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Podcast Notes: Pivot - "Betting on Reality with Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour: ACCESS"
Episode Overview
- Podcast Title: Pivot
- Host(s): Kara Swisher, Scott Galloway
- Guest: Tarek Mansour, CEO and Co-founder of Kalshi
- Release Date: Weekly on Tuesdays and Fridays
- Episode Theme: Examination of the rise of storytelling in tech, discussions on insider trading, rivalry with Polymarket, and the burgeoning field of prediction markets.
Key Discussions and Themes
Introduction
- Hosts' Remarks: Kara Swisher introduces the episode by highlighting the conversation between Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger regarding the storytelling trend in tech, followed by an interview with Tarek Mansour.
- Focus on Prediction Markets: The conversation transitions to the competitive landscape of prediction markets, particularly Kalshi's position relative to Polymarket.
Rise of Storytelling in Tech
- FOMO and Storytelling: Alex and Ellis discuss how storytelling has become a necessary skill in tech, with a shift from traditional media to "invented media."
- Definition of Storytelling: Emphasizes the importance of how companies present themselves in the crowded market.
- Cultural Shift: Reflects on the evolution of content marketing and the role of direct communication from founders.
- AI and Content Saturation:
- The hosts express concerns over the saturation of AI-generated content, leading to challenges in standing out.
- Suggests a potential meritocracy in storytelling, where quality communication can rise above sheer follower count.
Interview with Tarek Mansour
- Kalshi's Mission: Tarek discusses his vision for Kalshi as a regulated exchange for prediction markets, emphasizing integrity and transparency.
- Insider Trading Regulations:
- Mansour explains the strict regulations in place at Kalshi to prevent insider trading, which includes a no-trading rule for employees and strict compliance to regulations.
- He compares Kalshi's regulations to those of traditional financial markets, highlighting the importance of market integrity.
- Rivalry with Polymarket:
- Kalshi and Polymarket's differing approaches to prediction markets are analyzed.
- Mansour expresses confidence in Kalshi's regulated framework versus Polymarket's less regulated approach.
- Tarek highlights Kalshi's recent growth and increasing mindshare among users.
Insights on Prediction Markets
- Role of Prediction Markets:
- Mansour believes prediction markets can provide insights into societal questions and serve as a mechanism for truth-seeking.
- He argues that these markets are beneficial for understanding future events and can serve as a balance to misinformation.
- Financialization of Everything:
- Tarek's controversial statement about wanting to "financialize everything" stirred debate.
- He clarifies that the goal is to use financial markets to aid in discovering truths about significant societal issues, not to promote gambling.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
- Kalshi's Position in Society:
- The discussion wraps up with Tarek remarking on the impact of Kalshi's services on everyday life, particularly in sports and various cultural trends.
- Closing Remarks: Alex and Ellis encourage listeners to follow and subscribe to their content, highlighting the significance of their discussions in today's tech landscape.
Key Takeaways
- Importance of Storytelling: Effective communication and storytelling are now crucial for tech companies to differentiate themselves.
- Regulatory Framework: Kalshi’s commitment to regulatory compliance highlights the contrasts between it and less regulated competitors like Polymarket.
- Potential of Prediction Markets: Prediction markets hold the potential to provide valuable insights into societal issues, offering a crowd-sourced method for understanding future events.
- Cautions on Gamblification: The conversation emphasizes the need for responsible engagement with prediction markets to avoid unintended consequences.
Conclusion This episode of Pivot dives deep into the intersection of technology, regulation, and societal engagement, with a particular spotlight on prediction markets and the role they can play in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. The discussions between the hosts and Tarek Mansour provide valuable insights into the future of both storytelling in tech and the operational nuances of prediction markets.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Rise of Storytelling in Tech
0:45 to 1:42
Exploration of the growing importance of storytelling in the tech industry.
“and won, raised billions of dollars, and are in the middle of a fierce rivalry with Polymarket to win the prediction market race.”
The Shift from Reporters to Storytellers
1:42 to 2:28
Discussion on the transition from traditional reporting to storytelling and its implications.
“We've got Tarek Mansour on the show, the CEO of Kalshi.”
The Evolution of Content Marketing
2:28 to 3:48
Analysis of how the storytelling trend is an evolution of content marketing.
“Co-created media, masturbatory, corporate media, one of the above.”
Founders as Storytellers
3:48 to 5:02
The importance of tech founders engaging directly with their audiences through storytelling.
“So, yeah, to me, I mean, this is just kind of the next step.”
Challenges of Differentiation in AI
5:02 to 6:40
A look at how AI proliferation creates challenges for companies to stand out.
“You can still get your narrative out to the world through sources.news.”
The Role of Journalists in Tech
6:40 to 8:02
Discussion on the evolving role of journalists in the tech landscape and their importance.
“And that applies to us as well in the way that we package this podcast, what clips we choose, what platforms we post on.”
Insights from a Recent Interview
8:02 to 9:10
Alex Heath shares insights from an interview with Nikita Beer, head of product at X.
“Um, but I'm not, I'm not, you know, for the person to come in and like brand to the company, right.”
Reviving Media Relationships at X
9:10 to 14:02
Exploration of the need for journalists to return to X and the product changes being made.
“I don't know if I'd call them all wet blankets, but they all do think that what they're building is inherently interesting because that's why they're building it for 24 hours a day.”
Changes in Product Strategy at Substack
14:02 to 14:33
Discussion about Substack's product changes and traffic strategies.
“with me that, you know, they're making changes in the products that he thinks will hopefully incentivize people to come back.”
Elon Musk's Influence on Media Platforms
14:35 to 15:25
Exploration of Elon Musk's impact on media platform policies and banning journalists.
“And the interesting backstory to that at the time when that happened, that was again around the acquisition was Elon was trying to buy Substack.”
Show all 33 chapters
The Shift from News to Personal Content
15:26 to 16:12
Analysis of how platforms have shifted focus from news to personal engagement.
“to see Nikita say, look, like, you'll get traffic.”
Personal Experiences with Social Media Algorithms
16:13 to 17:59
Discussion on personal experiences with social media algorithms and news visibility.
“I feel like engagement is down when I post about anything newsy.”
The Future of Social Media Platforms
18:00 to 19:18
Debate about the direction of platforms like Threads and Blue Sky.
“I think it's my job to be close to my sources.”
Skepticism About Elon Musk's Vision for Twitter
19:19 to 20:24
Expressing doubts about Musk's vision for Twitter as a town square.
“I think they're going more in that direction.”
Insights from Tarek Mansour on Kalshi
20:25 to 20:59
Introduction and insights about Kalshi from CEO Tarek Mansour.
“Um, well, to close things out for, we get to the interview.”
Building Products Without Direct Use
21:00 to 23:07
Exploration of the challenges in building products that cannot be used internally.
“So you're going to be able to pay the bots in crypto or whatever.”
Regulatory Challenges in Prediction Markets
23:08 to 26:04
Discussion on the importance of regulations in prediction markets and trading.
“So there's like that interesting dynamic.”
Market Integrity and Fairness in Prediction Markets
26:05 to 28:01
Final thoughts on ensuring fairness and integrity in prediction markets.
“I think if your employees were using it, they'd also be spending a lot more time in the bathroom as well.”
Understanding Insider Trading Regulations
28:01 to 30:02
Learn about the regulations surrounding insider trading and how they apply to exchanges.
