Pivot - Betting on Reality with Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour: ACCESS

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

This week, Alex and Ellis talk about the rise of storytelling in tech and why X is now openly pleading for its haters to come back. Then they sit down with Tarek Mansour, co-founder and CEO of Kalshi, to discuss insider trading, his rivalry with Polymarket, regulatory chaos, sports betting, and why prediction markets are having a real moment. Listen to more from ACCESS here. ACCESS is produced in partnership with the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Box Media Podcast Network, and I'm Kara Swisher. We're off for the holiday today, but we have something good for you, an episode of Access with Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger. In this episode, Alex and Ellis talk about the rise of storytelling in tech and YX is now openly pleading for its haters to come back. As if. Then they sit down with Tarek Mansour, co-founder and CEO of Kalshi, to discuss insider trading his rivaling with Polly Market, regulatory. chaos, sports betting, and why predictions markets are having a real moment. Enjoy and we'll be back in your feeds later this week.

You recently made a comment that went kind of viral. I think you got a lot of heat for it. You said you want to financialize everything. Do you really mean that? Why did you scare my grandma with that comment? If you believe that markets work, what they do is they discover prices. But what if we applied it to some of the most important pressing questions about our future? Should you be able to bet on anything?

Cali is one of the fastest growing companies on earth, and it lets you do exactly that. They fought the government and won, raised billions of dollars, and are in the middle of a fierce rivalry with Polymarket to win the prediction market race. A power shift is brewing in the sports betting world. What does this mean for sports betting and the gaming stocks? This week on the show, we have Kalshi CEO, Tarek Mancer. We talk about insider trading, why Kalshi employees aren't allowed to use Kalshi, what he thinks of Polly Market and his controversial comments.

comment about wanting to financialize everything. But first, Ellis and I talk about the rise of storytelling in tech and why X is pleading for its haters to return to the platform. This is Access. Ellis, how's it going, my friend? I'm well. How about you? I'm good.

We've got a lot to talk about today. We've got Tarek, Mansour on the show, the CEO of Kalshi. But first, Ellis, I've been noticing that everyone seems to have FOMO about what you do. about being a quote unquote storyteller, that storytelling is the hot new thing. According to the Wall Street Journal, at least, they had a big story. Was it yesterday talking about the rise of the storyteller

and the, frankly, the decline of reporters? How did that feel? Going from earned media to maybe we'd call it invented media, co-created media, masturbatory corporate media, one of the above, take your pick. This was one of those stories that got viral screenshoted on X by a bunch of people we both follow in the tech world, everyone, you know, glamping on about their savvy media strategy that they have. And I just think it's kind of interesting that this is becoming a hot topic. And I think it kind of signals where everyone's head is at that in an age of infinite AI everything and products that all kind of do the same thing.

maybe the thing that matters is how you talk about your company. I don't know. You're the professional. You tell me. Humanity have never been more important. What we need is storytelling. I mean, to me it's nothing new. I feel like this is just the next evolution of content marketing and social. I mean, it's so crazy to me. I remember being back at the verge like 12 years ago. And our friend Sam Schaeffer was doing social probably paid a pittance to do this. like every other social media person in the industry. Shout out Hypeddesk. And that's all there is now is social.

And fortunately, these folks are being paid a lot more now for the value of their work and their skill at packaging content to fit in algorithmic social feeds. To me, this whole storytelling revolution, I think kind of coincides with this whole idea of founders and creators being interesting. And when you are telling whatever you have to say from the horse's mouth,

it typically feels more authentic or more interesting than it's being translated by somebody else, whether it's a reporter or the social media desk or otherwise. So, yeah, to me, I mean, this is just kind of the next step. I mean, selfishly, the way that I think about what I do is that it's more than just telling a story, but actually understanding all your audiences these days. As a tech founder, whether it's investors or candidates or internal teams or advertisers or in retail even before your IPO. And so I do think there is like a meaningful difference there.

I guess when I reflect on this, I'm glad it's being appreciated. I'm glad people are seeing this convergence, I guess, of the way that we communicate with the world and just being real about it. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, it definitely feels a little funny as the attention turns away from creators or even influencers

and reporters. and reporters in terms of how you get your narrative out to the world, you know? You can still get your narrative out to the world through Sources.News. Thank you very much. You bring like immense context, I feel like, to every story. And so if you're a company that has trouble translating their differentiation, I mean, but that is what a storyteller is in my mind. Yeah. I don't know. I think founders should go direct more, but I think a lot of of founders are wet blankets and have no personality and no ability to talk about what they do beyond the nuts and bolts of the actual thing. And to really do this well, you have to be,

I think someone like Tourek, who we have on later in the show, who can talk about it more at a high level. And that just takes, you know, that takes like a certain personality. It takes experience. It takes training. But yeah, I mean, I just think storytelling as a concept in the tech world becoming so popular right now with AI. I think, yeah, just to me suggest that there's a lot of copycats and a lot of cookie cutter type things out there. I'm reminded of a quote that Ilya Susskever gave the Darkash Patel podcast recently, where he was like, Silicon Valley has more companies than ideas right now. And it does feel that way. Yeah. And when there's less differentiation or when everybody's building the same thing, the story becomes even more of a potential lever to hook people

or just talk about yourself to the world more without pitching your product every day. That's really how I think about it. It's just a world now where everything is content. And that applies to us as well in the way that like we package this podcast, what clips we choose, what platforms we post on. And in some ways, I think it's nice that it's a bit more of a meritocracy maybe than it once was where it was all follower driven and it took years and years and years to build followers. So you had any leverage. So I think that's the bright side of it. But yeah, when everybody's building AI wrappers, it is awfully hard to stand out now. So we need to invent a new job for that. Everything is content. Is that the first slide of your deck? Kind of. I think the first slide of my

deck, which is no longer as relevant as it once was, was like if you build it, they will come. And it's just crossed out. And that was more of a hot take a couple years ago now that seems kind of like obvious. How's anybody going to use your app if they haven't heard of it? Right. Right. And I mean, I definitely feel this from my perspective of being a independent journalist now for just a few months, but the amount of outreach I've gotten from VC firms, startups, big companies that want to work with me on quote-unquote storytelling and I'm like no thanks you can just you know give me an interview but it is a wait you don't plug me in that conversation I do if you had a perfect opportunity there and you do you didn't take it no I plug you a lot I plug you a lot

