As someone who doesn't pay much attention to traditional news stations much these days, I was kind of taken aback by the over-the-top product placements they do now when exposed to it.

See for example:

https://youtu.be/9BPO-swW5eo?si=vLExNIXfeQmYHIDc&t=340

@5:40 (if your platform doesn't carry over the timestamp)

Polymarket/Kalshi are far more damaging to society than soda, but seeing this I was struck by how we've reached a point where the old Wayne's World product placement gag wouldn't even read as satire anymore, that's just how things actually are now.

The gambling industry has been trying to normalize gambling for decades.

I first ran into this in the mid-90's when the PR woman for a race track told me not to call it "gambling," but instead to call it "gaming."

We see gambling language used everywhere now, if you know what to look for. Terms like "all in" and "table stakes" are gambling terms,† but people use them every day in regular conversation.

† Though "all in" was used as far back as the 1930's to mean "very tired," I hardly ever hear anyone use it that way anymore.

Perhaps our greatest cultural fiction right now is the "rationality" of markets, and people are looking for insight more than ever on our insane world. So that makes perfect sense to me, really.