The Importance of Regulatory Oversight
30:03 to 31:34
Discover why regulatory frameworks are crucial for the integrity of financial markets.
“kind of build it regulated, regulated rails so that institutions, big partners can adopt it over time.”
Volume Comparisons in Prediction Markets
31:35 to 33:34
Examine the scale of prediction markets compared to traditional financial markets.
“Like, for example, if it's like a big customer that did something wrong, like the business may want to like be like, oh, maybe you should.”
Fraud Detection and Regulation Challenges
33:35 to 36:55
Learn how fraud is detected in financial markets and the complexities involved.
“And actually, let me ask you, how much volume, notional volume do you think goes through the Chicago Mercantile Exchange a year?”
The Impact of Regulation on Market Behavior
36:56 to 39:00
Understand how regulatory frameworks differentiate between good and bad actors in the market.
Competitive Landscape in Prediction Markets
39:01 to 40:55
Explore the rivalry between Kalshi and Polymarket, focusing on regulatory differences.
“Because then all the activity is out there for everybody to see.”
Legal Challenges and Market Share Dynamics
42:00 to 43:50
Learn about the legal battles Kalshi faced and how they impacted market positioning.
“them like how is this fair right like and that was i think the toughest part of the journey but the beauty is like when we won the lawsuit last year so we sued the government over the action market, then we won that.”
The Complexity of Market Regulations
43:50 to 46:10
Understand the challenges of operating within regulated markets and competition dynamics.
“And I think that changes the dynamic because, well, one that was very advantageous to us, it was a huge kind of boost for us as a company, obviously, even the results.”
The Absurdity of Success in Business
46:10 to 48:00
Explore the unconventional journey of suing the government and gaining mainstream recognition.
“I mean, it's just like an absurd problem.”
Transforming Knowledge into Market Participation
48:00 to 52:20
Discover how everyday expertise can be monetized through prediction markets.
“How do you think about Kalshi as a part of everyday life?”
The Role of Markets in Price Discovery
52:20 to 56:00
Learn about the significance of markets in discovering prices and trends.
“The same way that markets figure out the price.”
Understanding Financialization and Its Implications
56:00 to 56:39
Explore the concept of financializing important societal questions and its potential impact.
“Why'd you scare my grandma with that comment?”
The Role of Prediction Markets in Society
56:40 to 58:08
Learn how prediction markets can serve as a mechanism for truth amidst misinformation.
“I mean, it was taken out of context and people sort of like, you know, took in all sorts of directions.”
Balancing Engagement and Truth in Forecasting
58:09 to 59:25
Discover the balance between engaging content and truth-seeking in market predictions.
“But I think that that clip was taken out of context, out of a broader, kind of a broader explanation that I was giving.”
Regulatory Considerations in Market Predictions
59:26 to 1:00:25
Understand the regulatory challenges and ethical considerations in prediction markets.
“The things that are sort of like, will AI overtake?”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:03Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, and I'm Kara Swisher. We're off for the holiday today, but we have something good for you, an episode of Access with Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger. In this episode, Alex and Ellis talk about the rise of storytelling in tech and why X is now openly pleading for its haters to come back. As if. Then they sit down with Tariq Mansour, co-founder and CEO of Kalshi, to discuss insider trading, his rivalry with Polymarket, regulatory chaos, sports betting, and why prediction markets are having a real moment. Enjoy and we'll be back in your feeds later this week.
1:07and won, raised billions of dollars, and are in the middle of a fierce rivalry with Polymarket to win the prediction market race. Okay, PowerShift is brewing in the sports betting world. What does this mean for sports betting and the gaming stocks? This week on the show, we have Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansur. We talk about insider trading, why Kalshi employees aren't allowed to use Kalshi, what he thinks of Polymarket, and his controversial comment about wanting to financialize everything. But first, Ellis and I talk about the rise of storytelling in tech and why X is pleading for its haters to return to the platform.
1:41This is Access.
1:46Ellis, how's it going, my friend? I'm well. How about you? I'm good. We've got a lot to talk about today. We've got Tarek Mansour on the show, the CEO of Kalshi. But first, Ellis, I've been noticing that everyone seems to have FOMO about what you do, about being a quote unquote storyteller, that storytelling is the hot new thing. According to the Wall Street Journal, at least, they had a big story. Was it yesterday? Talking about the rise of the storyteller and the, frankly, the decline of reporters. How did that feel? going from earned media to maybe we call it invented media. Yeah. Co-created media, masturbatory, corporate media, one of the above.
2:33Take your pick. This was one of those stories that got viral screenshotted on X by a bunch of people we both follow in the tech world. Everyone, you know, glamping on about their savvy media strategy that they have. And I just think it's kind of interesting that this is becoming a hot topic. And I think it kind of signals where everyone's head is at that in an age of infinite AI, everything, and products that all kind of do the same thing, maybe the thing that matters is how you talk about your company. I don't know. You're the professional. You tell me. Humanity has never been more important.
3:11What we need is storytelling. I mean, to me, it's nothing new. I feel like this is just the next evolution of content marketing and social. I mean, it's so crazy to me. I remember being back at The Verge like 12 years ago, and our friend Sam Sheffer was doing social, probably paid a pittance to do this, like every other social media person in the industry. Shout out Hypedesk. And that's all there is now, is social. And fortunately, these folks are being paid a lot more now for the value of their work and their skill at packaging content to fit in algorithmic social feeds. To me, this whole storytelling revolution, I think, kind of coincides with this whole idea of founders and creators being interesting.
3:57And when you are telling whatever you have to say from the horse's mouth, it typically feels more authentic or more interesting than it's being translated by somebody else, whether it's a reporter or the social media desk or otherwise. So, yeah, to me, I mean, this is just kind of the next step. I mean, selfishly, the way that I think about what I do is that it's more than just telling a story, but actually understanding all your audiences these days. As a tech founder, whether it's investors or candidates or internal teams or advertisers or in, you know, retail even before your IPO. And so I do think there is like a meaningful difference there.
4:36I guess when I reflect on this, I'm glad it's being appreciated. I'm glad people are seeing this convergence, I guess, of the way that we communicate with the world and just being real about it. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, it definitely feels a little funny as the attention turns away from creators or even influencers and reporters in terms of how you get your narrative out to the world. You know? You can still get your narrative out to the world through sources.news. Thank you very much. you bring like immense context i feel like to every story and so if you're a company that has trouble translating their differentiation i mean but but that is what a storyteller is in my mind yeah i don't know i i think founders should go direct more but i think a lot of founders are wet blankets and have no personality and no ability to talk about what they do beyond the nuts and bolts of the actual thing.
5:36And to really do this well, you have to be, I think someone like Tarek, who we have on later in the show, who can talk about it more at a high level. And that just takes, you know, that takes like a certain personality, it takes experience, it takes training. But yeah, I mean, I just think storytelling as a concept in the tech world becoming so popular right now with AI, I think, yeah, just to me suggests that there's a lot of copycats and a lot of cookie cutter type things out there. I'm reminded of a quote that Ilya Suskova gave the Darkhash Patel podcast recently, where he was like, Silicon Valley has more companies than ideas right now.
