YouSaid · the spoken record

Tarek Mansour

lines on the record: 66
first: 2025-10-01
most recent: 2025-10-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And it's done safely, and nothing bad is going to happen, and democracy is going to be totally fine, actually. And you'll see, we're announcing a few things with some big news organizations pretty soon. You'll see the shift. That's happened in culture where the level of embracing that's happening with prediction markets now that's pretty nice to see.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was not that important? It was the one where we appeals Yeah, that was important because, well, I first screamed a lot, like we just all got shitface in the office and it was amazing. But then we got back to work because we got extremely anxious about launching the thing. That was a brutal three weeks because we had to ramp up really aggressively. And I mean, we really went from, we really grew 100x overnight. Like, it was crazy. And so that was the three weeks away I worked the hardest in my entire life. I was sleeping in the office. I was given this chance. We have to basically utilize it to the fullest. And we didn't charge fees on the election market. I don't know if you knew that. It was an intentional decision because, like, the KPI here is we got to show the world that these markets work.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we were so, there were some pretty big time vindication there. I think we were, you know, because imagine in 2020 like three, going up to our board, you know, like Sequoia and a bunch of others, it's like, hey, like, yeah, we're not really figuring this out. It's been two years of pouring money into this. And nothing is working. We lost half of our team over it. And company might die. And actually, what we're going to do is we're going to triple down and sue our regulator now. They looked at us, they're like, well, that doesn't feel right. And we still went through with it. And it ended up being absolutely the right decision. So that, I think maybe like October 7th, the day we won the election lawsuit was probably the day I felt happiest.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great book about life, like everything, honestly. So John Worden was sort of basketball coach. He's most legendary about it. I mean, the whole thing was always about never mention winning. Training the team is like focusing the process and like day in, day out, just fall in love with the training. And if you do, you just start winning. And I would say a few things. I see these things as sort of, there's good times and bad times for all companies. And so, yes, right now we're having a pretty great time. Like as good as it gets for a company. But I don't feel that different. I think it's just like solutions bring new problems and like then you focus on the new problems.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean It's weird because I don't know if I feel that much better this year than last year. I mean, Luan and I, when we started the company, we really built a company around, I love this book, so have you ever read the book, like the score takes care of itself?”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's interesting because we're not, it feels like we're sort of like halfway through. Like there's still just the current structure. I think we're not even halfway through. Like we have more brokers. We have a very deep pipeline of brokers, so that's great and more sports. I think it's the frontiers, the SEC thing. So I think it's like more markets. And I think we have a lot of what we want. I think over time is like, how do we start doing company related prediction markets? And we're very excited about that.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, it's a question I haven't been really thinking about so much right now. It's like all about how do we not break basically. Because, I mean, honestly, we grew way more than we could have possibly imagined even in the most bullish scenarios, even post-winning the election lawsuit. Even like December 2024, like forecast for 2025, like just nowhere near what it is today.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very bullish on it. I do agree with Don, actually, that over the next four or five years you see companies like Robin Hood, like companies, a lot of companies are leaning in. Well, Council is also leaning in. So we're pretty excited about it.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Without any limits, and let them build, right? Obviously, that's going to be, there's a lot of good that's going to come out of that. And then there's going to be some bad that come out of that, obviously. But to me, it's like, well, there's a lot of liquidity on chain today. So that's something that we should access at some point. Two, I think the clearing side, there's a lot of benefits for how like you have to do innovation and you have to do immutability. And usually right now we do it from like operational legal perspective. And obviously there's some tech. On-chain really helps with that. That's like basically what it's designed to do. And so over time, like I think I hope as sort of regulators get more permissive, like I see some parts of clearing going on chain where it enables some of these use cases and then also more transparency like the trades and the transactions are all transparent for everybody to see and then people can build interesting like UIs and interesting projects on top without us having to serve this whole permissionless sort of concept and so I'm”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On shade. Yeah, because one of the ones that I'm less interested in is sort of like skirting regulation. But I think that there's a number of things, which is like my mental model for it is a bit like, you know, The banking rails were set up in the kind of early 20th century. It's like JPMorgan, a bunch of his friends are like, hey, how do we dominate this whole thing? And they set up a bunch of regs and then they closed the door behind them. And that was sort of that. And there's a bunch more complexity to that. But to me, this sort of whole on-chain thing is it imagine. Given that problem to a bunch of smartworking developers?”