Anthropic vs. OpenAI Super Bowl ads, Northwood Space raised $100B Series B, Why @LoganPredicts quit his job to trade on Kalshi

You might remember the pod’s tech issues last week. Well this week they are so up. The pod has new, fancy mics and lighting. Priya kicks things off with her last-minute Super Bowl trip after buying tickets Saturday morning.

First up, the hosts break down the Anthropic vs. OpenAI Super Bowl ad beef. Anthropic dropped ads ahead of the game making fun of OpenAI for putting ads into ChatGPT. One featuring a fake therapist pitching a cougar dating site, another recommending shoe insoles to get jacked. The pod debriefs how Anthropic nailed ChatGPT's tone. They also discuss Sam Altman’s clap back that more Texans use ChatGPT than people use Claude in the entire country and if he was valid or not. Anika gives her hot take on why they’re both right and both wrong. OpenAI's actual Super Bowl ad went the wholesome route and the general public loved it, while Anthropic's ad landed in the bottom 3% of Super Bowl ads over the last five years according to Adweek. The trio also gets into Wegovy's Super Bowl push for their new GLP-1 pill, which took 10 years to develop, and Priya’s so down to take it (kidding, kind of).

Then the pod dives into their “Get the Check” segment on Northwood Space, the space infrastructure company founded by former Disney Channel star Bridget Mendler. Northwood just raised a $100 million Series B and landed a $50 million contract with the US Space Force for commanding national security space assets. The hosts walk through why ground networks matter: satellites need to transfer data back to Earth, and right now that means renting time on giant manually-turned dish antennas. Northwood's phased array technology is changing that and the pod is bullish. Maya highlights how Northwood's tech was actually used during the LA fires to get satellite data when traditional systems couldn't transfer it fast enough, and Anika draws a parallel to AT&T and Verizon selling off their infrastructure to companies like American Tower.

Finally, Anika and Priya sit down with Logan, Anika’s next-door neighbor growing up and now a full-time prediction market trader on Kalshi. You can create a Kalshi account to trade here: https://kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck. Logan quit his $75K financial risk analyst job after making more from trading on the side, and now has around $450K on Kalshi and $90K on Polymarket, having already made more year-to-date than his old annual salary by February. He walks through his research process, which includes buying a Dutch streaming service to watch Netherland’s election debates live and waking up at 3AM when trading international markets. Logan talks through some of his best plays, including catching a Nobel Prize winner before Kalshi and the public and buying Mark Zuckerberg at 1 cent for Time Person of the Year. Logan describes himself as "vibes-based" versus model-heavy and gives advice for people interested in trading prediction markets.

00:00 Priya goes to the Super Bowl

01:40 Super Bowl tech ads: Anthropic vs. OpenAI, Lays, Him & Hers

11:18 Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.6, OpenAI released Codex 5.3

16:51 Northwood Space raised $100B Series B

19:37 Northwood Space’s $50M Space Force contract

25:50 Interviewing a full-time trader on Kalshi @LoganPredicts

32:05 Spending 100 hours a week researching

37:14 Figuring out who is going to win Time’s Person of the Year

42:51 Kalshi as a source of truth in a post-truth world

45:03 What prediction market traders say in their group chats