Politics 101, Prediction Markets Win, FOGO | Apoorva Mehta, Alex Spiro, Anish Agarwal, Derek Blasberg

Democrats Take Congress, Markets Rally On Midterms

Funding and deals

• Traversal. AI site reliability engineer for enterprise systems raised $120m, with the hosts citing a $1bn figure.

Guest interviews

• Apoorva Mehta, co-founder and former CEO of Instacart and founder of Abundance. Instacart sold for $17bn after competitors including Amazon and Target shut down during COVID. He argues agents add little to an already frictionless consumer experience but a lot in the enterprise, where his company Abundance runs long-running agents with a trillion-dollar ambition. AI trading is new because it can reason, not just find statistical arbitrage patterns.
• Alex Spiro, trial lawyer at Quinn Emanuel. AI will eliminate a layer of litigation by synthesizing facts faster, but juries are not changing, so he has not altered his courtroom approach in 20 years. He rejects rehearsals because a good cross-examiner uses them against you. He is partners with Tom Brady in sports and wellness businesses and expects beachfront real estate and blue-chip teams to keep rising as AI wealth transfers.
• Anish Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of Traversal. Finding an incident's root cause is like finding a needle in a haystack with fake needles everywhere. Traversal started in January 2024, sells to American Express and Pepsi, and prices per investigation. Coding agents are now its biggest users, calling it to check whether a deploy will break something.
• Derek Blasberg, fashion writer and author. Avedon was the most important photographer of the twentieth century, a high school dropout whose Merchant Marine portraits led him to Paris fashion, and he signed every print in his lifetime so supply is finite. His $2m Dovima photograph anchors the market, and he shot China Machado as the first non-white model in a national fashion magazine. A Ron Howard documentary arrives on Netflix on November 11, and AI's bigger fashion influence is sizing and measurement.

News

• Democrats take Congress in midterm rebuke. Democrats won Congress on November 3, 2026 in a stunning rebuke of Trump. The Dow rose 3 percent and the Nasdaq 1.88 percent the next day.
• Prediction markets called the midterms right. Kalshi was 81 percent accurate three months out against a 77 percent Vote Hub average, and Polymarket called every Oscar category correctly. Jordi Hays said the markets called almost everything right.
• AI stocks sell off as election outcome lands. John Coogan said selling in AI stocks and data center builders showed investors expected this result. Ben Thompson argued the outcome is bad for the AI trade short term but much pain may already be felt.