Vlad Tenev on Robinhood’s Next Move: $1,000 for Every Baby, Future of Money, AI Prediction & Crypto

30:29And there was this report, it was called like AI 2027 by an AI researcher. Maybe you guys have read this. And recently they updated and they were like, okay, we thought everything would happen by 2027. It's going a little bit slower than we imagined. We're revising it to 2030. So AI researchers call that a slow takeoff scenario. And a slow takeoff is sort of good because that means we'll have more time than we thought to adapt and actually make changes. So I think we'll get there. I think initiatives like getting more people in the markets, making sure the young people and the babies have brokerage accounts from birth through the Invest America initiative will get us there.

31:17I think there'll be more entrepreneurship and probably that entrepreneurship will look like leisure to us today, which also is a good thing. Where do you see crypto going? Because obviously that's a major staple in what you guys have built with Robinhood. We're in 2025, let's say 2035, right? Yeah. Where do you see crypto going and Bitcoin specifically? Yeah, I think the biggest needle mover for crypto is that it's going to help take the great things we built in the U.S. and make them increasingly global and available to investors all around the world, some of which haven't had access to these tools.

32:02Because I think we kind of take it for granted here that we have the U.S. dollar, we have access to U.S. stocks, we have really high quality assets. When Robinhood gets our private initiatives, we'll be able to distribute access to private companies. So we have really good investments and ways to allocate your capital. If you're in Venezuela, you don't have access to those things. And that's actually why stable coins have been so popular. Because a lot of these people are in countries that have unstable governments, unstable central banks. If they do have central banks at all, they don't have functional banking systems.

32:38currencies are devaluing and they're just adding zeros and zeros to them the bills are worthless so stable coins really became popular as a way to store your wealth in u.s dollars because you know the crypto companies actually went in and and built local rails connecting to to all these markets so they've been plugged into the crypto system and i think uh crypto will evolve with tokenization to make it easy to distribute U.S. stocks and other investments overseas as easily as stablecoins have done it to dollars. So I think that's the future. Crypto will sort of like the technology will help stitch together all of the markets and make it so that everyone is on a level playing field outside the U.S.

33:29as we are in here. That's at least the future that we're working to build. So you believe in a whole ecosystem, not just Bitcoin. I mean, you're not a Bitcoin maxi that just... I'm not a Bitcoin maxi, yeah. I mean, I'm a Bitcoin fan, and I think Bitcoin has an inherent advantage. Price prediction? Oh, price predictions are tough. I would tell you, I'm pretty bull. And if you told me at the beginning of the year that there would be like a National Bitcoin Strategic Reserve and all of these dats, and we would still be sitting here basically... flat for the year maybe a little bit up i'd be i'd be surprised um uh it's got a lot going for it it's a singular asset right it'll it'll always be the first so i think i think it's got a bit of a religion around it with the bitcoin maxis and and that's hard to fight um relative to the other coins yeah i think uh obviously if you look at the correlation between the rise of bitcoin getting up to 126 ,000.

34:32You watch your stock also get toward all-time high around the same time. People feel like there's a correlation there, but there's also a piece that has helped the stock and that's the predictive markets. So not only could you invest in Bitcoin, but you could say, hey, I see it getting to 100 ,000 by December 31st. Talk about the role that predictive markets have played, because we talked about it, like you were thinking about it. We were talking about Polymark the last time we met in Miami and now predictive markets are a thing a real thing that I feel like you guys have adopted right away some of the other people in the space haven't yeah they're looking at you guys like this is a leader do we need to add this this is going to be disruptive yeah absolutely and it's it's kind of a fun position for for me to be in because typically when you look at crypto and all the other products we've added I mean stocks probably the best example we were like years after the leaders right i mean stocks went electronic in the 80s basically e-trade got started um the idea was to trade stocks on uh the apple macintosh you know apple macintosh had come out and these two guys got together in palo alto california and we're like what if we use the apple macintosh to trade stocks and i think that was in 1982 which is pretty crazy so we were multiple decades uh late to the game for electronic trading in stocks crypto started in 2009 we added crypto to the platform in 2017 actually yeah 2018 was when when you could start trading it so typically we've had an approach where we come in after there's like clarity that it's a real thing that people want and then we just bring our scale lower costs and you know better ux to the product so prediction markets is a new one for us because we were kind of out in front and then it's sort of like how do we maintain our lead and and market positioning and you know when we have a bunch of people coming after us it has surprised me that you know you have the exchanges uh like like poly and calci who have obviously been there from the beginning, but like no other broker has gotten into it yet.