6:18And it does feel that way. Yeah. And when there's less differentiation, or when everybody's building the same thing, the story becomes even more of a potential lever to hook people or just talk about yourself to the world more without pitching your product every day. I mean, that's really how I think about it. It's just a world now where everything is content. And that applies to us as well in the way that we package this podcast, what clips we choose, what platforms we post on. And in some ways, I think it's nice that it's a bit more of a meritocracy maybe than it once was where it was all follower driven and it took years and years and years to build followers so you had any leverage.
7:00So I think that's the bright side of it. But yeah, when everybody's building AI wrappers, it is awfully hard to stand out now. So we need to invent a new job for that. Everything is content. Is that the first slide of your deck? Kind of. I think the first slide of my deck, which is no longer as relevant as it once was, was like, if you build it, they will come and it's just crossed out. And that was more of a hot take a couple of years ago. Now that seems kind of like Like, obvious, you know, how's anybody going to use your app if they haven't heard of it? Right, right. And I mean, I definitely feel this from my perspective of being an independent journalist now for just a few months.
7:39But the amount of outreach I've gotten from VC firms, startups, big companies that want to work with me on quote unquote storytelling. And I'm like, no, thanks. You can just, you know, give me an interview. But it is a huge... Wait, you don't plug me? in that conversation? I do. If you had a perfect opportunity there and you didn't take it. No, I plug you a lot. I plug you a lot. Um, but I'm not, I'm not, you know, for the person to come in and like brand to the company, right. It's like figure out how to reach so-and-so audience. You know, I think of what you do a little more high level, but yeah, I just, I think there's a lot of people who think analytically and from an engineering mindset or a product manager mindset, but very few people who actually can step back and think about how is this actually going to engage an audience.
8:30And, you know, I struggle with that, you know, it's something that I can rotate too much in one way or the other all the time in my work. And you don't want to like be overly, I don't know, programming, overly trying to game the algo. I mean, we talk about this with the podcast and how we, how we do the podcast, but you also want to be relevant. So it's, It seems like a very hard line to walk. I think maybe in some ways you have had a bit less practice than others because you have scoops to lean on. Yeah, scoops do help. You don't need to sensationalize what a company is about when you are breaking news that has that inherent value.
9:08You know what I mean? Yeah. And that is the core of the storytelling to me when I work with any client is in some ways just trying to find what's most newsworthy about them. And you are right. I don't know if I'd call them all wet blankets, but they all do think that what they're building is inherently interesting because that's why they're building it for 24 hours a day. And I do think, as that Wall Street Journal article points out, the reporter's instinct to know what is going to break through. That's all you do every day, three, four, five times a day. A bit different for you. You're probably spending a lot more time over the long term building these relationships.
9:45Sometimes the source will tell you something in a year. that they may not tell you today. But back when I was doing it, it was like, I mean, especially at Business Insider, when I was writing fucking five articles a day, getting immediate feedback from the algorithm and also the clicks on the front page of what headlines are working. You get pretty good, right? You get pretty good at understanding what type of language people need. But yeah, I mean, I guess one other nice thing about former reporters is that we also have some pride and dignity and try not to like completely give in to the tricks if you will like i don't feel comfortable doing that i think a lot of people probably do that's why we're all broke as reporters yeah yeah so i do think we embody a better balance than than than many others
10:49well speaking of scoops you you want to talk about this this uh this interview i did recently yeah i want to talk about the interview you did i mean this was a good one man i mean this is some stuff i've been wanting to hear for a while so yeah alex you you sat down with uh nikita uh beer yeah who is the head of product now for x formerly twitter and nice to hear someone actually talk about what they're doing with the fine tooth comb an actual product builder i mean what do you feel like when you look back on this you know you took away the most but nice to hear that there's someone there like keeping the lights on and thinking about the product direction yeah for sure.
11:32Yeah. I mean, I've known Nikita for a long time. He's this, I would say he's become a personality in the tech world. He's this viral master of social apps who sold one to Meta back in the day, TBH, and then another called Gas to Discord. And I think Nikita's hilarious. Like I said, I mean, he's in LA too. We've known each other for years, but yeah, when he reached out was like, look, do you want to do an interview about bringing journalists back to X? I was like, yes, of course. It was his first interview since he took the job about seven months ago. He reports to Elon directly. And yeah, I thought this was interesting that this was the first thing that a senior leader at X is coming out and saying, which is we really want media and even, you know, capital J journalists to come back.
12:27And I think I know why, which is that, you know, I've been covering Twitter before Elon bought it for many years. I extensively covered when Elon bought it. And Twitter has always had this problem where a very small percentage of the user base posts most of the content. And that's true for, I don't know, I guess Snap was a little different because that was messaging, right? But these one-to-many platforms, that's usually the case. But even by kind of industry standards, Twitter was always pretty top-sided that way. And they would call them like VI – I think they were VITs. So someone's going to – an ex-tweep is going to – Very important tweeters.
13:09Yeah, something like that. Very important tweeters or something. And they would track this obsessively because this would kind of – this factor would basically determine whether Twitter was working or not. And I mean, what you saw with Elon, right, is like obviously a bunch of people in the media left, including many of my peers and close friends in the media who, to be honest, like kind of made me feel like shit for staying on X. It became like – It became like a – it is a political thing. And, you know, you had Blue Sky happen. You had Threads happen. and this diaspora now where everyone's kind of spread out.
13:48And like I wrote in this interview, and now I check three apps a day instead of one to find out what's going on in the world. And that hasn't changed, you know, three years. It's crazy to think like it's been basically three years since Elon bought Twitter, which is wild. And Nikita basically just outlined with me that, you know, they're making changes in the products that he thinks will hopefully incentivize people to come back. That's a new link viewer that is driving more traffic to web pages. I can attest to that personally. Are they still like completely shadow banning substack links as they want?
14:24So he says that's not happening. There's not no shadow banning of like certain link domains. There's no. That was not a shadow ban. That was a public ban. That was a no, that was a direct Elon ban. And the interesting backstory to that at the time when that happened, that was again around the acquisition was Elon was trying to buy Substack. He was actually trying to pitch Chris Best, the CEO on being the CEO of, you know, de facto CEO. I mean, Elon's obviously the real CEO, but the de facto CEO of Twitter. So there was, I think, some more stuff going on in the background there. But yeah, they were doing that.
14:56And, you know, Elon was banning journalists for reporting about the whereabouts of his private jet based on publicly accessible information. I think really stretching the definition of doxing to target journalists who were doing some pretty critical reporting of his acquisition at the time. So again, I have no, there's no fault or no, I have no qualms, I guess, with my friends in the media who have said, we're never coming back as long as Elon's running it. But it's interesting to see Nikita say, look, like, you'll get traffic. I mean, he posted like, this is the biggest arbitrage opportunity of your career for your journalist to come back because we have the audience.
15:37I think it's like half a billion plus people a month coming to the platform. Who knows how many of those are bots? But you know, and, you know, time spent is at a record high. I don't think that's true, though. You don't think it's true? No, like they have vacated so much of the quote unquote newsiness, I feel like of this platform. Like what I see most of the time, I'm very interested in news. And yeah, most of the posts I see are still from the last couple days, but it has really become for better or worse, like TikTok for text or memes or what have you. I mean, I don't know if it feels like that for you, but like, I don't know.
