Kalshi's $40 Billion CEO Is Taking On Wall Street and Vegas | PBD Podcast #881

I mean, this year we have people that are making over a hundred million dollars a year. Just on Kanshi, and they're like, not even thirty years old. Stop it, yeah. And no one knows who these people are. They're pretty secretive. Growing companies in the world, but also one of the most controversial. Kanshi calls itself a prediction market. But a lot of people consider it a gambling. You find the card counter, and what do you do with them? You kick them out of the casino. And so if anyone is doing smart research, you incentivize them not to, you push them out. We have an open market where winners can win. Actually, they incentivize people to do research and get better at the thing. Those guys are banned from the casino anyways. So then why do they hate you? I'm building the modern day financial market. That's what I'm building. Instead of giving the microphone to select few, we're giving the megaphone to millions of people. They're battling it out in the open and completely transparent way, putting money where their mouth is. Say not the way they're doing it. Imagine millions of people are doing that competing on the open market all the time. You get truth out of that. But what if some of these guys try to manipulate this because they see how much of an impact it has? What would that do to the market? Complete waste of money. Where should they have put it? Giving it to the campaign, put a bunch of ads on TV, attack ads on the other candidate. Or they should have commissioned their own polls that will say whatever they want them to say. Which by the way, you know, now, in the last stretch of the election, where's going to happen? So it's great to have you on. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I did. Kalshi, you're everywhere. I can't turn on TV with us in Kalshi, right? Tariq Mansour, co-founder of Kalshi went from what, zero to now. They're saying it's 22 billion soon to be 40 billion, depending on who's reading what article. But for the audience that doesn't know, maybe walk me through how the whole story of Kalshi came about. You're background before starting Kalshi. I was born in California and then I, a young age, I moved back to Lebanon because my parents are Lebanese. I grew up with a single mom, and you know, Lebanon is, we read some of it, it's a crazy country, it's very volatile. And it's kind of a shit show, honestly, like, but there's a lot of positive about it. It's beautiful and you know, probably hear some from friends, like with great night life, great restaurants, etc. But it's just the most defining thing is that everything's unpredictable. Like, you don't know what you're going to wake up to the next day. And you know, especially with a single mom that makes you an anxious kid and I was very anxious. I always liked math and I would play around with, I would read like papers and, and because math, you know, what's nice about it is, like, you have an answer. There's no debate. There's no my opinion versus Europe. Black and white. Yeah, there's an answer. Like, either the proof works or it doesn't work, right? That led me to, okay, I want to go where the math people go and at the time was thinking, like, MIT, this is the place. I went to MIT and then where are the math people going? Finance. Because finance is a very good application of math and, and, you know, it's funny. Like there's this saying in, at the time, because I also did the masters at MIT and in academia circles and in Wall Street, there's always this joke, which is like, you know, doing data science and research in academia is the same as Wall Street, because people do data science and research on both. The only difference in Wall Street is they have to be right, you know, because you put a paper out in it. Right. But in Wall Street, you have to make money. Yup. And, you know, that's why I always liked markets, I, because markets are a good application of incentives. Because what do markets incentivize? If you write, if you get a piece of a mission, if you're knowledgeable about the world, you make money. And if you're wrong, you lose money. Mm-hmm. Went to work at Goldman as an intern in 2016 and, you know, it's all these complicated products. The everyday laymen doesn't understand any of this stuff, you know, swaps and swaps and crowd default. And, like, all these weird, crazy terms. And then, Wall Street, what do they do over time? Is they complexify everything? They add more and more layers so that the average person doesn't understand what's going on. That kind of frustrated me a little bit. And, and the second thing is, people are coming and asking us simple questions about the future. They're like, hey, I think Trump is going to win. How do I bet on it? And these are, by the way, hatch funds, large corporations, like institutional investors. How do I trade on Trump winning the election? So who are you working on, they're at Goldman? Or you're working on it? I wasn't sure. Or mean or-- Equity derivatives in the trading side. Got it. So I was in the trading business. And, you know, they would say, okay, I think Trump is going to win. How do I play it on the markets? And we would say, you know, at the time, I remember that Trump trade was a short DSMP. Trump is a populous candidate. If he wins, he's obviously going to tank the markets. So you should, you know, if you think he's going to win, you should short DSMP. So that's what a lot of people did. From November, he won. People were right about the prediction where the SMB went up, they all lost money. That trade. Really bad way to express that opinion. So I started thinking, okay. And that was Goldman's position at the time? No, they sold it to a lot of customers, you know. But that's what happens. Like the banks at the end of the day, you're not taking the position as they are. You're selling it too. But the key thing is, to me, is like, what is a market? A market is a place that aggregates a large number of-- the largest diversity of participants, people from all walks of life, to trade on their difference of opinions, on, you know, to predict the price of stock, Apple, or price of grain, or oil. What if you build the same mechanic where buyers and sellers-- we match buyers and sellers like the New York Stock Exchange, exactly the same thing. But the underlying thing is something that people care about or relate to, whether it's politics. Like Trump is going to win or not. Brexit happens. Whether tomorrow, if it's going to be a rain, if OKC is going to win the next game, if inflation is going to go up or down. Just simple question about the future that can bring in a much larger number of people. And the more I read about it, you know, the idea wasn't you. A lot of economists love the idea of information markets, dating back to World War II. Why? Because, you know, when they would talk about the idea that market prices are the only form of truth. Why? Because markets, what they do is they aggregate information from everybody. Like, you know, you have a piece of information, Hawaii, and California, and Texas. And markets are like a magnet. They incentivize you. If you have a valuable information, what do you do? You go trade on it, and you think something is underpriced. You move it up a little bit. And if you think something is overpriced, you move it down a little bit. And that's what an information market does. And I love that idea. It's like the application of free markets to the pursuit of truth, right? Like if you and I want to figure out what the price of Apple is, we're not going to go and, like, debate with the price of Apple. We're going to look at the New York Stock Exchange. There's a big why? Because there's rigor in it. The incentive is to get it right. But now, in politics, what do we do? We debate. But now, we build a market with the same level of financial rigor, where people are there's quants and hedge funds. And people that are doing research and if they have good information, they're going to come trade on it and make money. And if they have bad information, they're having stupid opinions. They're going to trade on those opinions and lose money. And that's what the beauty of your market is. It filters out bad information from good information. And then aggregates it beautifully across the wisdom of the crowd, millions of people. So I had to start the company. I was like, I got to do this. I was going to go work at Citadel, which I love, by the way, it's a great place. But I was like, I got to do this. It's like, I think, too important to not do. Was anybody doing that at the time? You know, there was a lot of trials. So there was University of Iowa that tried an election market in the '90s, way back in the '90s. And it was super accurate. Small scale. Really? For profit. Yeah. And I was like, this is interesting. And then, how did you find that about it? I just started reading online and because economists really love the idea forever, they really wanted this to exist. And then, you know, then there was a book, Super Forecasters written by MIT professor, which I was, Philip Tetlock. And it's about this idea, like, about super forecasting and the art of who are the people that are good at forecasting the future? Who are the people that are good at doing this? And, you know, he did this very interesting analysis where he put a bunch of geopolitical experts, like elites, from DC, the big guys, the big talking head. And he put them against a bunch of random dudes to predict, you know, random dudes in random woman, to predict geopolitics, the thing that the experts are experts in. Guess what did better? The random people. Why? Because this is what's beautiful about it. It's like what he realized is like, actually, information doesn't sit with the elites. We are always making decisions based on what the elite tell us. Top down. Wow. To sit with the people instead of the elite. To sit with people. A lot of decisions are made by a handful of people, but the information that's important sits with millions of people on the nodes on the extreme everywhere. It's decentralized, distributed. And so markets surface that. They are magnet for all the information, for all the people to kind of bring it up, and then predict the future. And I love that. And to me right now, as you look at it, why is calcium more accurate than all these other places, you know, and you know, we, the Federal Reserve put our paper in February. They compared our forecast, the calcium, which is main street average people, to Wall Street on the economy, like inflation, fed interest rates, GDP, unemployment, which are the things that Wall Street, Bloomberg and all these guys are very good at gets who did better, calcium. And keep all the comments to me, it's like, who are these traders, like, who are these people doing it? And like, you know, and there's actually some research. I don't know if you can pull it up about who the traders are. I think it's one of these, yeah, this one. If you go down a little bit on the chart, and I love this, I mean, a little bit higher, that chart, that's right here, right, like 80% of our customers went to public school. If you look at our customers, our top customer is that twice as likely to have worked in retail, then have worked on Wall Street. You know, our best inflation forecaster is a random dude in Kansas, never traded financial markets, just loves reading about the economy and ask people about what do you think about prices. And imagine millions of these people, but that's the beauty we're giving people, how did you find a guy in Kansas? I mean, now we build the, you know, the people know because on the back end, you keep asking, why does this guy keep getting it right? Yeah, and I thought, you know, I talked to him, he's very anonymous and like, there's others that are like that. But the people that are no good at it. Do you look at people that are the best at picking like, is there like a leader's bulletin on the back? Yeah, some of their public, some of them don't opt into like showing it because they want to be very private. So they don't want people to know, it's like, Wall Street, a lot of people don't want to know. But do you, do you have the ability to find out who are the people? Oh, we do. We do, we do. We do. And what pattern would I give in names? What pattern? Because last week I had Frances Halganon from the Facebook whistleblower who was here. That's right, that's right. The movie that they just did the social reckoning, whatever it was called, she's told me about a program Facebook had what was called cross check and under that division, they developed a group where they looked at how many people who high score of reason, reasonability, meaning say this person's a conservative, but they get the most people from the left that like their post or say this person's a liberal, how many people on the right listen to them? And they say this is a reasonable human being, give them a bigger wide audience because they're reasonable. They're fair, even though we know which side they lean on. What patterns did you notice would who gets the most inscribed? - Why did you just subscribe? Because the people, and so this is what's important, it's not the elites, it really is. - That's wild. - I mean, this is the key thing, and that's why by the way, prediction markets use, look at the news and the elites, they don't like them because it's like, at the core, it's moving power from information from being centred with a few gay keepers. And a few people that tell us, here's what to believe in what not to believe. And it's giving it to millions of people. Nobody controls the prediction markets. So I don't, it's all the trading activity is public, and you can see who's trading and what they're doing. But it's millions of people saying, here's the percentage of something happening. And that shift of balance of power, this is what free markets do so well. It's they're giving, instead of giving the microphone to select few, we're giving the megaphone to millions of people that are battling it out in the open and completely transparent way and competing on their opinions. And if you look at it, who they really are, it's not like the same people that predict sports are