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My point is regulated. To me, it's a regulated front. It's more. So, okay, there are a lot of benefits, I really believe that. And I think the”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, maybe, I mean, well, it's interesting because probably now they're doing so there's kind of the on-chain strategy and then what we did, the regulated normal clearinghouse, like regulated clearinghouse strategy. And like now they're doing is sort of they're pivoting to ours basically. And so our view generally is like, well, it's a pretty positive sign for our strategy, probably, right? Because...”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, maybe there's like a separate dimension here, which is also the regulator is not always right, but there's a whole other thing there. Self certification is a regime, which, by the way, CME is also operated within, and so from that specific perspective, for each market, yes, it's not that every market goes through as a perspective, like in the SEC and then gets approved. It's actually like a disapproval regime But the CFT has authority to stay things, and it's a very broad authority, right? So maybe it's a good question that the CFTC because, you know, I can't speak on their behalf.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the election is obviously actually disapproved, right? And we had to sue over it. And we were clearly right on the law given that we won the district and then the appeals court.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's actually incorrect. I mean, I don't know. It's like, I mean, Terry, I'm very excited about meeting Terry. I mean, Terry is a legend. But we got a license and then a second one. So we got the exchange and then the clearinghouse. And then the broker license. So the exchange was like in 2020. And then the broker one was in 2025. All approvals. I mean, it's not like, you know”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a bit weird to me that the decision here is sort of don't let them make the choice if they want to invest in grade and if they want to do football then also great. I mean the solution that I feels weird to me which is like hide that option because the 50 year old or 30 year old man, the Son Robin, Needs me to figure out what to do with their money, right? And so that to me has always felt weird to me. And I think that's where financial regulation has sort of like gone too far in the last, I would even call it regulation. I'm very pro-regulation. We chose to be regulated up front, right? But this sort of like, I would say, I would say, I mean, people talk about lawfare, but whatever. The financial regulators, I think, have taken it too far in that dimension.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where the name is, you know, we want to have markets for everything. So I'm much more in the camp of like, you know, you figure out what people want to do and figure out how to do it in safe, equitable, and fair manner, like, you know, make sure that it's done with fair rules of the road for everybody to participate. And they want to get smart and do their own research. And if they don't, that's on them. And they figure it out and add some sort of checks and balances around it to make sure it's safe and there's customer protection. But I'll tell you that I'm a strong believer that the job of regulators should not be dictating what people should do with their money or their lives. I'm a very, very strong, like staunch sort of opponent of that sort of view of what a regulator should do. And I think that fits there. I mean, in some ways, maybe that's like, if you look at Roman, like there's all these choices now.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, but like, you know, I mean, a lot of people love sports, right? And like, you know, I don't know. I think that my general view with these things, I mean, I'm a free markets person. Like building a company”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the same exact sort of reason. So, like, what do you need, basically? And how does it work? But yes, I mean, the prime brokerages are very important because like. You basically get like they have the full portfolio. So you can get a bunch of margining benefits if you kind of do it all with one prime broker. And that's why usually prime brokers are the gateway into financial markets. And the same way as our broker strategy for retail, right? Like the Robin Hood and Weeble and some of the other brokers, it's very similar, actually, because you have your portfolio with a prime broker and then as you're thinking about your portfolio, it's like, hey, I could add on a hedge. It's much easier for me to do it through my prime broker than do it on a separate platform.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or, like a CEO leaving a company specifically, or they're worried about it. Then there's liquidity, like how much size can I take for it to be worth it for me to kind of allocate a desk and put resources into it? And then the second one is like margins, which today it's fully cash college on cashi. I trade $100, you have to put it up. That's very difficult for, let's say, a citadel.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It took a while. I mean, like we had a relationship way kind of when we started thinking about the company. We have a relationship with a lot of the sort of institutional pairs and market makers. And I mean, I worked at Cyda before. But I don't know if we just had a relationship and we started talking. And they see the vision. So Susquehanna really believes, I mean, Jeff has really believed in the vision of sort of like this idea of have some skin in the game to forecast any question about the future instead of debating about it. And he's always loved prediction market. So there's a little bit of a natural fit there. But like going back to the kind of institutional, like what we learned is like. It's there, right? A lot of them, whether they price these specific events like NFP specifically.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I would say right now it's a lot more just like learning. It's not necessarily hey, our approach is much more like we learn, we learn, and then we figure out how to build the right product, and then people come. It usually works that way, not sort of like, oh, like stuff on.