16:16I feel like engagement is down when I post about anything newsy. Like it is very much just kind of visual opinion driven stuff similar to the other platforms. It's just kind of incidentally who's still there. I feel like that's working. And in a lot of ways, because the subject matter is a lot more personalized now as opposed to your follow graph, I think it's actually even harder to stand out. That's interesting. I mean, that also speaks to what Nikita said about the algorithm. Maybe I just suck at posting. No, no, no. I think what they've done is they've replaced the traditional algorithm, which had a bunch of classifiers and labels that someone like Elon could go downrank so-and-so, downrank this category of content or these accounts to this purely Grok-based, which is like, yeah, for better or worse.
17:02Whatever that means. Grok-based, personalized, LLM-based algorithm that is entirely training on your preferences and your interactions. So maybe that's what you're telling X you want, Ellis. Well, I am. But how many people are saying, I mean, I'm obsessed with the news more than most people. And it's good these days. I start engaging with more. I started playing some old Mega Man games, and I'm really enjoying them. And now I'm seeing like really good Mega Man accounts, like doing niche memes and old artwork from the old games. Like, that's great. All I'm saying is that they don't appear to be focusing, especially if they're not tipping the scales on news.
17:44Well, I don't think they have a lot of news on the platform. That's the problem. I mean, that's why he was doing the interview is like they need the posters to come back. And journalists were the posters. and some of us have stayed. The reason I never left is because I think it's my job to be close to my sources. I named sources for a reason and the AI community in particular has never left X. To say that you're trying to cover this industry and understand what's going on and you're not on X and you're not interacting, to me, you're not doing your job well. Sure, you can still break news and you may not need it, But it still has been tremendously advantageous to me from that perspective.
18:26And it's the main reason I've stayed on. But yeah, I think that's why he did the interview. It's like there's not a lot of news. It's kind of all over the place. I mean, I feel like you go to do you check Blue Sky or Threads much? Not really. I think I see Threads via the crazy cross promotion module inside of my Instagram home feed. blue sky uh i get blue sky links from a friend or two but that's it um by the way uh great headline i love x wants its haters back did that just come to you that just came to me no llm involved actually yeah thank you um i mean i wanted i wanted a little bit of rage bait you know this was like a classic blue sky rage bait story i would say the vast majority of my peers in tech media are very active on blue sky and not at all on X, maybe some on threads.
19:17I think threads is actually trending in the direction of Reddit. If you look at what they're doing with the community stuff, uh, the sports stuff that they're leaning into, uh, Connor Hayes, the head of threads is also going to be in sources this week, but he just did a podcast, uh, with a bunch of NBA people. I think they're going more in that direction. And for X, I mean, they really need to convince people to leave blue sky, which I don't know. I mean, blue sky is its own echo chamber, man. It's like, yeah, you jump on there and it's like, you better, you can, you can imagine immediately in your head, like, this is, this is what it takes to work on blue sky and to, to be successful.
19:56And it's a very particular POV on things. It's like, you're very skeptical or you just downright, right. Hate AI. Um, you hate Elon, you love Mondami. Like there's, it's just like, there's this Venn diagram of like all these things that makes you on blue sky. And like, that's, I wish we were all together again, I guess. And Elon was, you know, he says he wants to make the town square and he has utterly failed at that in the last few years. Right. It's the, it's the opposite. And I think everyone is, is right to be very, very skeptical of, of that, uh, not happening, I guess. Um, well, to close things out for, we get to the interview.
20:35Um, did he divulge any, any juicy little funny Elon stories or habits? No, he did not. We're going to have to save that for a future conversation. You didn't ask? I asked a little bit. He said he meets with Elon multiple times a week and that Elon is spending most of his time on X and XAI. Is it still going to be the everything app? They're launching XMoney, the payments thing that he said he was going to do when he bought the company. I think they're launching it this month before New Year's. So you're going to be able to pay the bots in crypto or whatever. I think it'll be fiat, but yeah, that's launching very soon.
21:11Yeah, it is interesting to watch. I mean, these platforms, the features, as has long become obvious, are no longer really the differentiators, whether it's the feed or the DMs or the size of images or videos. It seems like it really just kind of has become who's on here, you know? And that may, I think, be fine for companies of a certain scale, depending on their ambitions. but I'm hopeful that these different platforms can emerge for different communities. Though I really do miss that moment of monoculture where everybody on Twitter was live tweeting the Oscars or the Apple event or whatever it was, that there is no place for that these days.
21:51And that was a special moment. I wonder though, I guess that was the idea with Twitter that didn't allow them to grow to the size that their investors wanted, is that not enough people wanted that. I think Twitter didn't grow for a lot of other more practical, just bad execution reasons, but that's a whole nother conversation. All right. Should we kick it to Tarek? Yeah, let's do it.
22:23Tarek, we were joking while we were waiting for you that we should have started a market about what time you were going to join. That's nice. I don't know how specific the markets are getting these days. Do people make them for such specific things? No, nothing like that. But there are certain things that people have interest in that could be about like a... Well, nothing about someone who works at a company or anything like that. And also the people at Calci can't trade. Because we run a regular exchange, so we cannot actually trade. Oh, really? You have a no trading rule. It's also like the regs, the regulatory framework doesn't enable us to trade on our own exchange.
23:05It's an interesting thing because, you know, it's hard to build a product when you can't actually really use it. It makes it a little bit harder. So there's like that interesting dynamic. Have you talked about that before? How do you do that? How do you build a product you can't use yourself? I just have to be very close to the customers. like really really be very I mean it's cliche like all all companies obviously talk a lot about staying close to the customer but I think this is especially true here where you just have to really be at all times as close as possible to the customer to basically figure out like what you need to build and how to make it better and what are the points of friction but but there are like there are some industries where like you know the technologists or the prop like you know, the product builder cannot fully experience their own products.
23:51You know, it's, it could be like in hard tech, or like, if you're kind of machinery, like, right, like you, you're not sitting in the office and like operating some heavy machinery. And so you also have to really kind of embed yourself with the customer. But yeah, no, I think it's feasible, but it is a challenge. Do we believe that Tim Cook is actually using the Vision Pro in his office or not is, is the real question. I mean, that does strike me as like, pretty remarkably tough, especially when things are moving so quickly. And I do believe that like having worked at Snap and the browser company, that founder does have a unique ability to make changes in the product when things don't feel right, whether it's with like the way a screen flows or a notification or otherwise.
24:33I've definitely come to believe over the years that dogfooding is a pretty critical lever. I wonder if there's any way to like say, hey, my friend, you're about to take a sabbatical for a little while. You're going to gather some feedback, use the app for a while, come back. But I guess that would still be biased, wouldn't it? Yeah, but it also would work. You have to have like a six-month post-calshi period. So if you leave, you have to wait for six months before you can trade. But it is, I mean, there are ways to kind of like, like you could still use the app without trading, right? Like, so that could get you a lot of the, I mean, that could get you a lot of the flows, except for maybe the core trading flow.
25:15And then we have, you know, we have like an internal like demo, like no, no real money, like free money version of the product. But that's also different. That also has different dynamics. So we get close, but not quite there yet. Same product, no dopamine. It's like, I mean, the whole point, right, is like having skin in the game changes the behavior of people, right? Like, that's the whole point. It goes back to sort of the whole question about polls versus prediction markets or like experts versus prediction markets. it's like the whole difference is there's some skin in the game here, right?