good at predicting politics, economics, financial markets. - Would you notice a pattern? Like if you're able to be specific? - Not age, not gender, not who they are, what their background is, it's more skill, which is the skill of self calibration, which is you go out, they're always reading below the headline. They look for information, like opposing views. They look for information that comes from opposing views at the centem to understand what the other side has. - Covered their own blind spots. - Yes, where am I wrong? They're always thinking, they're not thinking, they're trying to self-calibrate, because humans, we have this thing called the affecturistic. Have you heard of it? - No. - The affecturistic is this thing where humans, when they're, when you put something in front of them, in the first five seconds, we have this thing where emotionally we decide whether we like it or not, immediately. And that's why social media has really fueled that. That's why we're becoming so polarized, because you see a 10 second real about a person. If it's positive the first time, if I like the person pretty much forever, and if it's negative the second, the first time you're gonna hit that person pretty much forever, and it's gonna be so hard to get a real authorance. And you know how hard it is for us to change opinions, we don't like changing opinions. The guys are really good at prediction marks. The women and guys are very good at prediction marks, are the ones that resist it. The ones that are like, why do I believe what I believe? Let me go and seek out the opposite side and see what they believe and why they believe it. And like I'm always calibrating. Am I too certain, am I not certain enough? And by the way, they're not, when people say, you know, people are betting on cash. Sure they people are betting. And they're the same way they bet on the stock market and the same way they bet on anything else. But a lot of what they do is they trade in the sense that like, they're buying low and selling high. They think, you know, you could buy Republicans or Democrats, the same people are buying Democrats or Republican winning the Senate. Not because that's what they want to happen. That's because they're thinking what will happen. And right now, for example, a lot of people will tell me, the Republicans are underpriced for winning the Senate. I think the odds of Republicans are like 36% right now. That's underpriced, right? And they may be like, buy a 36. And then if it goes up to, you know, 50, they'll sell it at that point. And they're not thinking, they don't wait till the election. They basically buy and sell, buy low sell high. They're always thinking out where the value stands. And that's a very different type of thinking than the emotional clickbait that we have on Twitter. You know, on Twitter and social media, you don't get rewarded for truth. You get rewarded for, you know, if you put out a bunch of misinformation, you don't get punished. You get rewarded, you get more likes. In prediction markets, if you trade based on misinformation, you get punished, lose money. - So do you have a top 50 earners that you'll look at who have made the most money? - I look to have that. - Yeah, we have top, I mean, really we look at the top 15,000 because we have 30 million customers now. - Top 15,000. - Yeah. - And what does a top make? Are there people that make millions of dollars, people that make tens of millions of dollars? - Alpha Calcule. - Yeah, yeah. And some of them are regular people who are well known people. - They're pretty much all like the vast majority are regular people. - People think that Wall Street is outperforming on Calcule, but we are a new Wall Street. We're enabling a much broader people. You know the big short, you know those two guys that were in the basement, you remember those two guys, the guys that were in the basement that were, I was at Lone Pine Capital or something like that, I forgot the ones that, like the two kids that were in their mom's garage and then they were like that. - I do, so the guy goes to them and talks them. I remember those guys. - Pull it up and pull up and the images so people can do the two boys in a basement. Just type in next to big short. - Basement, yeah. - Yeah. - Let's see. - In the movie, type in in the movie? - I think you should just do like two, it was called Lone Pine Capital or something like that, I forgot. - Okay, keep going. I'll find it, I'll send it to 'em. - No, not that, not that. - Yeah, but I think those guys are the, you know, no, it's not this one, I forgot what the name is, maybe it's not Lone Pine, it's something capital. - Charlie Gallor and Jamie Shipley. - That's exactly that. - From a brown fuel capital. - Brownfield, right? - Yes. - And that's the customer. It's the people that are like, you know, looking at the world and trying to get smarter about the world and that's prediction markets, like financial markets, what do they do? They incentivize people to go out and get smarter about the world and get more diligent and if they do the analysis and they get smart, they get rewarded for it because they're bringing, so information to the open market and when people tell me, always like, well, how is this different from gambling, right? Like, how is that, what is the difference, right? And I always say it's actually very simple, structural difference. You know, back in the day when society, when we got grain futures, which I think now we all see it as a financial instrument, boring financial instrument. Society thought it was gambling. Why? Because farmers were betting on the price of grain. Some farmers were betting, some farmers were hedging and like, how do we decide that this is gambling versus not gambling? And the way they decided, yes, some people are speculating, do people bet or gamble on robinhood? Certainly, they do a form of it. The question is not whether there is some behavior that's like this, the question is like, are you doing that in an open competitive marketplace that rewards you for being smarter and for knowledge? Or are you betting against a sports book or a casino that actually doesn't reward you? It rewards you for basically losing money, right? Like, the person that gets the sweet of the casino is not a card counter. That's actually trying to be smart and like, do smart things. Is the person that's basically losing a lot of money to the book and has signs of addiction and is, you know, is in there for the entertainment? And there was, I regulated it differently and treated differently because the markets have a lot of positive externality, which is the forecast. That's why we look at the forecast of what's going to happen in the midterms or sports event or other. And then some people are actually using it. And I think you're going to like this. They're putting a position not to speculate to make money. They're putting it to hedge themselves as an inform of insurance. What does that mean? So, you know, so why, when green futures came around, they were helpful because of the prediction. They would tell the farmers, "Here's how much you can like sell your, here's the prediction of prices in six months or how much you can sell for." And then hedging, which is like, farmers would basically short the price of grain so that if the price of grain goes down and they lose revenue, the short pays them the offset of the rep, right? And so you see this on events, right? Like, for example, in hurricanes and the keys in Florida. - Is this like buying a stock and buying a put at the same time? - Exactly. It's the same thing. It's the same as buying insurance. So like a lot of people in the keys in Florida, they buy yes on our hurricane markets as a way to basically get paid if the hurricane hits their town. Instead of going to insurance companies as insurance companies don't ensure a lot of these homes. The other sport is a big source of hedging for us. So last week there was an article and there's hundreds of businesses do the same. We have a restaurant chain that owns 25 bars and they made their math that they make $120,000 if the Dodgers make it past the playoffs. You know why? Because if they make it, you're gonna have a lot of customers that come watch the games and they sell. And $0 if they don't or like much lower. So what did they do? They basically shorted the Dodgers. They bought no on the Dodgers making it past the playoffs so that the event contracts, the hedge pays them the revenue loss. It offsets the revenue loss. So now they're $60,000 up. But that's very important. It's very deep. Brilliant. It's brilliant and it's critical because why did Congress step in and create a national wide model regulation for grain futures? Why are they so important? Even though people are betting on the price of grain, like when people are saying it's gambling, imagine farmers had less predictability of their business in six months. What would they do? They would invest less. They get less lines of credit. Predictability in business is one of the key. Anyone who's run a business would know this. You would pick a cash flow that's zero or 120,000. Your cash flow that's $60,000 either way. You'd pick the predictable cash flow. And the reason is that you can give it better loans over time. Predictability helps you invest more certainly for the future. And so over time is what the river's markets do. As we get smarter about what's gonna happen, who's gonna win the midterms, we can make better decisions and then hedge all the things that impact us negatively over time, which helps promote investment and so on. Is there a way for somebody to get good at Kalshi where, hey, let me teach you how to be a better trader on Kalshi. Is there things like that as well on how to succeed? - It's a skill, right? It's a, it's, it's, it's maybe, let me ask this question. Who is, for sure, would I give it a name? Again, I'm not looking for names. I just went on chat, GBT, and asked the question, who the top 10 traders on Kalshi, these are some of the names that came up. Via markets, 951, can you go back to it? You know, loss buck. And so the win rate to the right is what matters the most to me, right? 55%, 73%, 41%, does this mean based on the position they make that's how often they win? - Yeah, the win rate is like, yes, exactly. Out of each position you take, how often is the right position? - Is the highest ever public on the afforded profit? - Yeah, people that are making like over, I mean, this year we have people that are making over $100 million this year. - Just on Kalshi. - And they're like, like, not even 30 years old. - Stop it. - Yeah. - And no one knows who these people are. - They're pretty secretive. - In the state. - It's like the brown field capital. - In the states. - Yeah, I mean, we, by the way, it's not like, we have a lot of people that are making millions and they tend to be more like private. By the way, that's not everybody. That's what I always say. People tell me, but there's a lot of people that lose. For sure, it's a competition. How many people win the NBA five? - Is it an 80, 20 split? What's the number? - It's like more than 65, 35. - 65 lose, 35. - By the way, he's what's interesting. What percentage of hedge funds are performing the S&P area? - That's a point. it's a much smaller-- - 20%, yeah. - 80% on the performance of the S&P, 80% of hedge funds lose against their hedge funds. - So you're better off just betting in S&P, than 80% of hedge funds, right? But that hedge funds are benchmark against the S&P because if you're below S&P, you're lost. But like, in the reason it's market, financial markets, including prediction markets, whether it's sports or whether politics, et cetera, there is skill-based game. If it was a game of chance, then it'd be 50/50. 50% of people would lose, which by the way, like is what you would see in a casino or whatever. But because it's a skill, some people are gonna put more effort and get better at it over time. - Another guy made a hundred million this year so far? - It's now he has a small team. It's like a few people on the team. - So do you think it's gonna get to a point where a calver person's gonna make a billion? It's gonna be-- - I mean, we could get, I mean, it's like the markets, right? Like, Jane Street and these guys make billions of dollars in the open markets. So as the market grows, I mean, now we're doing a trillion dollars of volume here. So as the market grows, it's gonna be, yeah? Okay, what number shocked you the most? You just said, we're gonna do a trillion. How much did you guys do during the world cup? I mean, I don't know what it was to do. - I mean, yeah, we, I don't know. We're bigger than we were now. Then we were at the time, actually. So I did a billion, billion, some, yeah. I think that was July, I mean-- - That's one game, right? Welcome home. - Yeah, but that month, I mean, we're doing, right now, we have because we have prediction markets. We have perpetual futures, traditional and romantic futures. I think the prediction markets are analyzing something like 600 billion a year and then the rest is 400 billion. So we're like around a trillion dollars of annualized volume. But-- - And what is the business model? How do you make money? - We take small fees, so that's the key. I mean, this is also one of the difference of being a market versus sports market. Sports market, business model. That's why, you know, betting and gambling people don't like in societies. It's a way to, your revenue is equal to your customer's losses. So what do you do? You forgot who the winners are and you banned them. You find the card counter and what do you do with them? And so if anyone is doing smart research, you incentivize them not to. You push them out. If anyone is a science of addiction and they keep losing money and they're not, they're doing it like without really thinking. You incentivize them to keep doing it. That's how you get rewarded. And you give the bonuses and promos. So you can keep these losers coming back. Markets, I am a marketplace. You are matching you as a buyer to somebody who's selling to you. And if you open the, for example, the Senate or any of the sports markets we have, you know, if you go down a bit and you click on Democrat Party, I don't