Trump Doubles Down on Tariffs & Robinhood Cashes In On Crypto

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0:27Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Trump goes full Hammurabi's code, pledging an eye for an eye with reciprocal tariffs on the countries of the world. Then RFK Jr. was confirmed as the nation's top health official, why everyone from cereal makers to drug makers are bracing for change. It's Friday, February 14th. Happy Valentine's Day, and let's ride.

0:55Love is in the air this Valentine's Day, and whether you're headed on a third date or going strong 20 years with your partner, Here's a little tip that could add a lot of intimacy to your relationship. Kiss for six seconds each day. Kissing for six seconds, a method pioneered by clinical psychologists John and Julie Gottman, is the threshold at which your body will release oxytocin, the hormone that calms the fear center of the brain, builds trust in a relationship, and is the same one believed to be responsible for a baby bonding with its mother. They developed this intentional intimacy concept after studying more than 3 ,000 couples over 30 years.

1:34Don't want to smooch each day? Maybe your lips are a little cracked? Another scientist found that a 20-second hug is pretty much the equivalent. Okay, lots of thoughts here, Neil. First, are there compounding returns if 6 seconds of kiss and 20 seconds of hug release X amount of octetocin? Then would a 60-second kiss and a 200-second hug release 10 times that amount? If I kiss someone for six hours, am I going to be the happiest person on earth? That was my first question. I'd probably be a little hungry. You would probably get a little hungry by the end. But also, what other activities derive a similar amount of chemical satisfaction?

2:07I was thinking maybe a 45-second firm handshake might get it done. Or, you know, two hours worth of high fives. Just little bursts of oxytocin here and there. But thank you for sharing these intimacy plans on this day dedicated to love. of I think I might try it out later this evening with my girlfriend. Tuesday on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozema St. John host the highly anticipated new competition show. I hired 10 creatives from all walks of life. They will be battling it out to see who can impress the world's biggest brands. This is a huge opportunity. This is the battle for the next big idea. This is not Play Play.

2:47We're spending millions of dollars. I'm so excited to embark on this adventure with all of you. Make the best idea win! On brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere Tuesday on NBC. Now a word from our sponsor, Wise Business. Sometimes running an international business just feels like being stuck in a giant maze. You're trying to find the exit, but just keep hitting dead ends. Then you run into a minotaur, a.k.a. hidden fees. When Theseus entered the labyrinth, he unspooled strings so he could find his way back. And that's where Wise Business comes in. They're not even your spool of string. Wise just eliminates the maze altogether.

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4:08It's time to be reciprocal. You'll be hearing that word a lot, Trump said earlier this week. If they charge us, we charge them. This reciprocal approach extends the U.S.'s trade wars to far more countries outside of just China, but we'll have to wait and see if the strategy is to try and extract concessions, as Trump has been known to do, or a legitimate attempt to raise import barriers and non-tax revenue in the process. Either way, implementing a new tariff code is a massive undertaking that will require reevaluating hundreds of countries' current policies in less than two months. Neil, the big one is here.

4:46And the big spreadsheet is coming. I mean, if you think you're good with Excel, the Trump administration probably wants to hire you because this is about to be the most gnarly spreadsheet ever. Imagine going to a tailor and getting a custom suit for every single country. That's exactly what is about to happen. And it's not just tariffs because say, Toby, I'm trading with you and you have 10 percent tariffs and I have 2 percent tariffs. So I say, OK, reciprocal, I will bump my tariffs up to 10 percent. No, there was a huge Clayton Kershaw level curveball here, which is that it applies to more trade barriers than just tariffs.

5:24They want to go after subsidies, regulations, value added taxes, exchange rates and other factors. All that amount to trade barriers on the United States. And that will go into their calculation that what is deemed reciprocal. So, yeah, this is not going to happen within weeks or months. So they're hidden. They're hidden the books and figuring out what a reciprocal relationship actually looks like. Let's take a step back and think about what the current system is and why Trump wants to remake it. Remember, we are currently in a global trade environment. Following World War II, a lot of the most powerful economies and countries in the world signed this thing called the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades, GATT.

6:07That ushered in this era of scratching each other's back. The agreement was eventually turned into and absorbed by the World Trade Organization. So for a long time, this word tariff has been kind of this ugly word because you wanted to supercharge global trade. You wanted to open up a lot of these pathways. But now the Trump administration thinks that higher tariffs is this pathway towards bringing manufacturing back to the United States and also potentially boosting revenue that you're going to lose if he implements these tax cuts. So there's been a lot of criticism of these plans, obviously, but this is kind of what Trump has been pushing for.