25:46If you take out the sort of monetary incentive or this idea of like, you know, put your money where your mouth is, then we default back to kind of a regular pull, right? People can just say anything. So the whole kind of truth-seeking aspect sort of erodes. You can bring back the bias, bring back subjectivity. And so the money component is a critical component to kind of take you from the subjective to the objective, rational plane. So it's a difference, a big difference. I think if your employees were using it, they'd also be spending a lot more time in the bathroom as well. As they were, I mean, maybe, yeah.
26:22They'd be distracted. I was reading recently about how companies are deciding whether or not to ban prediction market trading for their employees as well. So it's interesting to hear that Kalshi bans it. I actually was reading, too, that Google built its own internal prediction market. and that this is becoming more common. So, yeah, what's your advice to companies weighing whether they should allow their employees to use your product? I think that's okay. I mean, look, the same rules apply. So the rules that apply to the stock market generally mostly, like basically the same rules apply to the prediction market, or at least regular prediction markets, which is the case for Calci.
27:02And so it's an important distinction to be drawn. From the early days, from the kind of day one, it's like we're it's we're in financial services um and we're offering a financial product and i think in in those in that industry i would say like regulation is a very critical component or pillar of how you build things and so we define principle which is regulatory first we're gonna do everything regulated uh up front and what it means the thing at a high level is like you know figure out like customer protection like make sure that people understand what they're what they're getting into and what they're doing and number two is market integrity or this idea of fairness create create rules that are fair and you know um for the different participants it's right like if you if you're getting into a game that it's not fair you don't want to participate in that um or whether it's like anything in life and like if it's and so you have to kind of create it like the stock market a set of rules that like make it fair and so like the stock market the way that we've regulated this and you know we worked for four years before we launched a single product so working with the CFC which is a the federal regulator to regulate this like a financial market and so you have the same set of prohibitions so like you know like market manipulation is not allowed things like wash trading spoofing and then like this notion of insider trading and what it means like what is insider trading and how do you define it and so that is regulated like the executive like the stock market and so we have the same sort of set of protections we have systems that flag for these things and then if you flag somebody who committed it um you know it could go from from a fine to like like if you commit inside trading on a stock it could be uh like a financial crime like it could be a criminal prosecution and so it's an interesting question like when it comes to companies it's it's very similar to um like um if you are an employee of a tech company and you know something about the quarterly earnings like you cannot buy options based on that knowledge right and and the way to draw the line is essentially like you cannot use material non-public information to trade right and what does that mean so it's basically you cannot use information that is not supposed to be public that is like you are not supposed to make that information public by trading because actually trading with that information isn't some way one way of making it public like you can go make information public by like saying it to the press or saying it to friends but another way is actually trade on it because if you trade on it you're moving the price in a certain direction and so that's another way to make it public um and the same rules apply to calci and and and so that that applies to people at the companies government members of for example like congress if they have an impact or knowledge on a specific like a bill or something that they are themselves doing um and kind of a you know it's kind of like a case by case also applies to sports i was just going to ask, has anyone ever been fined or sent to the slammer then for something on CalSheet?
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29:54So a few things. Because we've like, okay, why do we take this whole regulatory approach? We take this whole regulatory approach because we look, we believe this market will be very large. And, you know, we believe that one of the ways to go, like the only way to go mainstream really is to kind of build it regulated, regulated rails so that institutions, big partners can adopt it over time. But then the second thing is that, you know, you want to build something with the right set of safeguards so that you know you mitigate and avoid sort of like the risks to happen any new technology especially financial technology technology comes with a certain set of risks that's always true self-driving cars uber rb all of it comes at risk and regulation what it does is like it is a forcing function because you have a regulator that has decades of experience that that have seen how things go wrong whether it's you know in drugs or in financial markets or whatever to basically like pressure test your systems and you know we've done four years of pressure testing before we went live now kind of since start to finish we started in 2019 now we're you know basically 2026 um it's been like seven years of pressure testing the system so the systems work really well like it's working as intended and you see you probably have noticed like you don't really like there there haven't been kind of cases of like people doing bad things on cash because it was very regular we asked you for your kyc all the trades are reports of the government like it's kind of a bad place to try to commit fraud there are other alternatives offshore unregulated and it's easier way to do it right like if you want to do something weird with crypto you probably won't go to coin base you'll probably go to some offshore you know exchange that like offers similar services because there's no KYC they don't know who you are they don't report things to the government so that's that's one so I think in cash those risks are very largely mitigated because of a regulated nature to there's something else that's interesting which is the rules for an exchange so when exchange which is an SRO a self-regulated organization you have to have a bifurcation between the commercial business aspects and the market surveillance regulatory functions so the market surveillance regulatory functions report to the CRO who reports directly to the board and a lot of the specific cases actually I'm not privy to so the yeah it's interesting because then you because you don't want to have impact on you don't want to have like a conflict of interest, right?
32:02Like, for example, if it's like a big customer that did something wrong, like the business may want to like be like, oh, maybe you should. But the rules say like, actually, there's an information wall between those two. So the regulatory side can interface with the regulator and the audit committees, et cetera, like independently of the commercial side. So they have full autonomy. Wow. So not only do you not get to use the product, but you don't actually fully know when people misuse the product, it sounds like. well the relevant team including exactly the chief regulatory officer no but the commercial side doesn't know so and this by the way this is common for example you know how at like Goldman so at banks you know how like the the trading side and the banking side cannot share information between each other I guess the trading side can share with the banking but the banking cannot share with with with the trading and it's the same thing I guess commercial can share with the regulatory, but there's some set of information that the regulatory cannot share with the business.
32:58Are these regulatory bodies equipped to investigate potential insider trading on this scale as the number of things that you could bet on or trade just dramatically multiplies? The answer is definitely, I mean, like, look, the CFTC, it's interesting, people talk about the scale of prediction markets. But look, I mean, this year, prediction markets have grown massive, Like, to be clear, so right now, I mean, I think, so CalShare is doing something like 70, 80 billion dollars of volume a year. And the broader industry maybe is 150, 200 billion dollars with millions of customers participating. But then let's compare that to the commodities markets and the swabs markets that the CFTC regulates.
33:40And actually, let me ask you, how much volume, notional volume do you think goes through the Chicago Mercantile Exchange a year? I was more interested maybe, I mean, I don't know the number, but I think maybe the more relevant number is volume per trader per se. It's still pretty small for CalShe. It's tiny. Right. And so that's what I'm saying. I realize it might be smaller, but I think the number of potential retail investors or just everyday people who are getting involved has just got to be on a very different scale, I would think. I mean, that number that I was going to mention is a quadrillion.
34:18Haven't heard quadrillion on the podcast yet. We need an air horn or something. Yeah, it's$1 ,000 trillion. So the CME does like$3 trillion of volume a day. And it's a massive market. There's very large diversity of participants in the US and outside of the US. Some of it is institutional, a lot of it is retail. And then you have the S &P futures, you have a bunch of different kind of products but it's a regulator that has kind of overseen like mass mass amounts of data like mass amounts of transactions on a daily basis across the board and yes you could have a composition and and i think it's not as kind of kind of we still have sort of a concentration of volume amongst like the kind of like prosumer traders or institutions these these things are not like they're not like uniform right it's not like you have 100 traders that do equal amount of volumes it's kind of very tilted and it's also existing in the traditional markets you have kind of a kind of a long tail distribution uh or like a skewed distribution and but the important thing here is like actually and this is very interesting when people look to commit fraud they don't do it for like 10 bucks or 20 right like they usually you know they try to make money out of it right otherwise why are you why are you violating the law and the the The fortunate thing about that is that the larger the size, the easier it is to flag, the more unusual the pattern is.
