🚗 Lyft's Bold New Strategy (with CEO David Risher)

0:00Yetis, look out for that white Toyota with the license plate ending in PBOY. Because we're hailing an interview with the guy who connects your hail to that Honda. David Risher didn't invent, found, or create the ride-hailing industry. But now he's the leader of Lyft. Yeah. He's the CEO of the Pepsi to Uber's Coke. But Bessies, this guy ain't just the CEO. He is the ultimate early hire. Because this guy was employee number 37 at Amazon. And then he quit the entire tech industry to give away books around the world. And he's the only tech CEO whose favorite show is Reading Rainbow. When Lyft hit a traffic jam back in 2023, Jack, who did the company call?

0:39David freaking Richard. Besties, this guy traded philanthropy for pink mustaches and has been leading Lyft ever since. And under his watch, Lyft cut corporate clutter, refocused on rides, and launched a women's only option. Oh, and he launched a Waymo deal. Since David took over, Lyft's stock has doubled. Which means Lyft is now worth two Lyfts. David is so different, he dropped the word and shitification in an earnings report. And he declared war against surge pricing. He even drives as a driver for Lyft while being the CEO of Lyft. So there's a 0.01 % chance that if you hail Lyft in San Francisco, your driver is the CEO.

1:20And yet, since Lyft announced earnings the day before this interview, we will jump in T-Boy style to those numbers, too. Besties, please welcome the king of carpools, the maestro of miles, and the Wakanda of wait time. Just don't cancel this interview before he arrives in the recording studio. David Risher is the CEO of Lyft. Hold on to your chassis, because today's interview with David is the best one yet. There we go, David. Welcome to the show. Let's meet on T-Boy. That was insane. Thank you, gents. Thank you. We are happy to deliver this for your annual report. I want to explain that two lifts thing that we mentioned.

1:56Yes. We should bring that up, Jack. Before you took over as CEO, Lyft's stock didn't move much. So we actually decided that Lyft's market cap was going to be our unit of measurement. Yeah, it's basically a$5 billion company. So if a startup raised capital and was worth$10 billion, we'd say that startup is worth two lifts. Or if Meta announced earnings and jumped like 4%, we'd say they added two lifts of market cap just in after hours trading. So we got a problem with you, David. Ever since you took over, Lyft stock's going up and we can't use it as a unit of measurement anymore. You're really messing with our measurements, man.

2:30So sorry that I've completely screwed it up here for you guys. So, David, now that you're the CEO, can you bring us back to the first 100 days when you took over the company? Those first 100 days are key. We learned it from FDR. We understand that you laid off half the staff. What else was part of your 100-day plan? So this was April 2023, April 17, 2023, actually. And as you had said, the company had sort of been stuck at$5 billion, which is not a very big number compared to where it went public. But more than that, I think it had a little bit lost its way. It was trying to do too many things.

3:05And as a result, what was happening is we were overpricing. We were underpaying drivers. We weren't necessarily sort of delivering excellence every single day. And the company, as I say, kind of lost its way a little bit. And so I did have a 100-day plan. Actually, it's really interesting you bring that up. The board, when they interviewed me for the job, asked me to put together a 100-day plan. And I still have it. And it literally said things like, okay, it didn't start with we need to reduce staff. It did start with we need to reduce pricing. And we need to increase driver pay. Because if you don't do that, you don't have a business.

3:38Particularly if you're in a competitive marketplace. And the result of that, or the way we had to pay for that, was reducing. was actually 26 % of the employees, which was$330 million of annual costs. And then we could plow that right back into riders and drivers. And so the big picture is we move from kind of doing a whole lot of things to being customer obsessed. And my basic thesis at the beginning was customer obsession is what's going to drive profitable growth. Yeah, Edis, we got a lot more with David, but first we got to hit a quick ad. Bureau premium non-alcoholic beer. All right, Edis, a little behind the scenes here.

4:10Before our New York City live show back in April, Jack and I went sober for two weeks. True story. Couldn't risk getting sick. I didn't want to be groggy. I couldn't afford a hangover. It was New York, baby. Okay, but Jack, celebrating the wins is what we do. And so for our live shows, we crack open something special. So we drank Biro, the premium non-alcoholic beer brand co-founded by Tom Holland. Yeah, I actually first saw it at my grocery store. Delicious tastes like a celebration, feels fantastic, and looks legit. More on the looks in a sec. And if it's good enough for the actor who played Spider-Man, it's good enough for us.

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5:20Monarch. All right, yet he's one lobster roll. No joke. 50 bucks on Nantucket. And why is that a problem, Jack? Because we're going to Nantucket this summer on a joint family T-Boy trip. It's a write-off. It is expensive, but we will travel with peace of mind because our finances are organized in Monarch, despite the lobster rolls. Monarch is the personal finance app that tracks everything. Accounts, investments, savings goals, and spending. Get your first year of Monarch Core for half off, just$50 with promo code TBOY. Monarch shows visually how much you're spending this month compared to the average month, which is really useful.

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6:22That's 50 % off your first year at Monarch.com with code T-Boy. Jack and I talk about financial trick shots on the show a lot, ways to do a small thing that actually adds a large amount of value. What else was on that 100-day list? Were there crazy ideas that didn't happen? Were there Lyft launching a swimming pool sharing service? Was there financial trick shots on there that were small ideas with a big gain? What else was on it? Okay, super interesting. So big picture. So the first thing was this customer obsession thing. And I know it sounds trite, and I know it sounds overused, and a thousand people say it now.

7:00But really refocusing the culture of the company on we have two customers in every car, a rider and a driver. They both matter. And if you don't do well by them, nothing else matters. So that's sort of the thing that we just said over and over and over again. And then there's this whole range of things you have to do once you decide that. First, you have to decide, do you have the right people around the table? Do you have the right senior leaders? And the truth of the matter is, some yes, some no. So we made some changes there. Second thing you have to decide is, do you have the right value proposition?

7:26As I say, we didn't. We weren't paying drivers enough. We were charging too much, so we had to adjust those. And we did that pretty quickly. And what's interesting in this marketplace is that it's expensive, but gosh, you can see the results pretty fast. I mean, literally in hours, you can see the result of a move like that. Like you change the fare and suddenly you're getting more rides. 100%. On the driver's side, if you get a way to increase driver earnings, more drivers come onto the platform. And I'm talking literally in hours. and then on the rider side, if you lower your fares. Because a lot of people are pulling apps out every day and switching between two and so on and so forth.

7:59And they'll move pretty fast if you do the right thing. So that was number two. Number three is we had to start innovating again. So Lyft was the early innovator in rideshare. I mean, the other guys, look, they had kind of a black car service. It was sort of a variation on a theme that existed, which is black car comes, picks you up, fine. That had been around for a long time. If you live in New York City, which you guys did, you know that's been around forever. Lyft was really the one that said, you know what, how about if it's a dude in a Prius? You know what I mean? How about if it's somebody in his own car and anyone can kind of do it as a way to make money?