6:43He wants to, you know, even the playing field on the global level, which really does upend what the system we've been operating under for, you know, since post World War Two. Yeah. And economists would push back on Trump's reciprocal pushes and say, look, the reason that tariff rates differ is because different different countries are really good at making different things. and we trade with each other so that one plus one equals three. And a good example of this is coffee. Brazil is great at making coffee beans. They are the largest exporter in the world. The United States, not so good at making coffee beans.

7:22Our climate is just not acclimated to that. So Brazil has a tariff on green coffee beans of 9 % because they have a big domestic industry there. They want to protect it. So they are putting tariffs on coffee beans coming into their country. The United States, we don't make any coffee beans, so we have 0 % tariffs, and that is to have cheaper coffee. Because if we put tariffs on coffee, we import all of them, essentially. So it'll just raise prices for consumers. And then on the converse of that, let's look at an industry like pickup trucks. The United States is really good at making pickup trucks.

7:56If you haven't noticed, just go to your local mall and look at all the cars in the parking lot. Japan makes good cars, but they aren't good at making pickup trucks. So Japan has a 0 % tariff on pickup trucks coming from the United States because they want their consumers to have as cheap pickup trucks as possible. The U.S. has a tariff of 25 % on pickup trucks from Japan because we have a local big industry here that we want to protect. So that's sort of how it's shaken out over the past few decades. This is the reason why we have differing trade and tariff rates. And now it looks like that is going to be shaken up.

8:32And one of the other final critiques here is that if you insist that we are going to match your tariff rate, we're going to be reciprocal with whatever you're charging us, we charge you. Then you basically are handing over your entire trade strategy to other nations because they say, oh, you're going to match us. We're going to jack imports up to the tariff rate up to 20 percent. Now, you have to jack it up to 20 percent. So you're like almost taking your agency away when dictating how you want to deal with other countries. So, yeah, there is just widely varying tariff rates depending on which country you're even talking about.

9:07I mean, India has tariffs of 60 percent on automobiles and flowers, 50 percent on apples, corn and motorcycles. These are domestic industries that they want to protect. So let's go back to this spreadsheet. It is going to be quite this undertaking because there's just so many different industries, so many different countries that you have to sort through and come up with a cohesive plan. And it could also be a negotiating tactic. The EU has already said that they would lower tariffs on U.S. exports in order to head off this trade war. They have 10 percent tariffs on U.S. cars right now. They said they would lower that to 2.5 percent to get ahead of this.

9:44And that may be what Trump is ultimately after anyway. The United States has a new top health official. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime environmental lawyer and former presidential candidate, was confirmed by the Senate yesterday to become the secretary of health and human services. His anti-establishment agenda to make America healthy again could shake up the$4 trillion healthcare industry and the food sector, areas that are now under his expansive purview. All Democrats voted no on Kennedy, while all Republicans voted yes, except for one, Senator Mitch McConnell. McConnell, who survived polio when he was a child, said he couldn't endorse Kennedy over his previous criticisms of vaccines.

10:25In my lifetime, McConnell said, I've watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles. So now that RFK is in charge, despite McConnell's no vote, of the nation's vast health and food apparatus, including the FDA and the CDC, what is he going to do? We don't know quite yet, but the business world is bracing for impact. In the past, he's railed against big pharma for over over medicating Americans, big food for creating an obesity crisis and big ag for putting pesticides and seed oils in diets.

11:05Yeah, I think there are a lot of phones ringing off the hook in Washington right now who are trying to figure out what to do under this new kind of purview that RFK Jr. has. Let's start with vaccine makers because, you know, that's been a very hot button topic under Kennedy's ideas. There have been, you know, pretty controversial. Remember, he called the COVID-19 shot that Pfizer produced one of the deadliest vaccines ever made. He's walked back some of those comments since, but a lot of these companies that still derive a lot of revenue from vaccines are nervous right now. I mean, Merck has an HPV shot.

11:43That's this company's second best selling product. Moderna's entire business is wrapped up in forming various vaccines. And it's not just manufacturers that are potentially at risk here, too. CVS said in a recent annual report that regulatory changes or consumer sentiment shift for immunizations may hurt demand at some of its shores. So if you are a health care company that does rely on vaccines as one of your mainstreams of revenue, then you are definitely a little nervous that RFK Jr. is now in charge. And the cost of public health. I mean, just as we're talking right now, there is a measles outbreak in West Texas.