know, yeah, right here. And then you, yeah, if you look at this, if you go down a little bit, yeah, right here, you know, yeah, right in the middle. The top, they ask is, if you scroll slightly up, just so that we see, yeah, right here. They ask are people that are selling and the bids are people that are buying. It's the same as a stock market. This is what a New York Stock Chain looks like. And we match buyers and sellers. And I take a small percentage. So if people trade, let's say $1,000 here, I'll take 0.7%. So I'll take, you know, let's call it $7, right? - On a thousand. - Yeah. - Is that relatively the number? - Yeah, it's like the New York Stock Chain. It's exactly, yeah. And I think that like, that is key because I do it whether somebody wins or loses it in different. Actually, I won the card counters or the smart people, like the New York Stock Chain wants the smart traders. Why? Because the smart traders are the ones that create efficient markets and accurate prices. No one will use my forecasts if it's not calibrating over time. Those people are very skilled are, and that's why the difference in model is so important. - It's like poker. You're not the enemy. Your blackjack, unlike blackjack, where the enemy is the casino here. - It's different from poker in one other sense. We're discovering the prices of something that has real human impact. So on poker, and people are like, you know, betting against each other. You're not learning anything, because you know what the probability of a card flipping is. Here, you're learning this ideal price discovery. You're learning the prices. If you go back up to the chart, that chart, you would never like, you know, have a chart on which poker hand is gonna play next, because, you know, that chart is a fixed probability. It's a, you know, whereas here we're, like that positive externality of getting smarter about the world is what makes markets. - Okay, so let's just say, let walk me through it. If somebody right here puts $100,000 on no $0.37 is the democratic party. What does that mean? - So if you look at it here, if you, yeah, on the right, if you click on a dollars all the way to the right, just a little bit, yeah, yeah, yeah, shares. And then if you type in 1,000 shares in the thing, it tells you immediately. So you're buying 1,000 shares. The average price you're gonna get filled out is 64 cents, and you're gonna pay $650 after fees, and then you're gonna get paid $1,000 if you end up being right. Now you're now, now you own those 1,000 shares. They're not shares of a stock or shares of, like, oil futures. They're shares of, you know, the Democrats winning the Senate. And then in a few weeks, if that goes up to, like, let's say, 75%, you can sell those shares, and you get, like, - Not even waiting till the end. - 11%. That's what most people do. The vast majority of everyone, they're buying and selling. - What percentage doesn't wait till the end? - Of the volume, I think it's like 70%. - 70% doesn't wait till the end. - Yeah, I mean, because they're traders. Like they're trading, they're bringing out, like a lot, again, it's, you know, I discussed this, people that are in the middle, a lot of these guys are also like, you know, sometimes they're kind of swing voters, because they're dispassionate about the outcome. They're unburdened by ideology. They're like thinking, okay, the Democrats are a little bit too overpriced or underpriced right now. So if I think it's overpriced, I'm gonna sell. - Wow. - It's like a stock. - That totally makes sense, yeah. - But that level of rigor is markets. - Okay, so let me ask you today, today's a special day. Why Brazil, election, president, Bolsonaro, Lula, right? Day one, you guys had him at 80%. - That's right. - And if you go to it, widen it a little bit more. Yeah, so day one, go back to like two days ago. Go back two days ago, you had him at 87%. That's about two weeks ago, a week ago. That's fine. - I like 75. - Yeah, 75%. - So in all of a sudden, this flips, Lula wins, 15 out of 17 districts that were doing the counting of the votes, said Bolsonaro's gonna win. Last minute, he pleased with the Supreme Court to open up the voting in areas that are pro, Lula, and all of a sudden he comes out of nowhere, wins out on how many gets plus minus 10.6 million. This has never happened in a history, right? So for you, when you watch it, 'cause you have a data that we don't have, what do you speculate is going on? - That's what's important to understand, there's two things. One, a market doesn't create new data. A market aggregates all the data, right? Like Apple stock doesn't run the product for Apple, right? Now Apple stock is at $100 a share today, let's call it. If Apple does a series of actions, like for example, if they, some bad regulatory action comes out that they were doing something bad in some of their factories, what's gonna happen to the stock? It's gonna go down. Why? Because new information has come to light. It is now gonna be priced in by the market. Market's gonna absorb that information in real time. If Apple releases a bunch of great products over the next three weeks, what's gonna happen to the stock? It's gonna go up. So what, and this is always important. Market's what they do is they absorb new information in real time. They're an aggregate of, and in the elections is the polls, the news, candidate quality. If candidate has a scandal, what's gonna happen to their odds? They're gonna tank. So markets, that's what they do. They do a very good job at summarizing all the information that's out there. And you know that the incentive to summarize it is clean because there's no partisan lens or bias. Like why is Fox saying something or CNN saying something? There's a partisan lens in here. Whereas the only lens for operational eyes that people are trying to get to ground truth because if they're closer to the truth, they're gonna make money. And they're further from the truth, they're gonna lose money. Now, sometimes there's new piece of information is very material, right? Like if a candidate is doing very well, but then their scandal happens, they're gonna tank very quickly. And that's what happened. There's a big new shift that happened yesterday on the election, which is-- Could you guys pinpoint what it was or could? I think a big shift happened when the, I think the extensions, I think started happening, but I hadn't looked at it quite yet. But the more interesting way to evaluate the prediction markets, I think. If you go back to the calibration plot, I think we have it in open, yeah, right now. If you go down a little bit, is this? So if you zoom in a little bit on some of these charts, that's what we call a calibration plot. So you cannot evaluate a prediction market accuracy on one market. There's a study on like two million markets that's public, anyone can replicate it. Where it says, what is it probably that we're saying something is gonna happen with? And how often does it happen? So if he says something has 20% chance, it doesn't mean it's not going to happen. It means it's gonna happen one in five times. It's gonna happen two in 10 times. It's gonna happen 20% of the time, right? God. And that's so important. It's like sometimes the 10% error, if you run the race 10 times, what's gonna happen? It's gonna happen one out of 10, it's not. And so that's what shows you in the spot, which is actually very accurate. It's like when we say something that has 20% chance, it actually does happen in 20% of the time. So on the back end, what did it show to you guys? Did you, did Cal she know that there is a possibility that Lula wins? There was a 25% chance, one in four possibility that Lula wins and that was looking at all the prevailing factors. And that change obviously dramatically when the new material information came to light. But like again, if Lula, if you play that election four times and Lula wins zero out of those four times, then we would be wrong. He should win one out of those four times. And that happens. And so what I say with the midterms right now, if people ask me, oh, how do you evaluate the midterms? Like look, look at 100 races that Cal she's predicting. And assume that the, it's saying that the Republican is winning 50% of the time or like 40% of the time. How many of those hundred races should go Republican? 40. It shouldn't be zero. It's not like every one of those races should go Democrat. And that one makes more sense because that's a volume of races, right? You're not dealing on one. That's right. But you have to look at elections over time. It's a probabilistic model, right? They probably, like right now we're seeing the Senate is going to go 64% Democrats, 60, whatever. It's like a three-sided coin where two sides are Democrat. One side is Republican. It's a three-sided die. There's three sides. Two damn one Republican. If you roll that die, you could still land Republican one in three chances. It's not a poll. And people really confuse markets with polls because polls are, what are you going to vote for? It's checking who's going to vote for what? Markets are, what is the probability? What do you think will happen? Something will happen. So of the guy that does a hundred million, does he do a lot of trades? Is it the person like, so it's not one. It's like diversifying. Is that kind of a, for sure, for sure. You're trading in and out, and those are the guys that make the market's accurate. Those guys would never be allowed on a sportsbook. Why? Because if they were making that amount of profit, who is it going from? The casino. Yeah. It's very different. You brought up the casino. The casino is a way to move money from people to the casino. So, who hates you? Who are you? Who is the enemy? Is that the casino? Yes. Because who would have topped three enemies of you? In the casinos. Mainly casinos at the front. I mean, yeah, because I think that they are the ones that are pushing the states to come after us. And because they want them monopoly on this too, right? That's how, you know, they, that's a model that's more transparent. It's healthier. But also, it's a, it's a market like, you know, institutional, we have institutional clients that are using Calci signals, but also using it to hedge against different, different events. You can now use a sportsbook to hedge against different events like that will never happen. Yeah, so we're doing an event in Las Vegas, and I don't know if you, uh, this got you or not, MGM Grandery, you know, we got the big vault conference. And while we're doing that, all of some last minute, they're like, you can't have Calci here. They don't have to do with anything. Sensor. Calci cannot be a sponsor. So Calci can be a sponsor. No, they can't. It's our sponsor. They're, they're, no, you can't, you can't have Calci in here because Cal. So what is the feud with an MGM in Calci? So what I'm going to probably on this too, I mean, some industries, you know, don't want more transparency into something. You don't think they want more transparency? Yeah, because think about it. Like, if, if, if we have an open market where that is, where winners can win, actually, that incentivizes people to do research and get better at the thing. And now, compared to the model where, like, every time you do it, a little bit of research, you get punished for it. You get kicked out of the casino. What does that tell people? Actually, oh, I'm getting really screwed with these odds. These odds are terrible. They're giving me bad odds. All these are, and then also they want a monopoly on any more, it's big business now and they feel like, oh, we should have a monopoly on this too. That's the age old question. Why did the taxes go after Uber? Is it because Uber was worse for a customer? No, absolutely not. Never. It's never what it is. Never, it's never what this is about. It's never about, because I'm actually, you know, and by the way, this issue of young men and addiction, I think it's a very real issue. And I've been always saying, the beauty of cash is, I don't make money of the people that are, like, losing money and getting addicted, et cetera, as much as the draftings does because, you know, the sportsbooks, they're betting on those customers. And so they need them. They keep getting more of them over time. The prediction markets, if somebody is losing all the time, they're losing it to somebody else. And so, in my view, I always tell the federal government, it's like, if you're worried about customer protection, let's regulate this and let's put sensible guardrails where, like, people that are using it in a way that's dangerous for them and they're responsible and it responsibly, we use tools to add friction to their accounts and make sure that we're giving them, you know, hey, you've lost a lot, relax, stop, maybe you have to take a pause, maybe you have to exclude yourself and move on. Guess who is the most against those types of things? Casinos. For sure. Those are the most profitable customers. Interesting. And those are the people that are coming out publicly saying, oh, you know, the prediction markets are the issue with young men, prediction markets were never the issue with young men. How much money did you guys lose that they lose to you? I don't think they are because I don't think 70-80% of our volume is the sophisticated multi-monitor, they're doing modeling, they're doing all this sort of thing, those guys are banned from the casino anyways. The smart traders cannot be in the sportsbook. You said 80% of them only have a public school diploma, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm saying it's a separate established, 80% of the people that are like the volume that comes from, 80% of our volume comes from a small percentage of people that are very, they are doing very highly like a lot of research, a lot of analysis. Got it. So the 24% are the banking wealth, being know what they're doing. These guys are in the space. Yeah, and those guys at the point is like, it's not a high percentage, as you'd imagine, people would think, oh, but it's not, it's actually 50% of our customers worked in retail. Okay, so one of the, yeah, that's absolutely amazing. But so, it's like anyone can, like if you put the effort, you can win. Now, look, not a lot