Confronting The CEO Of Robinhood - Why Most Investors Lose Money

28:06Yeah. How does that make any sense? I don't know if it was an overreaction as much as sort of us having to build trust with a new set of investors. And I felt like we had to do this when we were a private company. You know, we raised as a private company, we raised different rounds of funding seed series a all the way up to series G, which was our last round before IPO in 2021. And in a lot of those rounds, you bring in a new investor for the first time. And I always felt like there was a period of having to earn the trust of the new investor. Maybe they don't really understand how we operate.

28:45They're trying to figure out, did they make a mistake? Did they overpay for the company? They don't really know us that well. and I felt like for each new one, there was a period where, okay, we had to prove ourselves. This is a new person. They don't know us. We had to build trust. And I think when we went public, it was very much the same. You know, different set of investors. You know, you had the hedge funds. You had the long onlys. You had retail, which for Robinhood is a big chunk. But, you know, you'd think we always have retail, but no, as a private company, we didn't have any retail. So that was new for us.

29:22And I think that there was a period where we had to earn the trust of that shareholder base. And I think we've managed to do that. Finally, I could see the tide turning in 2024, kind of last year. Yeah. From my perspective, it seems like there's still that discrepancy between Robinhood where people still associate to some degree with more like childish or like it's a bunch of early 20s with something like a Vanguard or a Schwab that seems to have more of that like legacy push behind it. How do you intend to bring Robinhood to that level? A couple of years ago, our best customers maybe would have hundreds of thousands of dollars in their Robinhood account, maybe millions.

30:05But then as we've added more things and we become more established, I started talking to customers who are moving over tens of millions. You know, now I'm talking to customers that are moving over hundreds of millions into their Robinhood accounts. And, you know, my aspiration would be someone like me, you know, whatever classification I'm in should be able to have all of their wealth in Robinhood. And that should be just optimally managed at the lowest cost. And we can serve someone like me all of their financial needs that should then accrue to everyone. And I think the problem that the incumbents are ignoring is there's a great wealth transfer that's underway.

30:48According to some statistics, over$120 trillion is going to be handed down from baby boomers and silent generation to younger generations. And I think I see increasingly that Robinhood has the potential to be the main beneficiary of this, right? The young people already have Robinhood accounts. We're increasingly building tools to make Robinhood more useful to you if your family members are on it, not just your kids and your spouse, but also your parents. and nobody's thinking about that problem. The incumbent brokerages, they kind of get worse for you if you add family members accounts. But Robinhood's going to get better.

31:28We already have this with banking and with credit card, but it's going to come to investing as well. There's going to be a multi-generational experience. And I think Robinhood eventually for the mass market will play a role similar to what a family office would do for a high net worth individual. We can put a family office in your pocket that can manage not just your finances, but like all of your strategic life decisions when it when it comes to to your family. And I think I think we'll get there much more rapidly and with a much higher quality product than, you know, anyone in our industry. So on a personal level, how has your approach to money changed going from someone who didn't have maybe a ton of money to now someone who has plenty of it, especially post IPO and with the recent stock growth of Robin Hood?

32:21How has your approach to money changed? And also on top of that, we had Michael Saylor on the podcast a while ago. Oh, yeah. It's very interesting because that day micro strategies went down like a few percent. Yeah. And we had calculated he had lost like hundreds of millions of dollars in personal net worth. And we're sitting with him. And then after the podcast, he checks his phone, probably checks MicroStrategy stock for the first time that day. And he was just, you know, meanwhile, he's losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Like how does this work for you on a personal level? And once again, the approach to money, how has that changed?

32:57I think one thing that hasn't changed is, you know, I'm an immigrant. I grew up in a household where we were very conservative about all of our spending. And I think that imbued in me once I got a little bit of money. I still have this deep need to make sure I'm getting a good deal on stuff, even if it's irrational. So every time I purchase anything, I look at it from an investment lens. Am I getting a good deal? Am I buying some asset that'll depreciate? I would be very reluctant to buy a new car, right? The only time I would consider buying a new car, if it's literally like the first one in a model and it's so good and like I can't find a used one.

33:47Yeah. But, you know, I buy used cars. You buy used cars? Buy used cars. what what's the last used car you bought uh a 2021 uh 911 turbo s actually i didn't buy it that's a lease that's a lease why'd you lease it instead of buying it got a good deal how often do you look for good deals and like where else do you save money in everything that i do i look for good deals what does your wife think of this um does she think like you know oh, come on, we can get the car. We're at the point now, we don't have to worry about these things. Don't need to buy the manager special flank steak for 70 % off. I think she complains about it a little bit, but sort of jokingly, because she also understands it's, you know, the way that I've always been, the way that I am.

34:34And so you take the, it's what she loves about me. It's the principle of it, though. It's like, even though you can waste the money, you shouldn't. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I think I think there's a bit of confidence. It's a good feeling to feel like. All right, at least I don't have to worry that someone's going to take advantage of me financially because this guy is just going to like do a colonoscopy on any potential transaction. Does that ever. So I think that's very comforting in a way. But when you go and negotiate something, does it ever hurt when they look you up and they're like, oh, this guy can afford it.

35:10Like I could charge whatever I want. Yeah, they can just look up your name and net worth. And if there's a B after your name, like it's, you know, I feel like that's a different from car salesman to buying a house to like having tradesmen over like everybody, I feel like would just give a premium just because they can. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, there's ways that you can turn that into a positive, too. Yeah. I mean, if you think about wealthy people, a lot of times they get free stuff because, you know, you can just be like, well, how awesome would it be to tell other customers of your business that, you know, you're, you know, selling Lady Gaga a dress, right?