36:45No other broker of significant consequence. And I think they're coming, like they're seeing what we're doing and they see that it's resonating with traders and just with mass market retail. But yeah, I think we're also moving and we're adding new innovations. I think the event that we're going to unveil on the 16th is going to show some new things to people that they haven't seen before. And it's the fastest growing business that Robin Hood's had. You know, in the past year, we've gone from one single contract, which is the presidential election, to over 1 ,500. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?

37:30Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. its crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits.

38:12He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we've got some incredible guests like Kumail Nanjiani. Let's start with your cat. How is she? She is not with a thing. Great, great, great way to start. So this is a great beginning and hopefully you'll be able to, I don't know, maybe you will cry. Amanda Seyfried. Life is so short. If you feel something like that, you have that fire in you for this experience.

38:53It's not for a guy. It's for the experience of being in love and like it's bigger than a guy. Elizabeth Olsen. I love swimming naked so much. And I know you love taking pictures of yourself naked. I love to be naked. I just want to be in my brown underwear all the time. Ross Matthews. You know what kids always say to me? Are you a boy or a girl? Oh, my God. All the time. That's so funny. I know. So I'm always like, hi. I try to butch it up for kids, you know, so they're not confused. Yeah, but you're butching it up. It's basically like Dora's Day. Right? No, I turn into Bea Arthur. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

39:54who you ninked after. I just was like, damn, that **** got swag. Rocky offers a window into not only a boundary-breaking artist, but as a man committed to fusing creative ideas, community, and remaining unapologetically himself. Have you ever gotten roasted for any of your outfits? For sure. Some people don't be getting the vision. Look, they can roast me, they can cook me, they can deep-fry me, they can saute whatever they want. There's nobody who can **** with my fashion sense and my taste is impeccable. I'm just like, I impress myself a lot. It's an amazing conversation, one you definitely don't want to miss.

40:31So listen to the Questlove show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com.

41:08That's iHeartAdvertising.com. A new year doesn't mean erasing who you were. It means honoring what you've survived and choosing how you want to grow. It means giving ourselves permission to feel what we've been holding and knowing that it's okay to ask for help. I'm Mike Dallarocha, host of Sacred Lessons. This podcast is a space for men to talk openly about mental health, grief, relationships, and the patterns we inherit, but don't have to repeat. Here, we slow down. We listen. We learn how vulnerability becomes strength and how healing happens in community, not in isolation. If you're ready to let go of what no longer serves you and step into the year with clarity, compassion, and purpose, Sacred Lessons is your companion on your healing journey.

42:00Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike De La Rocha on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow Sacred Lessons with Mike De La Rocha and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today. We've gone from, it's basically the volume is doubled quarter over quarter. uh q3 had i want to say 2.2 million contracts uh but then october had 2.5 million so more than q3 put together and then you had november we announced some november numbers uh 3 billion contracts traded in november which is uh yeah it's a 30 million revenue wow in a month so so 360 million run rate if you if you take uh the november numbers um which is a big ramp and i think um you know it's it's it's just been really resonating with with the traders and sports betting uh sports a big part of it but uh the big part of what we're doing is also uh diversifying the contracts so it used to be just elections and elections i think um to me is probably the most interesting then we added sports and we've added a ton of leagues there is it sports betting or like what is it exactly uh i i liked uh most people i took to call it wagering wagering okay i like the language there i think it's different uh in all seriousness to sports betting and a lot of people ask about you know how is it different from a regulatory standpoint from a product standpoint, I think it's significantly different.

