Kalshi is Scaring DraftKings & How Do You Sell $102M of Louvre Loot?

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0:33Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Primon. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, so you stole$100 million worth of crown jewels from the Louvre. Now what? Then the NHL is cozying up with prediction markets, much to the chagrin of traditional sportsbooks. It's Thursday, October 23rd. Let's ride.

0:55I know everyone's busy with work and brainstorming a Halloween costume, but it's worth a reminder that the government is still shut down. And yesterday, the 22nd day into the funding lapse, This government shutdown became the second longest in history, surpassing the 1995-96 shutdown from the Clinton administration. The odds are growing it could become the longest ever, a record that stands at 35 days. President Trump is heading off to Asia later this week. House Republicans are staying home in their districts. And no one seems particularly eager to restart talks over expiring health care subsidies, the sticking point between the two parties that resulted in the shutdown.

1:30As GOP Senate Majority Leader John Thune said, we have negotiated. I don't know what there is to negotiate. Kind of like me when Toby requests a ridiculous fantasy football trade. First of all, respond to my trade request. Second of all, it's pretty wild. Second longest in history. And we haven't really talked about it because of how little progress is being made. I mean, the Senate failed to pass the House bill for a 12th time yesterday. Tomorrow, federal workers will miss their first full paycheck. They've already missed partial paychecks, but tomorrow is the first full one for a lot of people, which could ratchet up the pressure once more.

2:03But now I'm going to just put you on the spot here. How many days is this thing going? I'm going to guess we're going 56 days. We're tying Joe DiMaggio. And that's because in 50, not in 56, in 56 days from when this started, 35 days from now is Thanksgiving. And I think ahead of all the travel and flights that people are going to, TSA workers are still not going to be paid. I think the government is not going to take any chances with causing airport havoc because if there's one thing that americans will get frustrated with it's not getting to their flights on time so i did not put you on the spot clearly you were very prepared for that question you even have the joe domaggio line lined up but i like the way you're thinking about it all right and now a word from our sponsor disney campaign manager as a marketer you're trying to get your brand and its message in front of the right people at the right moment because if you're figuratively advertising gardening supplies and your advertisement is landing in the middle of the desert, that's pretty much money down the drain.

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3:29Learn more at DisneyCampaignManager.com. That's DisneyCampaignManager.com. The NHL is daring to skate where no other sports league has before, announcing new multi-year partnerships with prediction market platforms Kalshi and Polymarket yesterday. The licensing deal will let the upstarts use the nhl's logos team names and stanley cup brand across their platform something other leagues have been hesitant to do for instance if you wanted to predict the winner of tonight's chargers versus vikings and a nfl game you would only see them referenced by their city names when you log on so as not to run afoul of licensing deals so the nhl making the jump is a legitimizing leap for calci and polymarket while for more traditional sports books like DraftKings, FanDuel, and BetMGM, it's a warning shot.

4:15Remember, prediction markets let users buy and sell event contracts, financial instruments that pay out$1 if an event happens, and$0 if it doesn't. They were especially popular during election season as traders and prognosticators alike turned to Kalshi and Polymarket to get a read or make bets on who would take the White House. But the only thing Americans are more obsessed with than politics is sports, and the start of football season brought record-breaking trading volume, over $2 billion worth, dwarfing the frenzied levels of election season. That is scary for sportsbooks because every dollar your dumb cousin wagers on Kalshi is$1 that isn't going the way of DraftKings or FanDuel.

4:53Neil, since the late September launch of Kalshi's same-game parlay-style contracts, DraftKings stocks is down 18%, and FanDuel's parent company Flutter is down 10%. To see them wooing over the nhl these platforms are becoming a real threat to the big boys of gambling yeah they're absolutely scared and earlier this week they responded in part draft kings acquired railbird technologies they paid 250 million dollars for this company it's a cfdc license exchange it's a part of their strategy to enter the prediction market space because they are feeling extremely threatened their investors are a little very scared that calci and polymarket are going to eat their lunch.

5:35So DraftKings acquired this company so they can start offering prediction markets and kind of fight back because they are getting hammered right now from the growth of Kalshi and Polymarket, especially in the sports space. What are some of the advantages that these prediction markets have over traditional sportsbooks? They are actually not subject to the patchwork local gambling regulations that sportsbooks are. I mean, if I live in New York City, but then I travel to Washington or somewhere where sports betting is not allowed, you cannot access your sports book anymore, which is frustrating if you're a gambler.

6:10The prediction markets kind of play by a different set of rules because you are facilitating contracts between users rather than a house you bet against. They are considered financial exchanges, and so they are regulated federally by the Commodity Futures and Trading Commission. So they literally are playing by a different set of national rules than sports books are, which make them a lot more accessible to everyday people, which is why, again, if you are a sports book, one, you're mad about that because you're like, how come they get to do essentially the same thing that we're doing, but it's federally regulated at a national level, whereas we are subject to the whims of different states.