but I'm not I'm not you know for the person to come in and like brand to the company right it's like figure out how to reach so-and-so audience you know I think of what you do at a little more high level. But yeah, I just, I think there's a lot of people who think analytically and from an engineering mindset or a product manager mindset, but very few people who actually can step back and think about how is this actually going to engage an audience. And, you know, I struggle with that. You know, it's something that I can rotate too much in one way or the other all the time in my work. And you don't want to like be overly, I don't know, programming, overly trying to game the I mean, we talk about this with the podcast and how we how we do the podcast, but you also want to be

relevant. So it seems like a very hard line to walk. I think maybe in some ways you have had a bit less practice than others because you have scoops to lean on. Yeah, scoops do help. You don't need to sensationalize what a company is about when you are breaking news that has that inherent value. You know what I mean? Yeah. And that is the core of the storytelling to me when I work with any client is in some ways just trying to find what's most newsworthy about them. And you are right. I don't know if I'd call them all wet blankets, but they all do think that what they're building is inherently interesting because that's why they're building it for 24 hours a day. And I do think, as that Wall Street Journal article points out, the reporter's instinct

to know what is going to break through. That's all you do every day. Three, four, five times a day. A bit different for you. You know, you're probably spending a lot of a lot more time over the long term building these relationships. Sometimes the source will tell you something in a year that they may not tell you today. But back when I was doing it, it was like, I mean, especially a business insider when I was writing fucking five articles a day, getting immediate feedback from the algorithm and also the clicks on the front page of what headlines are working. Charpy.

You get pretty good. Right. You get pretty good at understanding what type of language people need. But yeah, I mean, I guess one other nice thing about former reporters is that we also have some pride and dignity in trying not to like completely give in to the tricks, if you will. Like, I don't feel comfortable doing that. I think a lot of people probably do. That's why we're all broke as reporters. Yeah.

Yeah. So I do think we embody a better balance than than many others. Hey, it's Olivia from OLLI. I gotta tell you, I saw when you asked AI about probiotics. No judgment. But I think OLLI can help. Probiotics are the good bacteria that support your digestive and immune system. Just two gummies a day to bring balance to your gut.

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Yeah, I want to talk about the interview. You did. I mean, this was a good one, man. I mean, this is some stuff I've been wanting to hear for a while. So, yeah, Alex, you sat down with Nikita Beer, who is the head of product now for X, formerly Twitter. And nice to hear someone actually talk about what they're doing with a fine-tooth. become an actual product builder. I mean, what do you feel like when you look back on this?

You know, you took away the most. Nice to hear that there's someone there, like, keeping the lights on and thinking about the product direction. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean, I've known Nikita for a long time. He's this, I would say, he's become a personality in the tech world. He's this viral master of social apps who sold one to meta back in the day, TBH, and then another called gas to Discord.

And I think Nikita's hilarious. Like I said, I mean, he's in LA too. We've known each other for years. But yeah, when he reached out and was like, look, do you want to do you want to do you want to do you want to do you want to do you want to do you want to do you know, of course. It was his first interview since he took the job about seven months ago. He reports to Elon directly.

And yeah, I thought this was interesting that this was the first thing that a senior, you leader at X is coming out and saying, which is we really want media and even, you know, capital J journalist to come back. And I think I know why, which is that, you know, I've been covering Twitter before Elon bought it for many years. I extensively covered when Elon bought it. And Twitter has always had this problem where a very small percentage of the user base posts most of the content. And that's true for, I don't know, I guess Snap was a little different because that was messaging, right?

But these one to many platforms, that's usually the case. But even by kind of industry standards, Twitter was always pretty top-sided that way. And they would call them like VI, I think they were VIT. So someone's going to, an ex-tweep is going to be about this. Yeah, something like that. Very important tweeters or something. And they would track this obsessively because this would kind of. this factor would basically determine whether Twitter was working or not.

And I mean, what you saw with Elon, right, is like obviously a bunch of people in the media left, including many of my peers and close friends in the media who, to be honest, like, kind of made me feel like shit for staying on X. It became like a, it is a political thing. And, you know, you had blue sky happen, you had threads happen. and this diaspora now where everyone's kind of spread out and like I wrote in this interview and now I check three apps a day instead of one to find out what's going on in the world. And that hasn't changed.

You know, three years, it's crazy to think. Like, it's been basically three years since Elon bought Twitter, which is wild. And Nikita basically just outlined with me that, you know, they're making changes in the product that he thinks will hopefully incentivize people to come back. That's a new link viewer that is driving more traffic to web pages. I can attest to that personally in my traffic. Are they still like completely shadow banning substack links as they want? So he says that's not happening.

There's not no shadow banning of like certain link domains. There's no. That was not a shadow ban. That was a public ban. No, that was a direct Elon ban. And the interesting backstory to that at the time when that happened, that was again around the acquisition was Elon was trying to buy substack. He was actually trying to pitch Chris Best, the CEO on being the CEO of a, you know, de facto CEO.

I mean, Elon's obviously the real CEO, but the de facto CEO of Twitter. So there was, I think, some more stuff going on in the background there. But yeah, they were doing that. And, you know, Elon was banning journalists for reporting about the whereabouts of his private jet based on publicly accessible information. I think really stretching the definition of doxing to target journalists who were doing some pretty critical reporting of his acquisition at the time. So again, I have no, there's no fault or no, I have no qualms, I guess, with my friends in the media who have said, we're never coming back as long as Elon's running it. But it's interesting to see Nikita say, look, like, you'll get

traffic. I mean, he posted like, this is the biggest arbitrage opportunity of your career for your journalist to come back because we have the audience. I think it's like half a billion plus people a month coming to the platform, who knows how many of those are bots. But, you know, and, you know, time spent is at a record high. You don't think that's true, though. You don't think it's true? No, like, they have vacated so much of the quote-unquote newsiness, I feel like, of this platform. Like, what I see most of the time, I'm very interested in news. And yeah, most of the posts I see are still from the last couple days, but it has really become for better or worse, like TikTok for text, or memes or what have you.