43:40And I haven't really done much sports betting, but what people love about it is you can actually trade these contracts during the game. So, you know, because it's a two-sided market, the exchanges run the contracts while the games are happening. And that's when the information's coming in. I mean, for example, you can see how each play changes the odds and the outcomes. And you can go in and out of the positions. And a lot of the market participants that are coming in, both from the market maker side and sort of like on the trading side, are the same market participants that have been trading futures and equities.

44:24So I think it's disruptive to sports betting, but I see it as a fundamentally different animal and a better product, which is why i think all the traditional sports betting uh sites are so nervous about it and they're just sort of like uh yeah they see the writing on the wall and they're they're working as hard as possible to figure out their prediction market strategy and some of them are outright pivoting to prediction markets completely as soon as you said the november's numbers went up i automatically thought nfl in its height college football in its height but it's not just sports an NBA.

45:00NBA is kicking off. World Series is just about to end. Well, and we have, I think we mentioned this earlier, AI model contracts, which, you know, is a face that I feel like I have some understanding of. And you have traders that are specializing in very specific areas. And, you know, like four months ago, it was, I think, 35 % chance that Gemini would have the best model by the end of the year. ChatGPT started the year ahead, right? And, you know, if you really, for folks that really kind of understood what was happening in the AI world, it seemed like conventional wisdom was wrong, right? You have Google who's on a steep trajectory and they have all the data, all the compute.

45:48They're highly motivated. I think now we look at the Gemini release and it's like, well, it's so obvious they had all these tools. But back then, I think conventional wisdom was wrong. So I think for a trader, it's going to open up more possibilities and you can specialize in things because there's probably at least one topic that each person understands better than the average conventional wisdom. So I think it'll pull in more traders. But I think the most interesting thing for me is that it creates a new source of information. It's almost like the new media or new news, where instead of watching talking heads pontificating about what's going to happen, you can just look at the market.

46:27And then you'll learn a little bit about what's likely or what's even true in this world. Do you have any reservations about this? Because it's like young people now are betting on sports more than they're opening brokerage accounts. So we know that gambling has been long history in America, but most of the time people that gamble lose money, right? So that's always been a thing of like, well, what's the difference between gambling and investing? And for a long time you could say, well, investing is a game of knowledge and gambling is a game of chance, right? Like you invest in the S &P 500, you hold it, you're going to make money.

47:01Vegas is a 50-50 chance. But now essentially the worlds are colliding and investing is kind of turning into gambling, like prediction markets, right? It's kind of like a form, it's a form of gambling in a more sophisticated way, right? So even with the political thing, I mean, we see what happens in sports betting. People bet a lot of money on sports. They're going to do things to determine that their team is going to win, which leads to corruption, which we see FBI have an investigation on the NBA now. Yeah. The same thing can happen in politics. If I bet a million dollars that this senator is going to win, like, you know, now you get into a very gray area of very, you know, kind of a dark pathway that could be followed.

47:44So I say that to say, do you think that this is actually a form of gambling? And do you think that it is kind of opening doorways to, you know, a new way of people just instant gratification gambling on everything in society? I think it's a little bit different. I mean, if you look at financial markets, there's been a lot of people think trading and gambling are one and the same. I think it's a little bit different. And I think every financial market has been sort of like under this attack. When futures trading first rolled out to retail a few decades ago, a lot of people ask this question, why is a retail investor speculating on the price of oil or corn?

48:37They're certainly not hedging their corn exposure in any significant way. And I think the answer is, in order for a market to work, you need speculators. And then some people say, well, you know, what's the difference between speculation and gambling? It's kind of two words describing the same thing. You're making a short-term price prediction on what's going to happen. And, you know, you're putting money behind that. And of course, when you're putting money behind a short-term price prediction, there's risk involved. But I think we need the speculators because without the speculators, the market isn't effective for the hedgers.