6:45Right. DraftKings and FanDuel say, we filed the most paperwork you've ever seen in order to be licensed in the states that have legally allowed sports gambling after the Supreme Court case in 2018, and especially in states like California and Texas, which still bar legal sports gambling, DraftKings and FanDuel and other companies cannot legally operate in Texas and California. Those are the two most populous states in the entire country. Meanwhile, Calci and Polymarket skate in and they're like, hey, here you go, everybody. Texas and California, you can do this. I should add that Polymarket is still not licensed in the United States, but it is moving toward that.

7:23They feel like they are, FanDuel and DraftKings feel like they are getting an unfair shake here. And the Trump administration, even whether this is actually allowed, it's operating in a very regulatory gray area. Trump administration has not really cracked down. Donald Trump Jr., the president's son, is an advisor to both Polymarket and CalShare. It doesn't seem like there's a lot of appetite in the White House or among regulators to crack down on these prediction markets, even though regular casino operators are pleading with them, too. And then finally, it is probably something that is advantageous to you as a sports gambler, just like an everyday person, to bet on these platforms versus against the house, quote unquote, where the sports books are setting lines.

8:07One example I will give is that if in a football game a long pass is completed and it kind of shakes up the calculus of the game, you can quickly go on Polymarket or Kalshi, buy an event contract of the team that maybe did the long completion of the pass and say like, hey, the odds just were swung in my favor. And then other people might pile in after you. and you can immediately sell that contract regardless of the outcome of the game versus if you bet on a sportsbook and that happens. The sportsbook has to give you buyout odds, and sometimes they can just stop it if things are moving too quickly.

8:42So you always have basically exit liquidity in these prediction markets versus you're at the whims of the sportsbooks when you are betting on them. So these mid-game wagers, these real-time wagers, are something that you could see become a lot more popular on Calci compared to something like a sportsbook where it's a lot more difficult to get your money out in critical junctures of the game. Moving on, important people are getting freaked out about AI killing us all again, so they wrote a letter to try and slow its progress. The more than 850 signatories of the new statement on superintelligence read like a who's who of modern tech and influence.

9:18Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, virgins Richard Branson, AI pioneer Jeffrey Hinton, former U.S. military and security chiefs Mike Mullen and Susan Rice, and even Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. In a show of ideological unity, their message was simple, stop building machines that can outthink us, at least until we can be sure that they won't destroy us. The letter specifically called out threats ranging from mass unemployment and surveillance to full-on civilizational collapse, urging the governments of the world to ban development of, quote, superintelligence until scientific consensus and public approval catch up.

9:52But while the letter was sounding the alarm about runaway progress towards superintelligence, Behind the scenes at one of the biggest companies trying to manifest that vision, things aren't necessarily going all that well. Meta is cutting roughly 600 roles from its superintelligence division just months after plowing insane amounts of money into building it up. The leader of Meta's AI efforts, Alexander Wang, said that the layoffs were less of a retreat and more of a tightening of ranks. By reducing the size of our team, Wang said in an internal memo, Fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact.

10:28But Neil, an interesting juxtaposition here. You have tons of notable figures crying out about slowing AI progress. Meanwhile, one of the very labs supposedly closing in on superintelligence is cutting headcount. Toby, I really wish you would be a little more load-bearing. Everyone always wants. I've been told that a bunch in my performance reviews, and I've taken it upon myself to become more load-bearing here at work. I love how they just made the new guy fire all the 600 workers. Alexander Wang was brought in for$14.9 billion to build Meta's new super intelligence team. Yes, they are framing it as trying to weed out some of the organizational bloat that has grown around this AI team.

11:06And they really just want these. They want like 50 super AI researchers who we know Zuck has been paying over$100 million to recruit from Apple, OpenAI, and Google to build super intelligence because Zuckerberg thinks that Meta is not on par with its rivals. When you talk about the best AI models, often we talk about Gemini from Google or OpenAI, ChatGPT. You don't often talk about Llama, which is Meta's model, because in April it released its fourth iteration. Developers were not that impressed with it. And Zuck got a little spooked. So he decided to go on this insane spending spree to bring in the best AI researchers.

11:44And he feels like, you know, the people maybe that they had already on staff were not up to par with this particular group that he's brought in. So he's trying to, you know, he's cut, he's told Alexander Wang to lay off all these people. They're saying they're going to find other places at Meta for them, but it is a reorganization because they do feel like they're behind. Meanwhile, you have this letter that was published. It's kind of the AI doomer versus, I mean, call them, I guess, AI boomers debate is not something that is new. It's been going on since this technology first emerged. But doomers kind of push for precaution and regulation.

