ACCESS with Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger

23:48Alex Heath:My skepticist hat is that I don't know who's on the other side of the trade. If I could see who was making all of these bets, I think I would trust it more. I mean, I trust the results. I mean, you're right. The majority of what I've seen, especially in the context of elections, is they do call it really early. I mean, I remember at Kalshi when I showed up, there was a CBS crew there and they had just called a race and then Kalshi had called it like an hour before. And that's pretty common. And so, you know, you see the results. But at the same time, just my journalist hat is, am I getting like fleeced here somehow?

24:22Alex Heath:Like, is there someone making money on this other side that has information that I don't? because this does feel relatively unregulated, right? There's not like SEC oversight. Is there of insider trading or even a concept of insider trading? Because like as a journalist, I sometimes get non-public material information or report it about companies, right? Like when is the next Gemini model coming, right? There could be a prediction market for that. If I get it confirmed and I report it, I could make a lot of money theoretically. I haven't looked into this. I haven't done it. I'm not saying I would, but I'm just saying it feels like this is a wild west that doesn't have any regulation.

24:58Alex Heath:And I'm wondering how you feel about that. Well, it's not exactly the Wild West. I mean, these are CFTC federally regulated products. It is a new product. So there's a lot of questions that I think as an industry, we have to figure out. But, you know, it's more often compared to sportsbook on the sports side. And I wouldn't say that the sportsbooks haven't exactly figured out either. And there's a lot of advantages to it being brought into a federally regulated realm because we have the machinery to do market surveillance, to do transaction monitoring. I mean, there's lots of stuff that you have to do when you're monitoring securities transactions.

25:44There's pipelines for reporting. So in my opinion, the best companies that are set up to do this are financial services companies or the stakes are so high that we've had to build machinery to monitor transactions and to look out for market integrity over many decades. I was looking through your App Store screenshots, and I believe that the prediction markets for some sports betting is like the very first screenshot at this point. How do you kind of prioritize the product development internally, you know, between something like this and then you've also got these products for like working on your, you know, IRA or something like that.

26:24How do you focus your internal team on where things are heading? So those feel like two pretty different things. Yeah. I mean, those are under sort of separate teams. So it's not an exact tradeoff. I mean, we have to worry about prioritization and tradeoffs on a business level. And that's what I spend a lot of my time thinking about. Just even like the vision for the company. Those feel like different paths conventionally. I would say. Well, the vision for the company is to become your financial super app. And what we mean by that is, you know, for a long time, Robinhood was people's secondary financial account.

27:04Right. But so I would say it probably does fit into the secondary financial account vision, but we don't want to just be your secondary financial account. We want to be your primary and secondary. So we believe that Robinhood can be the place where all of your assets and all of your dollars are held, and we can process all financial transactions. And what we've seen is that as we add new products, a lot of times engagement and usage of our existing products increases. So when we launched retirement, for example, there's a big question internally, about whether retirement was going to cannibalize our trading business.

27:50And the argument makes some sense theoretically, right? Some people have a certain amount of money. If you believe that money is going into Robinhood, and maybe before it was going into the individual brokerage account, now if half of it goes into the retirement account, maybe we would end up hurting ourselves because it would now be going to a place where we would monetize it less. But actually, that didn't end up happening. And what we saw was that the folks that were using retirement actually increased their activity in their individual brokerage accounts. They used us more because it started clicking in their heads that this is now my financial account, right?

28:33I do all of my finances here. We saw a similar effect with the credit card. You know, when someone became a primary gold card user with a credit card, we saw a positive impact to brokerage. And again, same reason. I'm a gold member. I'm doing everything with Robinhood. Let me look around and see if my gold membership actually gets me any other benefits. And if those other products are good, I'll give Robinhood a fair shake and probably first shot at my business. I think when you've spent as long and as much time as you have on trying to build trust as you built all these things over time, I think it makes a lot of sense that that aggregate value would be increased.

29:17The customer's consideration for each new product would be higher than it would have been had it would have been a separate app. But I saw an ad today in the Wall Street Journal that said, if you're looking for a broker that's not also your bookie, we invite you to try public. A different perspective on maybe some of the conflicts from the producer of this product point of view. Do you have any response to that? Yeah, that's a funny one. One of the differences between traditional sports betting and prediction markets is that the trades are happening on an exchange with buyers and sellers. And so there's no house that is incentivized to have customers lose.