35:40You know, it's like, you know, when someone, for example, goes out, like when you hear about the SEC investigate some insider trading, it's because usually some trader at a bank bought a kind of an out of the money option two days before earnings. But that option, they bought like millions of it, right? Or they bought like a large size. That usually is actually pretty, it's kind of a problem that's like a much easier one to solve. Not very sneaky, realistically. It gets flagged. It gets flagged. And when you look at it, it's like, who are you? Who do you know? How'd you get this information? And then you can escalate to investigations in the regulators.
36:12So in this context, people are probably seeing headlines recently about there was this trader, I think the name was like Alpha Raccoon or something, who netted over like a million dollars by very accurately predicting Google's 2025 year in search rankings, to the extent that like this person probably worked inside Google. but that happened on polymarket and you don't actually hear stories of this or at least i haven't seen stories of something like this on calci maybe i just haven't seen it but i imagine for you you get lumped in with those kind of headlines and it's like oh prediction markets allow insider trading blah blah blah like why why did that happen on polymarket and not calci it's the same as they're kind of like the regulated versus unregulated model right like it and i always say this it's like you can take any financial market like you can take the stock market right which a lot of us perceive is regulated and there's the right set of rules etc and if somebody offshore like opens up a stock market without kyc without the sort of like same level of protections yes things are going to happen on that marketplace right like it's it's not like like the thing i always say is like there are bad actors everywhere right the bad actors are like they'll always try to find outlets to you know do bad acts that's what they do and and so there's this key distinction between regulated and unregulated and i think generally with nascent technologies people sort of like merge the two and like treat them as similar and you see it's always with crypto right like there were good actors in crypto that were doing things regulated and you know sometimes they had challenges with the government like coinbase had all sorts of challenges with the government but that was a good actor it was like trusted kyc you know what you know where your money sits and you can trust us with it and and we report to the federal government and so on and so forth and then they were like you know offshore actors where you you could put your money and you have no idea where it's going right like you have absolutely no guarantees that that money could be going to somebody's pocket it could be going whatever and but for new technologies people like if something goes wrong in the unregulated piece they can lump like they can lump the entire sort of space in in one as you said i mean it's totally right alex like i totally agree with this it's a matter of education it's a matter to show that like you know look there are actors that are going to do things the right way and then there are actors that you know may have started to do things and maybe not so so so much the right way and over time may kind of converge but the most important thing and maybe this is kind of the thing that we're we're getting at in some ways like if you want to commit a bad act you're not going to do an regulated exchange we would know the name of that person we would investigate that transaction we would report to the government and everybody could see a transparency right you would prefer doing it by paying somebody in some crypto and, you know, non-traceable, like dark web thing, right?
38:56And that's actually reinforces the importance of a regulated, transparent model for this. Because then all the activity is out there for everybody to see. And, you know, we can work with regulators and we can put the right set of like sort of checks and balances and enforce them. Yeah, you all are really big, but Polymarket is too. And it's actually amazing to me the amount of mindshare Polymarket has in the tech community, especially considering they're not officially launched yet in the US. I was just at the Dealbook Summit in New York where Andrew Rostorkin was talking about Polymarket from the stage constantly.
39:28The All In guys talk about them. They're everywhere. Chain is everywhere. I really want to know how you feel about that. I have to imagine Polymarket being so prevalent in the mind of like the tech community specifically bothers you. But how do you think about that and your rivalry with them right now? I don't know if it bothers us as much. I mean, like, I would say a few things. Like, the number one metric we track is not really mindshare or, like, you know, I don't know, like, visits or other. It's, like, actual number of users, volume, financial health of the company, and do you have a real business.
40:05And I think on that, sort of from that perspective, we're much larger. And there's a bunch of ways to kind of measure that. and you know you probably have seen the sort of charts coming around and other to us that's kind of the most important thing like number of users real volume real kind of revenue like financial financial metrics it's interesting because last year if you were to kind of look at the mind share of calci like versus polymarket we were probably kind of like five to ten percent of the mind share um there's ways to measure you can look at google search for example like how many people know about a company versus the other it was a tough year because you know in 2024 in the early 2024, really kind of that similar dynamic was happening.
40:43So we, again, stood firm by a principle, which is regulatory first. We are not going to do anything that is sort of outside of the bounds of the law. That's kind of a principle we're never going to waver on. You didn't want to be a shoot first, ask questions later tech company? Just financial services, I don't think is the right thing to do, right? I really think financial services, the long-term winners are like, measure twice, cut once, do it right. It's one thing when it's burrito taxis. It's another when it's financial services. it's very very different right because in financial services when things go wrong they go wrong in a bad way and you so you really need a regulator and you need a regulatory oversight um so so it was hard last year was hard because you know they were getting the mindshare because they launched the market they just did it you know there's a whole debate whether it was in the u.s or not but you know it was obviously a lot of people were in the u.s but like that you know they scaled because they had the market and they had the offering obviously they scaled much ahead of us they basically went ahead and before us and that was a difficult period for the company because like that was i would say the most difficult period because we were kind of like hamstrung like being told no by the government and you know we um and then you had a competitor that's sort of like doing it you know and you've seen it's kind of i think columbus had their fair share of competitors that operate that way and that happened over and over and it was tough because you just gotta you go to the regulators like you're blocking us but you're not blocking them like how is this fair right like and that was i think the toughest part of the journey but the beauty is like when we won the lawsuit last year so we sued the government over the action market, then we won that.
42:11And we were right on the right side of the law. You know, the market share obviously changed, but the mindshare now, and we were looking at the metrics for this last quarter, like the fall, we're actually something like 55 % of the Google searches in the US. Like we've actually overtaken even in mindshare. And so, you know, for a while, we've been leaning on like the core business metrics and the product and the team. But now we're also actually at least equivalent in terms of the mindshare. We've gained a lot of territory there. So it's just a matter of time. I think at the end of the day, everything will converge to is a better product, you know, and I feel pretty good about our product.
42:42Do you think Polymarket is doing things the right way? I think that's on them to comment. I think that like. Oh, come on. I mean, look, our view is like, we approached it differently. I think we approached it sort of regulated in the U.S., do it right as a U.S. company. And, you know, they kind of did sort of offshore and the VPN thing and all of that. That was kind of the historical thing. And, you know, I just mentioned like that was sort of like a source of difficulty for us because it's like we are carrying all the burden of legalizing the space, which was so tough. Right. Like we spent four years and it was really like a very, very difficult journey to make this happen because, you know, you had the kind of battles of the government and they were kind of pushing us and they really wanted to sort of like this model not to exist without a lot of like real basis.