49:19So every market requires speculation in order to work. Now, I don't think everyone should be speculating with all of their money. but i think what we're seeing is people have different buckets you know they they have even the most active traders that we have on the platform those are the ones that tend to be most likely to open up retirement accounts as well so you know we do have people that are just using robin hood for for trading but if you take a typical active trader they tend to be the ones that use us for all of their things. So they'll have a retirement account. They'll have a discretionary.

50:02Maybe they'll have a dividend portfolio. We rolled out a nice feature called multiple brokerage accounts, which actually lets you put your money in different buckets. And increasingly we have banking. So we've got their checking and savings accounts with us. So what it looks like is a trader comes in. Maybe they come for prediction markets increasingly or crypto or stock and options trading. And then they open up a bunch of accounts with us. They use a lot of our products and then all of their, ideally all of their money ends up at Robinhood. But yeah, so in a hypothetical world where everyone was just speculating 100 % of their money, I think that would be not great for society, but that's not what we're seeing.

50:50And in terms of what we incentivize as a company, the behavior that we incentivize, we incentivize retirement. So a retirement account is the one where rock bottom cost, 3 % match. So we actually incentivize you to put money in. And that's been incredibly successful. Over 25 billion in assets, one and a half million funded retirement accounts. I think among the fastest growing, if not the singular fastest growing retirement product of all time. So what we really want to build is we want to be your financial super app. We want to be your primary and your secondary financial account. So all of your activities should be done at Robinhood.

51:34And you raise the integrity concern. Well, how do you know that someone's not taking advantage of their inside information to make money on these things? And I think this is a criticism that you can levy on the conventional sports books as well. And they've gotten into some heat for that. And they're saying, well, this is why it has to be regulated by the states, because we have all the machinery. Well, the financial markets have been dealing with market integrity concerns for decades. You can imagine it's pretty analogous to a corporate insider or someone that works at a company using information that they have on an upcoming product launch to make money.

52:23And, you know, we have robust safeguards in the form of trade surveillance, monitoring, and it's actually one of the benefits of doing this in a regulatory environment that has all of that set up rather than you know doing it offshore where all bets are off no pun intended and there's no control so that it's happening anyway people want to do it it's like a growing regulated market and i think it's better to have it in a place that has controls um than than the alternative is there a part of you in the team that says let's meet our customer base where they are or maybe where our future customer base is If we know that we've seen the spike of DraftKings, we've seen Flutter, which obviously owns FanDuel.

53:12We've seen casino apps come and just take over. Even New York having sports betting now, we've seen income. If we know that they're there, if we offer predictive markets, it's an opportunity to, yes, go from one spectrum to say, hey, there's more things to offer outside of just the sports betting. There are the retirement plans. There are brokerage accounts that you can open. And is part of it, let's meet them where we're at so we can convert them as well over to what we have as a totality? I think that's a big part of it. I mean, when I say we want to be your primary and secondary financial account, what I really mean is you should deposit your paycheck into Robinhood Banking.

53:52We should be the place where you have your savings account, your emergency fund, and you should, of course, have your retirement. and uh if if you want passively managed investments we've got robin hood strategies which i think is far and away the best digital advice product on the market that launched earlier this year and rapidly went to over a billion educational standpoint uh well from educational standpoint for sure but also just if you want a money button where you just put money in the account and it's invested for you reasonably at the lowest possible costs. I don't think there's a better digital advice product.

54:32Like a robo advice is what it competes with. And then of course, your discretionary trading and investing. So yeah, we think we can serve all of your dollars, right? Your money should come into Robinhood and essentially we should make it so that you never feel like you have to transfer money out. And I think when we saw the rise of sports betting, which happened with the deregulation of gambling at the end of the last decade, you know, and you see the articles where actually it's been growing incredibly quickly. Young people especially are doing more of it. I think we had a little bit of a choice to make.