8:27So that was the big innovation early on, as well as the pink mustache and the branding and kind of making it kind of everybody's, you know, everybody's thing instead of sort of a niche thing. But anyway, but frankly, they kind of lost it. John and Logan would say the same. They lost a little bit. COVID was super rough. Anyway, so innovation comes back. So literally nine o 'clock in the morning on that first day, we talk about some of the basics and I'm literally like getting my computer and logging into Slack and this sort of stuff. And then 10 o 'clock, we have the first meeting on what's come to be called Women Plus Connect.

8:55You guys just mentioned it, a women-only mode. And that was a big, big deal because I was saying to the company, look, it's not just about cutting costs. It's not just about changing prices. It's not just about that. It's also about innovating again. And that was literally the first real meeting I had at Lyft that morning. I think women make up half of the riders at Lyft, but only 25 % of the drivers. That's right. But women, for safety reasons, may want to hail a ride by a female driver. And so that just launched, but we're saying like over two years ago, that was like in the original plan. It actually launched in November of the first year.

9:25It's been building and building, and you've probably seen more and more about it, but it actually launched about four or five months after I joined. So yeah, so the concept is exactly as you said. So a woman, particularly maybe in a new city or late at night, you know, many women that I talked to, and this is just literally DIY research. This is just David saying, okay, you know, How can we create something that is truly differentiated from the other guys and is clearly something customers want? There are a lot of women out there who say, you know what? I just don't always feel comfortable in a car driven by a man.

9:55This is not a new idea. It had floated around the company for a while. The problem with big ideas is they're so easy to shoot down. They're complicated and you haven't thought through other details. There are legal complexities, there are societal things, all these different things. And so there are a hundred different ways where people figured out a way to shoot it down in the past. And so I was like, at 10 o 'clock, I heard about all those things from about 10 to 10.05. And about 10.06, we said, okay, that's cool. Glad you've educated me on that. Now let's get to work. Let's get to work. Like how are we actually going to do this thing?

10:26We launched in November, and it has been one of the most popular features we've launched ever in the company's recent history. Once a driver turns it on, because both the driver and the rider have to opt in, drivers never turn it off. And some of the best stories I hear from drivers are one where two women in the car, and it was just a different vibe and I just really appreciate your leadership and advocacy there. Okay, so Dave, that's a win. Jack and I were curious about one of the big ideas you may have had that failed. But we also just have to go deep on something you just mentioned, which is you said, I kind of like picked this up just from listening.

10:56You drive for Lyft as the CEO of Lyft. I mean, this is like the ultimate undercover CEO situation, but you're not undercover, you're just doing it. Can you tell us what that is like? Like, do you get in the car and how do you reveal it to somebody? It's like cash cap. So first of all, the first thing I should say is I love this part of my job. And I actually, I started driving actually before I became CEO. I started driving about, I think it was four or five days before I joined the company as CEO. Because I just wanted to feel what it felt like. You know, I wanted to learn what the driver experience was.

11:27And I wanted to hear from riders what it is that they, how they experienced the ride. It's great. The answer to how I reveal it is I don't until about two minutes until the end. And then all hell breaks loose. It's 50 % like, okay, we got to take a photo. But first, it's like, you're s***. I can't believe you. There's no way. Like their phone is out in about 10 seconds. They're like, if you're bulls***, I'm going to be so pissed at you. One star, one star. 100%. But yeah, and I do it maybe every six weeks or so. And it's just a great way to understand what it is that riders are going through. And I have so many fun stories about it.

12:03But one of the fun things about being a driver is, particularly actually, by the way, if there's a couple in the back of the car, they kind of forget you're there. So they say all kinds of crazy stuff. That's one whole interesting thread that we could kind of pull if you wanted to. Yeah, can you tell us one funny story and then also one serious, you learn something as the CEO story? Sure. On the funny side, I might give you two on that one. One of the funny ones was picking up a woman about 11 o 'clock in the morning, and the person who had held the lift was named like Charlie or something like this, or maybe Charles.

12:34And I said, you don't look like a Charles. And she said, yeah, Charles was my boyfriend a year ago. So then she starts talking. My boyfriend a year ago, and I broke up with him about a year ago today or ish. And then last night, the guy that I broke up with him for broke up with me. So I called Charles last night, asked him if I could come over, and then she just kind of stopped talking. And I'm like, and it's 11 o 'clock in the morning. And she was like a little embarrassed. And so anyway, after we stopped the car, I kind of said like, can we talk about choices? You know what I mean? It turned into a therapy session a little bit.

13:10Can I talk about it a little bit? Yeah, so it turned into a little bit of a therapy session. And it was super fun. She was a very interesting person, and she shared some life experiences with me, and I shared some with her. I'll tell you one other very quick one. And so it was a Friday morning, and I picked it. It was my second ride up in the morning. And you can see, by the way, when you pick a person up, you can see what the destination is, where you're going to drop them off, right? This is one of the innovations, actually, that we put in a couple years ago. It really helps drivers plan their day better.

13:32Anyway, so I see that the destination is actually Lyft's headquarters. I'm like, oh, that's a funny coincidence. And so I get out of the car to open the door, and it turns out it is probably a 25-year-old, fairly young woman who works for Lyft. Wow. And she kind of looks up, and she does a double take. And honest to God, her face goes white. Because you can see in her head like, okay, what's about to happen is I'm about to be trapped in the car with the CEO for the next 20 minutes. And what are we going to talk about and whatever? And it's funny. I was telling my daughter this story. She said, one of my daughters, and she said, you know, Dad, if that had happened to me, I would have been like, oh, I am so sorry.

14:05I left some up in the apartment there. I got to go back upstairs. Why don't you go on? I'll get the next one. But anyway, to her huge credit, she gets in the car. And then we have a great conversation, actually. She works on the driver's team. The funniest part, though, is she gets out of the car. And as a driver, you can't really see typically who tips you. You can kind of see it at the end of the day. But if a tip comes within about 30 seconds, you get a little pop-up. Honest to God, seven seconds out of the car, boop, you just got a tip. Oh, yeah. Grounding points. Some good ROI on that. Give me the teacher an apple right now.

14:33Good ROI. What about anything meaningful that you learned for the company? You're like, oh, my God, I can't believe we're screwing this up. Yeah, yeah. The single biggest one that I've learned, and I've told this story before, was a woman named Ann in Sausalito. So Sausalito, for those of you who don't live in San Francisco, is over the Golden Gate Bridge. And she commutes into work every single day. So her story to me, so she gets in the car. She's actually got a bunch of donuts in her hand. And she says, I'm so glad the prices were only 25 bucks a day. And I said, oh, what do you mean? She said, well, the prices bounce around depending on whether it's raining or not, depending on this, that, and the other thing.