29:57Right. So that's sort of the retort to the specific bookie comment. The other thing is a lot of these brokers, you have to understand there's a competitive marketplace here and not everyone can match our product velocity and how we serve our customers. And obviously the business has been going very well, not just prediction markets, but, you know, last quarter we had record net deposits into the platform. retirement accounts have just been on a huge influx of assets 25 billion plus gold card had half a million plus cardholders so so the ecosystem as a whole is very very strong now prediction markets uh are the fastest growing business we've ever had um and i think we've seen these criticism before but what's happening under the hood is our competitors are working as hard as possible to like replicate this.

30:55I mean, I think that company was making a lot of hay about how retail shouldn't be trading options and they were kind of against it. And then of course - Until they launched it. Until they launched options trading. Classic comms tactic. And now they're incentivizing by giving you contract rebates and things like that. So I think this is just people have their interests. If I was in their position, I probably try to have some kind of media strategy that stems the tide and prevents them from losing customers. And I do think there's a legitimate, like some customers just don't like to see it. And some customers don't like all the products we offer.

31:48So there's a legitimate challenge that we have as we add more products. How do we make the experience cohesive and how do we make sure that we only show to customers what they want to see? And I think that's going to push us towards solving some really interesting challenges with, you know, personalization and machine learning and making sure that actually your Robinhood experience is what you want it to be. And we're giving you the products that, you know, you're most suitable for and that you want to engage with. And I think we're in the early days of that. There's a lot more to do there.

32:26Alex Heath:I think on the last earnings, you said that the prediction business in October was bigger for you all than the whole last quarter combined. It had been doubling quarter over quarter. So what is driving this? Is it mostly sports? Is this just speed running all the sports betting companies? Or what is it really fundamentally? I mean, sports is a big chunk of it for sure. but we're also seeing engagement across in non-sports categories. For a while, our prediction markets business was like sports only. And we recently started rolling out to other categories like economics, technology, politics. Now we have over a thousand contracts.

33:07And one of the things we believe is that the non-sports landscape is going to evolve very, very rapidly. And there's really interesting things that you'll be able to do that haven't been built yet. But yeah, sports has been a huge driver. Also, anytime we roll out a new product, it takes time for customers to understand it. A lot of people have never heard of prediction markets. It's a little bit more technical and arcane. And the dynamics are different than than what they're used to with traditional sports books. So as they become familiar with it, as there's more events that they hear about, as we get a little bit better at incorporating it and integrating it into the product experience, which I think there's a lot of room for us to improve even further, we see growth.

33:59And I think there's tailwinds as well. I don't think that there's so many ways we can continue to improve it and make it more useful and better.

34:09Alex Heath:Look at you. You're a veteran public CEO already. Tailwinds. You got all the words. I love the word tailwinds, actually. I think I picked that up from my CFO. It's like a romantic. It's like you're a sailor out at sea, you know? Yeah. Any particular contracts you hope to see personally in the near future? I'm really interested in contracts that are more personalized. and what I mean by that is not that you know you'll be trading a contract on Alex's status or whatnot but really that you know let's say you were concerned about flood or fire risk in your primary residence I mean maybe you submit some information about yourself to a transparent market and you get a real-time price for market makers.

34:59And I think you can imagine that that could be disruptive to the insurance industry, right? Like there's no reason why I have to pick up the phone and, you know, have these giant companies pricing my risk in a opaque way when, you know, the entire financial market with all of its liquidity and everyone plugged in can, can kind of do that.

35:23Alex Heath:I mean, regulators are going to come crashing in on this if it gets to that level, don't you think? Well, I think you already see it with weather contracts, precipitation. You have it sort of in a generalized sense. There's fire contracts, wildlife. That's the whole purpose. That's how this industry started, right, is people hedging their risk. Now, why does it have to be only available to farmers and people running large institutions when individuals would like to have certain risks that they're legally required to hedge in some cases. And so, yeah, not to say that there's not going to be stakeholders that are going to fight prediction markets.

36:06You're already seeing it. But I think the power and the efficiency is just undeniable.

