens?
Speaker 2 (00:54):
I mean people will bet on anything if you give
them the chance, right, It's That's the yes of prediction
markets is that you can bet on anything you want.
It's aliens and government elections and sports, it's everything. And
if you give everyone that chance, then you have something
in terms of allowing people to bet on anything that's
a really sticky kind of platform. If you are a
(01:16):
polymarket or Calshi.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
So when did this really take off?
Speaker 2 (01:21):
It took off, man, I guess really in the fall,
when we started seeing betting on the elections. Circa like October,
Calshi won a court case where they were fighting the
government to allow election betting. They won in an appeals court,
and then in October, right before the twenty twenty four election,
they started allowing betting on who would win the presidency,
(01:43):
who would win office up and down the ballot in Congress,
and they really started taking off. And then we started
seeing just more and more whether the Fed will cut
interest rates, What will happen with the government shutdown? That's
a popular one right now. You can price how long
the government shutdown will last at Polymarketing Calshi, and they've
(02:04):
priced it longer than a month for quite a while now.
So anybody who's following prediction markets has been aware that
government shutdown is going to be a while, and it's
really interesting how well it's been able to price this.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
I'm more interested in will the US confirm that aliens exist?
In twenty twenty five, there is four million dollars, more
than four million dollars being traded on whether or not
the US will confirm that aliens exist in twenty twenty five.
Right now, polymarket gives it a four percent chance, which
is down six percent. I'm assuming it has to do
(02:38):
with the interstellar commet that we've covered on this program,
and you know the avy lobe from Harvard. He said
he's an astrophysicist and he put out a paper and said, oh,
it's gonna be aliens all. But my point is four
million dollars is running around in the economy where people
are betting if aliens exist. Walk me through how someone
even opens up that bet and how that takes hold
(03:01):
in polymarkets.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Well, people follow the news and probably you know shows
like yours, right, and they're they're they're ingesting lots of
information about the world and space and everything, and they
then want to trade on that. They know Pollymarket exists,
so they say, oh, I heard something interested about aliens,
and maybe I have an edge because I'm following this
(03:24):
interstellar object that might be aliens involved. And then people
discover it, right, It goes on social media and people
start engaging with it. It's just super fascinating the discovery.
But yeah, it's one of those things where people are
really interested in this topic and then they know there's
a place to trade on this, and then it's interesting
(03:44):
to them. It's like I want to put my money
where my mouth is and say aliens exist or aliens
don't exist, and I trade on it at a prediction market.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
How many bets are placed? I put this in numbers
and scope of how much this has taken hold in
America with platforms like Polymarket and Calshi.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Billions being traded in the United States and internationally at
both these apps. Calchi is mostly in the United States.
Polymarket is entirely international. As of right now, it will
be launching in the United States, but annually we're talking
certainly in the hundreds of billions now in terms of
markets across the spectrum against sports, culture, entertainment, finance, all
(04:25):
of those things.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Can these predicative markets have an impact on the actual
outcome of an event from taking place? Could the fact
that something is being bet on and that there is
a conversation about whether or not it will happen. Is
there science that could lead us to believe that that
in and of itself increases the inevitability.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
That's a hard question to answer. It is definitely interesting
that people are trading on it, and we get to
the truth. I think in a lot of ways we
are able to assess the probabilities of something happen. Again,
the one you talk about aliens. Percent chance that it's aliens.
It's probably not aliens, but there's a non zero chance
that it is. So we get a little bit of
(05:07):
truth out of prediction markets and people trading money on
it because it's hard to price these things otherwise. Otherwise
we're listening to experts, and now we have crowdsourced information
people taking all of the information in the world and
trading on it. Another interesting thing is that people could
be insider trading on these markets. You could have information
(05:27):
about what is going to happen and then you can
trade on it, or you share that information and trade
on it. And that's you know, that's a maybe a feature,
maybe a bug, but it does give us to information
and truth in a way that other sources of information
in the world don't.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
So you can bet on poly market that Trump says
the moon landing was faked in twenty twenty five, only
fourteen thousand dollars being traded on that, and polymarket gives
it a three percent chance. I mean literally people bet
on everything. It's crazy.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Yeah, I mean, they'll make a market for almost anything
in the world. Some of them are more popular than others. Certainly, Again,
you can bet on things like Taylor Swift just released
an album. How many downloads and how many listens would
it have on Spotify? Who will win the Oscars? Who
will do anything in the world. Honestly, it's there's no
limit to where this is going, and in some ways,
(06:19):
I think we've only really tapped the surface of what's
possible in prediction.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
I guess the question I'm asking is, like, where you're
trying to regulate it if someone is betting, I don't know.