15:05And basically every morning I get up and if the price is about 25 bucks, I'll take whoever's 25 bucks. If it's 30 to 35, ah, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe. but probably I'll drive in. If it's more than 40 bucks, then I'll definitely drive in. If it's a pain, because I got to park, I was so sorry. And I'm thinking to myself, oh, man, like this is literally what happens every single morning for her and stresses her out every single morning. And as I said, she had donuts today, this day, so she couldn't work from home because it was a co-worker's birthday. So she was like, I had to go in. Anyway, long story short, what I began to realize is that this thing, which in the industry is called surge pricing, it's an economist's dream, right?

15:43Like this sort of balances supply and demand, but it's a rider's nightmare. And I think maybe this is emblematic of the way that the industry had gone for a little while, is a bunch of people sitting in rooms thinking they're econometrics majors, whatever it is, as opposed to thinking, what are riders actually like and what drives them crazy? And this drives them crazy. And so since then, we've removed about$50 million of surge pricing. We call it primetime annually from our systems. We do all sorts of other things to try to do other things that don't require us to do the surge pricing. And we have now a product called Price Lock, which was very much inspired by her that allows you to pay$2.99 a month and lock in a price for a certain route.

16:20You know, it's really wild that you drive for Lyft because you have an incredibly accomplished resume. We did some research on you. You were an early employee at Microsoft. You were employee number 37 at Amazon. This is in the 90s. No, not trying to date yet, David. I understand. Back in life, dinosaurs were roaming the earth. That's a different digital era. That's amazing. Now, I'm looking at Amazon.com right now. It's a letter from Jeff Bezos dated February 2002. It says, thank you, David Risher. Besties, this is an Easter egg secret website. We will link to it in the show notes. In that tribute from Jeff Bezos, he says, every page must sell, which seems to be a quote from you.

16:59How do you translate your every page must sell philosophy to Lyft? That is an awesome question. The short answer is, okay, our purpose at Lyft is to serve and connect. Serve and connect. I want every single rider and every single driver to be served better than they've ever been served in their life. And I want to connect people to the people they love and the places they love. And I want to do it every single time. We do about 850 million rides a year, Two and a half million rides a day. By the way, we just did Halloween last week. You know, Halloween is one of our biggest nights. And it was significantly higher than any Halloween we've ever had before.

17:40We heard it was your best day in history. It was our best day in history. It was literally our best. It wasn't just our best day. It was our best hour in history, our best day in history, our best week in history. In terms of number of rides, number of riders, number of all the things. And I want every single one of those to be absolutely amazing. So that's, you know, selling in the rideshare world means you have an amazing experience, such an amazing experience, you want to do it again and again and again. That's what that means. I did actually want to ask a follow-up because Jack and I were also just amazed that you were employee number 37 at Amazon, which is how do you identify these companies?

18:12It's almost like you should be a venture capitalist. But as an insight to share with our audience, we describe our audience as ambitious millennials. How can they look for career opportunities at a company? What are the signals that a company or an investment is sending where you're like, I want to commit to that because that's going to be the next Amazon? You know, I don't know that I have a secret on this one. I can tell you that, okay, there's a book called Good to Great by Jim Collins. He wrote it many years ago. And he studied companies, some of which typically in the same industry, where one would do incredibly well and one would do just okay.

18:46You might think of like today, you might think of a Target and a Walmart. Both are successful, but Walmart is 10 times bigger than Target, as an example. And so anyway, he looked at these companies, and he found many things. But one of the things he found is they got really good at understanding what they're really, really good at, for sure, what magic thing. And people talk about flywheels today and all sorts of things, but what magic thing they're really, really, really good at, and kind of what drives their economics and so forth. That's a whole separate little story. But I sort of feel a little bit the same.

19:18When I look at a new company that I'm interested in, there's some combination of, is there a really interesting customer problem to solve? That's a really interesting thing for me. And then, frankly, do I think that I can do something pretty good there? Can I add some value? And the thing that I don't do, and I think this is the part that is maybe the most interesting, is what I don't do is say, where can I make the most money? I do not do that. And the reason I don't do it is because, well, first of all, chasing money, it's just a loser. It's just a loser. There's never enough. You will never be, it will never make you happy.

19:49I just, I can guarantee you. And I made a lot of money in my life. And I will tell you right now, it has never been because I've been interested in that. That's never been the sort of goal. If it is your goal, you'll be kind of upset with yourself for the rest of your life. On the other hand, what you do is you look at what's the minimum I need to do well. And then you go for the thing that you think is really interesting industry and something where you can do a really good job. Again, it's kind of broad, it's kind of cliche, but that's kind of what's motivated me over time. It's like the David formula for happiness.

20:12Do you want to like sum it up almost? Because I feel like you're good at like absorbing it. Is it like, for your last point, David, it's finding the thing that is not related to money, almost lowest effort you can make for the highest interest or happiness? Is that how that is? I don't know that it's lowest effort. Let me look at it another way. If I look at some of the big decisions I've made in my life, like let's take an example. You know, I joined Microsoft, as you said, back in the 90s, 1991. And I did it really because I thought technology was going to take over the world, super cool. I'd been kind of a tech kid, kind of sort of a little bit.

20:43and I wanted to live in the Northwest. And it was kind of like that. It was kind of like, and I just thought it was a super cool company. I mean, just frankly, nothing more than that. But then why did I leave Microsoft and why did I join Amazon? And this was a crazy thing. I mean, it was actually a wild story where sort of Bill Gates calls me into his office and he says, look, because he, this was in 1996. He said, wait a minute, you mean to tell me that you're going to leave Microsoft for some tiny little internet bookstore that nobody's ever heard of? Like that has got to be the stupidest decision I've ever heard anyone make in his life.

21:14And literally, he was just sitting there, and he was livid. You could just tell. And I don't think it was personal per se. I just think he thought it was a dumbass, such a dumbass thing. He couldn't believe anyone on the planet was thinking this way. But my basic view is like, hold on. This is technology, which I've fallen in love with, and this is books and reading, which I've fallen in love with. So those two things come together. I think this is a big thing. I'm super excited about it personally. I'm going for it. So I don't know. It's kind of like that. If I look through my life, a lot of my major decisions have been, frankly, of that type.

21:40All right. Now that David dropped the A word, let's pivot to another borderline curse word. Okay. Inshittification. You're the first CEO to use that in a financial report. Okay. Nick and I describe that term as when a product gradually gets worse as a company seeks more and more ways to make money off of you. And frankly, Amazon has inshittified a bit. Yeah, it feels a little bad. When you search for pillowcases, you have to fight through 26 ads before getting the highest rated one. Yeah. And then they ask you, would you like to subscribe? Subscribe to pillowcases. I think they default you to subscribe.

