How Kalshi Wants to Turn Your Stress into a Moneyline

When I was a kid in the late aughts, my elementary school had a gambling problem. Us students didn’t recognize what was going on. We weren’t gambling, and it wasn’t a problem. 

The story goes like this: In the second grade, every boy in my class was crazy about the Pokémon trading-card game, and all of us would play at every lunch hour. Eventually, we got tired of the same old routine and, to make things more interesting, someone suggested that we put our favourite cards on the line when we play. Since everybody could agree that the prospect of losing our prized Pokémon cards was less terrifying than the potential excitement of winning somebody else’s, we were off to the proverbial races. 

Fast-forward a few weeks, and some boys went home in tears after the school day, having lost every one of their favourite cards. My classmates and I didn’t see a problem with this. Everybody knew the terms, and nobody was forcing anybody else to play. It was their fault if they lost, and even more so if they didn’t know when to cut their losses. 

Our teachers caught on to our little operation and summarily put an end to Pokémon cards in the classroom and schoolyard. At the time, we interpreted this response as obviously fascistic. However, time has allowed me to see that the parents of these kids who lost all their Pokémon cards by betting them in the schoolyard were no doubt horrified. These kids had wagered away the products that were once allowances and birthday gifts, thus the punishment of ceasing this activity of ours fit the crime.

If somebody had sat our class down and articulated to us that what we were doing was gambling, and that some people are naturally predisposed to having a harder time knowing when to call it quits, I doubt we would have completely understood the implications. With that said, however, it might have given my peers and I some skills with which we could better navigate parts of our modern landscape. This isn’t to blame the teachers; how could they have known that two decades later, gambling would become so ubiquitous? 

And this, I believe, speaks to a larger reality that we are all having to contend with: gambling is everywhere. Social media sites like X and Instagram are designed like VLTs, where users must pull their feeds down like a lever to refresh them. Video games offer users of any age the ability to gamble on in-game cosmetics, most often in exchange for real money. A picture taken at a Drake concert in early 2025 that shows concertgoers holding signs reading  “please give me money to support my hospitalized mother” or “please help me buy my man a car” proves that even going to a concert can become a lottery. This is to say nothing regarding what has become of live sports broadcasting. 

It’s only natural that some industrious upstarts would seize on our moment by offering the people what they’re so clearly asking for: the ability to bet on anything. Enter: Prediction Markets. In short, they’re websites that allow anybody to place a wager on anything they can think of, primarily human interest stories. 

In early December of 2025, CNN announced that they were partnering with the prediction market Kalshi to offer viewers live betting analysis on ongoing stories. In practice, it looks and sounds like the sort of betting analysis you’re used to seeing for football games, only for the news instead. Kalshi has, somehow, managed to up the ante on the ubiquity of betting.

If you take a look at the Kalshi FAQ, you will not see a single instance of the word gambling. Instead, they tell you that they are interested in “empowering” their users by “transforming [their] insights… about the future into tangible assets”. The tactic that Kalshi employs of not addressing the elephant in the room is deceptively coldhearted. It’s just a cog in the machine turning normal people into habit gamblers that lack the awareness to identify what a gambling problem looks like, much less if they have one.

It doesn’t stop there. Kalshi also claims to be in the business of “turning differences of opinion into concrete action”. They claim that they will declutter the world of opinions by implementing a structured market with clear winners and losers. In their words: “taking the chaos of the future and distilling it down to a single clean number — the price”. To me, this reads more like telling anybody who is uncertain about the future that they can turn their anxiety into a reason to gamble. The implications get frightening when you realize that young people are reporting staggeringly high levels of anxiety. 

A great way to sell to people is to convince them that your product is the logical next step in a process they already partake in. The digital world is already filled to the brim with gamification, so it’s easy to lead people who frequent digital landscapes into seeing betting as a natural evolution of the processes they already engage in. Kalshi, in partnering with CNN, is attempting to cast a wider net and make everybody who experiences anxiety see gambling as their logical next step. They are trying to reach everybody who still doesn’t understand what they’re doing with their Pokémon cards and manipulate them into paying for their stress.

My goal in writing this is not to admonish anybody for how they choose to spend their money, only to point out that maybe, for as natural a step as this seems to some, there is reason for pause at the implications of the Kalshi-CNN partnership. I hope, with naive optimism, that, as gambling becomes even more pervasive, resources for helping people with gambling problems become more accessible. Until then, keep your wits about you. 

Remember: nobody gambles to lose, but the house never made money off the winners.