of people put the effort, a lot of people just do it on the side, or it is. Define effort. Yeah, like research, time, energy, you have to read a lot about what's going on in Texas, who's voting how I'm going to break down the different demographics, like you have to get deep, the same way that you get deep on a stock, if you're a bank, if you're a bank analyst and Morgan Stanley, what are you doing all day? You're doing quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis, you're doing surveys, you're polling, you're researching the stock, is the product going to work, you're asking customers, you like the product, you hit product, and then based on that information, you go and say, oh, I think the stock is going to, is overpriced or underpriced, and you trade based on that. And that's how you make money, but you get rewarded by the open market for that information that you brought. That's the same thing that's happening here, but you're doing it on a much broader set of things. It's in fashion too high. Is this sports team going to win or not? And that provides us a public good that is this bottom-up people driven forecast of what's going to happen in the world. So I asked the question here. I said, how much money have casinos lost to Kalshi? I'll read it to you. You can pull up the same questions he would have tells you. How much casinos have already lost in a January 2026 analysis by citizen estimates that prediction markets have diverted approximately 5% of legal sports betting volume. This translates to $8 billion in annual betting volume redirected to prediction markets. Approximately $800 million in potential annual sports book revenue, assuming they 10% sports book hold, $1.3 billion in potential state gaming revenue for taxes diverted since 2025. Does that sound about right? I don't think so. You think it's smaller? Yeah. The CEOs are drafting a fund in their quarterly earnings of this less than 1% cannibalization from prediction. Diff said this. And they write about that. Yeah. So why are they so worried about you? You know, there's a message like in the casino, by the way, and this is certainly true for casinos. Like casinos, no one is deciding to go and trade on Kalshi versus like going to their buddies and have a few drinks of the casino. That's not. If anything, actually the people that we cannibalize, if we read that study, which we're cannibalizing Robinhood and the NASDAQ and people that are in the financial markets that now have another financial tool and a financial instrument, but they're on things that they relate to because a lot of people, when they trade in options on zero data expiry options on S&P or NASDAQ, they think they don't have an edge against the big Wall Street guys. Whereas this is the same thing you're buying and selling, you're trading in an open marketplace, but on things that you may have an edge. People read the economy, people read politics, people like the weather and they do studies on the weather. Yes, by the way, there's some analysis, an independent school that is studying our weather markets. It shows that it's 10% more accurate than the weather stations. Think about that. We're 10% more accurate than the weather stations at predicting the weather. And that's because of our customers, like they're doing all sorts of crazy analysis on weather patterns, etc. They do it. We just did an ad with Shane Gillis on this. I don't know if you saw it. It was, if people loved it. With Danny McBride? Danny McBride? Danny McBride? No. It was the one with Shane Gillis and Danny McBride. Which one is it? It came out on Friday, it's, it's, it's fun, but it's, you know, they, it's a whole skit about how Shane, this guy is, they're both me, they're all, oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes. And then Danny McBride keeps getting them, you know, he's a, he's a weather, they're both weather men and Danny McBride keeps getting it right and, and Shane gets, gets it. Two phenomenal guys to get to do this. They're, they're, they're a lot of fun. Yes. So they're drafting CEO Jason Robbins in August, 2026 that only 1% and he also said 80 to 90% in the prediction markets, volume and states with legal sports, but came from professional traders and institutions. He's exactly right. Rather than traditional sports, but customers. And he's right. Then why do they? He's right. I mean, they're not, we're not. It's just about them. It's the broader casino because I think that, because you know, it's feel like they should also get a monopoly on this. So they want, are they in the space or they're not in it yet? They want to get into it. And like, it's too late for them. It's always interesting, you know, that a lot of these guys, because you know, first they came to us and they were figuring out if there's a way for them to get into it. And what did they say? Can we work together? They were figuring out if there's a way for them to get into the space, et cetera. And a lot of them realized that they were late. So what did they do? Like, let's litigate. You know, it's always litigate, legislate. And then when you finally realize that this is here to stay and the consumers have adopted it and they, you know, they don't want to change it, you finally innovate. But the state versus federal is never about customer protection. They're trying to ban prediction markets. Why? Because prediction markets, why are markets regulated at the federal level? Why is New York's stock exchange regulated at the federal level? Or the grain futures, even though states wanted to regulate it as gambling. Because you need a large global liquidity pool, you need a large diversity of participants. Imagine having 15 New York's stock exchanges where in Oregon, you can only buy Tesla stock from someone in Oregon. They want to make any sense. You want to be able to get as much as you want. You want to get worse prices. It would be complete. And the end, it's the complete opposite of free markets, right? If free markets get everybody on a uniform set of rules and have people in Texas trade against California. And how would we even get our prediction if the person in Texas, if the people in California are the only ones trading, only trading isn't getting Californians for the Texas election. It would never work. Is it too late for them? Because if you think about the language law, I'm of the view that you should always innovate because even if you're late in a market. Do it anyways. Yeah. The market is always big. I'm a positive some thinker, right? And if they wanted to get it, but I think it's a bit different because the professional traders are not going to read, they're not going to abide by the traditional casino or a sportsbook, like the biggest competitors are like Robin Hood and Goldman over time. And my cost because the customers are the same. Those professional traders that Jason is talking about, he's right, 89% are coming from professional traders and he's right about that because those are traders that otherwise are trading in equities and commodities and would you get into their space or you're not touching what they're doing? I'm not doing it. You have no idea which to get into what casinos are doing. No, no, no. Gaming is that's gaming. It's not you. Gaming is completely there. So what is the upside? Because there's no price discovery coming from it. But I'm building the modern day financial market. I'm building the next generation CME, the Chicago board of trade because historically what we had, why do the derivatives markets exist, right? They give us a predictability about an industry and once that industry materials, it needs instruments to manage that on predictability for lenders, for certainty, for investment. How do we start? We start with grain futures. 100 years, 150 years ago, because the American economy is primarily agriculture. They're moving into industrializing, so what do we get? Oil futures, metal futures, things that are basically inputs and outputs of the industrial phase. They're moving to interest rates, whoops, and interest rate futures, and credit, and all these other indices, S&P futures, why? Because banks and the services sector started growing, financial services become bigger. And to me, Kashi is a generalization of that, it's like, do we believe there's economic impact from politics, from sports, from weather? From all these different things? Certainly. And do we need an industry to help predict the risks around those different industries? For sure, over time. And that demand is going to only grow, and Kashi, that in some ways, generalizing the stock market. Who would Kashi take business away from it? If it's not sports gambling, who would it be? I believe these things tend to be more additive than people make it out to be. You think so? Yeah, I think so, because liquidity gets liquidity. So when I add, so okay, there's a farmer in California, a month or two ago, he's in the goat herding business, the goat herder, he has 3000 goats, what do these goats exist? They eat the grass that usually leads to wildfires, okay? And that farmer, you know, he had a risk, which is that there was a bill in the legislation in California that was going to up goat herding wages from $70,000 to $2,000, $2,000, $2,000, going to drive him out of business because he can't afford these. 70 to 240, more than three eggs. More than three eggs. So he was going to drive him out of business because how could you afford these wages? He went to insurance companies, can you please underwrite this risk for me? What they say? No, there's no way, who is in the business of underwriting these different risks? So he came to us and said, can you list the market on it? But certainly. Within two hours, the market started trading. We have a bit, you know, again, 30 million goats, we have a high of mine that can, you know, prices, it says that there's 10% chance of this thing happening. If you search for goat herder, you'll see it directly, goat her, yeah, first one. And then he bought $50,000 at 10%, which pays out $500,000 of the bad thing happens as a hedge, as insurance. And it happened and he got paid $500,000, so he's now using to diversify his business and stay afloat for another 18 months. He put 50K on cows, she made a half a million dollars. As a hedge. Yeah. Because he's now, he has to pay all right. So he's offsetting some of the additional costs. Who are we taking business from there? Nobody. We're bringing liquidity to a much larger set of things that wouldn't have been liquid otherwise. Like, when a sports business, a bar or a marketer comes up and puts a hedge on cowshed, to hedge themselves against sports risk, what is their alternative historically? Like, going and doing on draftings, they're never going to do that on draftings, it doesn't make any sense. They need the financial instrument that is straight on an open market where people are going to compete and provide them competitive bids and ask, competitive pricing. So they can book it on their financials as a financial instrument and place that hedge as a real hedge. And so it's a new market that's being created that basically makes, creates more opportunities to price risk and manage risk. But who is an enemy? Who is an, who is not happy with Calci? Who crafted across five Italian factories with build or technology underfoot? It may be the most comfortable shoe you will ever own, introducing the all new FLB shoe, finished a new chocolate curates a leather, made to move, built to endure, designed to impress. I generally feel that my core like elites were always not love it, because I think that's really what we're over. Like 80% of our customers active, they don't trade. So if 30 million customers that have trading accounts, but really close to 100 million in America that I use it for the forecast, you see it, Fox, CNN, you see it, the campaigns are all using Calci. What's the problem? 80% use it but don't, they use it for the information. They use it for the information. That's the public good that comes out of markets. Would you, would a sportsman be able to say 80% of my customers don't know, there's no use to it. What is the, yeah, information that you're getting at sports work, right? But that's what markets do, there's surface information to people. But here's the key thing about it, elites will never love these markets and they'll always attack us. That's why we often get attacked in the press, etc. Because like, it's the first time that information is flowing from people bottom up. There's no gatekeepers. There's no elite. We're not listening to a handful of people telling us, here's the truth and he's not what's true. We don't have gatekeepers of the truth. The truth here is being produced by millions of American people putting money where their mouth is, having skin in the game. Okay, so how about a, how about a fanatics, how about a Robin Hood, how about state gaming regulators, how about those guys would they, I think it's take a look, I think we, we always say like we're happy to engage, like I always tell states. It was never about if people want to attack us, people say, oh, we're avoiding taxes, that's not how it's true. I always tell states, if you want to taxes on a sensible rate, I'm actually not the type that is completely against taxes. I'm fine with it. Let's come to a reasonable, a deal that's a very fast growing industry and look if there's ways where we can promote more education and like fund education resources or education in general or healthcare. I'm all for it. I actually, that's my personal view. I'm a free market's guy and I love capitalism, but at the same time, I think things are a little bit too out of whack. There's too much wealth and equality right now. We have to adjust it a little bit to make sure we bring in more people into the system. I think when people are out of the system and they're sitting on the sidelines, it's normal that over time they're going to bubble up feelings that they don't like the system because you know, if I was out of the system, I wouldn't like it either, right? And so that's my view and then if there's really, if people are worried about consumer protections, if we feel like there's not, and I'm a pro-regulation's guy, I think there's needs to be sensible guardrails