22:13I've got six this month. How do you avoid the seeming inevitability of inshittification? How can Lyft avoid inshittification? Okay, so first of all, I think you've described it super, super well. By the way, let's give credit where credit is due. Corey Doctorow was the guy who originally came up with the term. In fact, a funny coincidence alert, Corey literally wrote me last night because he had not such a great experience with Lyft customer care, and so we're fixing this little customer care problem. But in a sense, in a funny sense, that is the answer. That is the answer right there, is you stay super, super true.

22:45Even if you get something, it was like 11 o 'clock last night, and I got a note, and I sent it to our customer service guys, and I said, we've got to get on this thing immediately. And literally by this morning, he sent me a note back saying, okay, that's all resolved. So there's a little bit of a, there's a tidal, T-I-D-A-L, pull towards gentrification because, as you say, as you grow bigger and bigger and bigger and you worry more and more about your finances and Wall Street screams louder and louder in your ear and all these different things, you can get distracted and all sorts of decisions get made that are just not that customer-focused.

23:20And frankly, this will sound a little maybe messianic, but this is what leadership is all about, is saying, you know what, we're just not doing that. We're just not doing that, and we're just not doing it. And it's hard, and every single day, there are hard decisions you have to make that are trades, and you keep at it because you know that in the long term, that's how you're going to build the absolute best company. But I wish I could say something cleverer than that. I think that's it. And so if the competition inshitifies, but you don't, you'll gain market share. That's it. Avoid inshitification.

23:47But I'll tell you, let me give you an example of what can make it hard. Okay, so when I joined, driver cancellation. So driver cancellation, you'll all have experienced this thing. This is, you pick up your app, you summon a lift, the driver looks like he's coming towards you, and then 30 seconds in, two minutes in, whatever, he cancels the ride or she cancels the ride, and then you get rematched. I'll tell you why this happens in a second, but when I joined, 15 % of the time it happened. 15 % of the time. 15 % of the time there was a driver cancellation. There was a driver cancellation. Exactly right.

24:20Yeah. Now, you might think to yourself, well, that sounds bad. And it is. But here's the thing. If you're sitting around looking at metrics, you might not convince yourself it's the worst thing in the world. Because most of the time when that happens, you get rematched with a new driver and the driver comes and picks you up. And so the ride is completed. So if you're looking at ride completes as a metric of success, you're like, ah, we got bigger fish to fry. But if you're looking at like customer annoyance and like how frustrating this is over time, you focus on this a lot. But it's a choice.

24:49And you can do a bunch of different analysis. And I remember people told me this. This was like on week three. They're like, okay, we're going to do a bunch of analysis that's going to talk about see whether if this happens to people, because it's work to figure out how to stop this from happening anyway, if this happens, whether they're less likely to take future rides and whether this is really a problem. And I'm like, okay, you go ahead and do that work if you want to. But meanwhile, what I'm going to tell you is it is so annoying that we just need to fix it. And so there's a lot of conversations about that.

25:11The data signals one thing, but we've been on the other end of that. It is so frustrating, you can't explain that to Lyft. the data wouldn't show that. And it's such a funny thing. This is one of the most common questions people ask me sometimes in the early days, particularly, how do you get such conviction on some stuff even when you don't have the data to pick it up? And I'm like, again, you just kind of have to, I don't know, so much of doing the right thing really is kind of looking deep in the mirror and saying, what's the right thing to do here, you guys? Stop freaking getting all confused with all this data.

25:36So anyway, it was 15%. Then about a year later, it was 10%. Maybe six months ago, it was about 5%. I think we're at about 4.5 % right now. Congratulations. Huge, huge, huge change. But you have to focus on it. And frankly, sometimes you've got to put up with a lot of noise and kind of hold on to the signal pretty hard. Because of those kinds of moves, in the last two and a half years since you took over as CEO, Lyft's market share in the United States has grown from 26 % to almost 31%. That's huge. Thank you. Congratulations. The stocks have doubled, basically. What are the main things that have worked besides reducing the cancellation rate that you can share?

26:13So a couple of different things. With any business, there's some basics you have to do. Some people call these things hygiene, and then there's some things on top of that. Okay, so a basic thing, for example, is pick people up quickly. That turns out to be pretty basic in the rideshare world, pick people up quickly. And every single year, and again, this is hard, right? Because again, two and a half million rides a day, that's big scale. How do you figure out a way to pick people up quickly? Well, frankly, you kind of grind it out. I mean, there's a lot of math behind it and a lot of focus. And again, it's several stories I could tell you.

26:39But bottom line is we now pick people up, I don't know, maybe a minute to two minutes to three minutes faster than we did a couple of years ago. And that's really, really significant. Really significant, as an example. A bunch of other basics I could tell you about. And then there are, I'd say, I wouldn't think of them as add-ons, but maybe sort of extensions to the basics. So a very specific example would be, we have a product which we launched about six months ago called Lift Silver. So this, okay, so you can do something that kind of helps everyone, like pick people up faster. And we're going to be relentless about that, by the way.

27:08I mean, we're working on things that I hope literally we will pick you up in seconds over time. Like, literally, it's one of those types of things. I remember back in my Amazon days. Yeah, exactly. It's just mind reading. Anticipation. The equivalent of same-day shipping. Well, it's interesting you say that. Like, one of the last meetings I had at Amazon way back in the day is I said, you guys, like, here's something that I think you can probably take to the bank. The faster you ship stuff to people, the better they're going to like it. Like, I think that's kind of true. And, like, that's their playbook.

27:35And now it's mind-bending, right? I mean, you can buy something at 8 o 'clock at night and it shows up, you know, by 5 o 'clock in the morning. So we can't quite do that, but we can do something along the same lines. So anyway, that's one thing that helps everybody. Then there are things that help specific populations, but particularly if you can help specific populations that have been underserved or that have a really clear need, that can also significantly change the dynamic. So LiftSilver is all about older folks. I don't know if you guys have parents that you've had the kind of rough conversation with that are kind of like mom and dad, maybe it's time to give up the car keys.

28:04If you haven't. I have not yet. Okay, well, I can sort of guarantee it's probably not going to be a great conversation. You know, it's not something that parents welcome. It feels like a loss of freedom. It feels like the world is getting smaller. All sorts of different things. Well, if instead you can have a conversation that says, you know what, mom and dad, I've given you a year worth of Lift Silver. And it's going to, you know, Carl will come pick you up. You know, it'll drop you at the doctor or the manicurist or, you know, grocery store, whatever it is. And then it's simple to use. And by the way, you know, I've even put it on my account so that you don't even have to worry about, you know, paying for it if you don't want to.