35:46So they get luxury items for free a lot of times. What's the craziest free thing you've ever gotten? Do you ever have a really successful trader make a bunch of money like I got to send him a gift? Yeah, I'm not allowed to accept those. Unfortunately, I think I think we have to donate them to charity by and large. Yeah, change that. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't I don't get a lot of gifts or at least not a lot of gifts that I can keep. And so what about your own personal investing philosophy? How has it changed now? Now, do you go into more like asset protection mode or how do you view money as you've climbed up this money ladder?

36:24It hasn't changed very much because still the like vast majority of my net worth is in Robinhood shares. And how does that feel then like on a swing up or a swing down? I mean, Robinhood was like up 1 % today. Yeah, you hit an all time high this morning. Oh, amazing. You didn't know that? I didn't know that. I mean, I knew in the past week we've been doing well, but. How do you not check the share price every day? I, because even on my account, I check. I feel like it would drive you crazy. Multiple times a day. I do. I don't want to make it seem like I don't check the share price because I do, even though I try not to.

37:00But I do try not to. Yeah, because it can be really distracting. Like, I don't want to feel, because if it's down, you know, four or five percent, which sometimes it is for no reason. I don't want to have a bad day. Right. So and I also don't want to get too excited and think that I'm winning if it's up for no reason. That's exactly true. Same thing for the podcast. It's like if we have a video that does really well, I try not to let myself feel good because I know if I do, then when videos do poorly for who knows what reason, then I try not to let myself feel bad. It's like you have to remove your emotions from the reality of this.

37:36It's exactly like that. Yeah. But really quick, one thing that I've noticed from talking to a lot of real estate investors on the channel is that once you go beyond a few units, managing your finances could be a bit messy. Like all of a sudden, you have rents coming in from multiple different sources, property taxes, insurance, vendor expenses out the wazoo. You blink and thousands of dollars worth of expenses disappears in places you didn't even realize. That's exactly why our sponsor, Baseline, is such a smart tool. It's a banking and finance platform built specifically for real estate investors and landlords.

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38:35So there's no more guesswork. And if you sign up with our link and fund your account, they will give you a$100 cash bonus just for getting started. So whether you own one rental or a growing portfolio, Baselane helps you stay organized, automate the busy work, and track performance all in one place. Check them out today at baselane.com slash iced. That is baselane.com slash iced to sign up or just click the link down below in the description, baselane.com slash iced. Thank you so much to Baselane for sponsoring this episode. So what is your prediction in terms of where the U.S. economy might be headed over the next few years?

39:07I think there's a cloud of uncertainty around these things always, right? So I think you have to counterbalance the sort of like bearish indicators, which are sort of like productivity growth historically has been pretty low in the U.S. And nobody's really been able to figure out why. I think outsourcing of the industrial base has been a big contributor to that. You have us printing money, right? And in a way, that's us borrowing from future generations to fund our spending now, which I think is a problem. Countries that have typically been big buyers of treasuries have kind of gotten out of that market.

39:54China probably being the best example there. And, you know, there's like seeds of geopolitical conflict or outright war brewing. And that's just those are kind of the bearish indicators. Right. Yeah. But there's some bullish indicators, too, that make me feel very optimistic. I think technology-wise, we're in probably the most interesting time ever. Like technology keeps marching forward. You have AI that has the potential to solve some of these issues, including productivity and the borrowing from the future through massive GDP growth. If, you know, AGI or ASI is unlocked. And it looks like the U.S.

40:38is leading in that, particularly Silicon Valley, which makes me feel very good. You've got cryptocurrency, again, which the U.S. very much in some ways companies are leading. And I think we're looking to onshore some of the innovation that's gone offshore in the past few years. And I think you have some things that we're proud to be a part of, which are ways to reverse the borrowing from the future to fund the present and instead use the present to fund the future. like this Invest America initiative that somehow miraculously passed and was part of the reconciliation bill, which would actually fund every new child born in this country with$1 ,000 in great American companies, which I think is very cool.

41:25What's Robinhood's plan with the$1 ,000 Trump account? Yeah, I think it goes very much into our strategy of making financial platform that's multi-generational work for the entire company. So right now to have a Robinhood account, you have to be over the age of 18. And I think this is one lever by which we'll expand it to folks that are under 18. And, you know, whether you're zero years old or, you know, 100 years old, you should have an amazing Robinhood experience tailored to your needs. I'm curious if you, I mean, maybe you can't even comment on this, but are there any regulatory provisions or rules that you think are just dumb and should go away?

42:07I think you should be able to invest if you're under 18. And I think if you got all those, a lot of people, they front load loss. Because when I first started investing, I had no idea what I was doing. And I tried, you know, selling calls and I was making money and I got greedy and I started buying calls and then I lost everything. And it made me learn so many valuable lessons. But I started doing that once I already started making decent money. And so I lost an amount of money that, you know, is a little uncomfortable to lose. Granted, I'm in a different position now than I still was back then.

42:37But I think it's good if you're just getting into investing to have some money that you can lose. And most of the time, if you're like 16, 15, 17, and you've made a few hundred dollars over the summer, so much better to lose that than after working for 10 years, learning about saving, learn about investing, then finally trying and then losing that hard earned cash and then maybe taking a 10 year break from investing because of that experience. It's funny. I have a story about that. I was 14 or 15. I made a Scott trade account when they had$7 trades and about$2 ,000 that I had saved up into that account.

43:09And I was on a penny trading forum. And I found some like random stocks that people were saying like, oh, this whole chart is going to go up. And I doubled my money from two to four thousand. And I got very confident that how easy that was to make$2 ,000. Lost it all. but we need these experiences but that lesson that lesson was amazing on scott trades and then i got lucky i made it all back i put it into ford stock i had like four hundred dollars left over and i bought ford stock at like a dollar something a share in 2009 and just forgot about it and it just made it made it back eventually but it took you know a solid like seven years to make it back but i did i started investing i opened up a brokerage account at etrade in 1999.