I mean, I don't know if it feels like that for you, but like, I don't know. I feel like engagement is down when I post about anything newsy. Like it is very much just kind of visual opinion-driven stuff similar to the other platforms. It's just kind of incidentally who's still there. I feel like that's working. And in a lot of ways,

because the subject matter is a lot more personalized now as opposed to your follow graph, I think it's actually even harder to stand out. Hmm, that's interesting. I mean, that also speaks to what Nikita said about the algorithm. Or maybe I just suck at posting. No, no, no, no. I think what they've done is they've replaced the traditional algorithm, which had a bunch of classifiers and labels that someone like Elon could go downrank so-and-so, down-rank this category of content or these accounts, to this purely grok-based,

which is like, yeah, for better or worse. Whatever that means. Grock-based, personalized, L-LM-based algorithm that is entirely training on, your preferences and your interactions. So maybe that's what you're telling X you want, Ellis. Well, I am. But how many people are saying, I mean, I'm obsessed with the news more than most people. And like, it's, it's good these days, you know? Like I start engaging with more, like I start playing some old Mega Man games and I'm really enjoying them. And now I'm seeing like really good Mega Man accounts like doing niche memes and old artwork from the old games. Like,

that's great. All I'm saying is that they don't appear. to be focusing, especially if they're not tipping the skills on news. Well, I don't think they have a lot of news on the platform. That's the problem. I mean, that's why he was doing the interview is like they need the posters to come back. And journalists were the posters. And, you know, some of us have stayed, you know. And the reason I never left is because I think it's my job to be close to my sources.

I named sources for a reason. And the AI community in particular has never left. X. Like to say that you're trying to cover this industry and understand what's going on and you're not on X and you're not interacting, you're not, to me, you're not doing your job well. Sure, you can still break news and you can still, you know, you may not need it, but it still has been tremendously advantageous to me from that perspective. And it's the main reason I've stayed on. But yeah, I think that's why he did the interview. It's like there's not a lot of news. It's kind of all over the place. I mean, I feel like you go to, do you check blue sky or threads much?

Not really. I think I see threads via the crazy cross-promotion module inside of my Instagram home feed. Blue Sky, I get Blue Sky links from a friend or two, but that's it. By the way, great headline. I love X wants its haters back. Did that just come to you? That just came to me no LLM involved, actually. Yeah, thank you. I mean, I wanted a little bit of rage bait. You know, this was like a classic blue sky rage bait. story. I would say the vast majority of my peers in tech media are very active on blue sky and not at all on X, maybe some on threads. I think threads is actually trending in the direction of Reddit. If you look at what they're doing with the community stuff, the sports stuff that they're leaning

into. Connor Hayes, the head of threads is also going to be in sources this week, but he just did a podcast with a bunch of NBA people. I think they're going more in that direction. And for X, I mean, they really need to convince people to leave Blue Sky, which I don't know. I mean, Blue Sky is its own echo chamber, man. It's like, you jump on there and it's like you better, you can imagine immediately in your head like this is what it takes to work on Blue Sky and to be successful. And it's a very particular POV on things. It's like you're very skeptical or you just downright hate AI.

You hate Elon. You love Mondami. Like there's just like there's this Venn diagram of like all these things that makes you on blue sky. And like that's I wish we were all together again, I guess. And Elon was, you know, he says he wants to make the town square and he has utterly failed at that in the last few years, right? It's the it's the opposite. And I think everyone is is right to be very, very skeptical of that not happening, I guess.

Well, to close things out for we get to the interview. Did he divulge any, any juicy little funny Elon stories or habits? No, he did not. We're going to have to save that for a future conversation. You didn't ask? I asked a little bit. He said he meets with Elon multiple times a week and that Elon is spending most of his time on X and XAI. Is it still going to be the everything app?

They're launching X money, the payments thing that he said he was going to do when he bought the company. I think they're launching it this month before, for New Year's. So you're going to be able to to pay. pay the bots in crypto or whatever. I think it'll be Fiat, but yeah, that's launching very soon. Yeah, it is interesting to watch. I mean, these platforms, the features as long become obvious, are no longer really the differentiators,

whether it's the feed or the DMs or the size of images or videos. It seems like it really just kind of has become who's on here, you know? And that may, I think, be fine for companies of a certain scale, depending on their ambitions. But I'm hopeful that these different platforms can emerge for different communities, though I really do miss that moment of monoculture where everybody on Twitter was live tweeting the Oscars or the Apple event or whatever it was, that there is no place for that these days. And that was a special moment.

I wonder, though, I guess that was the idea with Twitter that didn't allow them to grow to the size that their investors wanted, is that not enough people wanted that. I think Twitter didn't grow for a lot of other more practical, just bad execution reasons. But that's a whole other conversation. All right. Should we kick it to Tarek? Yeah, let's do it. Two years ago, Apple showed off a version of Siri that used AI to be more helpful, more intelligent, and just generally more awesome.

And two years later, it hasn't shipped a bit, and Siri is still terrible. But this week on the Vergecast, we're talking about how a new deal with Google could mean a totally new way of thinking about AI for Apple and that we might actually get good Siri. That plus the latest on what's going on with GROC and what's going on inside the metaverse, how you can be more productive in 2026, and the surprisingly sci-fi future of Lego, all that on the verge casts wherever you get podcasts. In the mid-1980s, Nintendo basically single-handedly saved the gaming industry with the Nintendo Entertainment System. And then a toy company convinced

to Nintendo that maybe the future of gaming wasn't controllers, but was instead this weird arm sleeve glove thing that let you control video games with your fingers. It was called the Power Glove, and it was awful. This week on Version History, a new chat show about old technology, we traced the whole story of the Power Glove, which failed spectacularly and also kind of invented VR. That's Version History, wherever you get podcasts.

To Rec, we were joking while we were waiting for you that we should have started a market about what's you were going to join. Nice. I don't know how specific the markets are getting these days. Do people make them for such specific things? No, nothing like that. But there are certain things that people have interest in.