36:15Alex Heath:What you were saying about farmers and, you know, hedge funds and stuff having access to this already made me think about, I wonder if this is something you have felt leading the company is you often get criticized, I think, for, you know, quote unquote gamification or bringing these things to the masses that potentially have negative externalities or could get people, you know, down a bad path if they get too levered or whatever. And then frequently, I think the other side of it that I hear from you and others is also, well, look like This was already available, but it was for a select few. And so it seems like the mission you've had since the beginning is democratizing.

36:52Alex Heath:I mean, I know that was the thing that you would say, but the prediction market's idea is, I think, taking what, yeah, farmers, hedge funds, what they already do, and bring it to everyone. And that is disruption in the classic sense. And it has positives and negatives to it. No, I mean, I'm sure you're also thinking about like, yeah, there are going to be unforeseen externalities of this at scale. Right. Yeah. And by the way, there's no leverage in our prediction markets currently. So they're fully cash collateralized. It's a longstanding criticism of every financial market that they're speculators.

37:28But I think, I mean, when you look at the futures markets, when they became accessible to retail several decades ago, it was the same thing. You know, people were trading grain and oil and orange juice futures and pork bellies. And, you know, there were speculators in there and a lot of people had concerns about that. Every financial market had speculation. But I think the thing most people don't understand is speculation is actually an important part about it's necessary for the functioning of these markets. You can't just have people hedging. You can't just have arbitrage. Even if you read The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, one of the seminal books of value investing, he talks about how speculation is actually integral to the proper functioning.

38:22So I don't think we can get rid of it. Now, I don't think everyone should be speculating and certainly not with a huge chunk of their capital, but we believe in markets. And so I think this activity is actually crucial to the proper functioning of all of the markets.

38:39Alex Heath:Would you ever bake that idea into the products where Robinhood says, hey, like, you can do this, but just FYI, you're about to put 40 % of your portfolio in something that's a little YOLO. Like, could you guide people more that way? We actually do a little bit. I mean, for example, when you have a leveraged ETF or, you know, a similar high risk instrument, we let people know, you know, that this is something that's, that's leveraged. It's not for long-term holding. We also, you know, indicate if something's like gotten to a point of, of large volatility, like we, we give those little alerts. If a company is bankrupt, you know, or has filed bankruptcy.

39:26So there's examples where we definitely let customers know. I think it's also a delicate balance because if you're an active trader and you know what you're doing, we don't want to put so many frictions in your way because then you'll just get annoyed and start, you know, using the products of our competitors that don't do those things. You know, the state of Massachusetts was like historically very protectionist about this stuff. So I don't know if you guys remember, there's a story about how they banned their citizens from participating in the Apple IPO in the 80s. You know, at the time it was like, oh, this is risky, most people shouldn't be.

40:08And I think in general it was from a good place. But then imagine multiple decades later, this is like an example of, it's sort of a negative example of nanny statism gone completely wrong. I mean, you've prevented people from like exercising their point of view and in hindsight making a lot of money. Yeah, I think that's true. But I also feel like there's a big difference between like an outright ban and like those commercials you see on TV that say we're going to give you$500 for free if you bet five that know that when someone shows up, they're probably going to lose it because that's the only way that they can make that offer.

40:47You know, how do you think about that stuff when you see it on TV or maybe even when PMs come to you with ideas that you know would work but might feel a little icky? I think we're generally pretty conservative about those things. I mean, obviously, there's always a gray area where there's discussions, but we benefit. I mean, if you look at Robinhood as a business, our revenue scales with assets under custody. And so the healthy customer relationship for us is someone whose account balance monotonically increases over time. So, you know, it doesn't bother us if you're allocating some of your portfolio and you're trading options, you're trading futures, you're trading prediction markets.

41:36But we're actually quite aligned with our users in the sense that we benefit as their account balances grow and their relationship deepens with us. And that's kind of how we've been successful. If you look at asset growth on the platform over time, it's not a churn and burn business where people put money in and then their account goes to zero. This is a compounding asset business. I'm just, I'm a product person. I'm just so fascinated by, you know, this kind of conceptual idea that maybe you bring some money into a product and there's two buttons there. One is to put it in retirement and one is to put it on the Packers.

42:16You know, if times were ever tough, you could see a world where someone comes and says, hey, let's make the Packers button a little shinier or a little bigger or make it number one in the rankings. And that's what I think brings some interesting decisions being a platform that includes both. so yeah your job is not an easy one yeah and i think that historically um it's been very difficult for a regulated business to actually uh make recommendations at that level right because the areas where you could make recommendations are pretty circumscribed you know there are all kinds of things govern making a recommendation to open a new account or how much money you should invest in a certain thing.