55:16You know, do we fight against this? You know, do we go out and say, you know, we're against it and people shouldn't be doing it? Or do we actually take the stance that we think people should be free to do whatever they want with their money, of course, within reason, and we want to make it a safe environment for them to do those things. And I think the reality is there's a lot of ways out there that you could not even invest, but also just spend money frivolously. I mean, we're just being bombarded with ads for buying different things and, you know, not even just money, but time. All these like digital video platforms that are just engaging us and sucking up our time.

56:09So if you look at, you know, the broader things that are keeping you from doing good behaviors, there's a lot of distractions out there. And I actually worry less broadly about sports betting than, you know, social media becoming super addictive and just sucking up all of our free time. Because time is also money, right? You're spending four hours a day on social media. That's time you could be spending doing other things. um so yeah i i think i think that at the end of the day you know people have to make their their own decisions for how to spend their time and and money and we we have to do the best to to help them do do things that are good but ultimately you know the the user is in charge how do you think that there's going to be an ai um bubble and do you think that the economy as a whole is headed in a negative direction a lot of people are forecasting a recession some people think that we we've been in the recession so what's your thoughts on a greater economy going into next year and a year after and what's your thoughts on so much talk about the ai bust happening yeah i mean to some degree we're always in um you know no new technology uh that's as popular as ai is just smooth up and to the right, right?

57:36People get excited about things. There's corrections. You saw it with crypto. You saw it with the internet and the dot-com. It's a question of where we are in that cycle. And my take is we're still rather early. Like we haven't even seen AI IPOs yet, right? We've got two companies that are really, really big AI native companies, NVIDIA and Google. You look at them from a fundamental standpoint. I don't think their price earnings are completely out of whack by historical measures. So, yeah, near term, I would say that public markets, they don't seem like they're overvaluing what we're seeing in AI yet.

58:26And I don't think a lot of the AI companies that are private, I mean, you can debate how real the data center build out is going to end up being. And I think some of those things are rather complicated to parse, you know, the spend commitments with the chips. But if you look at the fundamentals, people are buying chips, the models are improving. Researchers say they don't see an end to reinforcement learning and pre-training seems intact. So the models are continuing to get smarter, which makes me feel like, at least in the near term, we're going to keep seeing AI driving forward. yeah so we talked about predictive markets but one of the biggest revenue models for you guys lies in options trading yeah zero day trading uh futures trading with the new technology that you guys launched last year talk about the impact that it's had obviously on the company and where you're seeing your retail investors are they staying are you seeing more people in those spaces yeah uh legend has been growing remarkably quickly so legend is our desktop uh active trader platform and you know month over month we're seeing uh we're seeing continued growth and acceleration there and it's sort of like activity we wouldn't have gotten otherwise so i think active traders before we rolled out legend they were using our competitors because they need multiple screens.

1:00:04They need to chart on the same page as entering the order. So we weren't serving them optimally on mobile. And these are our most engaged customers. Every time I ask, how can we make Legend better on social media? I just get hundreds of comments of all of the specific things they want us to improve. So what gets me most excited is it's already quite big. People are already quite happy and I have just an endless list of more things that they want. And I've got a great team on it that's moving really fast and super motivated. So I think that's going to be a tailwind for the business. And we're doing things on Legend that nobody else is doing, incorporating AI tools to make it even more differentiated experience for our traders.

1:00:57I think for an active trader, they should feel like they're at a disadvantage using any other. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology.

1:01:34Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's up, y 'all? This is Questlove. Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with A$AP Rocky ahead of his album release, Don't Be Dumb.