That could be about like a, well, nothing about like someone who works at the company or anything like that. And also the people at Calci can't trade. So we, because we run a regular exchange, so you cannot actually trade. really you have a no trading rule it's it's also like the rags the regatory framework doesn't enable us to trade on one exchange it's an interesting thing because you know it's hard to build a product when you can actually reuse it it makes it a little bit harder so there's like that interesting dynamic have you talked about that before how do you do that yeah how do you how do you build a product you can't use yourself uh i just have to be very close to the customers like really be very i mean

it's cliche like all all companies obviously talk a lot about staying close to the customer, but I think this is especially true here where you just have to really be at all times as close as possible to the customer to basically figure out what you need to build and how to make it better and what are the points of friction. But there are like, there are some industries where like, you know, the technologists or the product, like, you know, the product builder cannot fully experience their own product, you know. It's, it could be like in like in hard tech or like if you're kind of machinery like right, like you you're not sitting in the office and like operating some heavy machinery. And so you also have to really kind of embed

yourself with the customer. But yeah, no, I think it's feasible, but it is a challenge. Do we believe that Tim Cook is actually using the Vision Pro in his office or not is the real question? I mean, that does strike me as like pretty remarkably tough, especially when things are moving so quickly. And I do believe that like having worked at Snap and the browser company, that founder does have a unique ability to make changes in the product when things. don't feel right, whether it's with like the way a screen flows or a notification or otherwise, I've definitely come to believe over the years that dog fooding is a pretty critical lever. I wonder if there's any way to like say, hey, my friend, you're about to take a sabbatical for a little

while. You're going to gather some feedback, use the app for a while, come back. But I guess that would still be biased, wouldn't it? Yeah, but also would work. You have to have like a six months post-calchi period. So if you leave, you have to wait for six months before you could trade. But it is, I mean, there are ways to kind of like, like, you could still use the app without trading, right? Like, so that could get you a lot of the, I mean, that could get you a lot of the flows,

except for me the core trading flow. And then we have, you know, we have like an internal, like demo, like no real money, like free money version of the product. But that's also different. That also has different dynamics. So we get closed, but not quite there yet. Same product, no dopamine. It's like, I mean, the whole point, right, is like having skin in the game changes the behavior of people, right?

Like, that's the whole point. It goes back to sort of the whole question about polls versus prediction markets or, like, experts versus prediction markets. Like, the whole difference is there's some skin in the game here, right? If you take out the sort of monetary incentive or this idea of, like, you know, put your money or your mouth is, then we define. fall back to kind of a regular poll, right? People can just say anything. So the whole kind of truth-seeking aspect sort of erodes. You can bring back the bias, bring back subjectivity.

And so the money component is a critical component to kind of take you from the subjective to the objective, rational plane. So it's a difference, it's a big difference. I think if your employees were using it, they'd also be spending a lot more time in the bathroom as well. As they were, I mean, maybe they'd be distracted. I was reading. recently about how companies are deciding whether or not to ban prediction market trading for their employees as well. So it's interesting to hear that Kalshi bans it. I actually was reading too that Google built its own internal prediction market and that this is becoming more common. So yeah, what's your advice to companies weighing whether they should allow their employees

to use your product? I think that's okay. I mean, look, the same rules apply so that The rules are applied to the stock market generally mostly, like basically the same rules apply to prediction market, at least regular prediction markets, which is the case for Kalshi. And it's an important distinction to be drawn. Like from the early days, from the kind of day one, it's like we're in financial services and we're offering a financial product. And I think in those, in that industry, I would say like regulation is a very critical component or pillar of how you build things. And so we define a principle which is regulatory first. We're going to do everything regulated up front.

And what regularly means the thing at a high level is like, you know, figure out, like, customer protection, like make sure that people understand what they're getting into and what they're doing. And number two is market integrity or this idea of fairness. Create rules that are fair and, you know, for the different participants. It's right. Like if you're getting into a game that it's not fair, you don't want to participate in that or whether it's like anything in life.

And like if it's, and so you have to kind of. create it like the stock market, a set of rules that make it fair. And so like the stock market, the way that we've regulated this, you know, we worked for four years before we launched a single product. So working with the CFC, which is the federal regulator, to regulate this like a financial market. And so you have the same set of prohibitions. So like, you know, like market manipulation is not allowed, things like wash trading, spoofing. And then like this notion of insider trading and what it means, like what is insider trading and how do you define it? And so, So that is regulated like the exactly like the stock market.

And so we have the same sort of set of protections. We have systems that flag for these things. And then if you flag somebody who committed it, you know, it could go from from a fine to like if you commit inside trading on a stock. It could be like a financial crime. Like it could be criminal prosecution. And so it's an interesting question. Like when it comes to companies, it's very similar to like if you are an employee of a tech company

and you know something about the quarterly earnings, like you cannot buy options based on that knowledge, right? And the way to draw the line is essentially like, you cannot use material non-public information to trade, right? And what does that mean? So it's basically you cannot use information that is not supposed to be public. That is like you are not supposed to make that information public

by trading because actually trading with that information isn't in some way one way of making it public. Like you can go make information public by like saying it to the press or saying it to friends, but in other way is actually trade on it. Because if you trade on it, you're moving the price in a certain direction. And so that's another way to make it public. And the same rules apply to Calci. And so that applies to people.

The companies, government, members of, for example, like Congress, if they have an impact or knowledge on a specific, like, a bill or something that they are themselves doing. And it's kind of like a case-by-case also applies to sports. I was just going to ask, has anyone ever been fined or sent to the source? slammer then for something on Kalshi? So a few things. Because we've, like, okay, why do we take this whole regularity approach? We take this whole regular approach because, look, we believe this market could be very large

and, you know, we believe that one of the ways to go, like the only way to go mainstream really is to kind of build it regulated, regulated rail so that institutions, big partners can adopt it over time. But then the second thing is that, you know, you want to build something with the right set of safeguards so that, you know, you mitigate and avoid sort of like the risks to happen. Any new technology, especially financial technology, comes to a certain set of risks. That's always true. Self-driving cars, Uber, Airy&B, all of it comes at risk. And regulation, what it does is, like, it is a forcing function because you have a

regulator that has decades of experience that have seen how things go wrong, whether it's, you know, in drugs or in financial markets or whatever, to basically, like, pressure test your systems. And, you know, we've done four years of pressure testing before we went live now kind of since start to finish we start in 2019 now we're you know basically 2026 um it's been like seven years of pressure testing the system so the systems work really well like it's working as intended and you see you probably have noticed like you don't really like there there haven't been kind of cases of like people doing bad things on cash because it was very regular we asked you for your k-yc all the trades are reports of the government like it's kind of a bad place to try to commit fraud there are other

alternatives offshore unregulated and it's an easier way to do it right like if you want to do something weird with crypto, you probably won't go to Coinbase. You'll probably go to some offshore, you know, exchange that like offers similar services because there's no K.C. They don't know who you are. They don't report things to the government. So that's, that's one. So I think in casually, those risks are very largely mitigated because of a regulated nature. Two, there's something else that's interesting, which is the rules for an exchange, so we're an exchange, which is an SRO, a self-regulated organization. You have to have a bifurcation between the commercial business aspects and the market surveillance regulatory functions.

