The Most Terrible Sentence Ever Uttered

By Noah Rothman

Friday, December 05, 2025

 

The human imagination proves endlessly inventive in its quest to craft the means of our civilizational downfall. For all our capacity for terror, no weapon compares with our capacity to weaponize ourselves.

 

Thus, behold! The most awesomely — in the biblical sense — ruinous force yet envisioned by the mind of man: us.

 

 

In his appearance onstage at last month’s Citadel Securities conference, Tarek Mansour, the CEO of Kalshi, a prediction market, outlined a vision of the future in which all of us, individuals and institutions alike, will have a financial incentive to avoid reconciling political disputes.

 

“The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference of opinion,” Mansour mused with heedless causality. “And I think if you do build a general-purpose exchange that can resolve differences of opinions on anything, the TAM [total addressable market] is quite massive, quite a bit bigger than the current TAM of the stock market.”

 

“We are living in a world where we have an abundance of information, but there’s a lot of noise, and we don’t really understand what’s real from what’s not,” he continued. “And prediction markets are an antidote to that. They do a very good job of surfacing information and distilling truth to people.”

 

That outlook is faddish at the moment. The collective wisdom of habitual bettors with financial skin in the game, some maintain, does a better job of sorting through disparate information sources to assess the likeliest outcomes. That’s a charitable way of describing Kalshi’s business model, which would transform the world you inhabit into a casino in which everything is a gamble.

 

Recently, Kalshi and its competitors in this space, like Polymarket, have generated as much attention for themselves as they have speculative capital investments. Everyone is getting in on the game, including the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who serves as a strategic adviser to Mansour’s firm. Neither he nor his father, who is presently committing the country to a violent, definitely-not-pretextual campaign against substance abuse, seems distressed by the addictive behaviors these products encourage.

 

At a time when many are coming around to the notion that legalized sports-betting was a mistake, it would be bizarre to commit the country to a course in which everything can fuel the vice of gambling.

 

You can wager on whether it will snow. Do aliens exist? You can play the odds. Will there be a ban of lab-grown meat? A polio outbreak? A new Drake album? A high-profile criminal conviction? You can stake your hard-earned income on these outcomes and more.

 

Most terrible, though, are the methods by which this hot new investment opportunity commodifies politics. Sometimes, though, the allure of commerce overtakes common sense. Thus we learned this week that CNN will enter into a collaboration agreement with Kalshi, providing the cable news network with the prediction marketplace’s data as it unfolds.

 

“That data will be featured on CNN’s air through a real-time data ticker and can be referenced across CNN’s platforms when journalists discuss news predictions,” Axios reported. “Mansour says the company is eyeing more newsroom partnerships as it looks to continue establishing itself as the most accurate and trusted predictions market in the world.”

 

In your mind’s eye, you can now picture a future in which every occurrence is accompanied by a real-time ticker that shows you the worth of current events. Contemplate the incentives that newsmakers, institutional stewards, and public officials will have to manipulate even the most banal features of daily life to reward themselves and others. Consider the effect on discourse when it is generally assumed that there is no outlook, no principle, no conviction that isn’t underwritten, somewhere, by a creditor. If it is possible to envision a future in which social trust is lower than it is today, Kalshi helps us imagine it — as it does the potential for general epistemic disorder. And that’s to say nothing of the individuals who find themselves in an inescapable gambling den, forever throwing good money after bad.

 

If nothing else, this potentially inevitable future will be great for rehabilitation-facility proprietors. The rest of us, not so much. The commodification of our political outlooks and the public policy outcomes we desire would distort the marketplace of ideas in ways that are difficult to consider fully. But no one seems to have done much thinking here.