28:38Right? It's a whole different conversation. So we launched it about six months ago. We've now given well over a million Lyft Silver rides. And it's so funny. We have a customer service that's just focused on Lyft Silver. Oh my gosh, the stories they tell about it. And it sounds like a joke. It sounds like, oh, my sciatica is so hard. But literally, that's what they say. They're like, I have sciatica. So therefore, I really have a hard time getting in a car. I really appreciate that the car is bigger for Lyft Silver and so forth. Yetis, quick break for a couple of ads. Upwork. Yetis, before we had a podcast, we had a newsletter.

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30:06Top hats, baseball hats, Von Dutch hats. We wear so many hats on this podcast. Honestly, we're not great at all of them. No, we've been avoiding hiring someone to wear those hats instead of us, especially the Von Dutch one, because hiring and training can take forever. Well, I'm proud to say that we are hiring right now at T-Boy, and this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Because sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95 % more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. So besties spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. less stress, less time, more results.

30:37When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. And listeners of the show will get a$75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com slash podcast. So just go to indeed.com slash podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Well, David, you know, we just described your stock doubling. We do also need to talk about the Uber in the room. Their stock has tripled in the same period of time.

31:15Big reason Jack and I have thought from covering their earnings. What is it, Jack? Uber has become a bona fide two-product company with food delivery and ride hail. Yeah. Why didn't Lyft launch a second core product like food delivery? So at a certain point, let's go back again to sort of corporate history and kind of how companies evolve. At a certain point, Lyft said, this is sort of back in kind of 2017, 2018, 2019, okay, the early innovation, the mustache, the driver's your friend, the get in the car that's a Prius, not sort of a high-end thing or whatever, that's kind of playing itself out.

31:53And the other guys have it too. They don't have the mustache, but everyone can pick you up type thing. So, okay, what are we going to do? And honestly, I think they looked at what the other guys did and said, we don't want to do that. Like, they're doing their thing, so we need to do our own thing. And I get the concept, of course. I think it's very smart not to just follow your competitor. I think it's a very, very smart move. But what they sort of decided to do instead was a whole bunch of other things, a whole bunch of other things. They kind of played around with rental cars. They played around with food delivery a little bit.

32:23They bought, as you know, a bike system, which actually has turned out to be quite successful. We were on city bike and we were on bay wheels and so forth. That was a big, big deal, but much, much more complicated and capital intensive than they, I think, understood. So that took a lot of their focus. So I just think the company, rather than make, let's say, one big bet, they made a lot of small bets and none of them really panned out. And then the pandemic came and food delivery became absolutely critical and foundational. I think it was bigger than rides for Uber for a period. I mean, by 10 to 1, right?

32:5510 to 1. Everyone's staying at home. no one wants rideshare, but everyone wants food. So I would say also those guys, frankly, got lucky. That was luck. But you put together, make one big decision and then get lucky compared to make a lot of small decisions and don't. And that, I think, explains. And then I'd say the last thing is, the other guys, again, they decided to go international, global pretty early and Lyft didn't. And that also, so you can kind of explain it that way, right? You can kind of say, okay, the other guys have food and the other guys had international exclusively. Now we do too, but whatever.

33:27That probably explains a lot of the difference right there. Yeah, I mean, it's a hard decision as a leader, I guess. Jack and I talked about a bunch about doing things differently and not just doing something someone else is doing. There are times where that totally makes sense and then it's hard to figure out the moments when actually something should be the status quo and you should do it. Hindsight's 20-20. And there's that too. Look, one of the things that I think is such, it's so interesting. I mean, we all make thousands of decisions every day And his business leaders, that's part of the job, right?

33:56Like, you're going to hire, you're going to fire, what idea are you going to say yes to, what are you going to say no? It turns out, of course, that only a small number of those decisions are really super consequential, right? And you're putting your finger on one. It's kind of like, am I going to fast follow? Am I going to go my own way? If I go my own way, and this is key, like, just that is not a strategy. You better have a pretty big vision for what that own way looks like. And I think this was an area where you get a little confused. You're like, well, if I do something different, that sounds like that's probably going to be good.

34:25But only if you've got a big vision for it. And I think they kind of lost a little bit on that one. Before we talk about earnings, I do want to talk about one thing Lyft does different. Tell me. Somehow the community is friendlier. We took a Lyft to get to this building this morning. And we asked the driver, hey, we're interviewing the CEO later today. Do you have any questions for him? He didn't give us any concrete questions, to be honest. He did tell us that the community was friendlier. We said, can you give us a specific example? and he said the people in the backseat are more likely to talk to me as the driver, which is kind of a nice crowd to be a part of.

34:55And they tip more. Oh, that's interesting. And he said, when pressed for details, I said, does that result in higher pay? And he said, maybe 10%. That's something you must be proud of. Yeah, I'm hugely proud of that. Speaking of proud of, let's talk about your QT earnings that you announced yesterday. It looks like all the important metrics at Lyft are at all-time highs. What kind of numbers are we talking, Jack? The stock is up 8 % because Lyft started its tenure as a publicly traded company with 21 consecutive quarters of losses. Yeah. But you just notched your fourth straight profit. Halloween, your best day of the year, and you just had the best Halloween in the history of Lyft.

35:35Yeah. Record number of rides. Tenth consecutive quarter of double-digit ride growth. The big question, how? Are people just taking more rides right now and all boats are going up? or you taking market share from the other guys? Yeah. So it's a little bit of both. Here's the thing. We do, as I say, maybe 800 to 900. By the way, thank you for that acknowledgement. It's really, actually, I have to say, it is very satisfying to come into a company and have such good stuff to work with, right? Great culture, great people, you know, great industry, something that really matters to millions of people every single day.

36:08And to be able to sort of shape it a little bit and move a little bit. And, you know, another stat, and then I'll answer your question is, we just generated a billion dollars of free cash over these last 12 months, which is a big deal. When I joined Erin, who's our CFO, and I joined around the same time, she was one of my first hires, we were consuming about$300 million. So from negative$300 million to positive$1 billion over two and a half years, that's a big deal. Okay, why? Again, customer obsession, customer obsession, customer obsession, that's the thing. Now, where's that growth coming from?

36:38So we do, as I say,$800 million,$900 million a year. The other guys, maybe they do$1.5 billion. So let's call it two and a half billion between the two of us. Okay. That's a big number, but here's the thing. People take 160 billion rides in their own cars every year, just in the United States, 160 billion, two and a half billion. So this is a huge, huge market. So one of the big mistakes that sometimes people make is they think binary or a zero sum, like if they're winning, we're losing. If we're winning, they're losing. Irrelevant, completely irrelevant. I don't care how the other guys do. All I know is if we're doing good, well for our customers, We're going to do well.