43:54So my dad had given me an incentive because I was part of this program where you had to take the SAT as a middle schooler. And if you take the SAT and do well, you get into this summer program where you basically get to do math, do like one year of math in three weeks. I don't know if you guys heard of this. It was called CTY. So anyway, he incentivized me. He's like, if you get above a 1300 on the SAT, uh, I will give you your score in cash. So I got very motivated. I was very excited because, you know, I was like 12 years old and I don't think he, he thought that I would do it because 1300 as a 12 year old is a good score.

44:37Um, anyway, I got a 1370 and he said, all right, uh, I'll give you a little bit more than, than that, but it's going to be in a brokerage account where you're not going to be able to just withdraw the money. I think back then it was even hard to do that. And that was in 1999, mind you, right before the dot-com bubble burst. So I invested in a bunch of companies. There was a time period where I made a lot of money and felt very, very confident. And then I had to navigate the crash and what happened subsequently. But I learned a lot of lessons. I learned what happened when I learned about company mergers and reorganizations because I bought stock in this company 3Com.

45:23I don't know if you guys remember. But 3Com made the Palm Pilot and there was a spinoff. So for every 3Com share, I had a Palm share and I would get the prospectus and I'd be like, oh, wow, I got these free shares. What happened? So I learned about mergers and reorganizations. I learned about bankruptcies. what happens when the company that you invested in because you were driving past its office building on the Dulles Toll Road in Virginia, and you thought the office building looked very nice, so you bought stock in it, and then it goes bankrupt, and what happens to your stock? And I think these are very boring things to read about in a book and actually understand, but once you experience it with your own money and your own shares, you understand it very deeply and viscerally, and it's like engaging to you.

46:12So I always said like investing in trading is similar to playing a violin. Like you can't learn to play a violin well by just like reading music theory in a textbook. You have to pick it up and play it. And the first time you play it, it's going to sound very, very bad. But if you keep playing it for 10, 20 years, the sky's the limit. And I think investing and trading have a lot of similarities with that or playing a sport. Do you see any other rules though that are out there that you just think to yourself, why does this exist? Oh, yeah. I think that many. The accredited investor rule, probably a prime candidate.

46:49So if you guys are not familiar with it or the viewers are, basically, you can't invest in a private company unless you're a high net worth individual. So there's either an income threshold or a net worth threshold, which shuts out 80 percent of people from investing in private companies. And I think it's particularly pernicious now when we have all these AI companies, a lot of which are private. Or SpaceX, for instance, which is the leading company in the space revolution, which is very, very exciting. It's very, very exciting to a lot of people, a lot of potential, but it's private. So you're shut out of it.

47:27And I think one fear that I do have about the future is that you've got the Gini coefficient at a historic high. Income wealth inequality is historically high. AI and those technologies appear, or at least there's risk of this. It's not clear how it'll shake out, but it appears that they'll have a centralizing effect. So they'll probably put more wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer organizations. And my fear is that if that wealth leads to an inflection point in wealth and income inequality and kind of the political unrest and the stressors and like the civil unrest that that could cause could actually stop progress or thwart progress or at the best case lead to lots of distractions.

48:18I think that's why I'm so compelled to make sure that, you know, we have more people bought into capitalism and And particularly with these AI companies that, you know, more normal people can be invested and exposed to the upside there. Because otherwise, I think, yeah, I think we could have some negative effects. What would you say is your strongest doomsday argument for America's economy and what the average person should be doing about that? And then on the other side, the strongest argument for a flourishing economy over the next 10 years? I think the strongest argument for a flourishing economy will navigate this technology and societal transition well, right?

49:01Like we're aware of the problem. We're going to make the fixes. We're going to invest and make sure the U.S. is at the center of these technological shifts and we'll kind of like make the necessary adjustments to our policies to ensure that that's the case. making it easy for the best talent around the world to come here working for our companies, encourage capitalism, which means protecting it and making sure that more and more people are bought into the system as investors, which I think we can play a strong role. And then GDP growth inflects and actually compensates for the spending, and we balance the budget that way.

49:49So I think that's a nice scenario. Negative scenarios, you know, you look at people losing confidence in our currency, getting into conflict, increasing spending much more aggressively and much further, losing talent to other countries that are more business friendly. Yeah, those are all negative things and could lead to instability. Although really quick before we go into that, don't worry, this isn't a sponsor, but we do need your help. Right now, one in 10 people around the world don't have access to clean drinking water. It's something so basic that all of us just seem to take for granted.

50:31That's why we're teaming up with Mr. Beast, Mark Rober, and thousands of other creators to help raise$40 million to bring safe, sustainable water to 2 million people worldwide. So join us in donating. The link is down below in the description. It would just mean so much to us. Honestly, even if it's just a dollar, it'll help make such a huge difference in somebody's life. Again, that link is down below. Thanks so much. And now let's get back to the episode. So being able to have access to massive amounts of investor data, financial data, how do you think that people's personal financial approach will be completely different a decade from now with how fast things are moving?

51:07I'm sure you have your finger on the pulse of what people want to be investing in, the changes they want made? I think that what we're seeing now is that a lot of our customers are heavily invested in innovation names on the public side. So you have NVIDIA, Tesla, Apple, Amazon, a lot of like Mag7 investing is happening. And I think people are making a bet that those are going to be the industries that drive the future. And I think so far, at least this year, it seemed like a prescient bet. I think another lens is looking at what the wealthy people are doing. Wealthy people are diversifying. They're investing in private companies.

51:54They're investing in real estate, as I'm sure you guys know. I saw real estate in your chart as well has done very, very well. So wealthy people have access to these things. And right now, retail investors on Robinhood have not great access, admittedly. I think that's going to change, and we're going to open up the floodgates to that. And what that's going to do is I think there will be a positive downstream effect of more entrepreneurship. More people will be starting companies if you have access to retail capital and the quarter trillion on Robinhood and other platforms. What I don't think will change.

