Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, and I'm Kara Swisher. We're off for the holiday today, but we have something good for you, an episode of Access with Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger. In this episode, Alex and Ellis talk about the rise of storytelling in tech and why X is now openly pleading for its haters to come back. As if.
Then they sit down with 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. 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'd 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?
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of storytelling in tech?
Kalshi 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 Mansour. We talk about insider trading, why Kalshi employees aren't allowed to use Kalshi, what he thinks of Polymarket, and his controversial comment about wanting to financialize everything.
But first, Ellis and I talk about the rise of storytelling in tech and why X is pleading for its haters to return to the platform. 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, frankly, the decline of reporters.
Yeah.
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 screenshotted on X by a bunch of people we both follow in the tech world. Everyone, you know, glamping on about their savvy media strategy that they have. And I just think it's kind of interesting that this is becoming a
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Chapter 3: How does Tarek Mansour define financialization?
I mean, it's so crazy to me. I remember being back at the verge like 12 years ago and our friend Sam Sheffer was doing social, probably paid a pittance to do this. Like every other social media person in the industry.
Shout out hype desk.
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 retail even before your IPO. And so I do think there is 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, uh, and reporters in terms of how you get your narrative out to the world.
You know, uh, 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, 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 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 ā I think someone like Tarek, who we have on later in the show, who can talk about it more at a high level ā
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Chapter 4: What challenges does Kalshi face regarding insider trading?
But 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. That was more of a hot take a couple years ago. Now that seems kind of like... obvious, you know, how's anybody going to use your app if they haven't heard of it?
Right, right. And I mean, I definitely feel this from my perspective of being 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 way you don't plug me in that conversation.
I do. If you had a perfect opportunity there and you, you didn't take it.
No, I plug you a lot. I plug you a lot. Um, but I'm not, I'm not, you know, for the person to come in and like brand of the company, right. It's like figure out how to reach so-and-so audience. You know, I think of what you do a little more high level, but yeah,
Yeah, 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 I struggle with that. It's something that I can rotate too much in one way or the other all the time in my work.
And you don't want to like be overly, I don't know, programming overly trying to game the algo. I mean, we talk about this with the podcast and how we how we do the podcast, but you also want to be relevant. So it's it seems like a very hard line to walk.
I think maybe in some ways you have had a bit less practice than others because you have scoops to lean on.
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Chapter 5: How does Kalshi's approach differ from Polymarket?
And I'm John Feiner. And we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, we cover the massive nationwide protests in Iran and the U.S. response. The episode's out now. Search for and follow The Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. Is the American dream still possible?
And it shouldn't be a wake-up that if you work hard, play by the rules, we're going to make the American dream accessible and affordable to you. You're not going to struggle. You're going to strive to achieve something. For those who think that the system is rigged, breaking news. You're not paranoid. I'm Preet Bharara. In this week, former Chicago mayor and U.S.
ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel joins me to break down the affordability crisis, education, why Trump supporters feel betrayed, and what a Rahm Emanuel presidential campaign might look like. The episode is out now. Search and follow Stay Tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts.
Well, speaking of scoops, you want to talk about this interview I did recently?
Yeah, I want to talk about the interview you did. I mean, this was a good one, man. I mean, this is some stuff I've been wanting to hear for a while. So, yeah, Alex, you sat down with Nikita ā
uh beer yeah who is the head of product now for x formerly twitter and nice to hear someone actually talk about what they're doing with the fine tooth comb an actual product builder i mean what do you feel like when you look back on this you know you took away the most nice to hear that there's someone there like keeping the lights on and thinking about the product direction yeah for sure um
Yeah, I mean, I've known Nikita for a long time. 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 an interview about bringing journalists back to X? I was like, yes, of course. It was his first interview since he took the job about seven months ago. He reports to Elon directly.
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Chapter 6: What impact does regulation have on prediction markets?
And yeah, I thought this was interesting that this was the first thing that a senior leader at X is coming out and saying, which is we really want media and even capital J journalists to come back. And I think I know why, which is that I've been covering Twitter before Elon bought it for many years. I extensively covered when Elon bought it.
And Twitter has always had this problem where a very small percentage of the user base posts most of the content. And that's true for, I don't know, I guess Snap was a little different because that was messaging, right? But these one-to-many platforms, that's usually the case. But even by kind of industry standards, Twitter was always pretty top-sided that way.
And they would call them like VI, I think they were VITs. Someone's going to, an ex-tweep is going to tell me about this. Yeah, something like that. Very important tweeters or something. And they would track this obsessively because 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. Same here. Yeah. 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 products that he thinks will hopefully incentivize people to come back. That's a new link viewer that is driving more traffic to web pages. I can attest to that personally.
And they still like completely shadow banning sub stack 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.
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Chapter 7: How does Kalshi ensure market integrity?
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 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 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 ā there's no fault or no ā 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 ā 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. I don't think that's true, though.
You don't think it's true? No, like they have... has 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 of 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.
Maybe I just suck at posting.
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Chapter 8: What role does customer feedback play in product development?
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. 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.
uh the sports stuff that they're leaning into uh connor hayes the head of threads is also going to be in sources this week but he just did a podcast uh with a bunch of nba people i think they're going more in that direction and for x i mean they really need to convince people to leave blue sky which i don't know i mean blue sky is its own echo chamber man it's like Yeah.
You jump on there and it's like, you better, you can, you can imagine immediately in your head, like this is, this is what it takes to work on blue sky and to, to be successful. And it's a very particular POV on things. It's like, you're very skeptical or you just downright, right. Hate AI. Um, you hate Elon. You love Mondami.
Like there's, it's just like, there's this Venn diagram of like all these things that makes you on blue sky. And like, that's, I wish we were all together again, I guess. And Elon was, you know, he says he wants to make the town square and he has utterly failed at that in the last few years, right? It's the opposite.
And I think everyone is right to be very, very skeptical of that not happening, I guess.
Well, to close things out before we get to the interview, did he divulge any juicy little funny Elon stories or habits?
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