43:02And our solution to that is not to get away from it. We make recommendations, but they have to be in specific areas where we make it clear that, yeah, we're telling you we have a fiduciary duty. We think that, you know, you should invest in this.

43:20Kara Swisher:Hi, I'm Brene Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling, and questioning. It's going to be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree. And we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. In 1984, Apple launched maybe the most consequential computer ever. It was not a good computer, particularly. There was actually a lot wrong with it. But the Macintosh had all of the right ideas about what computers would become, and it kind of changed everything.

44:03This week on Version History, our chat show about the best and worst and most interesting products in tech history, we're telling the story of the Macintosh and why, again, despite not being very good, it managed to change everything anyway. That's Version History on YouTube and wherever you get podcasts.

44:22Alex Heath:Another thing I know you're thinking a lot about is tokenization. and I know this is a big priority. You've tokenized, quote unquote, a lot of companies so far. You want to do more. As someone who is even, you know, versed in these topics, it's a little heady for me to understand why the world needs this. And I know you're, you know, crypto is a big thing for Robinhood. It's a huge business. This has, you know, synergy with that. But explain it to me like I'm a middle schooler. Like, why in the world are you trying to tokenize companies? Yeah, on public companies outside the U.S., it's quite difficult to get access to public companies.

45:02A lot of people don't have a traditional broker that's available in their country, but they do have crypto firms. So crypto firms have become the gateway to get access to U.S. dollars. I think in the same way, tokenized stocks will become the gateway to U.S. assets. There might not be a local broker that is low cost, but if you get the stocks on the blockchain, you get certain benefits like 24-7, instant settlement, better economics on stock loan and borrow. But the main thing outside the U.S. is actually just access. Now, within the U.S., it's a little bit more incremental. And so I think adoption will be slower.

45:45I think tokenization of public stocks will be an ex-US phenomenon first, as we've demonstrated. I mean, we've gone live with it, ex-US, right? But in the US, it's a little bit more incremental. You're going from 24-5 trading, which we offer, to 24-7. You've got instant settlement, which means that a GameStop situation can never happen again. Oh, thank God. That's a nice benefit for me, maybe less so for most people. I think stock loan and borrow could be disrupted. It's a very opaque lending and borrowing market for shares that I think could be improved. And you have some benefits of portability and self-custody, which, and this is maybe slightly contrary interest to say, but you can make it so that your stocks can just easily leave your brokerage.

46:36You're not going to be dependent on a broker. you can transact and trade tokenized stocks as long as the blockchain is up. So private companies are a different story. Very hard to get access to even in the US. And there's problems because even if you're accredited and you want to transact in private shares, your options for doing that in a simple and easy way are pretty manual. And the alternative trading systems that exist that try to provide real-time matching generally don't have very much liquidity. So you could be waiting quite a while before you could make a trade. And when you do make that trade, it's kind of a manual process where you're sending DocuSigns to people if you guys have done that.

47:26Alex Heath:Not a ton of liquidity in the secondary market unless it's like a really hot name. Yeah, but if you plug it into crypto technology, and I wrote a piece on this in the Washington Post a little bit under a year ago, you solve the liquidity problem because you're plugging this into a network, a global network where, you know, you've seen meme coins get billions of dollars of liquidity within a few hours. And I think blockchains have shown that they've been very effective at directing and aggregating liquidity to assets that people actually want. So you don't have to build a whole exchange from the ground up.

48:04You can leverage the existing usage and liquidity on crypto.

48:09Alex Heath:That makes sense. But I've heard you also say that there's this digital nimbyism going on with companies to this idea when you go to them and you're like, let me put your stock on the blockchain. They're not huge fans. You first, I think, pitched this with OpenAI and SpaceX. I don't think they took to it too well. Do you find that you're still meeting a lot of resistance here, or are you optimistic? Where are you at now? I think eventually it'll happen, and we're looking to accelerate it. But, I mean, we know which way this is going to go. It's very, very clear. We have a product, IPO Access, which we launched for our own IPO in 2021.