12:15This is not the first time. It feels like every few cycles or so we get another headline like this where a lot of people start pushing back saying, we need to slow down because we are basically driving into the night with headlights. We can hardly see in front of us. Is it smart? There might be a cliff in front of us. So maybe we should slow down here. and it is something that is semi-reflected in the popular opinion as well. The Future of Life Institute found that only 5 % of Americans support fast and unregulated AI development. So maybe this is something that you are hearing this group of people talk to the majority of people saying, I don't know if we want Zuck and Alexander Wang driving us towards superintelligence.

12:53Maybe we should take a step back and pause here. But then on the flip side, people are saying, we're not even close to superintelligence. That is a word that's become a buzzword, but no one can truly define what it means. I mean, it means that you're smarter than humans, but right now our models are not nearly smarter than humans. They're quite dumb. Andre Carpathi just went on a podcast and said that, hey, these are still models that don't think like humans. They don't distill information like we do. They're very good at memorizing stuff, but they're nowhere near actually being super intelligent.

13:23So it is fascinating to see both sides of the equation. No one wants us to plow towards super intelligence without thinking about it. but we're not really that close to begin with. And Andre Carpathie is a very influential figure in modern artificial intelligence. He is one of the co-founders of OpenAI, and a lot of people hang on his everywhere. So when he went on this podcast and said that, wow, these models really aren't up to snuff, and we're still 10 years away from building artificial general intelligence, what Sam Altman has said we'll do by 2030, and Elon Musk has said we'll do by the next one or two years.

13:54He's kind of pushing the brakes here. So maybe some of these concerns are a little unwarranted, according to him. All right. The Louvre reopened Wednesday for the first time since four thieves pulled off an Ocean's Eleven style heist over the weekend, taking off in broad daylight with what authorities called priceless jewels from the Napoleonic era. Except they do have a price, roughly what Juan Soto will make in his first two years with the Mets. The Paris prosecutor in charge of leading the investigation into the robbery said on Tuesday that the stolen jewels are worth an estimated$102 million.

14:25though that doesn't include their cultural value to France. This sum is indeed extremely spectacular, the prosecutor said, but it is in no way comparable to the historical damage caused by this theft. Investigators are making the number public in the hopes of persuading the robbers against breaking apart the jewels or melting them down to sell on the black market because they'll be worth a lot less broken down than in their original form. Of course, the thieves probably won't care since the items wouldn't be able to be sold undetected unless they are separated from the museum pieces. In total, eight objects were taken from a gallery that housed the country's crown jewels, including necklaces, earrings, and brooches belonging to French queens.

15:04Officials say that a team of 100 people is now investigating the heist, up from 60 previously, and the criminals remain at large. Toby, it's a race against time to find the perps before they turn over their loot to the black market, but it might not be as easy to launder 19th century lube diamonds than you think. Yeah, because these things are very well documented. You can't exactly go to any reputable diamond dealer and say, hey, I got this crown here. Everyone's going to go, dude, I know what crown that is. So you obviously have to break it down. There's two parts to this. There's the gold aspect and then there's the diamond aspect.

15:38There's actually not that much gold in the pieces that they stole. So bummer for the thieves, if you are the thieves, because gold's at an all-time high right now, but they didn't actually steal that much gold. So a lot of the attention is turned towards diamonds. And what you have to do, there's 9 ,000 individual gems here. You're probably going to have to break them down, recut them, turn them into something that they weren't before. And that takes time. And then you have to go and sell them off through the black market. There's often a rule of three that you want it to pass hands three times so it can't be traced back to you.

16:07So it's not an easy process. And the longer you sit on these jewelry, the longer you sit on these goods, the hotter things become because you do have 100 people looking into this. So stealing this stuff was almost the easy part. Moving it is the more difficult part. It did seem to be particularly easy because the director of the Louvre went in front of French lawmakers yesterday, and she's probably the most wanted woman after these thieves in the entire country because she let this happen. And she acknowledged that the security situation at the Louvre was not well. She said it was not sufficient at all.

16:40They had one camera in this area where the thieves parked their truck mounted lift to get into this to get into this gallery. and that one camera was pointed in the wrong direction. So she said she even offered her resignation, but the culture minister in France said, no, we want you to keep this job, but there's a lot of heat on her and on these 100 investigators to find this before the thieves break down this jewelry. And they're trying to warn the thieves. Again, it's probably gonna fall on deaf ears because they know all of this, that their loot is going to be worth a lot less than the market value.