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To kind of like deep institutional use case to basically start kicking in. And I think I see this sort of over the next two, three years. I think that's going to be a very big part of Cash. It's always been part of the vision because you create a marketplace where you can price anything What you're doing at that point is your pricing ris The pricing area is sort of happening in the wild. And then when you price the risk, it's much easier to create the liquidity the same way that it's easy to create liquidity for the option market today, that it's much harder for some esoteric event, as there's more and more price benchmarks, then you can provide more liquidity. And then after that, we can basically really cater to this sort of institutional risk transfer use case, which I think is kind of where the TAM really expands long term.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yes, but it's kind of a size thing, right? The main bottleneck is basically liquidity. And it goes back to the same question. It's like you have to incentivize more and more liquidity over time so that you get the larger sizes. So a typical, I mean, the way I think about it is there's a small prop shops and the smaller shops. Those are doing some. And you can take millions of liquidity on cashy. It's not that difficult now. Depends on the markets and so on. But then if you get sort of the buy side firms, like the larger, you know, like where you're just getting the top 10, 15 on the street, top 10, 15 hedge funds on the street. And then after that corporation, it's like, then you're talking like the minimum, minimum size, like for even to care is eight figures, but probably 50 to 100 million. And so I don't think liquidity is there quite yet. Like elections started flirting with that sort of level and we've seen some. But like...”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But say for sure is they don't have any privileges or benefits aside from anybody else. Aside from SIG, aside from, we have some small teams, two, three people that sign up to MarketMaker programs. Some of these teams are actually beating all the other market, the institutional, including ours, institutional are usually better than ours. But what we do is there's tiers. So if you kind of abide by certain conditions, you can get more rebates than if you do lower conditions and less rebates. And those tiers are accessible to anybody that basically would do the conditions uniformly. One, because regulatory wise, we have to. And then two, because otherwise people wouldn't trust the sort of marketplace. So, yeah, there's accused a lot about a lot of different things, you know, but like, that's normal. I mean, there's like a lot of incentives and interest that are on the other side of this equation, specifically now sports. At the time, it was elections.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're doing okay, I would say. And it's fine. They try to kind of which public equipment some of the markets are harder and so on and so forth. And that's a good thing. Otherwise, these markets would sort of not be there.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So people ask a lot about cashi trading. So fully, it's fully information. Like we've operated for five years. It's fully siloed informationally. It's like run independently and so on and so forth. What I can say emphatically, KTA has absolutely no advantages in any way, shape or form of other market makers or market participants. And we've always said that we don't think of this as a flank because it's true. And the CFC audits us and they see the numbers and the numbers are factual. They're not the best performing trader, let alone market maker on Calci by orders of magnitude. I'll leave it at that.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because without any sort of structure, then no one's going to commit to anything, right? Then people will only do it when it's advantageous for them and they won't do it when it's maybe like a novel market where we need to kind of butcher liquidity and so on. So you have to figure out the service set as incentives, especially in the beginning. And those over time go down as the market goes more and more liquid, as you need less and less of them.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Accessible by anybody in a certain sort of like tranche or tier or whatever. But if a market maker wants to come and trade on calcium, they could do that. And they have no obligations they can make, they could take, they could do whatever they want. Generally, what happens is like, you know, if a market maker wants like, okay, but then how do you kind of incentivize liquidity? Then you could sort of say like, okay, maybe you rebate you some fees if you basically commit to obligations and the obligations the way they look like is like if you make on the Fed market, so that's an actual specific example. you put like 75,000 contracts up on each side within like four three to four cents spread and you have like 98 availability so you're pretty much there every time we kind of probe you could for example get your fees that you pay rebated so you don't have to pay so that's kind of like actually our most common type i mean this is pretty much like market maker program a lot of them are public and people can sign up to which markets they want to participate in so some people sign up to economics some people do politics some people do sports some people do a combo of both a lot of people do financials and the reason you want that”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What did it do for everything? No, because, well, not everything, no, because you have fair access sort of requirements on a CFC regulation. So you have to have rules that basically are generally like.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You already have one that's sort of, I mean, You're like daily in your operations already very tough. Now you're adding a second one, and it doesn't scale linearly. It scales sort of quadratically. And so it's been really tough historically, but it may be now in this environment, I think it might be possible. And maybe we'll figure it out on Monday. So we'll see.