So the market surveillance regulatory functions report to the CRO who reports directly to the board. And a lot of the specific cases actually are not privy to. So the, yeah, it's interesting because then you, because you don't want to have impact on, you don't want to have like a conflict of interest, right? Like for example, if it's like a big customer that did something wrong, like the business may want to like be like, oh, maybe you should. But the rules say like actually there's an information wall between those two.

so that the regulatory side can interface with the regulator and the audit committees, etc., like independently of the commercial side. So they have full autonomy. Wow. So not only do you not get to use the products, but you don't actually fully know when people misuse the product, it sounds like. Well, the relevant team, including exactly, the chief regulatory officer, no, but the commercial side doesn't know.

And this, by the way, this is common, for example. You know how at like Goldman, so at banks, you know how like the, the, the chief regulatory officer, the trading side and the banking side cannot share information between each other. I guess the trading side can share with the banking, but the banking cannot share with the trading. And it's the same thing, I guess commercial can share with the regulatory, but there's some set of information that the regulatory cannot share with the business. Are these regulatory bodies equipped to investigate potential insider trading

on this scale as the number of things that you could bet on or trade just dramatically multiplies? The answer is definitely, I mean, like, look, the CFTC, it's interesting. People will talk about the scale of prediction markets. But look, I mean, this year, the prehistoric markets have grown massive, like, to be clear. So right now, I mean, I think SoCalci is doing something like $70, $80 billion of volume a year. And the broader industry maybe is $150, $200 billion with millions of customers participating. But then let's compare that to the commodities markets and the suave's markets that the CFTC regulates.

Actually, let me ask you, how much volume, notion of volume do you think, goes through the Chicago Mercantile Exchange a year? I was more interested maybe. I mean, I don't know the number, but I think maybe the more relevant number is, you know, volume per trader per se. Like I know that, you know, it's still pretty small for a calcium. It's tiny.

Right. And so that's what I'm saying. I realize it might be smaller, but I think the number of potential retail investors or just everyday people who are getting involved. has just got to be on a very different scale, I would think. I mean, that number that was going to mention is a quadrillion. Haven't heard quadrillion on the podcast yet.

We need an air horn or something. Yeah, it's 1,000 trillion. So the CME does like $3 trillion of volume a day. And it's a massive market. There's very large diversity of participants in the US and outside of the US. Some of it is institutional, a lot of it is retail. But and then you have the S&P futures, you have a bunch of different kind of products. But it's a regulator that has kind of overseen like mass, mass amounts of data, like mass amounts

of transactions on a daily basis across the board. And yes, you could have a composition. And I think it's not as kind of, kind of, we still have sort of a concentration of volume amongst the kind of like prosumer traders and institutions. These things are not like, they're not like uniform, right? It's not like you have 100 traders that do equal amount of volumes. it's kind of very tilted. And it's also existing in the traditional markets.

You have kind of a long-tail distribution or like a skewed distribution. But the important thing here is like actually, and this is very interesting, when people look to commit fraud, they don't do it for like $10 or $20, right? Like they usually, you know, they try to make money out of it, right? Otherwise, why are you violating the law? And the fortunate thing about that is that the larger, the size, the easier it is to flag, the more unusual the pattern is. You know, it's like, you know, when someone, for example, goes out, like when you hear about the SEC investigates some insider trading, it's because you need some

trader at a bank bought a kind of an out-of-the-money option two days before earnings. But that option, they bought like millions of it, right? Or they bought like a large size. That usually is actually pretty, it's kind of a problem that's like a much easier one to solve. Not very sneaky, realistically. It gets flagged. It gets flagged. And when you look at it's like, who are you, who do you know? How'd you get this information? And then you can escalate to investigations in the regulators. So in this context, people are probably seeing headlines recently about there was this trader. I think the name was like Alpha Raccoon or something who netted over like a million dollars by very accurately predicting Google's 2025 year in search rankings to the extent that like

this person probably worked inside Google. But that happened on Polly Market. And you don't actually hear stories of this, or at least I haven't seen stories of something like this on Kalshi. Maybe I just haven't seen it. But I imagine for you, you get lumped in with those kind of headlines, and it's like, oh, prediction markets allow insider trading, blah, blah, blah. Like, why did that happen on Polly Market and not Kalshi? It's the same as the kind of like the regulated versus unregulated model, right? And I always say this.

It's like you can take any financial market. Like you can take the stock market, right, which a lot of us perceives regulated and there's the right set of rules and except. et cetera. And if somebody offshore opens up a stock market without K.C. Without the sort of like same level of protections. Yes, things are going to happen on that marketplace. Right. Like it's not like like the thing I always say is like there are bad actors everywhere. Right. The bad actors are like they'll always try to find outlets to, you know, do bad acts. That's what they do. And and so there's this key distinction between regulated and unregulated. And I think generally with nascent

technologies, people sort of like merge. to and like treat them as similar. And you see, it's how it was with crypto, right? Like, they were good actors in crypto that were doing things regulated. And, you know, sometimes they had challenges with the government. Like Coinbase had all sorts of challenges with the government. But that was a good actor. It was like trusted, K-YC, you know, what you know where your money sits and you can trust us

with it. And we report to the federal government and so on and so forth. And then they were like, you know, offshore actors where you could put your money and you have no idea where it's going, right? Like, you have absolutely no guarantees that that money could be going to somebody's It could be going, whatever. But for new technologies, people, like, if something goes wrong in the unregulated piece, they can lump, like, they can lump the entire sort of space in one.

As you said, I mean, it's totally right, Alex. Like, I totally agree with this. It's a matter of education. It's a matter to show that, like, you know, look, there are actors that are going to do things the right way. And then there are actors that, you know, may have started to do things and maybe not so, so much the right way. And over time, may kind of converge.

But the most important thing, and maybe this is kind of the thing that we're getting at in some ways. Like, if you want to commit a bad act, you're not doing a regulated exchange. We would know the name of that person. We would investigate that transaction. We would report to the government and everybody could see it transparency, right? You would prefer doing it by paying somebody in some crypto and, you know, not traceable, like dark web thing, right? And that's actually reinforces the importance of a regulated, transparent model for this. Because then all the activity is out there for everybody to see. And, you know, we can work with regulators and we can work with we could put the right set of like sort of checks and balances and enforce them.

