Politics 101, Prediction Markets Win, Apoorva on Instacart's Acq, FOGO, Alex Spiro Joins

TBPN · · 2 hr 15 min

John Coogan and Jordi Hays react to the 2026 midterms and how well prediction markets called them, then talk with Instacart's Apoorva Mehta, lawyer Alex Spiro, Traversal's Anish Agarwal and writer Derek Blasberg.

Watch the episode 2 hr 15 min · YouTube

The gist

  1. Kalshi was 81% accurate three months out and 95% when polls opened, as data center bans went 43 to 1.
  2. Coogan credits Pangram, now expanding into AI image and video detection, with flagging a fake mullet cat image he fell for.

What they recommend · 1 pick

Pangram AI tools

"Pangram is expanding into image and video detection. They already saved me because I fell for the cat with a mullet, but Pangram was to the rescue and had identified that it was..."

Made by someone on this episode

Instacart · Apoorva Mehta's — A grocery delivery and pickup service that allows customers to orde...
Traversal · Anish Agarwal's — An AI site reliability engineer that investigates system incidents ...

Also mentioned

6:56 Polymarket · "You can just see like 99% chance that this person is going to win. And I think Polymarket called every..."
24:50 Winchester Model 1873 · "The Winchester Model 1873 is called the gun that won the West."
1:24:53 Escape · "I'll flag one for you, which is the company Escape, which is a robotic massage company. So you can go into..."
1:25:00 Equinox · "So you can go into Equinox, we're in a bunch of gyms, hotel chains all over the country."
1:40:25 DataDog · "You have to talk to the code, you have to talk to your Datadog, your Splunk, whatever the telemetry is. And..."
1:40:25 Splunk · "You have to talk to the code, you have to talk to your Datadog, your Splunk, whatever the telemetry is."

Ads in this episode

Cisco, Figma, MongoDB, Ramp, Public, Shopify, New York Stock Exchange, Railway, Console, CrowdStrike, Codex. They're paid, so we keep them out of the picks above.

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