You know, some artists will sell a million copies of
an album in one week. How do you regulate someone
who puts money on that going out and you know,
buying an album? Like when I you know what I'm
trying to say, I mean the regulation when everything is
a gamble. It feels like it'd be very hard to
(06:47):
stop fraud.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Yeah, I mean, that's one of the problems prediction markets
will have to deal with, is dealing with potential fraud
or people trying to manipulate outcomes. How many YouTube views
for a video like could somebody set up a bot
and create more artificial views, or like a bunch of
people are betting on this and then watch it over
and over again to try to create an outcome. It's
not impossible. It might be hard, but these things are
(07:10):
not impossible.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
That is considered insider trading correct.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Yeah, And there are rules that say if you have
material inside information, you can't do it. What that means
in terms of regulation and whether there's an investigation. Again,
we're such in world in early days and kind of
a wild West version of of prediction markets. It's not
clear what's going to happen with things like that, but
you know something like again, people have inside information and
(07:36):
they try and use it to trade. And I'm not
sure we've really know all the ramifications of what's going
to happen with prediction markets as information and part and markets.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
What's your take as you've what's your prediction of how
the prediction? What's your prediction on predicted markets for the
next five years? Where does this? Where are we headed toward?
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Man, We're headed toward institutional information. This is the interesting
part to me and probably to you, is the polymarket
raised two billion dollars from Ice, the company that runs
and operates the New York Stock Exchange. They are looking
at this not just as a place to bet on everything,
but to trade information. And if polymarket gets us for
(08:15):
better information, that's super interesting and has a ton of
real world value to people who are trading on anything
in the world, whether it's you know, it's weather, whether
it's the price of gold. This information that comes from
prediction markets is extremely valuable. And I think that's where
it's headed, is that the commodity is information and the
(08:38):
sky's the limit on how much information we be able
to get, Like is something to be destabilized in a
world like again, we have markets about what's happening in
Israel right now, and that more information we have about everything.
Then we track that we people who are investing money
and making decisions about geopolitical affairs. Military I've seen the
(09:01):
US Army has put out information about how prediction markets
can help them do and react to things that are
happening in the geopolitical scene. All of that, again is
kind of greenfield and where the really interesting part of
prediction markets comes from.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Wow, Okay, so I just googled that and there's an
army article that popped up the market knows that using
data from prediction markets to assess national security threats. So
how would the military use prediction markets?
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Yeah, they would like if people are trading on what's happening,
say in some Yeah, again, the Middle East is maybe
the best example. If there's a regime change, an election,
or will somebody be out of power, If we have
a prediction market where people are trading on that, then
again you have more information to deal with how do
I deploy resources? How are we going to formulate a
strategy to deal with what's next? In terms of that, again,
(09:51):
there are elections all over the country, all over the
world all the time, and knowing a little bit of
information without polling that's going on, and you know, had
elections in Oblivia. We have a little bit of information
ahead of time about who might win the election where
it might not be clear to us just from outside observation.
So there's a lot of that. Yeah, there's just a
lot of ramifications for the geopolitical landscape that's going on.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
A lot like me when I was at Bloomberger, I mean,
obviously the market reacts to everything, and the vix volatility
in next and everything not to get two in the weeds,
but you can kind of go and get reactions for everything.
And to your point, as prediction markets, you know, I'm
pulling it up on poly market right now. The chances
of a major meteor strike in twenty twenty five eight
(10:37):
percent chance. That's what the poly market's saying, which is
significantly more. The fact that I know this is wild
to me, Dustin, But that's actually double the chances of
an asteroid hitting even the Moon, which only has a
four percent chance in the year twenty thirty two. So yeah, right,
I would say the polymarket is not believing the asteroids.
What do they know that we don't know? Justin what
(10:58):
do they know about the asteroid? Stustin. I could talk
about this stuff with you all day. I learned a lot.
I learned a lot, and you know way more than
you even realize. My friend. The thought of the data
is my big AHA moment from today that the data
on what people are predicting is in many ways more
interesting than the outcome. And then obviously there's risk about
(11:20):
ways to enforce it. So thanks so much for talking
to me about betting big on aliens.