1:02:13He reflects on his journey from his Harlem roots to global icon status, discovering the hip-hop origin of his name. The ledge was on the TV. Rakim had the bucket hat Kangol join on. Pops was like, that's Rakim. That's who you named after. I just was like, damn, that **** got swag. Rocky offers a window into not only a boundary-breaking artist, but as a man committed to fusing creative ideas, community, and remaining unapologetically himself. Have you ever gotten roasted for any of your outfits? For sure. Some people don't be getting the vision. Look, they can roast me, they can cook me, they can deep-fry me, they can saute, whatever they want.

1:02:52there's nobody who can f*** with my fashion sense and my taste is impeccable. I'm just like, I impress myself a lot. It's an amazing conversation, one you definitely don't want to miss, so listen to the Questlove show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we've got some incredible guests like Kumail Nanjiani. Let's start with your cat. How is she? She is not with us anymore. Okay, great, great, great way to start. So this is a great beginning and hopefully you'll be able to, I don't know, maybe you will cry.

1:03:32Amanda Seyfried. Life is so short. If you feel something like that, you have that fire in you for this experience. It's not for a guy. It's for the experience of being in love and like it's bigger than a guy. Elizabeth Olsen. I love swimming naked so much. And I know you love taking pictures of yourself naked. I love to be naked. I just want to be in my brown underwear all the time. Ross Matthews. You know what kids always say to me? Are you a boy or a girl? Oh my God. All the time. That's so funny. I know. So I'm always like, hi. I try to butch it up for kids, you know, so they're not confused.

1:04:05Yeah, but you're butching it up is basically like Dora's Day. Right? No, I turn into Bea Arthur. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business?

1:04:40Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-iHeart to get started. That's 844-844-IHEART. Every January, we're encouraged to start over. But what if this year is about slowing down and learning how to understand ourselves more deeply? What if this year is about giving ourselves permission to feel what we've been holding and knowing that it's okay to ask for help? I'm Mike DeLaRocha, host of Sacred Lessons. This is a podcast for men navigating stress, emotional health, fatherhood, identity, and the unspoken pressures we're taught to carry alone. We talk honestly about mental health, about healing generational wounds, and about learning how to show up with more presence and care.

1:05:30If you want a healthier relationship with yourself and the people you love, then Sacred Lessons is the podcast for you. Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike DeLaRocha on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow Sacred Lessons with Mike De La Rocha and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today. Their platform, then Robinhood. And a couple other things we're doing besides the AI integrations, we've added index options, which was a very common request. Index options, they trade around the clock. It allows you to hedge with a broad-based market or index. and really quickly we've just grown our market share there to the point where you know we're we're now among the biggest players um if not the biggest options same story that's been more steady we were already quite big but if you look at the market share numbers which which are public um we're either number one or tied tied to number one every time i check it's number one yeah so so So we've been doing well.

1:06:35Yeah. And I think we're on a path, but yeah, there's more to do. We're still underpenetrated on web where a lot of the market is. So I see Legend continuing to drive that. Our AI tools are still nascent. I think those are going to get a lot better. And then, you know, you could see actually prediction markets high overlap with our active traders. You could see that becoming more integrated into Legend. It's not even on Legend yet. and across all of our other surfaces. So before we leave, I just wanted to ask you a question about, I know you and a lot of other tech billionaires have spent a lot of time in DC.

1:07:12Yeah. So I want to get your thoughts on the current administration, your conversations with the president and different initiatives. And then I think you have another story to tell about another politician that's into a gift. Oh, yes. Yeah, let's talk about politics. Let's talk about politics for a minute, shall we? Let's do it. I mean, from the very beginning, I think Robinhood has built ourselves up to be, and you could say at the beginning, it was inadvertent. I think the philosophy of most Silicon Valley companies would be stay out of politics, at least when we got started in the middle of last decade.

1:07:47Just build your stuff and probably ignore what's going on in Washington. And we started during the Obama administration. So we've gone through Obama, Trump one, Biden, and now Trump two. And so we've had a good mix of first being ignored, then having generally favorable conditions during Trump one, but maybe not as favorable as now. And then the Biden administration, which was just outright hostile to crypto and retail trading in general. So we've kind of seen everything. And I think it became clear around 2019, 2020, when we became big, that the strategy of just doing our business in Silicon Valley and ignoring Washington was not working because our competitors, the big brokers and financial firms, were very plugged into Washington.