48:47and our own IPO was for its size, the largest retail allocation at the time at, you know, north of 20%. And we had some other companies use it as well who are willing to go on the journey with us. But by and large in 2021, when I had this product, it took a lot of cajoling and a lot of just like asking for favors to make sure retail gets access to these IPOs. When we would get the allocations, they were pretty small. It was like, okay, we'll do Vlad a favor. We'll give him 1 % of the IPO, 2%, whatever. But there was skepticism. Executives were hearing from their bankers that it was a bit of a strange thing.

49:33And if you're an executive taking your company public, most of the time, it's just, let me get through this so I can focus on my business. I don't necessarily want to be an innovator in providing retail access to these instruments. But I do want to be an innovator in that. So I worked very hard and I pounded the pavement. We got a good IPO suite. And then the market basically shut for a couple of years. And an interesting thing happened in the interim. I think it became more obvious to the public. It had been obvious to me for a long time, but more obvious to the entire startup community that public companies that have retail fan bases and followings get rewarded.

50:20In some cases, we're pretty, pretty high multiples, right? You see Palantir, you see some others. And now when the IPO window opened, basically everyone's coming to us and asking us if they could have feedback on their retail strategy. How can they engage retail more? and a large number of the IPOs that have been on consequence have come to us and actually listed on the platform and in some cases given retail bigger and bigger chunks. And now they're talking about it. So I think the same thing is going to happen with private markets as well. We're kind of in the phase where it's a new thing. We're kind of the only ones that are trying to do it.

50:58Nobody really wants to innovate when they're raising a financing ground, but the setup is very similar to IPO access. Like it's the same set of constraints. And my prediction is within the next two years, it'll probably be faster than IPO access, probably even one year, it'll be normalized and you'll have the best companies available to retail because they'll just see that having that retail fan base and the supporters as early as possible is going to be immensely valuable. You look at AI in particular, where are the fans? I mean, it's a very popular technology. Adoption is very, very quick, but who's defending the AI companies in public?

51:45It's basically their investors and like the community of AI researchers. And the general perception, I would say, if you're looking at, you know, what's happening in the media and even in public discourse, there's a lot of fear and uncertainty. And it leans negative. I think there was an article talking about how this is like, at the same time, the fastest adopted technology, but also the least popular, right? And I don't think that's a healthy combination because I think that if the public is against AI, it's going to be a headwind, not a tailwind for the industry and for innovation. And I think the best way is to get people owning this stuff and not just have it go to the high net worth individuals and the institutions, but get it distributed to regular people.

52:40I think it will be good for the technology. And I think my opinion will at some point hopefully be a little bit more widespread. You're working on a lot of things right now. I saw you launch 10 new product suites in 2025. Five. Curious how you're running the company differently now than previously. I feel like I heard that you don't have any one on ones. You have over 20 direct reports. How do you think about all that? I've got a great, great GMs, a great team, the core Robinhood team, the people that are running the company, making decisions. A lot of them have been around for for a long time and gone through our share of crises together.

53:22Right. Not just GameStop, but also the IPO and the subsequent market correction, you know, the crypto market and the SVB crisis. So we've gone through some ups and downs and I think. Yeah. How's your blood pressure? That's a lot of crises right there. I stopped tracking it, you know, for a while I was very, I don't know if you guys felt the same. I was wearing my Apple watch and I was thinking about all this health stuff and now I've gone very mechanical. I'm like, I don't want to see it. Yeah. I kind of know when I haven't slept well, so I don't, I don't need the device. I'm becoming more of a Luddite as we keep rolling out more business lines.

54:07But yeah, that's really the short of it. I think I have a great team around me. I think we're working well together. Culture is something you evolve over time when you make mistakes and you fix them. And I think we iterate pretty quickly. I think you have to, but we're sort of not apologetic about being a company that wants to move fast and actually innovate.

54:31Alex Heath:Yeah, you've seen some crazy lows, and it feels like right now you're at this insane high. I think you're the second top-performing stock this year. You're on this product tear. I know. I wish we did the interview a week ago. When you were the top? Well, there's still weeks left in the year. But do those lows... Let's recheck it. It might have changed today. I don't know. We'll recheck it. But also on the last earnings call, I caught the joke about you had like a CO award that kicked in because of the stock gains. And I think your salary is going back to like 40K or something. Is that right? Yeah, pretty much.