Did you know that you can place a bet on
whether or not there are aliens? Yes, you can. Hello Future,
It's me keV and this is a dispatch from the
Digital Frontier. The planet is Earth, the year is twenty
twenty five. My name is Kevin Surreali, and today I'm
talking about prediction markets, what they are, how they are
impacting our society, the technology behind them. And there's nobody
(00:31):
better than to talk about betting big on aliens. Then
my good friend Dustin Galker. Dustin is really the expert
journalist in the nation when it comes to polymarkets and
Calshi and all the other prediction markets. And today we're
going to explore just how crazy this betting is and
how you can bet truly on everything. Dustin, how come
(00:52):
people want to bet on aliens?
Speaker 2 (00:54):
I mean people will bet on anything if you give
them the chance, right, It's That's the yes of prediction
markets is that you can bet on anything you want.
It's aliens and government elections and sports, it's everything. And
if you give everyone that chance, then you have something
in terms of allowing people to bet on anything that's
a really sticky kind of platform. If you are a
(01:16):
polymarket or Calshi.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
So when did this really take off?
Speaker 2 (01:21):
It took off, man, I guess really in the fall,
when we started seeing betting on the elections. Circa like October,
Calshi won a court case where they were fighting the
government to allow election betting. They won in an appeals court,
and then in October, right before the twenty twenty four election,
they started allowing betting on who would win the presidency,
(01:43):
who would win office up and down the ballot in Congress,
and they really started taking off. And then we started
seeing just more and more whether the Fed will cut
interest rates, What will happen with the government shutdown? That's
a popular one right now. You can price how long
the government shutdown will last at Polymarketing Calshi, and they've
(02:04):
priced it longer than a month for quite a while now.
So anybody who's following prediction markets has been aware that
government shutdown is going to be a while, and it's
really interesting how well it's been able to price this.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
I'm more interested in will the US confirm that aliens exist?
In twenty twenty five, there is four million dollars, more
than four million dollars being traded on whether or not
the US will confirm that aliens exist in twenty twenty five.
Right now, polymarket gives it a four percent chance, which
is down six percent. I'm assuming it has to do
(02:38):
with the interstellar commet that we've covered on this program,
and you know the avy lobe from Harvard. He said
he's an astrophysicist and he put out a paper and said, oh,
it's gonna be aliens all. But my point is four
million dollars is running around in the economy where people
are betting if aliens exist. Walk me through how someone
even opens up that bet and how that takes hold
(03:01):
in polymarkets.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Well, people follow the news and probably you know shows
like yours, right, and they're they're they're ingesting lots of
information about the world and space and everything, and they
then want to trade on that. They know Pollymarket exists,
so they say, oh, I heard something interested about aliens,
and maybe I have an edge because I'm following this
(03:24):
interstellar object that might be aliens involved. And then people
discover it, right, It goes on social media and people
start engaging with it. It's just super fascinating the discovery.
But yeah, it's one of those things where people are
really interested in this topic and then they know there's
a place to trade on this, and then it's interesting
(03:44):
to them. It's like I want to put my money
where my mouth is and say aliens exist or aliens
don't exist, and I trade on it at a prediction market.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
How many bets are placed? I put this in numbers
and scope of how much this has taken hold in
America with platforms like Polymarket and Calshi.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Billions being traded in the United States and internationally at
both these apps. Calchi is mostly in the United States.
Polymarket is entirely international. As of right now, it will
be launching in the United States, but annually we're talking
certainly in the hundreds of billions now in terms of
markets across the spectrum against sports, culture, entertainment, finance, all
(04:25):
of those things.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Can these predicative markets have an impact on the actual
outcome of an event from taking place? Could the fact
that something is being bet on and that there is
a conversation about whether or not it will happen. Is
there science that could lead us to believe that that
in and of itself increases the inevitability.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
That's a hard question to answer. It is definitely interesting
that people are trading on it, and we get to
the truth. I think in a lot of ways we
are able to assess the probabilities of something happen. Again,
the one you talk about aliens. Percent chance that it's aliens.
It's probably not aliens, but there's a non zero chance
that it is. So we get a little bit of
(05:07):
truth out of prediction markets and people trading money on
it because it's hard to price these things otherwise. Otherwise
we're listening to experts, and now we have crowdsourced information
people taking all of the information in the world and
trading on it. Another interesting thing is that people could
be insider trading on these markets. You could have information
(05:27):
about what is going to happen and then you can
trade on it, or you share that information and trade
on it. And that's you know, that's a maybe a feature,
maybe a bug, but it does give us to information
and truth in a way that other sources of information
in the world don't.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
So you can bet on poly market that Trump says
the moon landing was faked in twenty twenty five, only
fourteen thousand dollars being traded on that, and polymarket gives
it a three percent chance. I mean literally people bet
on everything. It's crazy.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Yeah, I mean, they'll make a market for almost anything
in the world. Some of them are more popular than others. Certainly, Again,
you can bet on things like Taylor Swift just released
an album. How many downloads and how many listens would
it have on Spotify? Who will win the Oscars? Who
will do anything in the world. Honestly, it's there's no
limit to where this is going, and in some ways,
(06:19):
I think we've only really tapped the surface of what's
possible in prediction.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
I guess the question I'm asking is, like, where you're
trying to regulate it if someone is betting, I don't know.
