It used to be so simple.

If you saw a commercial 1,000 times and were annoyed by it, you could be fairly confident that your friends, co-workers and neighbors had also seen the same commercial 1,000 times and were equally annoyed.

Lilly was lowkey one of the most famous people in America for years.

The proliferation of ‘targeted marketing’ has jammed a rod into the spokes of this particular spinning wheel of connection and now it’s much harder to tell what ads everyone else is getting spammed with.

Me?

I cannot escape Kalshi ads. Every platform. Every format. Every day.

Kalshi and Polymarket are in an epic battle to see who will reign supreme in the ‘prediction market’ space and whatever algos they use to identify likely idiots to bet on alien invasions have pegged me (correctly) as someone that might be interested in a little action.

If you’re not familiar with prediction markets, I asked Gemini to give me an explainer:

Kalshi is a trading platform where you bet on the outcome of real-world events instead of buying company stocks. Think of it like a “Yes or No” market for things like:

Will it rain tomorrow? Will the Fed raise interest rates? Will a specific movie win an Oscar?

You buy “Event Contracts.” If you’re right, each contract pays out $1. If you’re wrong, it goes to $0. The price (between 1¢ and 99¢) basically shows the market’s “percentage” guess that the event will happen. It’s a way to trade on your knowledge of the news.

But, baby – that sounds a lot like gambling! Is it gambling?

Yes, it most certainly is! Except the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) calls it “derivatives trading”, so technically it’s not gambling.

Ok, ok. This sounds like it could lead to some problems if people can use an app to bet buy derivatives on literally anything though, right?

I mean, if you think a guy in France using a hairdryer to blow on a weather sensor to win a bet about the high temperature that day is a “problem”, then yes.

Wait.

Oh, you’re talking about someone in the US military allegedly using classified intel to win 400K after placing a contract on Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro’s capture? Then also yes.

I’ll admit. Not a good look.

If you research what people are using prediction market apps for, you’ll find that it’s overwhelmingly sports bets. Sportico had the number pegged at over 90% this past football season while I’ve seen other numbers as high as 95%.

As of this posting 30 of 50 states have legalized sports gaming via an app like FanDuel or DraftKings. Another 9 have in-person sports gaming at places like casinos. But 11 states (including California & Texas) don’t have anything.

Prediction markets are sports gaming backdoor covers. Now you know what ‘House Tour‘ is actually about.

So what’s going to happen?

Much like other iconic tech companies that just kind of ran as fast as they could until some light regulation happened before everyone got on board (looking at you YouTube), Kalshi suits will be drug in front of congressional subcommittees and verbally lashed before making some concessions around betting on military action/political outcomes. They might even have to keep known criminals from signing up.

States not wanting to miss out on tax revenue from sports gaming will soon legalize the apps. A spunky young exec at Charles Schwab will launch an ill-fated imitation (the app will be named Chuck). People will lose biblical amounts of money on the mid-term elections after being a wee bit too bullish on crowdsourced data.

And sooner than later one of those ads is going to work on me. I’m betting YES on the incursion just so I can dunk on you if it happens.

Editors note | I’m fully aware that Polymarket is a non-regulated market and that users in the US need to use a VPN to access it, but did we really want to go down that path in a post that was kind of geared towards your mom?