17:16And in general, thieves rarely get more than 10 % of a gem's market value for stolen goods. So whenever they sell, it's going to end up being a lot less than$102 million. I don't know if it's worth it. I mean, doing all that work, going through all that risk for 10%, I mean, I guess 10 % of$100 million is$10 million. But I don't know. The math isn't math for me. We're going to take a quick break. And speaking of math, we're coming back with Neal's Numbers.

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18:21That's Vanguard.com slash audio. All investing is subject to risk. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor. Neil, would you rather have surgery performed by a junior resident or a department head? Is that even a question? Give me the doctor with the most practiced hands, please. Customers of Quest software have the same outlook. Quest has been a global leader in data management, cybersecurity, and platform modernization for decades. So now that the AI transformation is here, companies are turning to their established expertise for support. Quest's approach to AI success is based on three priorities, trusted AI-ready data, secure identities, and platform modernization that scales with AI demand.

19:02And they have thousands of customers around the world, including more than 90 % of the Fortune 500. So on top of Quest's expansive product suite, they use insights from those relationships to inform how companies build AI readiness and success. With something as complex and significant as AI, you're probably going to want to have a seasoned pro in the room with you. Head to quest.com slash brew to get started. That's quest.com slash brew. Welcome to Neil's Numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will have you opening up your notes app to jot all these down. For my first number, the PhD student could become an endangered species.

19:39A report from the Harvard Crimson found that PhD student admission slots will plummet in the school's faculty of arts and sciences over the next two years. A decline of 75 % in the science division and about 60 % in the arts and humanities. What does this look like in practice? The German department is going to lose all of its Ph.D. student seats, and the history department's Ph.D. class is shrinking from 13 to 5 over the next two years. But it's not just the humanities, and it's not just Harvard. Across American higher education, Ph.D. cohorts are drying up in the face of budget uncertainties and sweeping fiscal pressures from the Trump administration.

20:16In a survey of biology departments, 40 of 45 respondents said they had already downsized their expected Ph.D. cohorts for the next academic year or planned on doing so. 33 of 91 astronomy and physics graduate programs said they were shrinking the number of admitted graduate students, sometimes to zero. Besides pushing down demand for blazers with elbow patches, the shrinkage of Ph.D. programs could cause the pipeline of new scientists and innovators to shrivel up. Toby, why such drastic cuts and why now? I mean, if you look at Harvard, they are staring down a$300 million annual endowment tax. They have$113 million operating deficit.

20:54These are a financial reality that they are grappling with. And so they have to make cuts to their academic explorations. And PhD programs are what are on the chopping block right now. And so if you think about what's happening at Harvard right now, and then you trickle down through all the universities who aren't Harvard. I mean, Harvard has the biggest endowment in the world. So what must be going through the minds of other administrators at smaller schools with less financial resources? And it is devastating because this is where the next crop of experts come from in all of these various sciences.

21:24It's not just the liberal arts, astronomy, physics, the so-called hard sciences that are missing an entire generation if these programs start to shrivel up and die a little bit. So it does have long winding consequences, not just at one university, but throughout all of the industries that are affected and populated by the pipeline of PhD students. If you got a PhD, would you put it on your Twitter profile or LinkedIn? Well, first of all, you would definitely call me doctor straight from the even if it was English. I mean, hey, no shade to anyone, but I would be called Dr. Toby Howell, regardless of what the actual degree was in.

21:57For my next number, Iceland is home to a lot of things, volcanoes, Bjork, hot dogs made out of lamb, but it never had a mosquito until recently. Mosquitoes were seen in the wild last week, marking the first record of mosquitoes occurring in the natural environment in Iceland. It knocks the country off the very short list of places on Earth where no mosquitoes live, a list that now includes just one place, Antarctica. The unfortunate discovery was made by a guy named Bjorn about 20 miles north of the capital Reykjavik. In a Facebook group about insects, he wrote, At dusk on October 16th, I caught sight of a strange fly.

22:32I immediately suspected what was going on and quickly collected the fly. He contacted a scientist who drove to confirm Bjorn's suspicions, and together they collected three total mosquitoes, which is an incredible feat in of itself because I've never seemed to land a blow on those buggers. Experts didn't seem too surprised that a mosquito would eventually turn up in Iceland. Yes, mosquitoes do thrive in warmer humid environments, but they've also made a comfy living on Iceland's frigid neighbors, Norway, Denmark, Scotland, and Greenland. The species that was found on Iceland is quite resistant to cold.

23:04The going theory is that it hitched a ride on a ship or a container. As for global warming's role, Iceland is warming at a brisk pace, four times faster than the rest of the northern hemisphere, and that heating does create a more hospitable environment for insects. But scientists warn there's not enough data to explicitly link climate change and the discovery of mosquitoes on Iceland. They simply may have been fed up with all their friends talking about how they had such a good time biking around the island and finally decided to pay a visit. I just love that he called the mosquito a strange looking flag.