You know, some artists will sell a million copies of
an album in one week. How do you regulate someone
who puts money on that going out and you know,
buying an album? Like when I you know what I'm
trying to say, I mean the regulation when everything is
a gamble. It feels like it'd be very hard to
(06:47):
stop fraud.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Yeah, I mean, that's one of the problems prediction markets
will have to deal with, is dealing with potential fraud
or people trying to manipulate outcomes. How many YouTube views
for a video like could somebody set up a bot
and create more artificial views, or like a bunch of
people are betting on this and then watch it over
and over again to try to create an outcome. It's
not impossible. It might be hard, but these things are
(07:10):
not impossible.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
That is considered insider trading correct.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Yeah, And there are rules that say if you have
material inside information, you can't do it. What that means
in terms of regulation and whether there's an investigation. Again,
we're such in world in early days and kind of
a wild West version of of prediction markets. It's not
clear what's going to happen with things like that, but
you know something like again, people have inside information and
(07:36):
they try and use it to trade. And I'm not
sure we've really know all the ramifications of what's going
to happen with prediction markets as information and part and markets.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
What's your take as you've what's your prediction of how
the prediction? What's your prediction on predicted markets for the
next five years? Where does this? Where are we headed toward?
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Man, We're headed toward institutional information. This is the interesting
part to me and probably to you, is the polymarket
raised two billion dollars from Ice, the company that runs
and operates the New York Stock Exchange. They are looking
at this not just as a place to bet on everything,
but to trade information. And if polymarket gets us for
(08:15):
better information, that's super interesting and has a ton of
real world value to people who are trading on anything
in the world, whether it's you know, it's weather, whether
it's the price of gold. This information that comes from
prediction markets is extremely valuable. And I think that's where
it's headed, is that the commodity is information and the
(08:38):
sky's the limit on how much information we be able
to get, Like is something to be destabilized in a
world like again, we have markets about what's happening in
Israel right now, and that more information we have about everything.
Then we track that we people who are investing money
and making decisions about geopolitical affairs. Military I've seen the
(09:01):
US Army has put out information about how prediction markets
can help them do and react to things that are
happening in the geopolitical scene. All of that, again is
kind of greenfield and where the really interesting part of
prediction markets comes from.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Wow, Okay, so I just googled that and there's an
army article that popped up the market knows that using
data from prediction markets to assess national security threats. So
how would the military use prediction markets?
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Yeah, they would like if people are trading on what's happening,
say in some Yeah, again, the Middle East is maybe
the best example. If there's a regime change, an election,
or will somebody be out of power, If we have
a prediction market where people are trading on that, then
again you have more information to deal with how do
I deploy resources? How are we going to formulate a
strategy to deal with what's next? In terms of that, again,
(09:51):
there are elections all over the country, all over the
world all the time, and knowing a little bit of
information without polling that's going on, and you know, had
elections in Oblivia. We have a little bit of information
ahead of time about who might win the election where
it might not be clear to us just from outside observation.
So there's a lot of that. Yeah, there's just a
lot of ramifications for the geopolitical landscape that's going on.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
A lot like me when I was at Bloomberger, I mean,
obviously the market reacts to everything, and the vix volatility
in next and everything not to get two in the weeds,
but you can kind of go and get reactions for everything.
And to your point, as prediction markets, you know, I'm
pulling it up on poly market right now. The chances
of a major meteor strike in twenty twenty five eight
(10:37):
percent chance. That's what the poly market's saying, which is
significantly more. The fact that I know this is wild
to me, Dustin, But that's actually double the chances of
an asteroid hitting even the Moon, which only has a
four percent chance in the year twenty thirty two. So yeah, right,
I would say the polymarket is not believing the asteroids.
What do they know that we don't know? Justin what
(10:58):
do they know about the asteroid? Stustin. I could talk
about this stuff with you all day. I learned a lot.
I learned a lot, and you know way more than
you even realize. My friend. The thought of the data
is my big AHA moment from today that the data
on what people are predicting is in many ways more
interesting than the outcome. And then obviously there's risk about
(11:20):
ways to enforce it. So thanks so much for talking
to me about betting big on aliens.
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