Yeah. You all are really big, but Polly Market is too. And it's actually amazing to me the amount of mind share polymarket has in the tech community especially, considering they're not officially launched yet in the U.S. I was just at the Deal Book Summit in New York where Andrew Ross Sorkin was talking about polymarket from the stage. Constantly, the Allend guys talk about them. They're everywhere.

Shane is everywhere. I really want to know how you feel about that. to imagine polymarket being so prevalent in the mind of like the tech community specifically bothers you. But how do you think about that and your rivalry with them right now? I don't know if it bothers us as much. I mean, like, I would say a few things. Like the number one metric we track is not really mind share or like, you know, I don't know, like visits or other. It's like actual number of users, volume, financial half of the company. And you have a real business. And I think on that, sort of from that perspective, we're much larger.

And there's a bunch of ways to kind of measure that. And, you know, you probably have seen the sort of charts coming around and other. To us, that's kind of the most important thing. Like, number of users, real volume, real kind of revenue, like financial, financial metrics. It's interesting because last year, if you were to kind of look at the mine share of CalCher, like versus Polymarket, we were probably kind of like five to 10 percent of the mine share. There's ways to measure. You can look at Google search, for example, like how many people know about a company versus the other.

It was a tough year because in 2024, in the early 20204, that similar dynamic was happening. So we, again, stood firm by a principle, which is regulatory first. We are not going to do anything that is sort of outside of the bounds of the law. That's kind of a principle we're never going to waiver off. You didn't want to be a shoot first, ask questions later, tech company?

Just financial services, I don't think is the right thing to do. Right? I really think financial services, the long-term winners are like, you know, measure twice, cut once, do it right. It's one thing when it's burrito taxis. It's another when it's financial services, huh? It's very, very different, right? Because in financial services, when things go wrong, they go wrong in a bad way. and so you really need a regulator and you need a regulatory oversight. So it was hard. Last year was hard because, you know,

they were getting the mine share because they launched the market. They just did it, you know, there's a whole debate whether it was in the U.S. or not, but, you know, it was obviously a lot of people were in the U.S. But, like, that, you know, they scaled, because they had the market

and they had the offering, obviously, they scaled much ahead of us. They basically went ahead and before us. And that was a difficult period for the company because, like, that was, I would say, the most difficult period because we were kind of like handstrong, like being told no by the government.

And, you know, we, and then you have the competitor that's sort of like doing it, you know. And you've seen this kind of, I think Kuomis had their fair share of competitors that operate that way. And that happened over and over. And it was tough because you just got to, you go to the regular. It's like, you're blocking us, but you're not blocking them. Like, how is this fair, right? And that was, I think, the toughest part of the journey. But the beauty is like when we won the lawsuit last year, so we sued the government over the election market,

and we won that. And we were right up on the, we were on the right side of the law. all, you know, the market charge has changed, but the mind share now, and we're looking at the metrics for this last quarter, like the fall, we're actually something like 55% of the Google searches in the US. Like, we've actually overtaken even in Midechair. And so, you know, for a while we've been leading on like the core business metrics and the product and the team, but now we're also actually at least equivalent in terms of the Mineshare. We've gained a lot of territory there. So it's just a matter of time. I think at the end of day, everything will

converge to where is a better product, you know, and I feel pretty good about our product. Do you think polymarket is doing things the right way? I think that's on them to comment. I think that like... Oh, come on. I mean, look, our view is like we approached it differently. I think we approach to sort of regulated in the U.S., do it right as a U.S. company. And, you know, they kind of did sort of offshore and the VPN thing and all of that.

That was kind of the historical thing. And, you know, I just mentioned, like, that was sort of like a sort of difficulty for us because it's like, we are carrying all the burden of legalizing the space. which was so tough, right? Like we spent four years and it was really like a very, very difficult journey to make this happen because you know, you had

the kind of battles of the government and they were kind of pushing us and they really wanted to sort of like this model not to exist without a lot of like real basis and then you had like a bit of a sort of dynamic where the opponent or the competition

like had no restriction whatsoever, right? It's a bit like you're in a boxing ring and then your hands are tied behind your back and then you have to you have to kind of go box, right? Whereas your opponent doesn't have their hand tie beer, but they may even have a knife, right? And you're just getting like, you know,

you're just kind of in that ring. So that was tough, that was tough. And there's no secret about it. And like, and you know, we had a history, our history between the two companies, as you know. Yeah, it's a very fierce rivalry, I would say. It was a very fierce rivalry because like, because of that dynamic, right?

It's like, you're sitting there and we're getting bloodied here and like you go to, and people who aren't realizing it's like, guys, like, you know, And it's not like customers or others, like, give you props to try to do things the right way. That's the tough part about doing things the right way. It is hard. Right. It's not the easy route.

It's not like you do it. And then people are like, great job. Congrats. You did things the right way. Actually, no one really cares until it matters. Like, no one cared about, you know, for example, like, FTCS was sort of like the golden child for a while up until it sort of blew up. And then everybody cared overnight. Right.

And so that was the hard part. And like, look, I mean, we made some mistakes as a company. There was some incidents where, you know, We made some bad tweets about them, and they made some mistakes, they made some bad tweets about us. And there was a lot of this sort of back and forth where we would go to press,

they would go to press, and so on and so forth. And we were just, at the time, at least, in the 2024, it was like, we just go up to the press, the radio. It's like, guys, do you not see this dynamic? Like, we are being blocked from doing anything, and then they are not. Like, how is this fair? How is this happening?

So that was, I think, deeply frustrating. I think this year, well, one, we learned from our mistakes in the past, but now we're also like a very different paradigm where like we did actually win that lawsuit and legalize the space. We did open up the space in a legitimate way. And there's a real way for the space to exist in a regulated, safe, responsible way now. It could become legitimate. And I think that changes the dynamic because, well, one that was very advantageous to us.

It was a huge kind of boost for us as a company, obviously even the results. But it was also beneficial for them because now they have a path to come and do it the right way and do it regulated and legal. And I think it seems like this is the path they were doing. trying to converge, they're pivoting towards our strategy. And I think that's a good thing. And I hope this to take committed to that because I think over time, both of us will push the space. Like, as long as they're sort of fair and reasonable competition between two of us, I think this is going to be great for the both of us. If you would have told yourself 10 years ago

that you would be suing the government and be on South Park in 10 years, what do you think you would have said? I mean, it's just like an absurd problem. You know what? It's just like, It's like also how do you kind of relate those two, right? It's like, yeah. I mean, you're like, is this a good outcome or the world's worst outcome? I think it's pretty good outcome. I think that like, you know, the, well, I would sort of dissect that for a sec. Like, I think the suing of the government in South Park.