37:12Now, it also does happen that we have taken some share. That's nice. What does that tell you? That tells you people like us. And when they take a Lyft, they tend to take another Lyft. By the way, our drivers, to your point about drivers before, have now a 20-something, I think it's now 27 % preference for Lyft over driving for the other guys. 27%. That's not small. It gets to your tip point, Jack. Which gets to your tip point. It gets to your, like, how happy do I feel when I'm driving for a Lyft? We have an earnings guarantee. Again, I can tell you all about this. But a long, long way of saying that we're just providing better service.

37:44And by doing that, yeah, we're taking some share. But more importantly, we're getting more people in lifts every single day. Bigger slice of a bigger pie. Yeah. Are you past 31 %? We're right about 31%. The other, other guy in this scenario that we should mention isn't really a guy. It's a robot. Yeah. Yeah. We thought this was your first earnings where we've heard you mention the word Waymo in the report. And Jack and I were curious because your Waymo relationship, kind of a situationship. So in Nashville, people can hail a Waymo self-driving car on the Lyft app or on the Waymo app. You mentioned you're building a$15 million depot in Nashville.

38:21Can you explain what that is? Yeah, sure, sure. So first of all, let us say it's a situation ship. And that is a funny term that I also used with my daughter a couple weeks ago. But she clarified. I asked, I said, are you in a situation ship? And she said, no, no, no, no. It's a relationship. And I'm like, okay, cool. I just wanted to sort of clarify. Also, we say situation because Waymo has gotten, by some studies, bigger than Lyft in San Francisco, but you've also partnered with them in these other cities. Yeah, so it's complicated. It's complicated. It's complicated. I mean, come on. Life is complicated.

38:50Yeah, no, for sure. Look, we're going to compete with them in some cities, no question at all. Absolutely no question at all. But we're also going to cooperate with them and partner with them. It's like we're frenemies. We're frenemies, right? We are. Okay, so what's going to happen in Nashville? In Nashville, when we launch, as you say, you'll be able to order Waymo through the Waymo app. You'll be able to order a Waymo through the Lyft app. No matter who you order it from, we're going to be managing the fleet. Okay, so fleet management is this whole sort of technical thing. If you're into it, you can actually go to our website.

39:20You can see videos about it. It's basically like who cleans the car, who charges the car, who makes sure the car is well-maintained, and so on and so forth. And we do that. We do that already for some Lyft cars today, and we'll do it in Nashville specifically for Waymo. That's what you need to depot for. You need to spend some money. It's basically, think of it as a big parking lot. But in that big parking lot, you've got to have chargers. You've got to have repair bays. You've got to have all these sorts of things. And we do that stuff. And we do it well. We do it very efficiently. So we'll do that in Nashville.

39:44That'll be great. That'll be a service that we can provide Waymo behind the scenes. That means they don't have to do it. They like that. Then we do something called supply sharing, which basically means you've got a fleet of cars that are Waymos. You also, by the way, have a lot of driver-driven cars. And we're going to sort of manage the kind of balance between the two of those things. The hope is that this situationship in Nashville blossoms to something beautiful, right? And both companies aspire to see it replicated elsewhere. But just like any relationship, you know, you got a date first and maybe the second date and the third date before you decide to kind of get married and so forth.

40:18Yeah, like most relationships, you hope they commit to you. Oh, yeah. Yeah, for sure. Less of a drama and more of a rom-com worth a happy ending kind of thing. I mean, I really appreciate where we're going with this. 100%. Look, I will tell you, I've been married now for 30 years. And so I'm kind of a long-term relationship guy. So I didn't necessarily announce to Waymo that that's what I was looking for on the first date. But if you're listening, you guys, I just want you to know that's kind of my mindset when it comes to relationships. Breaking news. Liv CEO wants full life commitment. Full life commitment.

40:49Yeah. So let's say Waymo announces it's expanding next to Seattle. Okay. How are you going to be Uber besides your – what are you going to tell Waymo? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You're making a little complicated for me, guys. What are you doing for me? Well, look, let's, let's again, back up for a second. So, um, self-driving cars, this is of course what we're talking about. First of all, a great product. I mean, let's just stipulate it's a, it's a great product and it's a safe product. It's a chill product. You know, it's a fun product, all these different things. So when you get new products in an industry, you have a choice.

41:20Your choice is either embrace them or ignore them. I recommend embracing if it's a good product, Because if you ignore, you wake up one morning and you find your Kodak and what happened to my film business. You know what I mean? Like, shoot. Darn. Thought that digital photography was kind of a fad. Turns out it kind of is here to stay. So anyway, so we're embracing them. We're embracing self-driving cars for many different vendors and manufacturers and so on and so forth. Waymo is one. May Mobility is another. We work within Atlanta. Baidu, which is effectively the Google of China. We use their technology or will use their technology next year in Europe and on and on and on.

41:56So one basic thing is we're going to have multiple partners. So we are going to be, let's call it polyamorous a little bit too. You know what I mean? Or can we just kind of stay with that little vibe a little bit for a second? We're going to be polyamorous because we're not in the business of building cars. We're not in the business of building a baby tech. And it really is in our interest and frankly in the industry's interest for there to be multiple good suppliers of this. And then city by city, it's going to be different. But the one thing that will be the same is in all cities, there's going to be what we call a hybrid network, a combination of some percentage of self-driving cars, which will be fairly small for the foreseeable future, and a lot of driver-driven cars.

42:32A lot of driver-driven cars. Can I throw a fourth person to the situation, Chip, and make it a menage a quatra? You know, with the self-driving cars, David, as you would like enter Seattle, if you enter Seattle with them, the other angle here is just AI. Like an interesting thing I've noticed in San Francisco is I actually got in a Lyft the other day. And I think it was a Lyft-owned car, the driver told me. Because plastered on the side was a description of Lyft with a human driver. And it seemed like Lyft was making a brand statement there, that you're about people, not about the AI and self-driving.

43:03Are you trying to span both those worlds and do both? Or are you trying to commit to one and say, hey, we're the human side of things while the other guy focuses on the automated side of things? I mean, it's really the latter. So by the way, the other guy's full name, I think is, I don't say the name, but I think the word technologies is actually in their name. And that's not who we are. Like, we are about serving and connecting. Now, of course, technology plays a huge role. Like, I mean, literally, every single time you pick up your phone, you're using the technology. But guess what you're using it for?

43:27You're using it to get out into the real world. Let me give you an example on the driver side of some technology that we're using, AI technology that helps drivers. I'll give you two examples. The first is what we call the driver earnings assistant. So if you're a driver, you're thinking to yourself at the beginning of the week, okay, I got some time, maybe Tuesday afternoon, maybe Thursday. Maybe I got a doctor's appointment on Wednesday. I can't drive. Maybe Friday afternoon I got to pick my kid up after school. So what the AI earnings assistant allows you to do is type in your plan for the week.