around the market. Why? Because you want to make sure that it's fair. If a marketplace is not fair, there's corruption in the marketplace. What happens? People stop trusting it. Why would you ever participate in a marketplace that is not fair? Where the guy on the other side may have a knife and you don't, right? Like that's unfair. And so I believe in regulation and tell states, look, let's have a good faith discussion of it. If you think there's a, if you think that we are regulated, we're, we spend the first way is getting regulated. But if you think there should be additional consumer protections in your estate, let's have a conversation about that. We're open to it. As long as it doesn't hamper on the three markets' principles of a federal regulated exchange. Are you in all 50 states right now? Except for Nevada, which you're going to make sense, you know, they got a point. What do you think you'll ever will get in there? I think you know, it's bubbling up. There's some litigation. There's litigation that's going on and I think, you know, we feel very good about like, you know, the way that this needs to be regulated is federal. And I think that there's a bit of kind of, I think there's some confusion plus the casino lobby is, is, is doing a lot of work right now again. Yeah. How about Polymarket? Look, I think I like competition. I think competition is great. And you know, we have competition from Polymarket, we have Robin Hood. We have, you know, the big banks are getting, they've announced they're getting into the prediction market space. Which is exciting. I mean, we just announced a partnership with S&P. It's the largest. And the NBA. And the NBA. Yeah. But I'm excited about some of these the largest financial data provider on the planet. It's, you know, and I think the difference I have with Polymarket is we took a regulatory first approach to building the business. I wanted to build it in America, the American exchange and pro regulation regulated first. And I like got regulators of financial market and like have all the right rules run, banning insider trading and banning market inflation, making sure miners are not on the product. All the kind of sensible guard was there needs to be. And it's when the first four years doing that, right? They just launched offshore and then start growing before. And you remember, remember this a few years ago, Polymarket was the brand. It wasn't calcium. I remember that clearly. But I was so committed to the regulatory first and doing the right thing. And they didn't, right? They didn't happen. And that's the, I think the philosophical misalignment we have because that's why you started hearing about the insider trades are going on police. They have markets on war and now maybe they're, now they're stopping what they used to have them. They don't verify customers. And so all these bad things started happening. But that wasn't us because we were doing it under the right umbrella with the right consumer protections and the right guardrails. But you know, as, because it's a nation industry, people can mingle us. People think it's the same. But no, there's an American regulated market and there's an offshore market that was not really abiding by rules. Now they're coming in and they're abiding by rules, which I think is a good thing. Like I hope they do more and more of that. But as long as you have the right sensible rules, I think that you need more competition. Competition pushes us to get better. And so I hope over time that they really embrace doing things the right way, which I think they're saying. Is there anything different between the two of you today? Oh, for sure. I mean, we're regulated. We're. They're not. They're still not. I mean, a lot of it is not. And then we, we ban insider traders and we police it. We verify our customers when they're coming in. We have consumer guardrails on. If people are doing, you know, I think any of these products, there's some irresponsible use. People can. Losing is not bad. Competition's on winners and some losers, you know, like you don't, when somebody loses in the NBA, you don't go, go give them a trophy. Like that's, that's how it works. What's bad is like irresponsible use and addiction. Those exist on prediction markets, they exist in gaming, but they also exist in Robinhood and they exist in like, you know, the financial markets, right? How many people, how many times you hear about like a guy who lost his shirt on trading options in the open market? It's very common. And you need to regulate that, right? You have to have sensible guardrails on making sure that like, look, I believe people should make their own decisions, but you have to give them warnings. You have to say, look, you're getting off your skis, you're doing more than you should. Here's all the friction that we're going to add to your account. Make sure that like, you know, you look at how much you're losing. Make sure to use these risk management tools and diversify. You're going a little too crazy. And I think it's important to have these guardrails because otherwise you're going to have some of the irresponsible uses caused on, on, on regulated and that's not a good thing. Now would, but would you guys end polymer as an MBA teamed up with both of you or just CalShi? I mean, I believe they're teamed up with both of us today, which I think is good because it's, it's the league saying, how does that happen? How does it happen to team up with? It happens. I mean, these big leagues have multi partners and, and they do it within the space. Sometimes they do it with broadcast, right? You do broadcast deals with two different, right? I think it's important because one of the key things that, what are we going to see as a fan? Are you going to see polymarketing in CalShi? Oh, it's more complicated than that. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, we have different teams that we partner with, et cetera, but the key pillar of that, actually partnership that, you know, usually people don't talk about that. That's really what's important by this part. We're very excited about them. It's not the marketing. Marketing is a piece of it. It's the marketing integrity piece because now where we have an NHL, we have an MLB, we have an nowity MBA. A, is a data sharing agreement to police the bad actors. And that's what's important, because market integrity is one of the foundations of a free market. I always say, what's the opposite of free market? It's corruption. Free markets and corruption cannot coexist. Why? Because free markets has a requirement of a free, open, and fair competition. The competition needs to be fair. Some people have access to specific special rules. It's not a fair competition, and nobody's want to participate. It ruins the competition. And so markets have to work-- if they have to work, they have to be fair. And so what we do with these leagues is, like, for example, we ban athletes from trading on the league. We have a bunch of market integrity and game integrity measures, which is, like, if we ever catch an athlete that was trying to do something weird, they're going to get punished, and they're going to get criminally indicted. Do they currently do it? They do it on the sportsbooks, in general. Most of the cases happen. Not with you guys. Now, we have a very stiff regime around the police who find it. How do I identify? I do think so, one customer verification. And by the way, it's the same thing with elections. So actually, if you open the Senate race in Texas, or either any of these races in the elections, yeah, if you go down a little bit, a little bit more, slightly more, slightly more, a little bit more. I'll tell you what, no, that other market. Yeah, but if you scroll down, so a little bit more, I'll tell you one stuff, right, slightly. A little bit lower, lower, lower. A little bit lower. OK, if you look at here, insider training is prohibited. You open that. Those are all the people that are not allowed to trade on this market. So people that are involved in the campaigns, and so who are these? These are the people that have insider information. And you want to police them, and you want to ban them out of the system, and we do that. We actually, if our systems, when you do the customer verification flags, OK, this person might be involved in that, I mean, so we ban them proactively. Now, what people do is, you know, when you want to-- if you have a cousin at Tesla that wants to trade on insider information, what they do, they don't do it themselves. They give you the information, so you trade on it. How do you catch them? We use the same systems as the NASDAQ. We have actually a partnership with the NASDAQ and a bunch of other systems. The same system. So what happens is there's suspicious pattern. And when we look at suspicious pattern, we are on investigation. A third of our team is like compliance. You know, those guys have investigatory-- We do have your team as compliance. A lot, yeah. How many compliance people do you have? We have now, I mean, over 50, 60, I mean, like the compliance market regulation lawyers, and they are basically in the business of like, they look at these flags that the system brings, and they look at a case who is the person, how they trade, why they trade. And then if they find that there's something wrong, it goes from fines all the way to criminal prosecution. We can refer to the DOJ, which we have. We've referred, you know, George Santos to the DOJ. What happened to their brother? Something happened with that. He tried to manipulate the market, and we caught him immediately. You know, the other thing that's great about prediction markets, there's not more insight training on prediction markets than the stock market. What's great is it's all transparent. All the traders look at it, and they say, hey, something is weird here. Oh, they tell you. I'm not sure because all the trades are transparent. And like when somebody cheats against you, you're incentivized to say, hey, somebody cheated. And so when we look at it, like, okay, well, there was cheating here, and like, we're gonna enforce it. It's like a crime, it's financial crime. How do you police crime long term? You catch it, and then you heavily punish it so you deter the next person from doing the same thing. And that's what we do this when New York Stock Exchange does. The difference of prediction markets is like, I think more of the, I think there's more insight training in the stock market than the prediction markets. The difference of prediction markets will be catch more of it because it's so transparent. Tell me why. All the trading activity is transparent. Everybody can see it. So is it kind of like a decentralized like on Bitcoin where you can kind of see what's going on? We're not decentralized. We just like show all the trading activity publicly. And then it's so obvious, you know, if somebody is, something is trading at 10%, and all of a sudden somebody is buying it and bulk, you're gonna look at that. Why are you buying at 10%, something is weird. What do you know? What, what happened here? Who are you? Who, who'd you call? What is the piece of information? Do you reach out to them? That's compliant. Our investigation team reply. And are you getting faster? I want to put a stop to it. So there's a monopoly. We're very fast on it. We immediately band the account. But here's the key thing. Instead of trading case on New York's auction, they take time to bring why? Because you have to bring it a real case. Our standard in the America, which is a good standard, it's an incidental proven guilty. So you have to establish a fact pattern and go through due process. Like you have to go through the courts and then you know, show that like you, you, you, I mean, sometimes people settle. They say, I'm sorry, I did the wrong thing. Let me know what I need to do. And a lot of people do that. A lot of people decide to fight it. And there you have to like, it takes five. What's Santos? I don't remember honestly. I think he's decided to fight it. I forgot or he paid the fine. I'm not sure. I completely forgot to be honest. For a life after a prediction market company found he misled public about whether he would-- They find them $70,000. They need $1,000. And he cows, she is an imposter, finished penalties. You guys find them $72,000. Which is way more than he made you. Wow. And then we make those fines. We pay them, we give them to like a non-profit that basically like works on educational resources on like insider trading and like I'm training people to be-- So you don't take that money. You give it to the charity. Yeah, yeah. Very cool. Yeah, I mean, we now hire like a bunch of FBI agents and forensics experts to police the markets. Wow. Because they're very good. You almost have to, right? Yes, yes. People ask me, are you done? No, because it's like cyber security. Are we ever safe from cyber security? Like fraudsters get better at like circumventing the defenses and so the defenses need to keep getting better. What role does AI play in Calche for you guys? We use a lot of AI, you know? I mean, it's amazing. Honestly, it's truly amazing how much like productivity gains you can get and look, I think. I've been thinking about this a lot. Like how much AI is being used in traders? Like, are they using AI? And what I've seen is I talk to our top traders. It's AI plus human, that is their best strategy. So the AI lets you code faster. Let's you summarize information better. But the layer of human judgment is necessary. Because I think AI, what it does is it memorizes all of our past. But you know how there's an idiom which is like past performance in the financial markets, don't it? I'm not indicating future performance. And I think that's true in prediction markets. And these financial markets too. And so humans still have this unique judgment of like, I think this one is different this time. And this is why I think I'm going on my gut intuition. And that gut intuition has, I'd like to believe that it hasn't been replaced yet. So partnerships, is it, is it, are you watching like, what the, I saw Polymarket got LeBron James. And it was a bunch of thing about it, 20 to 50 million bucks. I don't know what they paid the guy, but it was a big