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say it's been a very exciting concept for even pre-KALSH. It's not like we're, but I think the SCFTC SEC relationship historically has been a big part of the bottleneck because you're on the SEC side, you can't really do futures. And if you're on the CFC side, you do futures where you don't do securities. And then you have this question of like, should I get reggated by both?”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you know, like the idea of, sorry, kind of one general and then specific answer generally and then specifically. So the general sort of principle is like I think anything that has a different of opinion, difference of opinion of qualitative opinion should basically have a mechanism to resolve that quantitatively. Like, instead of debating subjectively on something, like let's debate about it objectively and quantitatively, which is trading, what's am I? And then there's some limits. I think there are markets that do create bad incentives. And I think actually CA does handle them. And we really haven't done these markets. But to your question, yes, I think that's probably what the next frontier looks like. And I think that the concept of security futures has been like a very kind of like.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think it's kind of exactly the same as financial markets. And like a lot of our liquidity is in the non-liquid markets market maker driven and the liquid markets non-market driven.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you listen to the market right now, let's give an example, even Fed rates, you gotta kickstart somehow, right? Like the financial markets need market makers, right? And they financial markets are the ultimate version of peer-to-peer. That's what they are. But it's basically a way to kickstart Mushavikarin. Actually, our most liquid markets, the more successful a market becomes, the more profitable market becomes, the lower the percentage of market makers, like whether it's like partners like Susquehanna and institutional market makers and others, the higher it is that it's basically organic liquidity. So actually the more successful it is and the more profitable for us and like anybody, the lower the participation of these market makers. So the use is actually like you got to have somebody that starts the bid ask. Otherwise you put a market and there's nothing. It's just that. And so you have to kind of break the chicken in the egg. In some ways you start with the chicken and you incentivize that chicken so that the egg comes and then you basically get the flywheel rolling.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not quite right. No, the Java advice is a sports operation, which is listing the markets, how to settle them and all these different things. What's that dynamic is similar, right? Like you have to know which markets to list, how to list them, what are the price feeds to kind of like pull up, to pull, to basically settle, whether it's sort of like this team one versus the other, that's very different from we need, I don't know, like someone who's like an expert in program to bring in traders and figure out how to optimize like how to like optimize like losses and things like that like this is very, very different.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just don't think this is the same here. Like, that's not how the New York Stock Exchange makes its money. It makes its money based on fees. Same with Robin Hood, same with Kalshi. And so I think there's a big structural difference.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, gambling is sort of like you create an artificial risk and then you roll a dice and then you gamble on it. But trading on whether Brexit had happened or not, that's just like a natural risk that's sort of there. And then the second question is that, and to me even more important one is the market-based mechanism versus sort of like you walk into a casino, the odds are structurally stacked against you And actually, if you start making money in the best case scenario, they basically stop you from participating. And that happens in sports books and others. And in the worst case scenario, they kneecap you, right? And so that to me is gambling. It's like the revenue of the company is equal to the losses of its customer and vice versa.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a whole question of grain futures should it be gambling or should it be a financial instrument? And if it was gambling, it was going to go under the bucket shop laws. And it was the Supreme Court case Chicago Board of Trade versus Christie where Supreme Court basically ruled in favor of the Chicago Board of Trade, which is like, yes, a lot of people are speculating, but there's value to these markets beyond the actual speculative activity that's taking place. And then you get into the kind of question of like, what is the standard of the commodity exchange act? Like, should all the activity be hedging? Well, if that's the case, then you let's just cancel the whole act. Let's just stop trading altogether because in most markets, including Grain Futures, 95% plus is not hedging and speculative. And I think that's true in the stock market. And so, you know, and then like, okay, well, how do you distinguish and should we take out the speculative and just keep the hedging? Well, if you do that, then there's no liquidity and so it doesn't work. And then how do you even know who's hedging and speculating? Do you go and check the person financing? So you go into all these different questions.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Joyline is basically it's the sort of thing where, like, I mean, in 1905, I think we talked a little bit about this, like the Supreme Court.