1:08:39And so this led to politicians, lawmakers, regulators who were hearing from all these people, just hearing negative things. And so we made a presence. We started investing quite a bit. We have a big office in D.C., full office with, you know, not just government affairs and legal, but actually engineering, security, you know, lots of people. it helps i also grew up in the area i was i'm sort of a dc local so uh i felt at least uh i knew where to go you know when when uh when when i when i'm in the car working my way over to congress but yeah it's it's always been um we've tried to go on both sides um we republicans have historically been more receptive, right?

1:09:31I mean, I've been to the White House at least five times this year and I was not invited once during the Biden administration, despite the fact that we're a big, big financial company, you know, leading retail trading. So certainly we appreciate that this administration's been willing to engage and actually make America the center for financial services. And they have great initiatives like the Trump accounts, which are encouraging equity ownership, which we're very aligned with. So because they've been so willing to engage and lead, we've been more and more involved. And we see it as an opportunity to further our mission.

1:10:09But it doesn't mean that we're not engaging with the Democrats as well, because some of the Democrats are also less on the hyper-progressive socialist side and more middle of the road. And, you know, they want the U.S. to also be number one in business and financial services. And so, yeah, we've continued to engage on both sides. And the thing you referred to earlier was, yeah, I got a burner phone sent to me by Governor Gavin Newsom. And I was on a trip and I come back and, you know, my team tells me, Gavin Newsom sent you a flip phone. and i'm like what what do you mean the gavin newsom the governor and i'm uh i'm based in menlo park california they said yes you know we checked with this team it's real everyone thought it was a little bit strange but okay and i opened up the phone and it's gavin newsom's number in there and of course i call it immediately gavin uh gavin newsom picks up and i'm like governor It's me, Vlad Tenev.

1:11:20I got your phone. Thank you. It's very nice. And to his credit, he said, look, there's a perception that the state of California and me personally are against entrepreneurship. We're an inhospitable place for you to build companies. I want you to know that you can call me at any time. And anytime you have a problem or you want to talk about how we can improve the state and make it a better place to do business, I'll pick up the call. and other people got this phone too so it wasn't just me it was like a marketing strategy because he could have just gave you his number that's true um yeah can you only call can you only call him from that phone i haven't tried i've only tried calling him from that like the batman immediately um nora let's get on this but i appreciated the gesture so i mean it just shows you that i think that there are democrats that are open to engaging with business and like what we're doing as well.

1:12:17And I think that, yeah, I mean, we're obviously happy to engage with anyone on both sides to further the mission of making everyone owners of this great American industry. But of course, I do appreciate what this current administration is doing. They've been doing really good things in general. I think they're getting some of the important things right. And the Invest America Trump Accounts initiative in particular, I think, can change the world if implemented correctly. So with that one, I'm very excited. And of course, I've told the president and the Treasury who's overseeing it that whatever we can do to make sure it goes smoothly, it's high quality.

1:12:59People actually use the accounts and it's not just buried somewhere inaccessible. Want to explain that, what that is? Yeah, so there's an initiative that passed as part of the budget reconciliation bill earlier this year that will give each child born in this country an investment account with$1 ,000 funded by Treasury invested into a diversified portfolio of think like S &P 500. Think it attracts S &P, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it would just be passive. The investments would go in, it would grow. And, you know, when the child hits 18 and then 35, there's hurdles where they assume greater control over that portfolio.

1:13:40But Michael Dell and his wife, Susan, donated, I think, about$6.5 billion to increase, to give$250 to not just newborns, but backdated the past 10 years. And I think you're going to see more and more companies doing interesting things. So one of the areas of focus has been how do we make it as easy as possible for money to flow into these accounts from your family, from corporates and employers, from your church or other religious organizations? How can we make this sort of like a multi-generational giving platform that makes it as easy as possible to actually give money from us to the next generation?