12:1924 people have been infected. Some have been hospitalized and all of them were not were not vaccinated with MMR, the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. And then another interesting angle here for the pharmaceutical company, some a agenda item of RFK that has won support across the political spectrum, which we should add. Many of his ideas have gained byproducts and support, you know, going after big food, saying that they put profits over the health of Americans. Bernie Sanders was like, yeah, dude, I 100 % agree with you. One of them, interestingly, for the pharmaceutical industry is that he wants to ban TV advertising for pharmaceutical companies.

13:04Elon Musk is on board with this. And this would shake up TV and pharma. The pharma industry, you know, anyone who's watched TV recently knows that they spend a ton of money on advertising. They are on track to spend over$5 billion alone on national television as advertisements this year of five popular nightly news shows on major networks last week. Advertisements from the maker of prescription and over-the-counter drugs accounted for half of ad spending. So this is going to run up against a lot of opposition from industry, but it's just another big idea that RFK has. And then finally, one other idea that we should speak about is that RFK is not a fan of weight loss drugs.

13:49You know, Wagovi, Ozempic, the GLP-1 class of drugs that has absolutely taken the world by storm. He said, when I'm working in the next administration, I will address our sick food system. Instead, he wants to address, you know, the root cause rather than something papering over it. And that could set up a fight with one of Trump's other top advisors, Elon Musk. Elon Musk has been extremely supportive of these weight loss drugs. He went as far as to say nothing would do more to improve the health lifespan and quality of life for Americans than making GLP-1 drugs super low cost to the public. So that is a potential point of friction that we could see develop between two of Trump's top lieutenants.

14:27Robinhood, the trading platform best known for the meme stock boom, is growing up. It reported earnings earlier this week, and it was all highlights. the company posted its first ever annual profit and revenue more than doubled. It's been quite the turnaround. After it went public, Robinhood withered away, losing 80 % of its IPO market cap, but it staged a huge comeback since, with its shares more than quadrupling over the past year. How did it right the ship? Firstly, by attracting more serious investors away from competitors like Fidelity and Charles Schwab. CEO Vlad Tenev said his company finished the fourth quarter with$1.3 billion in net transfers, more than any other brokerage.

15:09It also rode a crypto trading tsunami. Its crypto-based revenue jumped in insane 700 % year over year to reach$358 million. Neil, shares finished up another 14 % yesterday. Robinhood and its merry band of crypto degens is cooking. Robinhood has certainly benefited from the hype around crypto. When people are trading crypto, when people are trading stocks, when there's volatility, Robinhood and its peers will do well. And it hasn't just been Robinhood. Coinbase reported a 100, which is the largest crypto trading platform, reported a 130 % rise in revenue just yesterday. Fidelity, Schwab are all raking it in.

15:53So when Bitcoin goes over$100 ,000, these companies are going to benefit. But you could say that Robinhood has made certain tactful changes that puts it in a really good position to benefit now to the point where its market cap is over 50 billion dollars it's been releasing a number of financial products crypto and other to you know make its platform more sticky get more people coming over from other uh platforms get more money on uh on Robinhood itself rolled out a subscription uh offering called gold which it said has 2.6 million people right now signed up paying every single month for advanced features.

16:33It also rolled out a credit card that has a very long wait list. So it's been pedal to the metal for Robinhood and they're not even close to done. Right. There's kind of two angles you can look at here. One, it rode this animal spirits wave really well. Customers traded$14 billion in crypto in the third quarter on its platform. Sounds like a lot. You go to the fourth quarter, that number jumps to$71 billion. So just a massive uptick in crypto trading. But you're right. A lot of the reason why analysts are a little bit more bullish on it is that Robinhood is maturing as a company. It has these very sober offerings.

17:08It offers retirement accounts now. It has that credit card that it launched. And also, those funded accounts that are subscribing to its gold service, that is a very stable form of revenue that doesn't wildly fluctuate alongside the crypto market. So that's why analysts were like, all of a sudden, Robinhood is kind of looking like a very well-positioned company. It does have a long way to go to reach the big boys that have trillions of dollars in assets on their platform. But right now, Robinhood is certainly, you know, aging gracefully into its teenage years. And we'll see whether in those teenage years it rolls into events contracts, which is those prediction markets that have become so big recently with Polymarket and Kalshi.