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the news is breaking. I mean, it is legal to trade on California states. I mean, that's big news. And we are, I mean, you know, but like, I do actually think that like. I'm not as worried about this. The word gambling is the one that really irks me, I think, because Like, okay, zero DTE options. Retail is doing what, like a trillion dollars of volume. I mean, you probably know the numbers. What is it day right now”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which brings me to the second question, which is I'm just a strong believer in markets. Like, I think a market based model for these markets is better than the over-the-counter sportsbook model. Because the odds are better. Anyone can be a price better. They don't have to be a price taker. And the results show less people, like the percentage of people that basically lose on calcium is closer to 50-50. That's just not the case in like a traditional sports book. And I think that's the sort of argument that wins it long term, which is just better. Like you get better prices, more transparency, and the ability to influence basically participate in a way you can't in a traditional model.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's an event kind of related to war, terrorism, assassination, violence, or gaming. And then there's some sort of illegal stuff that's illegal under state or federal law. And so you can fall under that category. We can debate whether this falls under gaming or not. And there's actually quite a bit of debate there. And then the second test, which is like, if it does fall under this category, CFC can make an explicit determination that is contrary to the public interest, right? So there is that sort of second standard.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was X nominee now. I mean, we'll see. But I mean, I don't know. I don't know if it's X nominee, but there's a couple of questions. But he was not there when this happened and he's still not there, actually. So I don't think that's very relevant to the question. I think the change of the administration is relevant to the question. Like, yes, I mean, I think it would have been much more challenging than the prior administration. There's no question about that. But the law is pretty clear. I mean, if you read the Commodities Exchange Act, there's like a two-pronged test.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was like a whole thing about, you know, I worked at Palantry and thus, I'm obviously kind of rigging the election. Obviously the vibe has shifted pretty dramatically with the election. And because there is some kind of power in these markets. So when it comes to sports, like, On the legal piece, it is legal. Like, the CFTC could stop it if they wanted to, but the states can't. That's federal preemption, and that's how it works. And we're in extremely strong legal footing. I mean, Don was mentioning sort of this. I don't think CFT is asleep at the wheel. They have less staff, they have staff, and the staff is aware of sports. It's not like we showed up one day like, hey, surprise, sports markets are here.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I guess so. So the legal question, I mean, like our approach has always been sort of legal and regulated first, like always do it within the bounds and expand the bounds. So we did this prediction market, then elections. I mean, a year ago, right? A year and a half, well, a year ago even. People were saying this was going to destroy democracy, right? Like it was the end of the world if we ever got legalized and then we got legalized and it was like super biased and I was being accused of being wassad agent. I don't remember that period. But like it was like”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I don't have kind of as much of a problem with the word betting. I think gambling is sort of where I have a problem. When Sami launched Water Futures like three, four years ago, I remember the headline about that is like, oh, you can now bet on water. It's like, all right. I mean, I guess the word betting is used very sort of loosely. I would say two things there's sort of the legal question and there's sort of the ethical is this good for a society question and those are my two that matter”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“3x, maybe. Okay, okay. So, like, yeah, I mean, NFL Sunday is like massive, but it's a little bit like asking the question, like, okay, well, on election day, what was the volume? Yeah. Like 99.9% elections, right? So sports is very large, but we have other categories now, like culture, for example, I think, is growing at a similar rate. It's just starting from a much lower baseline. And our market diversity, our liquidity is just not there yet. Whereas sports is much more kind of like, I would say much more diverse and much more liquid.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Volume on a Sunday is very, very big. But it's interesting. I mean, I'll say a few things. The sports side has grown, I'm shocked. I'm still shocked. Every week I do a forecast and we beat it. America likes NFL. I mean, I don't know. I mean, they like football. I don't know more than expected, I guess. But it's a little bit more than that. The thing about sports is, let's say there's two things going on. One, there's just a lot of scheduled events. There's just a lot in the week. But if you compare like a one-to-one, like a game to basically anything that Trump does, Trump will win. Like, you know, like in terms of volume one-to-one, these markets do really, really well. And it could be literally unlike, I mean, anything he does. The problem there is not enough scheduled events. I think there may be over time”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, there's like a self-certification, which is basically you fight with the CFC and they kind of like. Generally, historically, it's basically like if you file it and you haven't engaged with them beforehand, they usually will basically block it. They'll call you and say, stop until we talk, and then you do it. But now we've covered so much territory and we've built so much technology and the operations and the regulator in the loop that most new things that we do actually fit into a bucket that we've already done. And sometimes there are complete new things. Like right now, the frontier is actually some of the SEC company related markets, I think is the sort of next frontier. But we've covered so much grounds now that most things are of a similar flavor.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source