52:35This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. is the appeal of investing. I think investing will become more attractive. It'll become more necessary. I think everything that we're seeing with AI, and even if you believe in these scenarios where you'll have large-scale labor force disruption, job loss in some sectors, you kind of saw a preview of what that looked like in 2020 at the beginning of COVID.

53:27And what happened was lots more people started investing in the markets. So I think that's a durable effect. And I think that if I had to guess, investing will be a much bigger portion of every individual's life 10 years from now than it is today. Here's what I'm thinking is that 10 years from now, we're going to have 24-7 trading where I could go online or on Robinhood and trade at 2 o 'clock in the morning. And I want to see shares prices go all the time. Well, you basically already have that. I mean, we have a 24-hour market except on Saturdays and early part of Sundays. Exactly. And holidays.

54:06So I want more of that throughout everywhere. And then I also want it so that I could send individual shares from one person to another. So if I want to give Jack one share of Robinhood, I'm able to transfer it like I would a Venmo. And then lastly is I think no one has been able to truly get real estate in such a way that you could like swipe up and buy something or cut out all the middleman involved in real estate or somehow securitize a property. And every platform that I've seen, I would never put my money in these things. But I think there's a way where you could turn a house into some sort of like a swipe up or co-ownership with people.

54:50That third one I'm very interested in. Yeah. Yeah. So big opportunity. I want to see a place where if real estate continues going at the same pace that I could own a house with like three other people equally in a way that just works online. I don't know how that would work logistically, but I think that's the direction things are at least heading. Yeah. And real estate's a big market. So it's a big potential. And if you look at high net worth individual, 10 % of your portfolio is real estate. So, yeah, I think that's one that I care about. What are your plans to get into real estate? Well, we have mortgages now through a partnership with Sage Home Loans.

55:30And I think that's been a good use case, proofs to us that our customers care about home ownership. They care about real estate, both in terms of like buying a home themselves, but also they think about it as an investment. So I think we'd get into it in two ways, and I'll speak to it generally. I think there's one viewpoint where it's an investment and it's part of a diversified portfolio. And I think over time, as with any investment that's a part of your portfolio, we'll want to have access to the highest quality assets and make them available to retail. The other thing is there are certain investments and people think about them as investments, but they're like physical things that people own.

56:22I mean, like watches, a good example. A lot of people invest in watches, they collect them. You invest in art, but maybe you don't really want one 64th of a painting. You actually want to take custody of your art and hang it up on your house. Or you invest in classic cars, right? I mean, classic car market, collectibles market has been a very active market. And I think we'll want to open up access to that too, because there's a whole realm of investments that you think of as investments, but you want to hold it in your hand. I think we're starting to explore that a little bit in our banking product and with the credit card.

57:03Right now, you can redeem your rewards points into physical gold bars. and that's actually a very attractive offering to people, believe it or not. And of course you can buy gold ETFs and get exposure, but there's something about holding a piece of gold in your hand and putting it in your safe that people really, really love. They like to touch and look at their investments. So we'll get into that as well. Okay, but for mortgages, why not do that yourself? Why not do everything in-house? Yeah, I mean, there's different parts of a mortgage, right? There's the servicing and the user experience, which actually means, you know, selling you the mortgage, communicating the value of it, taking, doing the billing and, you know, putting it in your budget.

57:46And I think that's integral to the customer experience in many ways. So I think over time, you'll see us get deeper and deeper there, and we'll probably own the customer experience and the servicing. Then there's the actual loan itself, you know, giving someone the money and taking that risk. And I just think like that's more of a utility product. There's thousands of banks and different types of lenders in the U.S. that would be willing to compete for the actual economics of that. And I just think we might do some of it in the future, but Robinhood is less differentiated in providing the utility loan service.

58:28But why not then allow other users to fund loans? I mean, peer-to-peer lending of some sorts. That's been tried before, for sure. I mean, you know, lending clubs started with that model. And I think what they find over time is the peer-to-peer aspect becomes a little bit more of a gimmick. And the people that are like driving the volume tend to be sort of like institutional lenders and players that have large amounts of money. I think individuals are less interested in these types of loans as sort of like investment opportunities. I mean, we don't hear them being in high demand. They'd prefer to invest in other things.

59:13But if it changes and suddenly, you know, we have all these assets and we want to give customers the option to, you know, back invest in loans or fund them, the philosophy is like go where customers are demanding. And if they want that type of selection, we would certainly consider it. And what about with tokenization and the future of that? So tokenization is very interesting. I think it's the biggest innovation in capital markets in well over a decade. And there's two ways to think about it. One is for outside the U.S., I think tokenization will be the best and simplest mechanism to get exposure to U.S.

59:57stocks and other assets. So in the same way that stablecoin has become the best way to get access to U.S. dollars if you're outside the U.S., tokenization of equities will be the best mechanism to get exposure to U.S. equities and other assets outside the U.S. will become the best platform for U.S. stocks. It'll become sort of a global unified platform where you can invest in stocks. Inside the U.S., you get 24-7 trading. You get instant settlement. You get a lot of back office improvements to how a company like Robinhood can operate that lead to lower costs, which eventually will be passed on to consumers in different ways.

1:00:40And you also get the capability to take any asset, no matter how illiquid or scarce, to be tradable 24-7, just like a stock or crypto asset. And so I think the biggest opportunity in the U.S. would be tokenizing private companies and actually making them tradable real-time, just like public stocks, and making them understandable, easy-to-use, liquid. So, yeah, we're excited about that. And we built the technology. We have a working tokenization of U.S. equities in the form of stock tokens is live in the EU right now. And you saw we demonstrated tokenization with private companies as well with the SpaceX and OpenAI tokens.