43:54Like, here are some things I want to do. Here's my goal for the week. And the earnings assistant will say, great, drive this time, drive this date. By the way, there's a lot of stuff going on at the airport on Thursday afternoon if you can figure out a way to drive then. And so that's an example of where we're helping drivers with AI not be replaced, but rather earn more. Second example, you can go as a driver and you can download what we call an accomplishment letter. An accomplishment letter says, okay, Nick started driving for us in January of 2024. Or 2023, let's say. He's in the top 2 % of drivers in terms of reliability.

44:29Here are a couple of comments that riders have made. And here's sort of an AI synthesis of those comments. I would recommend Nick for any service-oriented job you can hire him for. You have a dependable guy and so forth. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to say, look, drivers matter. Ask anyone. You just did. Ask anyone for some of their best, most interesting Lyft rides. And a lot of it is I had this great conversation with a driver. And, oh, by the way, he helped me out of the car when I needed it or something was going wrong in my life. And then there's sometimes where you just want a robot driver too.

44:56And that's cool. We're going to do both great. That's pretty cool. The driver we went with this morning, he had completed 1 ,200 rides. Dang. And his driver rating was 5.0. Dang. Has he ever gotten a four-star rating? I don't know. Anyway, he has 9.8 years of experience. Amazing. And one of the things he told me is a pet peeve of his is when people in the backseat make out. It's too close for comfort. Okay. I was thinking for his 10th year anniversary gift, maybe you could send him a curtain. He specifically requested. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. For a little privacy. Yeah, a pink curtain. A pink curtain.

45:32Slammin' Salmon Crate. I would 100 % love that. I'm not sure he's really thought that through, though. As a father of a daughter. When you close the curtain, you know, you may not necessarily be super thrilled about what's going on behind you. Then you make it a real situation. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. So sometimes you've got to think a couple steps ahead on that one. But let me get his name and I'll send it to him. You know, he did say that he would feel very seen and appreciated if the drivers got, like, a birthday present or an anniversary gift or something like that. Yeah, yeah. We're leaning into that.

46:02We've now got a driver loyalty program. It's not yet at the birthday gift level, but at the very least, every single dollar you make, you get points for. And people, you get Amazon gift certificates and Walmart gift certificates, all these sorts of things. And I forget the number. Maybe, Stephanie, you remember it. I mean, I don't know. Hundreds of millions of points have been accumulated. So not quite birthday level, but at least we're giving drivers a way to get more. You're kind of getting at the platform problem, Jack. You get the airplane points if you're the customer getting in the lift, but then you've got to throw a gift to the drivers, too.

46:30So you kind of got to keep both sides of the platform happy. Always, always. I mean, Jack, should we pitch David on some ideas and do some rapid fire? What do we got, you guys? So we had an idea for Lyft Haul, hauling stuff for people. Actually, just to step back for a sec, you know, we're here in the room with the CEO of Lyft. We don't work for Lyft, so, you know, there's no reputational risk here. We had some ideas. So I don't have a pickup truck. I wish I did. But I need stuff moved. Have you ever considered Lyft Haul? Lyft Schlepp is the other name. We're work boxing. Pass. Okay. All right, we mentioned this earlier, but lift pool.

47:02Essentially, lift is in the sharing economy. You are connecting supply and demand. What can we provide lift riders at the end of a lift that's an experience? Because you're helping them get to experiences. Yeah, yeah. So this one I think is super interesting, and stay tuned on that one. Maybe not, I don't know if pool means, is that swimming pool? Is that the concept there? We were thinking swimming pool, but again, work boxing at this stage. Fair enough, fair enough. Just spitballing here, spitballing. Yeah, look, I think just 10 seconds on this. I think, you know, we want to make every ride amazing.

47:32But for sure, you know, over time you can imagine a world where there's certain things that you can do or get to in a lift that are, if not exclusive to us, at least we make it, you know, easier and better for you. A tiny example, and this would be a tiny example, but we do it already, is if you go to a concert, man, we want to make getting out of that concert, you know, an easy experience, right? So we have our own pickup drop-off location. Maybe it's got a couch. Maybe it's got school vibes, music and whatever. So just so that you sort of feel like, oh, man, this is awesome. and then you're out of there fast as opposed to having to wait for two hours and walk around circles.

48:01This fits with our trend, Jack, of the clubification of America. Essentially, Lyft is a club. Interesting. Do you want to pitch one more, Jack? So I think you're going to like this one, but your CFL might not. You launched Lyft Media. Yeah. What if you did the anti-ad instead? Yes, Lyft has ads, as you may have seen in the app, Yetis and Bessies. This has become a booming part of the business. $100 trillion of annual revenue. Yes. What if instead you showed us a New Yorker cartoon or a clip from a PBS documentary or a New York Times crossword puzzle. Essentially giving up the ad revenue for the opportunity to delight a customer.

48:34Yeah, and that might be a reason to open up the Lyft app next time instead of the other. Sometimes you get an ad, sometimes you get a New Yorker cartoon, you don't totally get anything that's hilarious. Okay, so this one I'm into. And I got to tell you two things. First of all, I love the New York PBS or NPR New York Times reference. What are you guys like, 70 years old? What the hell is going on? This is a very confusing set of references for me. But okay. I was about to say a Seinfeld clip. Wholesome old school group. Yeah, exactly right. But that's going to make a date as well. Do you guys drive all those?

49:02Like I'm just a little bit confused all of a sudden. Super. But anyway, that was the first thing I have to say. The second thing I got to say is I'm about to go completely off script here. So a weird tiny little side hustle that I started a year and a half ago. So you ever do Wordle or Spelling Bee in the New York Times? You ever do that? Okay, nice, nice, nice. I got to pitch you on this. There's – check out Contrabee. Contrabee. That's right. It's C-O-N-T-R-A-B-E-E. It's in the App Store, and it's actually a little creation of mine. I haven't really revealed this before, but I'm doing it right now.

49:29It's just like Spelling Bee. It uses the same letters as Spelling Bee, but you can't use the center letter. Mind blown. So if you see that coming up in a Lyft one day, it's 100 % self-interest. It's like the CEO pushing his own, you know, singing from his own book or whatever the expression is. That is breaking news. CEO Lyft David Richer is a side hustle word game that may come to Lyft one day. 100%. I do have to ask one final question before we get to the rapid fire, which is for our audience listening, you are CEO of a publicly traded multi-billion dollar company. You are driving for that company.

50:03You have a secret game you've created. What is the key to managing time if you want to accomplish great things as a Yeti or Bestie? My wife tells me this all the time. I have an unreasonable set of expectations for what can be done per unit time. And I set the expectations so damn high that – and then I just have no choice but to do it. There are 28 hours in David Risher's day. Somehow. Somehow I found a couple extra four hours now. I will tell you I'm an aggressive user of my calendar. What I mean by that is I am very, very clear on like I can tell you sort of down to the minute what I'm going to be scheduled for doing.