1:14:27and and to me it's very powerful because in so many of the other things that we do we're sort of like taking money from the future and and spending it now like the national debt and big deficits are a form of that social security there's also an element of that like we're funding folks now and the the debt is going to have to be paid for in the future so i like to counteract that the fact that this counteracts that i think is very powerful yeah and parents can put money into that account. And it's just the idea of compounding interest over time, right? Somebody gets it when they're born, by the time they're 18, it reaches a certain amount.

1:15:05Obviously, if you put more into it, there'll be more. Whereas when we started the conversation almost, it was like, what happens to the kid who's graduating high school in 20 years and now can't find a job or maybe college is not affordable, that accountant is at least there for them to pursue other things. Entrepreneurship is one of those things that you was talking about. Yeah, absolutely. This is like a good foundation for, you know, not just sort of a nest egg for the future financially, but also I think it gives people skin in the game for American industries, like the biggest American companies.

1:15:42You'll sort of like make sure that, you know, young people feel like they have some ownership, some skin in the game, and, you know, they'll be less likely to want to burn the system down if they actually have some skin in the game and are incented to protect it, which I think is a good thing because so many young people feel like they don't have skin in the game. And like, well, if the American government or the financial markets aren't working for me, what's my incentive to, you know, be a supporter of free markets and ownership? And I think giving people that ownership is, yeah, is much stronger.

1:16:23It's like when you own a piece of land or a house, you keep it in better condition. If you're just sort of like a visitor or even renting, you don't care about it as much. My final question is this. It's probably my favorite quote of yours this year. It was in a journal over the weekend. And they were talking about how you used to drive a modest Tesla car. Yes. And in the next quote, it says, why do I care about what other people perceive of the CEO of Robinhood? We were talking about watches before. it's in the piece it talks about how you're collecting uh uh cars at this point when did we should acknowledge that you guys are wearing some very nice watches as am i this is a robin hood quartz special here everything earned one of is that one of one uh no no no we are um we're testing it we're testing it for broader distribution so maybe at some point you'll be wearing these too Maybe you'll see us in that watch.

1:17:19I just want to know at what point during this past five, ten years did you get to the reckoning of like, you know what? I'm living life on my terms. I think it was probably somewhere between the end of 2022 and the end of 2023 when things were actually quite negative in Robin Hood. And I think that that that quote was taken a little bit out of context or I mean, I definitely said it. But what I was trying to communicate is that, you know, a lot of times as a CEO or just as a human being, you're kind of pressured to do things a certain way based on appearances, how other people will perceive them.

1:18:17Other people want things, so maybe I should like support them publicly. And I think there was a general shift of, let me just think about what I think is right and what I want and communicate that rather than trying to like do things or communicate things just because I think that's what other people want to see. So I think authenticity in a nutshell is actually important. I think I've gone back and forth on this. I didn't want the outcome to be, I really like nice things. yeah because I'm actually back to driving the Tesla and wearing the quartz watches so yeah it wasn't it wasn't as much of a statement about luxury and spending money but more that I think authenticity is important and if you find yourself doing something just because it's the conventional wisdom and it's not making you happy then you're you're probably doing the wrong thing.

1:19:17Well, Vlad, thank you for your time. Appreciate it. Thank you. Always a pleasure. I appreciate you having us, man. Thank you. You have it. Ernest, what's up? You ever walk into a small business and everything just works? Like the checkout is fast, the receipts are digital, tipping is a breeze, and you're out the door before the line even builds. Odds are they're using Square. We love supporting businesses that run on Square because it just feels seamless, whether it's a local coffee shop, a vendor at a pop-up market, or even one of our merch partners. Square makes it easy for them to take payments, manage inventory, and run their business with confidence, all from one simple system.

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