1:01:29What's the risk of that? Is there a risk that the tokenization price just goes up so high that it's worth fundamentally way more than the underlying company? Yeah, there's certainly that risk for privates. And, you know, in some places for Publix where it's completely untethered from the real market, there's that risk as well. But for our stock tokens in the EU, the two are tethered. So right now, we call it phase one of our stock tokens offering. Every trade actually is backed by a one-for-one trade that happens in the traditional market. So if you buy, for example, an Apple token in the EU, we'll go out and actually buy a real share and then mint the token.

1:02:20So then you know you're getting a good price because it's the price that's available on the best of the exchanges. Now, the downside is there's no 24-7. But what will happen in phase two when we list the tokens on Bitstamp is you'll basically get the best of both worlds. If the traditional markets are open, you'll get the best price available on the traditional markets if it's better than the price on the secondary token markets. And if the traditional markets are closed, you'll be able to trade. So I think that's how the problem will be solved. Who thinks of these ideas? Is this you or is it a team?

1:03:00Well, we have an amazing crypto team, a lot of great engineers. Johan, who's the GM of our crypto business, started off as an engineer here. So the team is very, very good. And back in the depths of the crypto winter, I think it was 2022, when we were talking about tokenization, we actually said, you guys remember DeFi summer in 2020? So this was like when DeFi became popular and it was the kickstart of the crypto bull run in end of 2020 and 2021. So they called it DeFi Summer and it kicked off the broader resurgence of the crypto market around that time. So we said to ourselves, OK, what would it take to actually get out of this bear market and get a new crypto bull market?

1:03:56And wouldn't it be cool if Robinhood actually instigated that? So we called the project Robin Hood Summer internally. And then, you know, I think it's early. It's a little bit early to tell, but like tokenization is definitely becoming a bigger thing. I wrote a I wrote a opinion piece in The Washington Post. And gosh, the the number of questions I got about that opinion piece and the number of our competitors that suddenly made tokenization a top business priority after that was was staggering. So I do think the next crypto summer will be by and large driven by real world assets tokenized on blockchains.

1:04:38I think you're starting to see that with the stablecoins too. Stablecoins like a tokenization primitive. What about the increase in prominence of AI? How do you expect that to affect the overall stock market? Do you think that a few companies are going to be massive winners or do you think that the broad access to AI is going to... lift a lot of the smaller companies that now can do things at a low cost. Like the big companies used to use economies of scale. Now everyone has access to AI, which just decreases the cost of labor and production. I think thus far, what seems to be happening in public markets is the gains seem to be accruing to a relatively small portion of companies.

1:05:19You know, Mag7, I mean, the companies that are leaders in AI are definitely getting it. Those are like the data centers ones, though. You're right. Typically the ones that own the centers themselves. Yeah. I mean, you have the infrastructure layer for sure. And also the chip makers, NVIDIA. I mean, all these companies that are training models are by and large doing it on NVIDIA chips. Now NVIDIA is the world's most valuable company. But yeah, it's still, I'm sure you guys have looked at this chart. If you look at the S &P 500 and compare the returns of MAG7 over the past year to everyone else, It's like Mag7 is huge.

1:05:56Everyone else is kind of flat, which indicates to me that there's sort of like a centralizing effect to this. Now, I don't know if that's going to be indefinite. I would think as the AI tools get better, you'll have more. My prediction over the long run is you'll have more single person companies. Like one individual will be able to use AI as a huge accelerant to starting a business. And in the same way that if you wanted to start a software company in the 90s, you'd have to manage your own data center. But AWS came along, the cloud software providers came along, and suddenly you no longer need those 50 people to buy servers and rack and stack if you want to start an internet company.

1:06:42I think you can think of AI as fulfilling a lot of these specialized functions that you would have had to spend a lot of your time thinking about. And then, you know, if Robinhood gets in and you have something close to capital as a service where you can press a button and get money in your bank account for starting your venture, I think we'll have a lot more more companies. And really quick, let's talk about something that every growing business runs into at some point. You hit a wall where you just need help. You can't do everything yourself. And thankfully, that is where our sponsor Upwork comes in.

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1:08:17Upwork.com. Thank you so much to Upwork for sponsoring this episode. Now, really quick, I just want to say that when Jack and I first started the Ice Coffee Hour, we had to figure out everything ourselves. From the best cameras to use, the best editing equipment, how to get guests, every day presented new challenges. That, of course, is why today's sponsor is so helpful and so relevant, and that would be Shopping. Shopify is basically your all-in-one business partner. They power millions of businesses worldwide from major brands like Mattel and Gymshark to entrepreneurs just getting started. And here's a fun fact.

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1:09:52Make the money. Shopify.com slash ICH. Thank you so much to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. As a CEO of a massive public company, a concern of many people is that AI is going to be taking in everyone's jobs. Do you notice this to be somewhat the case? Like if you don't replace some labor with AI, you're just going to lose out to competitors. And do you think that that's a valid fear? Or how do you, as someone with many employees, see AI competing with the labor force? How do you see that relationship? Jobs certainly will change over time. Some things that you can now do entirely with AI should be done entirely with AI.

1:10:35I think we have to shift as a society and not artificially protect those jobs, but work on making sure the people that are on that path are able to pivot and do something that is more valuable to society in the same way that you know, you wouldn't protect lamplighters, right? And it was funny. It's very romantic in a way. People used to come with those torches and light all the lamps. I think I was in London last Thanksgiving and they have one part of the city where they're still like protecting the lamplighters. I do think humans will still be at the center of things and there will be lots of opportunities for human ingenuity, at least for the foreseeable future.

1:11:22I think the jobs will change and nobody can think about, you know, you've heard this term, the singularity, right? The singularity, Ray Kurzweil, intelligence explosion. I think it's inherent in singularities that they're hard to think about, but I think we have pretty good clarity over what the next two to three years at least is going to look like, probably five to 10. I think we're still far away from, you know, humanoid robots coming into our houses and, you know, burping our children or putting them to sleep. So yeah, I think humans are going to be calling the shots for a while, which means that there will be new and more interesting human jobs.