43:28and then you had like a bit of a sort of dynamic where the the opponent or the competition like had no restriction whatsoever right it's a bit like you're in a in a boxing ring and then your hands are tied behind your back and then you have to you have to kind of go box right whereas your opponent like doesn't have their hand tied behind they may even have a knife right and and you're just getting like you know you're just kind of in that ring so that was tough that was tough and there's no secret about it and like and you know we had a history our history between the two companies as you know like yeah it's a very fierce rivalry i would say you guys it was a very fierce rivalry because like because of that dynamic right it's like you're sitting there and we're getting bloodied here and like you go to and people weren't realizing it's like guys like you know and it's not like customers or others like give you props to try to do things right way that's the tough part about doing things the right way it is hard right it's not the easy route it's not like you do it and then people are like great job congrats you did things the right way actually no no one really cares until it matters like no one cared about you know for example like ftx was sort of like the golden child for a while up until it sort of blew up and then everybody cared overnight right the the the and so so that was the hard part and like look i mean we made some mistakes as a company there were some incidents where you know the the we made some bad tweets about them and they made some mistakes they made some bad tweets about us and there was a lot of this sort of back and forth where like we would go to press they would go to press and so on and so forth and and we were just at the time at least in 2024 is like we we just go up to the press the radio is like guys do you not see this dynamic like we are being blocked from doing anything and then they are not like how is this fair how is this happening so that was i think deeply frustrating i think this year well one we learned from our mistakes in the past but now we're also like a very different paradigm where like we did actually win that lawsuit and legalize the space we did open up the space in a legitimate way and there's a real way for the space to exist in a regulated safe responsible way now.
45:21It could become legitimate. And I think that changes the dynamic because, well, one that was very advantageous to us, it was a huge kind of boost for us as a company, obviously, even the results. But it was also beneficial for them because now they have a path to come and do it the right way and do it regulated and legal. And I think it seems like this is the path that we're doing. They're trying to converge. They're pivoting towards our strategy. And I think that's a good thing. And I hope they stay committed to that because I think over time, both of us will push the space. As long as there's sort of fair and reasonable competition between the two of us, I think this is going to be great for the both of us.
46:02If you would have told yourself 10 years ago that you would be suing the government and be on South Park in 10 years, what do you think you would have said? I mean, it's just like an absurd problem. It's like also, how do you kind of relate those two, right? It's like, yeah, I mean, you're like, is this a good outcome or the world's worst outcome? I think it's a pretty good outcome. I think that like, you know, the, well, I would sort of dissect that for a sec. Like, I think the suing of government in South Park, they're both interesting and they talk to two different things. Like suing the government is interesting because not many people do that, especially your own regulator.
46:37So that, you know, and, but the beauty about the US is like you, you have that sort of system, right? Like the government has checks and balances. And that's an amazing thing about our system. It's like none of the three powers that may be have full autonomy and full power. They kind of self-check and check each other. We disagreed with the regulators' assessment. These markets, the law was clearly saying they were legal. And I always say this. I think the law applies to the industry, to participants and people, but it also applies to the government. Sometimes this is kind of missed, right? The government is not the law.
47:11there is the law and the law is something that we all have to apply including the government and we disagree with that decision and i think we were bold enough it was a very difficult decision i think suing a government comes with a lot of cost um and we were hurt pretty dramatically by that but we won and we were right um and so i think that's number one i think that's kind of like a beauty i i came from lebanon right like that is something that would never happen in lebanon like just like the notion of like oh you know i disagree with the government i'm going to go sue it, it's like, where do you even go?
47:39Like, I don't even know, like, if you walk into the courthouse with a lawsuit in hand, I don't even know, like, I think they turn it into a cigarette, maybe. I don't know. And the South Park thing, I think is just a statement that, like, we built something that has gone mainstream. Like, I think that, like, people care about. And I think that's, you know, that's, I think that's, it's been a wild ride to get there. How do you think about Kalshi as a part of everyday life? It seems like everywhere you return. There are billboards, Instagram ads, even on the Apple sports app, they've got betting lines.
48:12And I know you guys do a lot of advertising that certainly I'm seeing a lot of the advertising about sports betting on NFL and this and that. How does it feel to have this kind of a part of daily life? I think on the one hand, it is very fun. On the other, I think I have seen some ads that talk about creating a side hustle or passive income, whether it's from you guys or others. how does it feel to be a part of that reshaping of kind of how people interact with the financial markets? The way I'll answer this question is I'll sort of go back to kind of the core of how, like kind of why we started the company.
48:47So I spent time in financial markets, like at Goldman and at Citadel. At Goldman, the thing that struck me is sort of the large institutions, I was there in 2016. There were two big events in 2016, Brexit, and then the US election, so the first Trump election. all the kind of big guys what they were focused on is essentially you know I want to get exposure to Brexit or hedge against it and then I want to get exposure to Trump or hedge against that and then we would create these financial bundles and all of that and there were three issues like one it was a we gave them the wrong products like the traditional financial markets don't get you the exact sort of yes no is Trump going to win exposure that they were looking for so one of the big things we sold is the the S &P if they wanted to go long Trump so people write about trump but then they lost money so it's a horrible you know the second thing is there wasn't an open fair market for people to price this question it was just like the bank deciding and we would charge crazy fees it was it was exorbitant and the third that like irked me the most is like a lot of people have views on this like and also a lot of people are impacted by brexit it's like this notion that like you are only impacted by brexit if you're big enough to get a seat at the goldman sachs table like was a bit weird to me it was like kind of like you know but this is where the idea was like you have a financial market to price companies commodities like what if you built one to price like simple questions about the future and if you did something like this like the beauty of this is like areas of expertise like everyone is an expert on something like areas of of knowledge and expertise and passion lie much in a much broader set than just wall street there's a lot more people out there outside of wall street that have views and have knowledge about politics i have knowledge about the economy they read the news every day and they love it and they love interacting with the news uh it could be the culture it could be sports it could be any of these sort of categories but right now it's kind of this this you know um the set of instruments is very wall street specific like an average person is not gonna look at an interest rate swap and be like i'm gonna participate in that it's just you know too complicated very unrelatable and i think the thing that's changed and that's that's great i mean there's for example like um there's this account on Twitter it's like only grounded 10 or something like that you know that this person basically has made$70 ,000 trading on culture culture markets so how successful movies are going to be what Taylor Swift is going to release or not release and they paid off their student loans with that and it's just kind of like their favorite company like they love the company so much because they're like i have spent like hours and days and weeks and months get it learning about this and up until now it was kind of like it was like a fun side thing now i can like actually you know actually exercise my skills and it could become a hobby and i could sort of try to make money off of it um and i see this very similar it's kind of like uber's value proposition with these types of marketplace new category kind of creators like uber was sort of like you have a lot of free time how about you ride a little bit and make some money and in our case like you have a lot of knowledge sometimes very niche weird knowledge like maybe even your family doesn't even want to hear about it at thanksgiving but how about you kind of try to make some money off of that and and from the beginning it's like if we can build that financial market in a regulated safe way like where you put the right set of customer protection and you let people kind of openly and transparently trade against each other that could be very interesting things because you can have this sort of like social crowdsourced.
52:19Let's figure out the truth together. Let's figure out the price. The same way that markets figure out the price. When you talk about expert knowledge, I know there's this idea, you know, from Warren Buffett and others that when it comes to the stock market, nobody knows anything, you know, that isn't already priced in. Do you feel like that's different? Maybe could you call it like a long tail of topics or is it you feel like that dynamics different if you're making that proposition to people? That's a great question. I actually think so. You know, it's interesting. Like, I think that because like, let's think about it in simple terms, right?
52:50Like the, if you go to stock market and try to buy an option on Tesla, like how could you know more than like the market makers, right? I mean, I actually worked at some of these, like how could you, right? Like it's kind of rigged there. It's like there's asymmetric information. The large institutions, Wall Street has more information about where options and stocks are going to move than the average person. It's kind of a truth, right? and no matter what you do, you can do all the research in the world on the stock, you're not going to have the vast data sets and pools of data that like the big hedge funds have.