number. I was seeing a guy talking about it on the podcast. Who do you see spaces and industries to go and say, these guys will be good. This will be a good spokesperson. Is that kind of like the lobbying and the creativity between the two organizations today? Yeah, it's creativity. And look, I think our view, I always think the product needs to be the thing that sells itself. And that's our biggest motion is people like the product. And they tell others about it. And our biggest motion is people use the forecast. You know how you see the cashy charts. And your podcast, you see it in Twitter. People use it as a way to get informed. And that's a way to kind of get more and more people in the nominal, right? More people, people, now Fox and CNN use their data as well on their partnerships with them as well. Because the data works, it's a market driven way to think about the world, right? Now, and so I, all of our marketing, if you see cash is market, is never this hard sell. Like, oh, come use the product. And I don't like any other stuff. What I try to think is we try to just be human. So let's have, let's explain these complicated market-based concepts in a fun and human way. Because what's the best? What are the two emotions that like get people to do something? One is hatred, but I don't want to go there. That's not a good thing for consumer brand. That's for politicians. Let them do the hatred stuff. You know, they keep hitting each other. That's the way they can mix. The second one is laughter. Like, light. People have already hard lives. Like, you know, I grew up a single mom in 11. Like, you know, like, like, day-to-day was brutal. And what do people like? How do people think about things that they want to live in? So, for example, the Shane Gillis, I just find him to be very funny. I think he's a very funny guy. And he gets cash, so some people don't like him. But what I liked about him is he's simple. He just explains things in a simple way. And like, I wanted to explain a lot about how a lot of people use Kalshi as a weather forecast. Because it's more accurate in the weather station. How do we explain that concept? And he came up with this weather-man concept that I love. I mean, he came up with it. Yeah, he was like, we need to do this. And we do it with Danny McBride. And it's going to be amazing. And like, and he was right about that. Did he approach you guys with the idea? We were talking about each other. And like, and you know, it was really about, I always say, it has to be authentic. Don't sell something to the customers. If you sell something to the customers, they're not going to like it. They're going to be pissed. And you just put yourself out there, have some fun with it. Explain what it is. Why it's a good thing for a society. I mean, think about it. We're a little bit more accurate about predicting the weather. Thanks to markets. How incredible is that? And you're not going to explain it by like putting a bunch of math and data and statistics in front of people. Are you going to explain it by doing something like hearted that like people can watch and not, you know, throw up when they look at another ad on live TV? That's pretty wild. That's, is there going to be more bigger things being announced here soon with different partners? You know, I'm really excited about the SMD partnership. That's it. Yeah, you were talking about that earlier. The core partner historically has been CME. And I feel like this Kalsh S&P is, I really feel today. I really felt it's a start of a new era. Because it feels like we're finally being perceived as the next generation of financial markets. Because they're going to distribute our products to institutions. And we're going to be developing a bunch of indices. You know, what's S&P's most famous index is the S&P 500, which is a pulse on where America's market is. What if you build the Kalsh S&P economic index? Inflation index. Sports index, which is what are different teams and how they're performing over times. Political index are releaning more Republican or Democrat. Not like who's going to win this next midterm. Is like, is the country going towards Republican or country going towards Democrat? We have this thing called K-Pow. If you pull it up on Google, Kalsh K-Pow. And if you open this thing, look at this chart. I mean, this is, for example, one of the recent, if you go down a little bit. This is like the Kalsh political index, which is an aggregate of all the prediction market data into one piece of information, which are we projected to lean more Republican or Democrat over time. And you can see it today. By the day. By the day, real time. Like the S&P, it doesn't be for politics. But this is the beauty of that partnership. We're gonna build the S&P. Here's the thing. Do you think the only thing that's worthy of predicting right now is American stocks? Do you think it's worthy of predicting of the economics, the politics, the sports, the weather? All these things are worthy of prediction, and now we have finally a financial market, with financial market rigor to predict these things. And this part is where the S&P is, I think, kind of propelled that too. - Let's look at this here. If we look at this chart, January, 2026. - That's right. - Republicans are up, right? It was plus, let's just say eight or nine. Okay, whatever that number is, go a little bit. Yeah, plus eight, okay. - So then when it goes blue, look at that though. - Is that the war? - If you look at that though. - Go to the dark. Go to the black dot, one behind you, right there. Operation in Iran, got it. So then it goes. - So then what caused it to go back to red? Go to the next time. Supreme Court decision, Louisiana versus, okay. - It was interesting. - I remember that. So Virginia Supreme Court, all of a sudden, we got. It explains every one of them. Generic, and then go back down to Democrat. Go all the way down to the next time. What's it say? - Average gas price. - And you had something you were showing me about the gas price. - Yes, I'm going to show it to you. But just think about it. It's the rigor. And if you can open that as well, you look at the Democrat control of odds. And you, you know, that's the probability of the Democrats winning the Senate, the market base. What millions of people are predicting. And you layer it now. You can't do analysis and insights, like you layer it against national gas price. I would move it over time. Look at that correlation. But this is the beauty. You're bringing a level of rigor into these processes. And if you go back to the K-POW, right? Like, that is a financial market. That is a market driven, a prediction market, financial market driven number. That is not what the pundits are saying or the elites are saying. Or my opinion is or your opinion is. Markets don't lie. And that's the rigor that I want to bring to everything. - People ask us questions sometime. They'll say, like, go to the telerico one. Go to the telerico one. Senate race, you just had it like a minute ago. Yeah, keep going all the way up. So they'll say, okay, $45 million here, $552, $600. Okay. What if a billionaire in the back end puts $20 million into telerico? Does that kind of manipulate the market to believe that telerico's got that big of a lead? - So there's a study and I don't know if you can find it. I think in calibration, if you go to the publications, I think we might be able to find it there. Let me see. If you click on publications on the top tab, you go down a little bit. Let's see if it's anywhere here. Okay, it's not here. I'll surface it later. But there was a study we did on Spencer Pratt at Mayer Race. It was, he was a 10% chance of winning the Mayer Race. And someone put $2 million, I think $1.5, $2 million, to move the odds up. So the person moved the odds to, I think, 30%. - From 10 to 30. - Yeah, 25 to 30. I forgot the exact numbers, but it moved up. Within, oh, here it is. If you go down, that's great. Let's find the chart. If you go down a little bit. Okay, if you zoom out a little bit so I can see that. See how it jumped. It's actually, it's actually, okay, 27 to 45. - Didn't make a difference. - What happened right after? Do you know that delta? Guess how much time I took for it to correct? - One day. - Nine seconds. - Stop it. - Stop it. - Markets. It's the beauty of markets. So what happened when I went to 45? What happened to the people that are trading on this thing? What did they see? - I think this price. - I think you were talking about this. - This is the price. - God, it's full. - If I give you Apple stock. If you know that my Apple stock and you have your, that is worth $100. And all of a sudden now it's trading at $60. What are you gonna do? You're gonna buy it. You're gonna keep buying it all the way to a lot. - So then let me ask you a question. So, isn't that, but isn't that beautiful? - That's fantastic. - By the way, I want to just say one last thing. When people put out a bad poll, you know, Wedgewood, you saw that poll last week, there were two guys that come up with fake numbers, and it was called it all of media. Who's correcting that? Isn't that influencing public perception? This is the beauty of it. It's markets don't lie. They have an embedded structure to constantly calibrate towards the truth, average out towards the truth. - Okay, so do this. What if somebody does? - By the way, we had an investigation on this guy. - I'm gonna ask you multiple questions. So let's just say they say, let's do a million dollars, but 20 times over the next week, what would that do? - Same thing. - Same thing. - I mean, the market is always thinking, is this person knows something? Are they trying to do something else? Why are they trading it? So maybe it moves, but then after that, it's kind of like, it's the same as a stock market. So when someone puts a big order on Apple, the market thinks about it. They're like, look, are they putting it because there's a new piece of information that we're not aware of? Or are they putting it because they're trying to buy a lot? Or are they putting it for some other reason? - Yeah, and this is great because this is overcoming a lot of the objections that people think about. Back in the days, there was a business where-- - And by the way, it's illegal if you're actually trying to manipulate the market. It's a financial crime. - I get that, but this wouldn't be the first time someone's trying to do that. - For sure, but like, what is the punishment that these guys got? - Nothing happens to them, right? - Right, it's like, ah, it's a funny spoof, whatever. - Nothing happens. - It's gone, but remember back in the days, they would say, hey, pay us $200,000. We're going to have 6,000 people that are going to buy your bulk to help you become a New York Times, and then our company got caught. I don't know if you remember that or not. - That's right, that's right. - The company ended up getting caught. You can even pull this up. You may find a story on it. They say, hey, we're going to give you this much money. You keep 250 of it, but bet, do this to that. - So here's the-- go back to thinking about that thing. That $2 million or whatever, $1.25 million they put on that. What happened at the end? They just wasted it. - Wasted. - Complete waste of money. They should put it giving it to the campaign that have been a better use of money. Put a bunch of ads on TV, attack ads on the other candidates, or they should have commissioned their own polls that will say whatever they want them to say. Which, by the way, you know, now we're in the last stretch of the election. What is going to happen in the next seven days? The Democrats and Republicans are going to both put polls that are saying the opposite thing. The Democrats are going to say Democrats don't like whatever points. And Republicans are going to say I'm up by whatever points because they're commissioned the polls to make them say whatever they want to say. That money would have been much better used, done in a more opaque system. On an open market, it's much harder to game the market because people are seeing it and broad daylight. And if we catch you, if we catch you doing this, you'll commit a financial crime and we're going to enforce against you. And see, look at this. It's very hard not to catch. - It's going to happen to that guy that did the one point. - So I actually don't know because there's an ongoing investigation going on. I don't-- I'm not privy to what's happening because the market regulation department is in-- Like, the way that we regulate it, we regulate it as a financial exchange. Like the New York Stock Exchange. Those exchanges, those compliance and regulatory functions don't report directly to the CEO or the report to regulatory oversight committee. So these investigations, I don't know about them up until they're basically done. And the reason is because you don't want the business side to impact the regulation. - So there was a couple of stories with military. I don't know if you heard Hex said-- - That's probably why. - A couple of days ago, Hex said, you can't, you know, if you're in a military service, you can no longer do anything with-- with Kalshi Pali, none of that. That just happened like today. - I'm in favor of that. - That's great. I'm sure you are. So, but there was something with a-- - The Maduro trader. - The Maduro trader. - That's right. - What was that all about? - It wasn't Pali. I mean, because there, there's no customer verification. So by the way, that trader tried to do it on Kalshi and he blocked him. - Same trader. - Yeah, and tried to do it on Kalshi. - The DOJ department, they tell you, like, oh, there was another exchange where he tried to open an account and we got back. - What kind of-- - And it doesn't always work. We have a system, that's the whole point. We have a system that catches people up front to ban them from proactively-- proactively ban them from trading on things they might have control over. And by the way, to be clear, we don't do war, terrorism, assassination, violence, like missile strikes, markets, et cetera, that exists offshore. We don't do them. We cannot do them. - They do. - So, they have-- they used to, now I think they're starting to clean up and take them out, which I'm