1:12:05And in the same way that those of us that were early adopters of smartphone technology in the 2000s or early adopters of the internet or early adopters of like spreadsheets in the 80s, if you were an accountant, for instance, you have a huge advantage. And what I've been telling folks here is at some point, it's going to go from being an advantage, which I think we're in now. If you really use these AI tools, you're at an advantage to everyone else. And at some point, probably rather quickly, I mean, we probably don't have five years. I'd say we have two or three to a point where if you're not AI native and if you're not conversant in these tools, you'll be at a disadvantage relative to anyone else.

1:12:44So I don't think people should worry about AI taking their jobs. I think people should worry about someone that's AI conversant, you know, being more valuable than them in the market. And you should prepare yourself for that scenario. How should someone prepare themselves for that? What should they learn or what do you recommend people do? I mean, think about it like a child, right? I think like you look at children using computers in the 80s and 90s and they would just like play with them, right? They'd like play with it. It takes time. It takes interest. I think the problem that a lot of adults have in the workforce are they're very busy.

1:13:26They have existing tasks. And sometimes when you get those tasks done, you're just tired and you don't really have time. And we have other things going on. We have families. But at the end of the day, it just takes dedicated time to play with these new technologies. And if you can integrate that play with your work, if you can actually like figure out how to use it while you're working. I'm a huge proponent of integrating work and play in your personal life. And I think having them be separate worlds is not a long term sustainable strategy. But yeah, you just have to like play with it and tinker.

1:14:05I think that's the best way. Do you ever feel misunderstood by the public just being who you are and running the company that you do? Yeah, I mean, I've gone through the GameStop stuff, so definitely used to it. But how tired are you of talking about it?

1:14:22It's okay. You can be honest. It's just such a complicated thing. Yeah. So sometimes I just don't know what aspect of it to discuss. But that's the thing is, is when all of that went down, I remember Graham and I were talking and he was making videos on it, covering it. And I defended. And Graham came to me. He was like, he was like, do I defend them? Like, like, how what kind of a position do I take on this? Because unfortunately, the way that YouTube works, the way that if you're making videos to appeal to the masses, you need to have a villain, especially when people are hurting. Totally. And so you can either choose that route, the politically expedient route of making a villain, getting everyone to love that.

1:15:03Or you could choose sometimes the hard truth, which is the more nuanced approach of like, hey, these things aren't as cut and dry as you guys may think of them to be. Yeah. That's what sucked back then, because I remembered, I think we had a call and you had done a few podcasts at the time. Yeah. And everybody hated those podcasts. Yeah. I guess you're like, oh, you're just a paid shill for Robin Hood, even though you were never paying anybody. It was just, I'm happy to go on and talk about it if you want to hear me out. And I'm sure even this, some people will think, oh, they must have been paid or something.

1:15:38No, it's just like, this is an honor to be here. We've been trying to do this for years. Like, we're just excited about it genuinely. But I remember at that time, and it's still to this day, if you go and defend Robin Hood over GameStop, you're just shit on. And if you go and say, oh, Robin Hood disabled the buy button because they're in bed with Citadel and all this, everyone's like, oh, yeah, thank you. Thank you for standing up for the little. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, if you say, oh, that's bullshit or that's just a conspiracy theory or that's totally wrong, then they're like, oh, of course he would say that.

1:16:10What do you think he's going to admit colluding with Citadel on a podcast? But I think I've gotten some advice from some people who have unfortunately been through some like crisis comms situations, right? Some crisis comms situations. um uh daniel leck from spotify has has been through some shit as well and we had this conversation where he was like um there's like various stages to a communications crisis there's like when you see a little bit of smoke happening and then there's like a brush fire is kind of the middle stage and at some point it becomes uh an inferno a conflagration and you've completely lost control and you can't put out the inferno.

1:16:59You kind of just have to like get out of the way because you're not going to control the message. And I think the unfortunate thing with GameStop is the time where it was a small brush fryer or like a smoke was very short and it actually ended and it turned into an inferno before I woke up. So I was, I woke up and my phone was unusable because I was getting so many like text messages and tweets. It was like, if you've seen that video, I think Kim Kardashian posted it at some point where she turned off do not disturb on her phone. And this thing was just like, it was just unusable. So it was like that.

1:17:43And what Daniel said is the conventional wisdom is you kind of just have to hide during the inferno. And then when everything is rubble, and everything is a mess, then you kind of like poke your head out and do an Oprah interview. So I didn't do that. I actually got out right in the middle of it. And I did a bunch of interviews, right? Sorkin, Cuomo. I had the congressional hearing. I did the Elon Clubhouse. And sometimes I think about what if I just, it was very hard at the time because everyone's like, oh, we need to hear from Vlad and we need to talk. But in hindsight, I probably should have like let the dust settle a bit and then did one big interview.

1:18:28I think no one's ready for nuance. Like I heard you and it's hard for me to understand because you explained it in such a way that was complicated. It was way too high level. Your explanations of what actually went down when you could break it down. If you just made your own piece of media and you were like, this is exactly what happened. This is, you know, they requested this amount of liquid capital to back these things. And then And then this is when I got the tax. This is how long we've been a company. This is how much capital we have. What am I supposed, like, there's no option for the company.

1:18:56100%. Like, if you controlled everything and put that out there, instead of more candidly trying to hope that you're able to relay a very nuanced and hard to articulate perspective, like live, that made it a lot more difficult. You explained it like an engineer. 100%. For me, I was like, I have to go and listen to this like twice just to, okay, that happened, this happened. Okay. And you have to know how it actually works. Yeah. How the system works. I think I botched the communications on that to some degree for sure. It was obviously not fatal for the company, but I think I could have done a much better job.