17:48Robinhood did roll them out ahead of the presidential election. They tried to do it for the Super Bowl. But the regulators stepped in and said, no, please take that off. So they did. But, you know, a name like Robin Hood getting into events contracts, which is those things where you can just bet on an event to happen outside of sports, like sports gambling, but but for just like things happening in the world, we'll see if they are able to take these prediction markets mainstream. It sounds like the event contracts are pricing in a 100 percent chance of us going to break right now. Race the rudders!

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20:05So I get to go first and my stock of the week is DoorDash and not just because it came up clutch during my Super Bowl party. The stock is up 5 % this week after the delivery giant reported its first full year of profitability ever. Revenue grew 25 % during DoorDash's fourth quarter, while it posted net income of$141 million, compared to a loss of $150 million a year ago. There was a time that DoorDash being profitable seemed as remote as Toby shooting under par. It racked up hundreds of millions of losses, spending gobs on marketing, discounts, operations, and there were plenty of haters saying the economics of food delivery, a savagely competitive sector, would never work out.

20:47But DoorDash has managed to build a healthy business and become the dominant player in the U.S. restaurant delivery space, commanding two-thirds of the market and distancing itself from Uber Eats and Grubhub. Oh, and the Super Bowl was pretty good for it, too. DoorDash said its delivery drivers earned more than$50 million during the game this year, up from 43 million last year from all you chicken wing ordering freaks. People like having personal chauffeurs for their burritos. Total orders are now up 735 % over the past five years. It's not just that DoorDash is executing, which it has been very well for a long time now.

21:23It's also that there's just a lot of demand for food delivery in general. Just look at the results from Uber's delivery segment last week. It also beat expectations. DoorDash is a much larger player, though it controls two-thirds of the U.S. meal delivery market. That is triple the share that Uber Eats has. So I am curious to see how it does going forward because these two companies have been kind of avoiding each other for most of their early lifetime. DoorDash initially went very hard, focused on suburbs. Uber Eats, meanwhile, went very hard and focused on urban areas. So now the two are mixing a little bit more.

21:58They're stepping into each other's territory. So I do think we might see another, you know, sort of food delivery war start to cook up. But DoorDash is cooking. And I think with its first profitable year, it is a signal of the maturation of the gig economy, which I mentioned. Few thought that the economics would ultimately work out for these type of companies. But Lyft also reported its first profitable year ever in 2024. Airbnb and Uber also reported their first profitable years in 2023. Next up is Instacart, which is reporting later in this month, and it could report its first profitable year ever.

22:35So these companies that rely on independent contractors that have been embroiled in labor negotiations and criticized for not paying drivers enough, but also just not being profitable enterprises are really turning a corner here. When were these companies started? 15 years after they started. In the Zerp area, those 0 % interest rates definitely helped start them. So a lot of people are saying they have these enduring moats because we're not going to see an era like that to raise capital again. I do miss the discounts. The discounts were incredible. The millennial subsidized lifestyle. My dog of the week is Reddit.

23:10On the surface, Reddit's earnings this week were pretty solid. 101 million daily active users in Q4 up 39 % year over year. And a solid beat on revenue expectations should have made investors happy. But instead, shares fell more than 15 % on Wednesday. The culprit, according to CEO Steve Huffman, Google tweaked its algorithm, which led to fewer Reddit posts hitting that SEO sweet spot to get a boost in search results. That means when you search for something like Severance Dead Seal Explained, Reddit posts might come up a little lower in Google's pecking order. Hoffman tried to assuage investors' fear during the earnings call, explaining that Google's algorithm changes take place two times a year and that this one is not the first and not the last.

23:55Still, an annoying development for a company whose shares had been up 23 % so far in 2025. The Reddit-Google relationship is pretty interesting. You could call them frenemies. You could call it symbiotic. But Reddit relies on Google for so much of its traffic. 55 % of all of its users are what they call logged out users, which are essentially people who come in from a Google search and they aren't logged in to the platform. Those are most of the people that, you know, travel that that scroll through Reddit every single day. At the same time, Google needs Reddit as well. It's paying it$60 million for it to help train its AI large language models.

24:40So you have this very interesting relationship between Google and Reddit. At the same time, they are also competing against each other. Reddit is also has released this AI search tool that, you know, ostensibly would be what Google is for. So it looks like Google's little algorithm. Reddit relies so much on Google that Google's tiny algorithm tweaks, which it does a couple times each year, you know, threw a hammer in its earnings and sent its stock tumbling. Yeah, Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, said that this one was particularly interesting because they saw this immediate swing downwards. But then right after, they saw recovery towards the end of the quarter.