Betting on reality with Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour

25:43mean it's like i mean the whole point right is like having skin in the game right changes the behavior of people right like 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 like the whole difference is there's some skin in the game here right if if you take out the the sort of monetary incentive uh or this idea of like you know put your money where your mouth is then we default back to kind of a regular poll right people can just say anything sort of the whole kind of truth-seeking aspect sort of erodes.

26:16You 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. They'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 CalShe bans it. I actually was reading, too, that Google built its own internal prediction market and that this is becoming more common.

26:57So, 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 prediction markets, or at least regular prediction markets, which is the case for Calci. um it's an important distinction to be drawn right like if 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 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 um 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 uh things like wash trading spoofing um and then like this notion of insider trading um and what it means like what is insider trading and how do you define it and so that is regulated like exactly 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 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 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 is in 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.

29:42And so that's another way to make it public. And the same rules apply to Calci. And so 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. And it kind of, 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 Calci? So a few things. Because we've like, okay, why do we take this whole regulated approach? We take this whole regulated approach because we look, we believe this market will be very large.

30:17And, 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, comes with a certain set of risks. That's always true. self-driving cars uber rdnb 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 reported to 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 coinbase 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 college 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 we're an 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.

32:08And a lot of the specific cases actually I'm not privy to. So the, yeah, it's interesting because you don't want to have impact on, you don't want to have like a conflict of interest, right? 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. But the rules say like, actually there's an information wall between those two so that 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.

32:44Well, the relevant team, including exactly the chief regulatory officer, know, 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 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 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. Are 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?

33:26The 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 we patient markets have grown massive like to be clear so the right now i mean i think so calci is doing something like 70 80 billion dollars of volume a year um and the broader industry maybe is 150 200 billion dollars with millions of customers participating but then let's compare that to the uh commodities markets and the swabs markets that the cftc regulates and actually let me ask you how much volume notional volume do you think goes through the Chicago Mercantile Exchange a year?

34:01I was more interested maybe, I mean, I don't know the number, but I think maybe the more relevant number is, you know, volume per trader per se. Like I know that - It's still pretty small for CalSheet. 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. Haven't heard quadrillion on the podcast yet. We need an air horn or something. Yeah, it's 1 ,000 trillion.

34:39So, you know, 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 SMB, B 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 I think it's not as kind of, we still have sort of a concentration of volume amongst the kind of like prosumer traders or institutions.

35:18These 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 market so you have kind of a kind of a long tail distribution 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 dollars right like they usually you know they try to make money out of it right otherwise why are you why are you violating the And the fortunate thing about that is that the larger the size, the easier it is to flag, the more unusual the pattern is.

35:55You 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 it's kind of a problem that's like a much easier one. 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.

36:27So 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.

37:05Like why did that happen on Polymarket and not Calci? It's the same as kind of like the regulated versus unregulated model, right? And I always say this. It's like you can take any financial market. like you can think the stock market right which a lot of us perceives regulated and there's the right set of rules and 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 uh 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 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 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 doing a 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?

39:03You would prefer doing it by paying somebody in some crypto and, you know, non-traceable, like dark web thing, right? And 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 could 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.

39:38I was just at the Deal Book Summit in New York where Andrew Ross Sorkin was talking about Polymarket from the stage constantly. The All In guys talk about them. They're everywhere. Shane 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.

40:12It's like actual number of users, volume, financial health of the company, and do you have a real business? And 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 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 It was a tough year because in 2024, in the early 2024, really kind of that similar dynamic was happening.

40:58So we, again, stood firm by our 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. Because in financial services, when things go wrong, they go wrong in a bad way.

41:30And so you really need a regulator and you need regulatory oversight. So it was hard. Last year was hard because they were getting the mindshare because they launched the market. They just did it. There's a whole debate whether it was in the U.S. or not. But obviously a lot of people were in the U.S. But because they had the market and they had the offering, obviously scaled much ahead of us they basically went ahead and before us um 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 this 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 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 election market then we won that and we were right up on this we were on the right side of the law you know the market obviously changed but the mindshare now when we were looking at the metrics for the 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 my chair 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.