1:19:36I think there were two issues, one of which you point out. I just got out there too early without actually even knowing the full information of exactly what happened, who the players were involved, who was talking to who. There was like a cloud of uncertainty and there was just, we needed to say something. And we were getting roasted for like not communicating fully and properly, right? Which I would say we communicated properly, but certainly we didn't communicate with the full. there were there were more details that were released as soon as we got them and we're and we're confident in them and actually you get in a lot of trouble for both communicating wrong things um that you then have to correct right because that just feeds the the trolls even more if they're like oh we'll see yeah they were lying they changed the story so something something so you have to be accurate and truthful and we have to make sure everything is like correct uh And, you know, so you saw our communications got more detailed over time.

1:20:37But in hindsight, we probably should have just chilled out and like come up with something comprehensive and full as our first thing. The second thing was just sleep deprivation. And it was like I was on these interviews after pulling many all-nighters because it was all hands on deck during that time. Because Robinhood was a small startup and we were dealing with not just this like issue, but also historic volumes. We were the number one app on the app store. It was very rare for a finance app ahead of like Instagram and TikTok, right? And all kinds of things get strained when you grow too fast as a financial app.

1:21:15So we were dealing with that. And so, you know, I came on these podcasts and these interviews. And by the way, everyone was remote. So it was actually hard to coordinate. and my face was kind of pale and they're like, oh, he looks kind of like a vampire. That's not, that's not very confidence inspiring. Um, and you know, it was, uh, yeah, all, all conspired to make that not ideal, I guess. So if you were to answer the not so simple question of why did you disable GameStop buy button, how would you now answer it? Oh, I mean, it was just to comply with regulatory requirements. Yeah, basically, if you don't comply with regulatory requirements, they can come in and shut down your business.

1:22:00And then what happens is it's not just the people that traded GameStop that can't trade, but nobody can trade. All the buy and hold investors that are just holding shares in their accounts, they get hurt. So people are going to ask then who's in charge of the regulation. Yeah. So the tricky part is regulations have multiplied over time. A lot of these things date back to Dodd-Frank, which was created in the wake of the global financial crisis. And Lehman went belly up. You had Bear Stearns. And they were like, okay, how do we protect this from happening? We just have to make sure the capital requirements go up early so that we prevent a huge systemic issue from crashing the market.

1:22:50And I don't think they anticipated that a lot of those capital requirements would just get triggered by retail investors buying up meme stocks. Why couldn't the price just continue going higher indefinitely? Wouldn't you think that at a certain price, there's going to be a seller on the other end? And if there's not, the price just goes higher and the retail investors just figure it out amongst themselves? Like, why does there need to be a capital requirement behind that? Yeah. I mean, I think part of the reason is that a lot of trades happen on credit, effectively. So you buy the stock and you have to deliver the shares a couple of days later.

1:23:30You have to pay for them a couple of days later. And I think what's happened a lot in the past, when you have these short squeezes and some stock goes up, it then goes down. And then if, you know, you have that two day period where people have to pay for the cash, sometimes they don't show up with the cash and they're like, oh, I made a mistake or yeah, someone else made that trade. It wasn't me. So, so you have reversals and, and I think that's a big problem. So now, Now, of course, if there's real-time settlement and the cash and the shares exchange hands right away, there's less of an issue.

1:24:11But yeah, I mean, there's good reasons for these things. I think that you do see a lot of strange behavior when there's market euphoria or strange things happening. And a lot of people are looking out for their best interest as well. uh the other thing that's interesting is if you look at actually what happened um trading volume was very very high in those meme stocks uh during that entire week and in january 28th was a thursday and then the weekend came and then we had like the super bowl so a lot of people i think blamed robin hood for uh for you know the subsequent uh collapses in in some of these stocks.

1:24:56But I think a big part of it was it was just the weekend and people moved on to something else. You know how an internet mob doesn't usually hold their attention on one thing. I think they just, you know, markets were closed, they moved on to something else. And then there was the Super Bowl and so many other things. Yeah. Plus there were other brokerages platforms that disabled the buy button. So you saw a huge just like when the market opened on Monday, there was just like a big difference. Do you think something like that could ever happen again? Like with GameStop? Because I feel like that was such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

1:25:33And so which stock is it? Actually, now there's this thing about how people are asking ChatGPT for what stock to buy, right? And, you know, what happens if it just has a billion users and it tells everyone the same stock? I've thought about that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's going to be exactly like GameStop. It's rarely the same exact thing, but I think something analogous could happen. And, you know, I think this thing of like, let's say the same AI model develops a very, very deep relationship with, you know, all of the users. ChatGPT might get to a billion weekly active users before the end of the year.

1:26:15And what if that gets them to all buy the same stock? See, I'm thinking, why is there not? Or maybe this is highly illegal. What's to stop somebody from making an AI company that just recommends at the same time every day one stock to buy? And that's it. And people could just choose to buy that stock. That's probably highly illegal. That's like market regulation. I don't know. If it's AI and it's random and you're not trading ahead of everyone else, who's to say that I can't post once a day? Open source anonymous. I'm just saying, who's to say I can't post every morning? I am buying this share.

1:26:51I am buying this share. I am buying this share. I mean, if you think about it, that's some of the concern around copy trading, which, you know, not very popular in the U.S., but like, you know, in Europe, copy trading has become a thing. And I think that's the criticism about it hurting, it's called. Graham and I have this idea and we honestly it wasn't in our outline to bring up but I just thought of it right now and I wanted to run this by you so we were thinking what if every single day there is one coin flip and you can either on a prediction market bet heads or tails that's it and you have to bet on a certain side for every like dollar you put up on heads there has to be a dollar put up on tails or I don't know you know however that would be figured out how that middle amount would be figured out.

1:27:38But basically, you could bet heads or tails. One coin is flipped every single day. It's a massive cultural moment for the coin flip. Everyone tunes in 12 PT or something like that. And then it's 50-50 and you can do it. Yeah. No house advantage. You know, Robinhood could do this and tokenize it and take 0.01%. And the only overhead is one quarter. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business.