55:07I think this was not a lot of people caught this, but I had some grants back in 2019. We were a private company that had share price targets of around$50 and$100. And, you know, a year ago, the stock was trading at, I think, in the 20s. And then, of course, with the tariffs, it dipped back down. So I don't think that we had forecasted all of those rewards hitting, but here we are. There you are. So that was the cause for our miss on tax expense and employee bonus accrual.

55:42Alex Heath:What's your bonus? Okay, cool. How do you keep yourself grounded in a moment like this, especially when you're going into next year? You are full on founder mode. And I'm sure your board trusts you immensely after this year, not that they didn't before. But how do you ground yourself and keep looking around the corner for what could disrupt you, so to speak? Look, we have to remind ourselves to not get complacent. I try to remind our employees of that as well. And I'm saying it to the employees as much as I'm saying it to myself, right? Like, I know inevitably I've been through so many of these cycles.

56:20There's going to be a time in the future where everyone thinks we're shitheads again. Um, uh, hopefully less acute than times before. And generally I believe the trend will be up, but you know, it's, it's always cyclical to some degree. And, um, that's just what we sign up for.

56:38Alex Heath:Who didn't want to talk to you before? Who wants to talk to you now? Let's name some names. I mean, honestly, I don't know. Nope. I didn't get too many podcast invites, uh, back in 2020. That's fair. That's fair. Well, we're glad to have you on. We met over a year ago. I don't remember where the stock price was, but it was early on in the predictions markets thing. It was before the U.S. really opened up. Before the election. Yeah, before that. And you were talking to me about it in the context of the media and how you were thinking about the media because you have a media arm. You're doing a social network now.

57:10Alex Heath:And I hadn't really heard of it that way. um and actually yeah we should we should actually just go to that the the social network thing i think ellis and i are both fascinated by me as someone well we both covered social networks and then ellis worked at one um but you're you're rolling this out it's not fully out but uh are you are you really taking on finance twitter here is this is this the goal you're gonna go go toe to toe with elon on this i mean maybe uh it's not the way we think of it but the um i think we have certain advantages. We have a highly engaged customer base that's rather large.

57:46We have the ability to build great technology. I mean, you might have seen where we've been live streaming our product events and our earnings with live video in the app. And we've been able to include interactivity as well. So we can run polls and different sort of like UI elements. I thought you were going to say the users could slime you or something if they felt like it.

58:12Alex Heath:Next earnings. If they felt like it was too boring, yeah. We should add that. But Opendoor last week actually live streamed their own earnings in our app. So we've been working on building this earnings information and data ecosystem. You can ask shareholder Q &A. And I think the interesting opportunity for us is actually becoming the place where the ideas are generated and shared. And can we be the first place where you actually post something interesting that has like financial or business or economic content? And I think the advantage that we have is because we're going to be where the social network is and the transaction, we can solve the verification problem to make sure people aren't faking their trades and posting inaccurate information.

59:07And the more assets we add, so now with prediction markets and options and futures and equities, you can imagine the stronger kind of that network effect would be. Like you could actually get diverse content. It's interesting. Lots of opinions. And can we become the place where you actually post first? I think that's going to be the challenge. But if we get that, I think it could be the best source of business and financial content out there.

59:37Alex Heath:You know if this works, you are going to get the call from Elon and he's going to go, what the hell are you doing? You know that's coming. I don't know that that's the case necessarily. And I think to some degree, a lot of the big social media products are looking to add finance in there. So, you know, rather than us just sitting around and getting disrupted, can we try to figure out what the best way is to integrate that into one experience? It's definitely a compelling package with social 24-7 markets. I think I saw the top replies to one of your tweets about, you know, these kind of always on markets idea was a bunch of memes of people looking very tired, like I'm tired, boss.

1:00:21You know, we all know this is fun, but it's also addictive. I mean, I don't even bet any money on fantasy sports, but I had to stop because every single time I was on the toilet or up late at night and couldn't sleep, I'm looking at it. I wonder what advice do you give to young people today to kind of come up with these new norms and modulate that behavior? Because it is fun. You feel like there's always more to learn, whether it's with stocks or the prediction markets. Yeah, I think it's very, very tough for a young person now when you have so much, you're bombarded by digital stimulus. And, you know, I recognize that I have a mobile app that people use, but I actually legitimately don't think, I mean, if my kids spent more time investing and learning how to trade on Robinhood, I don't think I would feel as bad because, you know, it's just, there's social media, there's YouTube, there's Minecraft.