53:21So they will always have an advantage over you. And to me, it's that imbalance of advantage that make it sort of like, it's very hard to actually gain an edge if you put in, like, if you put effort into the stock market. On CalShield, it's different because like, there's a team of traders, for example, on the weather that like scrape satellite data and they create correlation patterns and they have meteorologists in the team etc and they figure out like you know all these sort of like sophisticated data science models to predict the weather next day and they are making money of it they're pretty successful and the beauty of it is like i don't think the hedge funds have any more information than they do right like if you could call that like creating the fundamentals if you were, or like doing the work of understanding the fundamentals.
54:11The fundamentals. That's where the truth side comes in. I have studied Timothee Chalamet's eyes more than anyone, and therefore I know that he is SKD, right? That's what you're saying is like there's people who may obsess about things. That's got to be a prediction market, right? Chalamet and SKD, do you know about this? I don't know about this. What is it? There's like a rapper who is in disguise, and people think it might be Timothee Chalamet. Oh, I don't know. That's interesting. People like claim to know his eyes because, you know, and say that it's him. These markets reward people to go out and do research and then bring it into the open market.
54:49Right. And over time we get holistically. So think about, for example, the OK, whether tariffs are net good or net bad for society or whether there's going to be a recession this year or not. right like one way to do this is like you go and do this bloomberg economist survey and you ask a bunch of you know experts hey what do you think and then they give an answer and that's our forecast right that's historically been this is what we believe to be true um but it doesn't work that well if you compare that to the calci economic forecast over the last few years we have been much much more accurate it's just much better kind of gauge of what's going to happen and the reason is because it's a very different mechanism, which is now I'm giving an incentive.
55:28I'm rewarding people to actually go out and do research and then come and trade on it, bring it to the market. And if you give that, think of it, that incentive at scale, it's holistically making us smarter about, for example, the economy. It's making us smarter about COVID and whether it's going to come back. Like maybe this whole COVID episode of whether, hey, COVID is done, COVID is not done. If they were listening to the markets, we were saying Omicron is going to come back. There's an Omicron wave and it was going to come back because some traders were doing research and they spent a copious amount of times you know they're not necessarily by the way like doctors or like people that you would imagine to be the covid experts the people that maybe love the topics and spend so much time in quarantine reading about it and then they brought that information to market which is very useful and if we had listened to the markets maybe we would have put like kept the mask on for a little bit longer and we might have avoided the second second wave before we let you go to rec um you recently made a comment that went kind of viral i think you got a lot of heat for it because people rightfully have concerns about the gamblification of society where you said you were, yeah, trademark, you said you want to financialize everything.
56:31What did you actually mean by that? Do you really mean that? Why'd you scare my grandma with that comment? Interesting. I think that, yeah, I saw that. I mean, it was taken out of context and people sort of like, you know, took in all sorts of directions. But really what it means is this notion of if you believe that markets work, what they do is they discover prices. They're a very good mechanism for discovering fundamentals. I think, as you said it in a great way, fundamentals behind something. And so and then uncovering as much truth as possible behind that thing. And so what we're saying is like, sure, applying that to companies is very important.
57:09Applying that to commodities or currencies is very important. but what if we applied it to some of the most important pressing questions about our future right like could we applied it to a much broader set of things and like look from first principles like we live in a world where the the ratio of noise to signal has gone up a lot misinformation is everywhere polarization is kind of an all-time high people say different things about everything and you you don't know what to like you go to twitter if you go to my twitter feed versus yours we might see literally two entirely different versions of the world to us like this is kind of a bit of an antidote it's like how about we apply some of the things that we discussed like this mechanism for truth this incentive to be truthful to be unbiased to be objective to a lot of these questions right is there gonna be an earthquake in california where is hurricane is gonna hit in florida covid is gonna be a recession these questions that do actually impact people on their day-to-day but today there's just like it's like social media where like the the incentive is engagement whereas prediction market the incentive is truth and so that's really what I meant by that.
58:09But I think that that clip was taken out of context, out of a broader, kind of a broader explanation that I was giving. Do you guys have a mission or vision or document for your own team to like steer people toward whatever type of truths you think are important? Or is it just kind of going to be driven by engagement, culture, excitement? Because I feel like that's potentially a pretty big question for you guys in what type of role you want to play in the world um that's a great question so yes the answer is yes definitely and i think that uh the way that i sort of describe it is like um you have to have a balance and you know there are certain things that for example may be more engaging but less useful from a truth-seeking perspective but that help kind of like the things that are like less engaging but more truth-seeking um from a kind of forecast perspective right so and you have to balance out between those two it's a bit like and the example is like you can look at a lot of market places right like for example maybe where ubers are most needed are like in urban areas but that's where it's harder to get riders and they're less needed in like sorry by rural areas but it's mostly in urban areas but you still have to build a critical mass in urban area to get to the rural and i think it's a little bit similar here like you have to get enough of a critical mass in certain places to basically get for example i you know for example personally i'm always interested in a more longer term forecast.
59:30The things that are sort of like, will AI overtake? Will we get another kind of like - Not when the McRib is coming back this year? What is McRib? Is it the burger? Oh my God, correct. Good for you, good for you. Good for you, man. Well, who exactly is making these calls about what goes live on the site? So a lot, I mean, and then the second point I was going to say, so a lot of it comes from our team that like are figuring out what's trending on Twitter and like what's double people's mind, like what's in the news. But the other thing, it's like, this is the other thing, like look i believe in markets right like i'm a believer in markets and like it's like look at what customers want and like what they're interested in what they're asking about and like have them suggest markets the one thing the one cover is like that doesn't mean you just do everything anything i mean we again we're regulated everything goes to a regulated pipeline and there's a number of things that we don't touch like war ties and assassination violence things that could create a bad incentive we never touch those um one because it would be illegal and And two, even if it wasn't, like, I think those would not necessarily, even though there could be interest from the forecast, like, for example, if you have a war market, I think it could create a perverse incentive.
1:00:34It could create a bad incentive. And we basically shy away and do not touch those. So I think you have to have a, like, you have to have a balance. And I think we've gotten fairly good at that balance. All right, Tarek. Well, we'll let you go research the McRib and SKD. And, yeah, we appreciate you being on the show. Thanks so much, guys. Appreciate you having me. Take care, man.
1:00:57Thanks to Tarek for coming on the show. We're a new show, so please follow, like, subscribe everywhere you get podcasts. You can also find us in lovely high-definition video on AccessPod on YouTube. If you like this episode, please leave a five-star review or thumbs up and share it with a friend. It helps a lot. You can find me at Hamburger on Twitter and at Meaning.Company. You can find my newsletter at Sources.News. Access is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and the show is produced by Hooked Creators. See you guys next time. Au revoir.
From the publisher
This week, Alex and Ellis talk about the rise of storytelling in tech and why X is now openly pleading for its haters to come back. Then they sit down with Tarek Mansour, co-founder and CEO of Kalshi, to discuss insider trading, his rivalry with Polymarket, regulatory chaos, sports betting, and why prediction markets are having a real moment.
Listen to more from ACCESS here.
ACCESS is produced in partnership with the Vox Media Podcast Network.
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