50:40And it's personal stuff. It's side hustle stuff. It's every Saturday morning. I'll tell you a 10-second story here. Every Saturday morning I get up and I write in a journal. I do two things, actually. But first thing is I write in a little journal. I ask myself, how did my work go this week? How's my family doing? How are my friendships doing? And how is my health? And I set out a little kind of plan for the week. And it's kind of deliberate, but it makes me happy and productive and kind of keeps me moving sort of on a bunch of different dimensions. And then actually I write the board for about an hour about how lift is doing.

51:09So anyway, some of it's just sort of scheduling and planning. Wow. Okay. What's the most interesting thing you're working on right now? Something you're really excited about that you haven't shared. And for the Yetis and Besties listening, David's PR team is here in the room. So even something that they don't want you to say is fine on air. I love this. Gosh, what can I say that is at the intersection of something I can say publicly without getting killed and I'm genuinely interested in? There is an internal product that we're working on called Instant Match. and I want you to imagine a world where you open up the Lyft app and instead of getting what I think of as an excruciating 45 seconds of sort of like, we're matching you, we're matching you, we're matching you, we're matching you.

51:55Instead of getting that, you literally get a car saying, here's the car you're going to get. Here's the car you're going to get and click this and it'll be there within two minutes and it's already driving in your direction. So that's a very complicated problem to solve and we won't be able to solve it for everyone all the time, but that's something I'm super, super excited about. Can I attempt to summarize the Lyft strategy beyond customer obsession? Sure, whip it up, Jack. Lyft is focused on being the number one ride hail for both drivers and riders, while Uber is distracted with other things.

52:24Lyft nails the basics, the fundamentals matter, and doing them better than Uber will grow market share. That's your strategy, would you agree? Super well put, super well put. And the only addition I would say is, it's not so much that I care about growing faster than other guys. I want to get every single person out and about and having a great life. That's my focus. This comes full circle to your point about careers, David, which is if you just focus on the making money part, you're not happy or you may not make that money. You're focusing on the satisfaction element and then the money comes.

52:57That's the bet. Super well put. Well, on that note, shall we whip up some quick rapid fire questions and have David whip up his own tape going on itself? Yes. David, what is the best brand that isn't Lyft? Apple, sure. Why not? David, what's your dream Lyft collab or partnership? Starbucks. I want to be able to get you a coffee no matter when. I'm kind of coffee addicted and matcha addicted, so I want to get you a coffee anytime you want. They busted out the holiday decorations today and the red cups. Yeah, we heard David was a matcha guy, so we had a nice matcha waiting for him. Yes, he did. It was absolutely fantastic.

53:27We got you back. What's the best car you've ever driven? Best car is my first car. Honda Accord. That was my first car. Get out. And I understand your real name is John. My first name is John. And that's your real name. My gosh. I was a 91 Honda Accord. We had those automatic seatbelts that kind of like move over like this. I had the exact same thing. Exact same thing. Stick shift Honda Accord, first car. It was a used car, and it will always be my first love. Best restaurant in San Francisco? Oh, so tough, man. So many. I got to say, I love going to the Taylor Sun. It's on Fillmore Street. It's got, you know, super interesting, you know, crostini.

54:06I know that sounds a little bit goofy, but anyway, it's a great place. Good to know. Yeah. Good Negroni selection. And if you, David Risher, were a stock, what would be your three or four-letter ticker symbol? Oh, dang.

54:21CMBK, comeback. I want to write some of the comeback story for the ages. Love that. Oh, I got one more for you, David. Tell me. We have read in our research, as we jumped in T-boy style, that you once said you loved making decisions. Yeah. And the interview didn't really double down on that. And Jack and I were thinking, most people hate making decisions. So what is the key to making decisions? Metrics versus magic. Information versus intuition. Your gut versus graphs. What percentage is imagining? What percentage is engineering? It's not that I love making decisions, but I'm thoughtful about it in the following way.

54:51I will think, I will this, I will that, I will that, and then I'll just go for it. And typically, those are the biggest decisions. Let me give you a very specific example. My wife. I mentioned I've been married 30 years. We dated for a while. We stopped dating. We started dating. It was complicated. I wasn't necessarily always the best boyfriend. I'll just put it out there right now. But anyway, eventually I was like, you know what? Dang, I kind of feel like maybe at some point I got to need to propose. So at 2 o 'clock in the afternoon, and I kid you not, 2 o 'clock in the afternoon, she had just dropped me off.

55:22We'd just been out with her. I said, tonight's the night I'm going to do it. And so between 2 and 6.30, I went to the store and got a ring. I called her parents. I called her best friend. And I called the restaurant. I said, I'd like you to sing to us at the end of the evening here. And at 6.30, she actually came again. She picked me up, drove me to the restaurant. At 7 o 'clock, I proposed. And this was a long time ago, obviously. But I still kind of remember sort of like this idea kind of bopped around in the back of my mind. Maybe there's some metrics. Maybe there's some this. But at the end of the day, it's just like it's just go time.

55:56So that's kind of the vibe I go. Spoken like the comeback king over here. Unreal, David. Well, Jack and I always end every story by figuring out what is the takeaway. So what's the takeaway on David Risher and or Lyft? It's so hard to say these sort of things and not just sound like a big old egomaniac or some crazy person like this. But I can say something that I know is true about myself, which is I am a purpose-driven person. I am a purpose-driven person. I left Microsoft to go to Amazon, not just because it was a great internet bookstore and because Jeff Bezos was an amazing guy, but it was because I love reading and I think more people reading is good.

56:28I started World Reader for the same reason. I think more people reading is good. I can tell you all the data, but it's just good. I joined Lyft because I want to bring people out of their bubbles, off their couches, off their phones. I mean, look, DoorDash is amazing. They're a partner of ours. Netflix is a great product. But honest to God, if you spend your life in that mode, you're just not going to be happy. And so I'm very purpose-driven and I get a lot of energy. I think you have to find a source of fuel for yourself. And I get a lot of energy from feeling like there are some big purposes that need to be you know, kind of whatever, brought to life.

57:00And somehow, for whatever reason, that's what I find super motivational. David Risher wants you to get in the car and then get out of the car. There you go. Maximus Decimus Meridius says strength and honor. David says serve and connect. Now you're really dating us, Jack. Wow, you guys. David, thank you so much for the interview. Congratulations on the great earnings. And David, before you go, I got one quick thing. Before that iced matcha disappears, you know, Jack and I like to do this once per show when we've got an exciting company recovering. Can you smash that cha-ching button? This is to celebrate an 8 % stock jump this morning.

57:33Congrats to you and the Lyft team on your best quarter yet. Huge thanks for everyone who's contributed to this. I'm going to smash the button. There we go. Cha-ching!

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