I'd bet dollars to donuts that Kalshi and Polymarket eventually end up being donuts in a lot of VC portfolios. I'm not against prediction markets. I actually think they're fascinating. But let's not pretend they were invented yesterday. Prediction markets have been around for decades. People have experimented with them for elections, weather derivatives, corporate forecasting, and all sorts of other applications. The problem is taking an interesting forecasting tool, pouring hundreds of millions of venture dollars into it, and then applying the Silicon Valley "growth at all costs" playbook. That playbook works when you're building something with massive social utility. Uber connected riders and drivers. Airbnb unlocked housing inventory. You can argue they bent or even broke rules, but there was an obvious public benefit that justified the debate. What's the public benefit of turning every human event into something people can gamble on? How many dildos get thrown onto a WNBA court. Whether a war escalates. Whether a politician resigns. Whether a government contract gets awarded. Sports. Celebrity gossip. Every random event in life slowly becoming a ticker symbol. The more I look at these businesses, the less they look like forecasting tools and the more they look like consumer gambling products wrapped in the language of markets, information, and democratization. And because they're venture-backed, they don't just need customers. They need hypergrowth. That means aggressive marketing, regulatory arbitrage, influencer campaigns, and constantly finding new users to keep the flywheel spinning. Philip Tetlock and the superforecasters have spent years studying forecasting. The results are genuinely interesting. But forecasting tournaments never became a mass-market consumer product because most people don't actually want to forecast. They want to gamble.