in favor of. But they're still, like, wildfires they've done them. I think those are bad. But that's the key thing of distinction between the regulated, onshore, American markets versus offshore, unregulated markets, right? And that distinction is very important. But the press, you know, lumps are same. So, in this case, this is a soldier that's working on the project with Maduro. - Yeah, bad. That's bad. - And he ends up, he's a special forces guy. Does he end up getting the money here? He gets caught. - He got caught. - He got caught. - I mean, obviously, by luck, because he uses his name on the email. - So, they don't have to-- - So, they also not a smart criminal. - They don't do a customer verification there. So, how would you-- that's the problem. You have to KYC, well, you know your customers, like banks. So, they caught him by luck because his name wasn't the email. Now, for us, we have systems because we asked him for your social security address. - You do ask him for social security. - Yeah, yeah, we're like opening a shop. - And they're not asking for social security? - Now, they're starting a-- they're working on a regulated US platform, which I'm very favorite. I'm happy that they're doing that. So, where are they regulated properly? So, there's probably one kind of short, probably one kind of US, which is great. But I think, over time, we want more regulated-- - More of the regulated onshore. - What happened with the Khamenei situation? The 54 million hours. - Oh, that's an interesting one. So, that one, actually-- And, you know, I don't think that loss is going to go anywhere. Because what's happened is we had a market on, like, whether the leader was going to be out. Now, here's the thing that's very important. I told you, we don't do death markets. What does that mean? All of our markets have a death cover. It's very clear. It's always clear in the box right when you're trading that says, if a candidate got forbid dies or other things, we settled the market at the price before the event happened. So, no one can ever profit from a death. Because you don't want to create the incentive for someone to do something bad. - For sure, yeah. But obviously, people were like, oh, well, I should have profited because he was out. And, you know, when people don't, they want it to get paid because you would have made a lot of money. But we stood by our principles. It's like, we are not going to pay based on death. That's the principle that's the rules from the start. And some people are going to get pissed about that. And that's what's hard about building a business that has very many customers now. It's like, sometimes you're going to have to make decisions that are right. I strongly believe that was the right decision. I would never change it. And I would do it again. But some people are going to be pissed about that. And that's just how it is. And we reversed what we did. It's like, look, if, to the extent that there was confusion, if there was, we're going to reverse you. All your fees, we didn't make any money on this market. And all your losses, if you lost on this market, we're going to reimburse you. They were still pissed because they felt like they should have won. - Oh. - And that happens because you remember that. - We had a person here, okay. We had a person here who won. He's like, oh, my God, you know, I keep my obviously. And he's like, hey, you know, I put on the whole thing with comedy and, you know, and then all of a sudden he comes like, oh, man, I'm not getting anything because they decided to do everything back. I didn't lose any money, but I didn't make the money. - Nobody lost. I made sure of that. But like, we made it clear. The rules are the rules. - You remember this one that happened here. Conor, you remember that whole. But the rules, these markets, if you go back to the Senate race, let's go back to that for a second. And if you go down, there's something called, if you control F rules, you'll see it, but maybe go down a little bit more here on the view of full rules on the bottom. Each market is a legal contract, that's what we call them event contracts. There's rules of exactly how it's going to settle. Zoom in a little bit. Some trade size, a penny. And pay out quite here. And it's like encompasses that. The first candidate who presents certification of election, et cetera, et cetera. And that's what the market has to have certainty on. What is it going to be? Yes. And what is it going to be? No. And if we can never move away from those rules, because if people don't trust that we're going to follow the rules to a T, then you're buying, you know, then you're never going to trust that we're going to settle it the right way, right? And that's the key thing. And it's important to understand that because, you know, sometimes what is a yes, what is a no? And if the whole administrative hall moves is open. And so we have a very specific definition of like the seven day average of boats reported by this agency. That's the kind of definition that we have. And that's always been a challenge for financial markets, you know, I'll give you this funny example. Have you ever heard of butter futures? No. Butter futures are one of the big futures that are traded. Right. And because butter, you know, butter producers need futures to hedge it, et cetera. You know, it took a while to define butter because, you know, people would freak out on the Chicago World Trade and the CME at the time saying, no, no, no, you're not accounting for butter the right way. Because that form of milk should be accounted as butter. And that, and then at some point, the way, how they resolve it, they're like, you know what, I don't care what everybody's definition of butter is, the definition of butter that we are going to use in this market is this level of saturation, this level of density, this level of salt. And that's what you guys do. And that, you have to see only way to create and literally what's the step process that when somebody wants to create a position, then who writes the contract, then we have a team that like, so a lot of customers want to trade it, then we have a team that is now very good because we've listed so many tens of thousands of markets, so most markets look and feel like a market that we had in the past. So we pull up templates, and then we see if there needs to be refinement on like the specific rules. If it's something completely new that we haven't done before, we create a very uniform set of rules on it that is certain upfront, then we list, and then we have to make sure that the regulation department is okay with it, which is like, we're not doing some of the markets that are banned, and then we basically put it out in the open market. How many total markets have you guys ever had? We have tens of, I mean, ten, oh, I mean, all time. Millions now. Millions now. How active do you have right now? Ten tens of thousands. And the method of creating track and approving, what is that process? Like there's a group coming in. What things will you say now? Yeah. I mean, like, look at the Dodgers market real quick, if you like, if you Google maybe like Dodgers or Calci Hatch, maybe just Google it, Calci Dodgers, I mean, maybe Reuters, the article I below that one, you know, that was a market that we already had, we already had markets on the teams. They were like, okay, I won that specific market, I'm not picking it past the playoffs because that's the risk that we really incur, and you see that $60,000 hedge, they didn't do it to make money. They did it to offset some of the risks that they had, and we discussed this a little bit. Because these market formations is like a specific to the risk that a person has, and sometimes it's more broad, where like they basically buy the index, like, oh, the Dodgers are going to do well over time or do less well over time. And we always have to balance, like, is there going to be enough liquidity, or are there going to be enough for parts of it? So how do liquidity comes? It's from people that are speculating, right, because whenever someone is hedging, who's on the other side? It's a speculator. Someone is doing it for making money. We always think about what are the markets that will have enough liquidity, where people are going to be speculating, trading it up. You know, people say, do people bet on Calci, like, yeah, they bet like they bet on the stock market. And that speculation is the thing that helps get the market efficiency and the prices to help the hedgers do what they need to do. Give me the weirdest markets you've had, weirdest positions you've had. Oh, the gold herder is one of them. That's one of them. What else have you? Taylor Swift is always very popular. Taylor Swift. Any kind. Where she was getting married. You know, I have a deal with MSG. So people always, you know, when I talk to policy makers, they come to me and they say, why are people trading on Taylor Swift? Like, what is the economic purpose of her? Like, it's, it's, you know, wedding dress is another example. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you that. The wedding, whether she picks Jor or not, do you believe it's going to move the Jor stock price? Now they're probably a company. But do you believe it will move it? I think so. For sure. I mean, like, yeah. I mean, think about 402,000. So what, what? Think about the number of people. Think about the number of people that will pick Jor as their wedding dress. Just because Taylor Swift picked her wedding dress as Jor. Just think about that. Just truly that. Isn't that a lot of opportunities there for somebody, for, even for her team to go to Dior and say, hey, $50 million will have you be the dress that, isn't there like opportunities like that? I mean, but they probably pay her to do that, by the way. Think about it. You don't think Jor is going to pay it. That's what I'm saying. I would, you know, that's advertisers. I mean, you know, people, we had a market in West. She was going to get married. Okay. People were like, well, that's frivolous. Why would anyone care about that? I'll tell you. I mean, I have a partnership with MSG, where the concourse on the 6th floor is not the cash e-commerce. And I can tell you right now, we have an internal model that tells you how much value is that part. You know, we pay, except, let's call it, that's not the right number, but let's say we call it, we pay a million dollars a year for that partnership. After Taylor Swift decided to get married there, that million dollars a year of value is now 2.5 million dollars a year of value. Think about it. You have, but think about, you know, when adverts, people always tell me sports have economic consequences. Obviously, they have economic consequences. Like, if you, if you sponsor, like, do you think my MSG deal, the deal value of my MSG partnership went up after the next one? No, three X, two and a half X. Exactly. What? So is that a binary risk that I actually hold? Is there an economic impact? They're all on 3G. It's so far. They got it. They got it. They got it. They got it. But is there an economic impact from the niche when you lose it? There's no question about that. And that's why it's regulated. That's why it's regulated, right? Like the regulatory, what do you do about, there's manipulation in the stock market. I mean, actually, you know, another's funny. You know that onion futures are illegal in America? Illegal? Illegal. Look at the onion act. No, there's no, you're going to find if the onion act is going to be repealed, but you're not going to have, if you, if you go, look at Wikipedia, onion, onion act, you know why? So onion is the only vegetable where it's illegal to have a future on in America. Why is that? So onion, just do onion, onion act, not actor. Yeah. Onion future that. The United States law, bang, and the trading of futures contract on onions as well as motion picture box office. So motion picture box office is very, is another story and you can talk about that. But what happened? Two guys, 1955, Sam Segal and Vincent Kosega, what do they do? They, they, have you heard of a short squeeze? They put a short squeeze? Yeah, of course. Yeah, they bought all the onions to buy, put a short squeeze and then tank the market, which bank wrote it off farmers. They manipulated the, the, the money on your markets to make a profit. What did Congress decide? What did, what was Congress conclusion at the time? Congress was like, you know what, the problem is clearly onions here, not humans, so we should ban onion futures that will fix the issue. As if that could never happen and corn futures or soybean futures or, or financial markets are at large. The answer is not banning onion futures as we know. The answer is actually regulated them at the right set of guardrails and the same guard as the risk exists. Anyways, humans will always try to game a system. And by the way, you know this is a bad outcome because onion futures are one, so if you go to my Twitter, you'll see I, tweet I put out recently on, I compared the oil price volatility to onion prices. We're just not a one to one comparison, but still it gives you a little bit of a, of a feeling. So if you go down a little bit, a little bit more, you're going to find the chart, a little bit more here. If you open that chart, look at the volatility of onion prices against oil. And by the way, oil is considered to be a volatile, you know how oil will be excluded from inflation because there's a very volatile commodity. Look at the volatility of onion prices. You know why? There's no futures market for it. It's less predictable. That's a bad thing. So because of that, interesting. Isn't that like, isn't that, I mean, this is an actual, should we have ban onions and the answer is unequivocally known as a terrible decision? Very interesting. Very interesting. I read some word for you, you had 150 people reporting to you. Is that true? Yeah, me and Luana, I'm like, how do you have 150 people reporting to you? I work a lot. I really do. Like, you know, I, and I want to talk a little bit about this, you know, you talk to a lot about this, but, you know, I believe in hard work. I really believe in like being committed to the thing and really believing it. And the sole of