{"podcast":{"title":"Machines Like Us","slug":"machines-like-us-97796","podcast_index_feed_id":97796,"rss_url":"https://feeds.simplecast.com/FJSi7gLl","website_url":"https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/machines-like-us/?token=s3d","image_url":"https://image.simplecastcdn.com/images/5829159f-6973-4aae-be8c-2e4a6cf3b1a8/51c9ed6a-5439-45e0-9ede-c50bba95a992/3000x3000/mlu-final-apr23.jpg?aid=rss_feed","author":"The Globe and Mail","episode_count":51,"summary":"Machines Like Us is a technology show about people. We are living in an age of breakthroughs propelled by advances in artificial intelligence. Technologies that were once the realm of science fiction will become our reality: robot best friends, bespoke gene editing, brain implants that make us smarter. Every other Tuesday Taylor Owen sits down with the people shaping this rapidly approaching future. He’ll speak with entrepreneurs building world-changing technologies, lawmakers trying to ensure they’re safe, and journalists and scholars working to understand how they’re transforming our lives.","last_synced_at":"2026-07-21T22:18:08.692236+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/machines-like-us-97796"},"episode":{"title":"We Can Now Bet on Almost Anything. Should We?","slug":"we-can-now-bet-on-almost-anything-should-we","published_at":"2026-06-23T10:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/machines-like-us-97796/we-can-now-bet-on-almost-anything-should-we","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/machines-like-us-97796","url":"https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/machines-like-us/?token=s3d","audio_url":"https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/afp-119681-injected.calisto.simplecastaudio.com/7862a9c5-dc9a-4d42-9fcd-d04ed44df073/episodes/109e0d97-766b-4dd0-8592-ca7d3fadffbf/audio/128/default.mp3?aid=rss_feed&awCollectionId=7862a9c5-dc9a-4d42-9fcd-d04ed44df073&awEpisodeId=109e0d97-766b-4dd0-8592-ca7d3fadffbf&feed=FJSi7gLl","summary":"Human beings have always loved to gamble. Archaeological records suggest we’ve been doing it for the last 12,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age. But for as long as we’ve been playing games of chance, we’ve worried about what they might be doing to us. For thousands of years, everyone from Aristotle to George Washington condemned gambling, an ancient anxiety that ran so deep it became something like a moral consensus. And then that consensus evaporated. In the span of a decade, both Canada and the US legalized sports betting. Now anyone with a smartphone and a credit card can wager on basketball, hockey, or American cornhole. But it turned out that was just the beginning. A few years later came “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket that let you bet on, well, just about anything: whether the US will invade Cuba, the odds of James Comey being sent to prison, and whether Jesus Christ will return before 2027. That last one, by the way, is currently sitting at 3% on Polymarket. If betting on missile strikes, military coups, and political prosecutions feels kind of gross, I’m with you. But James Surowiecki thinks we should give prediction markets a chance. Surowiecki is the author of The Wisdom of Crowds, a book he wrote more than 20 years ago, where he argued that large groups of ordinary people are actually better than experts at making predictions. It’s become something of a foundational text for these markets: the idea that they can crowdsource knowledge, aggregate what millions of people believe about the future, and use that signal to make better decisions. So I wanted to have James on to make the case for prediction markets, and to see if he could make me feel just a little less squeamish about a world where you can gamble on everything.","meta_description":"Human beings have always loved to gamble. Archaeological records suggest we’ve been doing it for the last 12,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age.…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":3127,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/machines-like-us-97796/episodes/we-can-now-bet-on-almost-anything-should-we/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/machines-like-us-97796/we-can-now-bet-on-almost-anything-should-we.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}