They're both interesting and they talk to two different things. Like suing the government is interesting because not many people do that, especially your own regulator. So that, you know, but the beauty about the U.S. is like you have that sort of system, right? Like the government has checks and balances, and that's an amazing thing about our system. It's like none of the three powers that may be have full autonomy and full power. They kind of self-check and check each other. We disagree with the regulator's assessment.

These markets, the law was clearly saying they were legal. And I always say this. I think the law applies to the industry, to participants and people, but it also applies to the government. Sometimes this is kind of missed, right? The government is not the law. There is the law. And the law is something that we all have to apply, including the government.

And we disagree with that decision. And I think we were bold enough. It was a very difficult decision. I think serving in government comes with a lot of cost. And we were hurt pretty dramatically by that. But we won. And we were right. And so I think that's number one.

I think that's kind of like a beauty. I came from Lebanon, right? Like that is something that would never happen in Lebanon. Like just like the notion of like, oh, you know, I disagree with the government. I'm going to go sue it. It's like, where do you even go? Like I don't even know. If you walk into the courthouse with a lawsuit in hand,

I don't even know. Like, I think they turn it into cigarette maybe. I don't know. And the Southwark thing, I think is just a statement that, like, we build something that has gone mainstream. Like, I think that, like, people care about. And I think that's a, you know, that's, I think that's, it's been a wild ride to get there.

How do you think about CalShia as a part of everyday life? It seems like everywhere you turn, there are billboards, Instagram ads, even on the Apple Sports. app. They've got betting lines. And I know you guys do a lot of advertising that, uh, certainly I'm seeing a lot of the advertising about about sports betting on NFL and this and that. How does it, how does it feel to have this kind of a part of daily life? I think on the one hand, it is very fun. On the other, I think, you know, I have seen some ads that talk about

creating a side hustle or passive income, whether it's from you guys or others. How does it feel to be a, be a part of that, that reshaping of kind of how people interact with the financial markets. The way I'll answer this question is I'll sort of go back to kind of the core of how, like kind of why we started the company. So I spent time in financial markets, like at Goldman and a Citadel. At Goldman, the thing that struck me is sort of the large institutions, I was there in 2016. There were two big events in 2016, Brexit, and then the U.S. election, so the first Trump election. All the kind of big guys, what they were focused on is essentially, you know, I want to get exposure to Brexit.

or hedge against it. And then I got on to get exposure to Trump or hedge against that. And then we would create these financial bundles and all of that. And there were three issues. Like one, it was a, we gave them the wrong products. Like the traditional financial markets

don't get you the exact sort of yes, no, is Trump going to win exposure that they were looking for? So one of the big things we sold is the S&P if they wanted to go along Trump. So people write about Trump and then they lost money. So it's horrible. The second thing is there wasn't an open, fair market for people to price this question.

It was just like the bank deciding and it would charge crazy fees. It was exorbitant. And the third that like earth me the most is like a lot of people have views on this. And also a lot of people are impacted by Brexit. It's like this notion that like you are only impacted of Brexit if you're big enough to get a seat at the Goldman Sachs table like was a bit weird to me. It was like kind of like you know. But this is where the idea was like you have a financial market to price companies, commodities. Like what if you built one to price like simple questions about the few?

And if you did something like this, like the beauty of this is like areas of expertise. Like everyone is an expert on something. Like areas of knowledge and expertise and passion lie much in a much broader set than just Wall Street. There's a lot more people out there outside of Wall Street that have views and have knowledge about politics. I have knowledge about the economy. They read the news every day and they love it and they love interacting with the news.

It could be the culture, it could be sports. It could be any of these sort of categories. but right now it's kind of this this you know the set of instruments is very wall street specific like an average person is not a look at an interest rate swap and be like I'm going to participate in that it's just you know too complicated very unrelatable and I think the thing that's changed and that's that's great I mean there's for example like there's this account on Twitter it's like only grounded 10 or something like that you know this person basically has made $70,000 trading on culture, culture markets. So how successful movies are going to be,

what Taylor Swift is going to release or not release. And they paid off their student loans with that. And it's just kind of like their favorite company. Like they love the company so much because they're like, I have spent like hours and days and weeks and month, get learning about this. And up until now, it was kind of like, it was like a fun side thing. Now I can like actually actually exercise my skills and it can become a hobby and I could sort of try to make money off of it. And I see this very similar. It's kind of like Uber's value proposition

with these types of marketplace, new category, kind of creators, like Uber was sort of like, you have a lot of free time. How about you drive a little bit and make some money? And in our case, like you have a lot of knowledge, sometimes very niche, weird knowledge. Like maybe even your family doesn't even want to hear about it at Thanksgiving.

But how about you kind of try to make some money off of that? And from the beginning, is like if we can build that financial market in a regulated safe way, like where you put the right set of customer protection and you let people kind of openly and transparently trade against each other, that could be a very interesting thing because you can have this sort of like social crowdsourced. Let's figure out the truth together. Let's figure out the price. The same way that markets figure out the price of them. When you talk about expert knowledge, I know there's this idea, you know, from Warren Buffett and others that when it comes to the stock market, nobody knows anything, you know,

that isn't already priced in. Do you feel like that's different? Maybe could you call it like a long tail of topics? Or is that you feel like that dynamic's different if you're making that proposition to people? That's a great question. I actually think so. You know, it's interesting.

Like I think that because like let's think about it in simple terms, right? Like the, if you go to stock market and try to buy an option on Tesla, like how could you know more than like the market makers? Right. I mean, I actually worked at some of these like how could you, right? like it's kind of rigged there. It's like there's asymmetric information. The large institutions, Wall Street, has more information about where options and stocks are

going to move than the average person. It's kind of a truth, right? And no matter what you do, you can do all the research in the world on the stock, you're not going to have the vast data sets and pools of data that like the big hedge funds have. So they will always have an advantage over you. And to me, it's that imbalance of advantage that make it sort of like, it's very hard to actually gain an edge if you put in, like, you know, like, you're going to, like, you

put in like if you put effort into the stock market on calcium is different because like there's a team of traders for example um on the weather that like scrape satellite data and they create correlation patterns and they have meteorologists in the team etc and they figure out like you know all these sort of like sophisticated data science models to predict the weather next day and they are making money of it they're pretty successful and the beauty of it is like I don't think the hedge funds have any more information than they do, right? Like, if you could call that like creating the fundamentals, if you were. Or like doing the work of understanding the fundamentals.