1:01:23And better than shrimp Jesus, doom scroll, what we're saying? Yeah, I just think that it is a problem and it's something that I worry about and I'd like to contribute to making it better for sure and eventually scale that. But yeah, if I had to think about like one personal cause that I legitimately really am worried about, it's just like digital addiction. So I don't have all the answers.

1:01:55Alex Heath:Yeah, you said as Robin Hood scales, you find yourself wanting to be more of a Luddite. I mean, that's interesting, right? A lot of the founders who run these digital products and these platforms, you talk to them and it's like you get drained yourself, right? It's a lot. Yeah, I think it's unnatural to be in front of a screen for so much of your life. And, you know, when the smartphone came out, it was just the superpower, right? The people that were good at using smartphones, I think, had an advantage. But now, you know, we're spending so much of our time on smartphones that it's become a tax.

1:02:25It's almost like, you know, if the person next to you is using it more, you're at a disadvantage. and I think it's unfortunate that technology kind of evolves in that direction.

1:02:39Alex Heath:Well, maybe we can end it here. You're live streaming your earnings. You just did it at the Chase Center. I imagine these will get more ornate each earnings. I'm expecting more spectacle. Are we going to get a pre-earnings walk-in where you've got the designer bag, the jacket, the shades? Final Countdown is playing. Yeah, final countdown's playing. Is that coming, or are we just going to do post-game? You know, the inspiration for earnings was an NBA post-game interview, where we thought to ourselves, okay, after, let's say, the analogy is like game three of the NBA finals. It's not over. It's not game seven.

1:03:20It's actually, you're somewhere near the beginning of the series. But if you have a good quarter, It's sort of like interviewing LeBron after the Lakers win. He's got a little bit of swagger. You know, he's thanking his teammates. He's looking good. Maybe he's wearing his shades. If the Lakers lose and you're interviewing LeBron, he's got the towel on his head. Maybe he throws some shade on his teammates. But it's informative and entertaining either way. So if they could make it so that an NBA postgame interview is worth watching, we should be able to make earnings worth watching as well. I mean, it's not easy, is it?

1:04:00It's like, how much can you really say that you aren't prepared to say? Well, I mean, we've been able to do quite a lot. Turns out quite a lot. And it's been baby steps. We went on video. And now I'm at the point where if I'm reading a script, it's hard for me to not sound robotic. It's hard enough even without a script, to be honest. Um, so I, I operate best when I just have like, uh, an idea of what I want to talk about, but, but the rest of it is kind of extemporaneous in a sense. So I think we've been able to make it more engaging while, while still obviously providing the necessary information and communicating the results well.

1:04:39And hopefully it leads to an investing public that's more informed because they're actually watching and listening to the earnings calls. and I think in order to do that we have to make them a little bit more engaging. It's a nice microcosm of the Robinhood product strategy as well. It's like, you know, yeah, if people are more interested in this stuff they'll engage with it more and I think in the same way if people are more interested in their finances they'll engage with their finances more and you'll get great outcomes as a result.

1:05:09Alex Heath:Well, next time if you walk out with the shades on in the pre-game walkout we'll know that it was a good quarter, right? that's good well i've tried the shades thing actually if you saw my france event um oh yeah i wore shades now there was a debate about this and you know the the folks that i was working were like don't do the shades if people can't see your eyes it's untrustworthy and they're not gonna like it and the funny thing was after that event if you see the twitter photos the ones where i'm wearing shades people are like oh he looks like a scammer and then you know the ones without the shades were were flying so okay that's bad advice i learned that it's actually true yeah shades are no good shades are no good vlad really appreciate this thanks so much yeah always a pleasure thanks to vlad for coming on the show we're new here so please follow like subscribe you know what to do on all your favorite platforms of choice at access pod including youtube where we have full video of the show and time code so you could jump around.

1:06:14Alex Heath:If you like this episode, please leave a five-star review or thumbs up and share it with a friend. It means a lot. You can find me at Hamburger on Twitter and at Meaning.Company. You can find my newsletter at Sources.News. Access is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producer is Shiraz Dume. See you next week. Bye. You always got to do the bye, don't you?

1:06:43Kara Swisher:Thanks for listening to this special episode of Access. Happy New Year. We'll be back with a new episode of On on Monday.