memorization is going to be the founder at the end because you're making decisions. I think I pretty much work like seven days a week and long hours. I think it's scalable because we have a lot of tools now to scale companies, especially with AI. Like, I think companies over time, you know, the traditional structure is you have a boss who has reports and those reports are bosses for other reports and you go down in a three like structure. And then that layer in the middle is what we call the management layer. And you know, when people complain all the time, whether they say the management layer is the worst, they don't get things done. And it's where all innovation dies and why, because managers are in the business of politics. No matter what, when the industry gets big enough, what you need is leadership and what is leadership is like you point the vision and communicate and motivate your people to go on and roll in one direction. And management is the thing that like checks in on people all the time. Make sure they're done. That whole thing, they're checking in, making sure something was done. Make sure it was not done. Guess what's very good at doing it right now. Yeah. It's very good at tracking and measuring and like summarizing and all these different things. You don't need that massive management layer. So I think organization is going to be structured more as a circle over time. Where founders and leaders can like use AI to track a much greater number of people that they could have in their brain before had. And that's what we were trying to build at Cal State. We've been really very kind of at the front of using AI and that's what excites me, by the way. We're at 250 people company now, which is very small given the size of the company. And I always say these are young people. - You're so much. - We need a $2 billion dollar company with 350 people. - 250, yeah. - 250 people, that's it. - Yeah, we're actually the highest revenue for employee company and I think that might be the planet. But that to me is the opportunity and I want more young people to read it. You have all these tools now. You can go and build things. You can go and do things. And I want young people to trust themselves more and like, if you have a good idea, put it out in the word. You'll be surprised. And you have a bad idea. Put it out in the word and fail and learn how to make it better for next time, right? And I think I worry that young people are not thinking about the word that way. I think they're too negative. And I think it's very important. - What do you think they're negative? - I think it's a little bit we discussed. I think a lot of people feel that capitalism is pushing them out of the system. I mean, I grew up in Lebanon. That sets me a little bit. It sads me because when I came to country, I was so pumped. I was so excited. I was born here growing up in Lebanon. My mom was always going to America. If you work hard, you can make it. You know, you're the same thing, right? Like, you build, you work hard, you push yourself to your extreme and you get rewarded. It's a country that rewards you. And I worry a lot of people don't believe that anymore. - Do you think they're right? Or do you think they've been brainwashed? Do you think they've given up? Do you think the influences from the outside too? Inside? What do you think it is? - It doesn't really matter because they think that, right? - Your feeling is it doesn't really matter what's causing it. It's just the fact that we think that that's a bad thing. - We are what we are, right? And so we got to fix it. We got to figure out ways of fixing it. And I think that, you know, my feeling is that the fix is going to have to be a way to educate and communicate to a lot of people that they can, they shouldn't sit on the sidelines. They shouldn't be on the sidelines. They should jump into the game and start playing. And now with AI, all these tools, it's so much easier to start playing and start doing cool things, right? And it, you know, you-- - What's the process? Walk me through it. So let's just say the way you came up with the idea of calcium, in a meeting, you're like, okay, what if we did this? What if we created these markets, right? And you read about what happened in Iowa, and you read this book, Super Forecaster, or whatever it was, and Super Foreaser. Which by the way, I looked at the book. The book came out in 2016. You started calcium in '18. So what is the lens to look at something and say, I'm going to get into this industry. I'm going to get into that industry. - My honest feeling, and like, look, I'm a risk of a first guy. By the way, I told you, I'm a little bit anxious. And Luana was, my co-founder was always more risk-on. She's faith-based. She likes to, you know, she believes that things are going to work out. - She's the Brazilian. - Yeah, she believes that things are going to work out. - She pushes things, right? And it took me a while to really come to terms. But the core thing is I really believe. People should just follow their instincts and do the thing they really are like, like, childishly excited about. If you're childishly excited about something, like, everybody has a child in them. I don't think that ever expires. Some people ignore it. Because, like, oh, I have to become an adult and do all these different things. But you don't have to ignore it. And, like, you should just like follow the things that, like, you kind of, you find yourself sometimes at night, just reading about. Doesn't matter what it is. It could be sports. It could be, I don't know. Some people are into, like, Reddit channels. Some people, whatever it is, that thing that, like, gets you going and you know, you start talking about it. Like, that thing that gets your friends to eye roll when somebody brings it up because, you know, they know that you're going to, like, not stop, not stop talking for another 45 minutes. That's probably the thing that you should work on. I really believe that. And people think too much about how do I be successful, et cetera. Like, you have the tools now to imbue your personality and your thing on a lot of, like, society. Like, and if you're excited enough about something, I think over time, I'm going to bring enough people on the journey. Once you're birthday. May 7th, 96. 96. Okay. And just animate. What role did anime play for you? Oh, I love anime. Tell me why. I love. You know. And is there a favorite one? Is there one that you. You know, I was, like, kind of, a lot. I've been Dragon Ball one piece. There's a lot of new ones. I mean, I was, like, you know, nerd in high school. So, like, a lot of nerds, you know, it's funny. Like, a lot of people were, like, closeted anime watchers. And now it's kind of cool, because people are into Japanese culture and it's become a cool thing. So, a lot of people that, like, I didn't know would watch when we were younger now. I realized we were all watching, but we never told each other, because you'd get bullied and recessed if, like, you ever said that. But I love it because there's something about it. You know, it's. The thing that I love the most about it is, like, there's sort of this notion of, like, all the characters of some unifying traits, which are on self-improvements. Like, I always think, you know, the people that do the best, that are essentially at the top of the food chain and, like, you know, most of the anime is. There's always, like, this dynamic of the main protagonist and then, like, the secondary protagonist. That's usually their arch rival or arch enemy or their competitor. The main guy is usually mostly focused on himself and, like, getting better. He's always competing against himself. He's always stressed about not achieving his full potential and not doing enough to, versus what he's capable of. And the second guy is the guy who's trying to beat the main guy. He's usually a little bit more envious, more, you know, he's designing what the main guy. And the main guy, you know, always outperforms and there's always that foundational thing of, like, be the main guy, be the guy who's just pushing yourself. Because if you push yourself and deliver the best you can, you're probably going to get somewhere. And there's something neat about that. It's a positive view of society. You don't have to beat others to do your thing. Just find your own path and beat yourself. And keep beating yourself every week. And if you do that for a long enough period of time, beautiful results will happen. It really does. What's your. You go from zero. You're at Goldman. Little bit of that Citadel. And Chicago or here? Probably on Chicago. I was in New York, actually. Oh, New York. Okay, so New York Citadel. But all of these are, as an intern. I never really had a full potential. So, at what point these guys want you? You two guys on. I want you two guys, and yeah. They're. My son's gone through. Like he's like. Oh, what are they saying? So, you two guys on this incredible. JJK, you said you're right. JJK is all he talks about. And that. I love. Between two of them. This and another one. What is the main character's name? And. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well. But Gojo is the same. What I just described, by the way. Never cares about beating others. He just like cares about being. Just beating himself. It's with me. Explain so to me for 45 minutes. When I tell you. The way he breaks them. He lights up, right? Yeah. He says, there's this one character that he cuts himself. You know, he's able to cut you and. It's fascinating. He lights up when he talks. He got everybody recruited and the Hamptons to watch it. And they're just. They're 20 minutes up. It's incredible. One after another at another level. Well, go back. Go back too. So you go from Goldman. Then Citadel, New York. And then you got. And then you got. And I was going in and out of my tea. So I did Citadel, then I went and. Sure. And you. And you're doing the stuff with MIT. So when you're. When you're doing that, when you're going through it. In your mind, when you're saying, OK, I'm going to get in. And all of a sudden, you got a company that's $22 billion. You know, whatever. It's about to get a valuation of $40 billion. 250 employees. You have influence, enemies, all these people. How do you keep yourself sane? How do you not lose? Your sanity. I think it's. The core is like. It's interesting. I always. You know, I always tell people like. I like what I'm doing. I like markets. I really like free markets. And I believe in free markets. I believe that we should have more of them. The more we have of them, the more. Every time we did more free markets, we got better results for society. Every single time. It never misses. Now, you have to have some sensible guardrails, but I think. And I believe in the mission of markets. I believe in prediction markets. They will depolarize us over time. They will make us smarter. You know, people ask me, "What's the difference?" Like, you know, we talk a little bit about the gambling. The gambling is incentivizing bad behaviors. Keep losing and, you know, doing French entertainment. Prediction markets incentivize people to think more over time, to think more rationally, to think probabilistically. You know, the truth is not. Republicans are going to win or Democrats are going to win. The truth right now is 40% chance is going to move over the next week as new information develops. And I want people to get more and more mathematical about the word. That excitement that I have, the thing that I just described, the childish excitement about what I'm building, is the thing that gives you something. Because I'm not doing it at the court. Obviously, I'm very happy. And, like, things are, you know, we've got. We're very lucky to have all the success we had. In some ways, I'm living the American dream, and it's amazing. But, like, I don't spend much more than I used to. Like, I, you know, I fly better. I think that's one of the best things about, you know, making some money. Like, you can fly more comfortably because, you know, honestly, like, flights are getting really tough these days. I eat nice things. I'm like, you know, but things have not changed materially. I just like what I'm doing, and I'm locked in on, like, I love doing it. Like, work is fun for me. It's play. Like, we're like, "Oh, why do you go to a weekend? Are you miserable?" No, I love, I love going to the office. It's like amazing. You know, I, like, go, and, like, there's new ideas, and there's, like, this thing that I can build in. Like, "Oh, my God." And, like, wait, what are customers? Oh, customers didn't like that feature. They're liking that new one. That's the best thing to do, because I think, over time, and we've got acquisition offers over time, and like, what do you want to sell? Because, I thought about it. I was like, "Okay, if I sold it, I made a lot of money. What would I do?" I don't know. I know myself. If I go and, like, do nothing with a bunch of money, I think I'm going to get depressed. People always think about, "If you don't have purpose, it doesn't matter. You can have all the money in the world. It doesn't really matter." And you know, you'd know this, right? Like, I was like, I probably would go back to maybe being in financial markets and being a builder, and I thought, well, exactly what I'm doing right now. So, like, so. Yeah. I feel like I would go back to-- You're married. I would be building a, you know, I know I have a girlfriend for four years now. And so, I think, like, I tell people, figure out the thing that makes you light up. And if you don't know what it is, ask your friends what it is. They will know. And you should probably work on that. I tell you what, Kalshi, incredible concept. And it's amazing what it's turned into, and I'm so curious to know where you take it next, because for us, when we look at anything with election, decision, any of that stuff, we go straight to Kalshi. And if you're not already doing it, you ought to go out there and do it for yourself as well. Thank you so much. This has been a pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. designed to move with you. Because true luxury isn't about being noticed. 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