That's where the truth side comes in. I have studied Timothy Shalameh's eyes more than anyone. And therefore I know that he is SKD, right? That's like, that's what you're saying is like there's people who are a calcium for that? Is there a calcium for that? That's got to be a prediction market, right? Salomey and SKD, do you know about this? I don't know about it.

What is it? There's like a rapper who is in disguise, and people think it might be Timothy, shall. Oh, I don't know. That's interesting. People, like, claim to know his eyes and say that it's him. These markets reward people to go out and do research and then bring it into the open market. Right? And over time, we get holistically.

So think about, for example, the, okay, whether tariffs are net good or net bad for society, or whether there's going to be a recession this year or not, right? Like one way to do this is like you go and do this Bloomberg economy survey and you ask a bunch of you know experts, hey, what do you think? And then they give an answer and that's our forecast, right? That's historically been this is what we believe to be true. But it doesn't work that well. If you compare that to the Kalshi economic forecast over the last few years, we have been much, much more accurate. It's just much better kind of gauge of what's going to happen. And the reason is because it's a very different mechanism, which is now I'm giving an incentive.

I'm rewarding people to actually go out and do research and then come and trade on it. Bring it to the market. And if you give that, think of it, that incentive at scale, it's holistically making us smarter about, for example, the economy. It's making us smarter about COVID and whether it's going to come back. Like maybe this whole COVID episode of whether, hey, COVID is done, COVID is not done.

If they were listening to the markets, we were saying, Omicron is going to come back. There's an Omicron wave and it was going to come back because some traders were doing research and they spent a copious amount of times. They're not necessarily, by the way, like doctors or like people that you would imagine to be the COVID experts. The people that maybe love the topics

and spend so much time in quarantine reading about it and then they brought that information to market, which is very useful. And if we had listened to the markets, maybe we would have kept the mask on for a little bit longer and we might have avoided the second wave. Before we let you go, Tarek, you recently made a comment that went kind of viral.

I think you got a lot of heat for it because people rightfully have concerns about the gambleification of society where you said, Camble of the catch. You were, yeah, trademark. You said you want to financialize everything. What did you actually mean by that? Do you really mean that?

Why did you scare my grandma with that comment? Interesting. I think that, yeah, I saw that. I mean, it was taken out of context and people sort of like, you know, took all sorts of directions. But really what it means is this notion of, if you believe that markets work,

what they do is they discover prices. They're very good. mechanism for discovering fundamentals. I think, as you said it in a great way, fundamentals behind something. And then uncovering as much truth as possible behind that thing. And so what we're saying is like, sure,

applying that to companies is very important. Applying that to commodities or currencies is very important. But what if we applied it to some of the most important pressing questions about our future? Right. Like could we applied it to a much broader set of things? And like, look, from first principles, like, we live in a world where

The ratio of noise to signal has gone up a lot. Misinformation is everywhere. Polarization is kind of an all-time high. People say different things about everything, and you don't know what to, like, you go to Twitter. If you go to my Twitter feed versus yours, we might see literally two entirely different versions of the world. To us, like, this is kind of a bit of an antidote.

It's like, how about we applied some of the things that we discussed, like this mechanism for truth, this incentive to be truthful, to be unbiased, to be objective, to a lot of these questions, right? Is there going to be an earthquake in California? where is the hurricane is going to hit in Florida? COVID is going to meet a recession. These questions that do actually impact people on their day to day, but today there's just like, it's like social media where like the incentive is engagement, whereas prediction market,

the incentive is truth. And so that's really what I meant by that. But I think that that clip was taken out of context out of a broader conversation like kind of a broader explanation that I was giving. Do you guys have a mission or vision or document for your own team to like steer people toward whatever type of truths you think are important? or is it just kind of going to be driven by engagement, culture, excitement? I feel like that's potentially a pretty big question for you guys and in what type of role you want to play in the world. That's a great question.

So yes, the answer is yes, definitely. And I think that the way that I sort of describe it is like you have to have a balance and there are certain things that, for example, maybe more engaging but less useful from a truth-seeking perspective, but that help kind of like the things that are like less engaging, but more truth-seeking from a kind of forecast perspective, right? So, and you have to balance out between those two. It's a bit like, in the examples, like you can look at a lot of marketplaces, right?

Like, for example, maybe where Uber's are most needed are like in urban areas, but that's where it's harder to get riders and they're less needed in like, sorry, but rural areas, but it's mostly in urban areas, but you still have to build a critical mass in urban area to get to the rule. And I think it's a little bit similar here. Like you have to get enough of a critical mass in a certain places to basically get, for example, I, you know, for example, personally, I'm always interested in the more longer term forecast. The things are sort of like, will AI overtake?

When the McRib is coming back this year? What is Mick Rib? Is it the burger? Oh my God, correct. Good for you. Good for you. Well, who exactly is making these calls about what goes live on the site? So a lot, I mean, and then the second point I was going to say, so a lot of it comes from our team that, like, are figuring out what's trending on Twitter and, like, what's double people's mind, like, what's in the news.

But the other thing, it's like, this is the other thing. Like, look, I believe in markets, right? Like, I'm a believer in markets. And, like, it's like, look at what customers want and, like, what they're interested in, what they're asking about. And, like, have them suggest markets. The one thing, the one cover is, like, that doesn't mean you just do everything, anything. I mean, we're regulated. Everything goes to a regulated pipeline.

And there's a number of things that we don't touch. of assassination violence, things that could create a bad incentive, we never touched those. One, because it would be illegal. And two, even if it wasn't, like, I think those would not necessarily, even though there could be interested from the forecast, like, for example, if you have a war market, I think it could create a perverse incentive. It could create a bad incentive. And we basically shy away and do not touch those.

So I think you have to have a balance. And I think we've gone fairly good at that balance. All right, Tarak. Well, we'll let you go research the McRib and SAC. SKD. And yeah, we appreciate you being on the show. Thanks so much, guys. Appreciate you having me. Take care, man. Thanks to Tarek for coming on the show.

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