42:49We'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 towards a better product, you know, and I feel pretty good about our product. Do 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 US, do it right as a US 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?

43:28Like, 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. and 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 together but 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 the 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 every 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, it was like, we just go up to the press, the radio is like, guys, do you not see this dynamic?

45:12Like 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 it could become legitimate and i think that changes the dynamic because well one that was very advantageous to 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 and 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 like and i hope they stay committed to that because i think over time, both of us will push the space.

46:01Like 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.

46:29Kein Formatieren, kein Ärger, einfach machen. Jetzt lebenslauf.de besuchen und loslegen. Nach der Krise beginnt nicht die Ruhe, sondern die Veränderung. Es läuft wieder, aber anders als früher. Wer scheitert und wieder aufsteht, führt anders. Das zeigen uns Betroffene, Berater und Experten. In Folge 5 von Endstation Insolvenz geht es darum, wie aus einer beinahe Pleite echte Stärke entstehen kann. Now listen to the podcast channel Good Shafting for Credit Reform, everywhere where there are podcasts.

47:28or the world's worst outcome? I think it's a pretty good outcome. I think that like, you know, the, well, I would just 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. So that, you know, and, but the beauty about the US is like, 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.

48:01They 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. There 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 very difficult decision I think string government comes with a lot of cost and we were hurt pretty dramatically by that but we won and we were right and so I think that's number one I think that's kind of like a beauty I came from Lebanon right like that is something that would never happen in Lebanon I just like the notion of like oh you know I disagree with the government I'm gonna go sue it it's like where do you even go like I don't even know like if you walk into the courthouse with a with a lawsuit in hand.

48:52I don't even know. I think they turned it into a cigarette, maybe. And the South Park thing, I think, is just a statement that we built something that has gone mainstream. I think that people care about. And I think that 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 turn, there are billboards, Instagram ads, even on the Apple Sports app, they've got betting lines. And 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?

49:31I think on the one hand, it is very fun. On the other, I think, you know, 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? I'll do we answer this question is I'll sort of go back to kind of the core of how that kind of why we started the company so I spent time in financial markets like a Goldman and at Citadel at Goldman the thing that struck me is sort of the large institutions what the 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 I want to get exposure to Brexit or hedge against it.

50:18And 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, 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 S &P if they wanted to go long Trump. So people were right about Trump, but then they lost money. So it's 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, have knowledge about the economy.

51:38They read the news every day and they love it and they love interacting with the news. 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, you know, 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 there's this account on Twitter it's like only grounded 10 or something like that you know this person basically has made 70 ,000 dollars 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, let's figure out the truth together.

53:29Let's figure out the price the same way that markets figure out the price of them. 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 i think that um because like let's think about it in simple terms right like the the if 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 like 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 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 so 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 calcium is 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, et cetera.

54:57And 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? So you could call that like creating the fundamentals, if you were, or like doing the work of understanding the fundamentals. The 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 obsess about things.

55:34That'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 Timothy Shalem. 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. Right. 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.

56:07right 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. I'm rewarding people to actually go out and do research and then come and trade on it, bring it to the market.

56:43And 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. But 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 code 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.

57:40What 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.

58:18Applying 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.

58:50To 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 going to be an earthquake in California? Where is hurricanes going to hit in Florida? COVID is going to 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 incentive is engagement, whereas prediction market, the incentive is truth. And so that's really what I meant by that.

59:17But I think that that clip was taken out of context, out 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. that's a great question so yes the answer is yes definitely and I think that the way that I sort of describe it is like 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 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 marketplaces 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 the more longer term forecast.

1:00:39The things that are sort of like, will AI overtake? Not when the McRib is coming back this year? What is McRib? Is it the burger? Good for you. Good for you. Well, who exactly is making these calls about what goes live on the site? And then the second point I was going to say, so a lot of it comes from our team that are figuring out what's trending on Twitter and what's double people's mind, what's in the news. But the other thing, it's like, this is the other things 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 types of assassination violence things that could create a bad incentive we never touch those um one because it would be illegal 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 it 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 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 you being on the show thanks so much guys appreciate you having me

1:02:06Thanks 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.

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