Tarek Mansour

Um, and I, I think it's a very...

Calci's a really interesting story in that when, when you watch videos of Tarek Mansour or Luana Lopez Lara, the two co-founders, and now the CEO and COO respectively of the company, talk about Calci in the early days, um, they don't talk about sports at all.

They talk about Brexit.

They talk about, you know, "We wanted to find a way to hedge outcomes and, you know, create a new financial asset class." And that's all well and good, but the, the net effect of their business is allowing the same sports books that they denigrate as predatory to operate under the same business model they do, um, in the three most populous states in the country.

In reality, a Dartmouth study dating all the way back to 1880 finds no syst- uh, systematic evidence of political or demographic bias.

For most prediction market traders, this probably doesn't come as a surprise, but I would encourage everyone to read the study and give it some, some thoughts." Now, um, this was, uh, tweeted by, uh, Tarek Mansour, who's the, uh, CEO of Kalshi.

Obviously, he likes prediction markets.

He's a fan.

But hey, maybe I'm going too hard on these guys.

Maybe I'm just jealous that I couldn't be a billionaire by age 25 like Kalshi's CEO, Tarek Mansour.

It's like a way to monetize your knowledge, same way like an Uber driver monetizes their free time.

When I was 25, I was still doing Taco Bell commercials.

Meanwhile, Don Jr. is an investor in Polymarket and an advisor to both Polymarket and Kalshi.

Now, you might assume the companies did this to get access to the president through his son, but you would be wrong.

Stop being a hater, because Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan explained the real reason in an interview with 60 Minutes.

I think there's gonna be people watching who think that you put the president's son on your advisory board to get influence, to be able to protect yourself.

These are really great questions, and I really enjoy talking about these questions.

That is Tarek Mansour, who co-founded and is CEO of Kalshi, the biggest prediction market in the U.S. As for these thorny questions about prediction markets...

I like to think of them as risks rather than downsides.

Like, AI comes with a bunch of risks, and we know that there's risk of online addiction, a lot of people kind of having mental health issues because of AI, and there's job displacement.

[upbeat music plays]

This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.

[upbeat music plays] Tarek Mansour is the 30-year-old CEO of Kalshi, and on paper, he's already a billionaire.

When he talks about the power of prediction markets, he can make it seem as if they've got magical properties.

Members of Congress have also called for guardrails as the industry expands.

For perspective from one of the largest prediction market platforms, I'm joined by Kalshi CEO, Tarek Mansour.

Welcome.

Thank you for joining us.

One Kalshi founder, Luana Lopes Lara, is the youngest self-made female billionaire.

The other founder and current CEO, Tarek Mansour, joined the billionaire list at age twenty-nine.

But that is not what Mansour wants to talk about.

This valuation of the company or my net worth or others, and I just don't think that's that important.

We were going along just fine.

Everybody thought we were going to make it, and then at the last minute, something weird came out of left field, knocked the project flat, and that's why we didn't make the deadline.

[instrumental music]Tarek Mansour, the CEO of Kalshi, calls Robin Hanson's work on prediction markets foundational, but he especially likes to cite the work of Philip Tetlock, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist who you may have heard on this show in the past talking about the folly of prediction.

Tetlock argued in his book Superforecasting that when it comes to predicting the future, even an expert can be beat by a thoughtful amateur.