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1:29:00You got to flip the quarter. And you could film it, you know, and live stream it. And that could happen every single day. That should exist. I think that's an interesting idea. Yeah. I mean, that could be a prediction market, right? The daily flip. Just the one quarter flip. And that's such like a free marketing opportunity because I just know for a fact that would go viral. Oh, I know. It's so simple. We just don't have the infrastructure to be able to make that happen. Like, there's just no way. I would love that. 6 p.m. every day. But we want to do it. And I would participate, you know, and I would be like, today, heads, who's like part of the heads gang?

1:29:29You know? And just have it. Like$100 maximum. I think there will be a nice novelty effect for that. But I would be surprised if it has a lot of longevity. I think it's kind of like HQ trivia. It's very nice for a little bit. But then there's so many interesting prediction markets that are now available on Robinhood. I mean, we keep adding more and more varieties. You can look at best AI model at the end of 2025. That's an interesting one to me, right? because I think right now I was looking Gemini is like 53%. Chad GPT, I think, was below 20%. So I think there's lots of interesting things you can do that would probably eventually take people's attention away from the coin flip.

1:30:16And I think a lot of people track these things. So you can do the Emmys now. Emmys are interesting. So I could put money on the Fed rate decision. Fed rate decision. The economic ones have been have been have been cool. The sports like there's pro baseball. So there's a wide variety of things to choose from, which make me think it's interesting, but probably something that would have a short lived. It would be really cool if you forced it so people could only put in$1 and you can cash out at any time. But it does 10 days in a row and it caps at 10 days because, you know, one to the power of 10 or whatever the thing is, it's like a million dollars.

1:30:58And so you can try to turn$1 into a million dollars, but you could only ever put in$1 and you can like parlay into the next one. And you could cash out anytime and you maybe in the beginning select, you know, heads, heads, tails, heads, tails, tails, heads. And then up to 10. if 100 ,000 people do it, there's going to be... Yeah, people that become millionaires off of$1. That would be the coolest marketing opportunity, I'm telling you. I would love that, actually. Yeah. Just put in$1, and then after 10 days, it resets. Yeah. Well, you know, if the folks at Kalshi are watching, that might be interesting.

1:31:33Yeah, because then at that point, when do you turn from investing just to straight up gambling? It's a dog at that point. Investing. I think, yeah, Yeah, I think with this particular one, it'd be hard to argue that there's a particular predictive skill involved. Is that how the predictive markets are able to operate in such a way that's not considered gambling? Because it's not random chance that you could have specific knowledge on something and feel like you have more experience to bet on that outcome. Yeah, or a hedging benefit. Yes. So could there be knowledge or skill involved or is there a hedging benefit or a speculation benefit to these markets?

1:32:19I mean, if you think about it, if you're trading futures and these are prediction markets are by the same regime, the CFTC that regulates futures. Do you know, do you have a deep understanding of like the price of copper or corn? You know, some people do. Some people actually study this. A lot of people have some dependency elsewhere in their life on the price of copper and they're hedging against it. And so what makes a vibrant derivatives market is three different market participants in equilibrium. You have the speculators who have a point of view on what the price should be and they're speculating.

1:33:02And some people call speculators gamblers. But if the technical derivatives parlance, it's speculators. But you need them also because you also have the hedgers and the hedgers are trying to offload risk. But not everyone can be hedging because then the price gets out of whack. So you need the speculators to actually bring the hedgers into equilibrium. And then you have the third group, which is the arbitrageurs. The arbitrageurs are basically playing a low risk, low latency game. They're connected to every market and they're like, oh, corn's at a dollar here and it's at two dollars here. I'm going to buy up all the corn for a dollar and sell it at the same time for two.

1:33:42And they provide a valuable service too, because you want to make sure that if you're hedging or speculating, you don't really care about which market you're going into because there's overhead in that. So they make sure the prices are uniform across everything. So there's a lot of people that just think trading in general is gambling. I reject that premise. I think that these are useful markets and people are providing valuable services and kind of hedging their risk, speculating or sharing a point of view. And how does your own personal portfolio look today and how do you allocate across public markets, private markets, stocks, bonds, crypto, real estate?

1:34:27Yeah, the vast majority of my portfolio is Robinhood. So I'm highly concentrated. I do have some public markets exposure, but basically when we went public, I had to lose discretion over all of that. So yeah, I don't have discretion over the lion's share of my trades, meaning they happen in a trust that other people kind of decide and manage for me. And I think the idea behind that is because I run Robinhood, Robinhood's a big company, even the perception of somehow being exposed to data and using that to make trades could be risky. So we just decided to handle that by me not having discretion over any trading.

1:35:19That's interesting. Yeah. But you get reports every month or two from your wealth managers that say, okay, we put some money into this, we did this. But you don't have any discretion over that because you're worried people would paint it in some sort of picture of like, oh, you're using user data to make trades. Copying Chris Camillo. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, that could be like a distraction at best. That's interesting. And, you know, it's relatively small because I'm, you know, 90 plus percent Robinhood anyway. Speaking of Robinhood, why does Robinhood focus more on live customer service reps where you could just easily one number like Amex Platinum where they pick up on like the first ring and you talk to a person?

1:36:05We actually do have that. We recently rolled out something called Robinhood Concierge, where if you have a lot of money in Robinhood or your trading activity is high, you can be eligible for Robinhood Concierge and you have a person that you can actually text with. Um, and then, so, so it's kind of like barbell strategy. I don't think we can give every person, uh, Robinhood concierge, but we can do it to a small portion of people. And usually those are people that have needs. I mean, if you have a large Robinhood portfolio, if you can't get a hold of a person that becomes a problem for you. So, so we, we do, we do that offering and actually more and more people are in that category.

1:36:49So we're going to have to continue to scale that and make that better. And then for everyone else, we've been making huge investments in our AI customer support, where I actually think we're best in class. And we've been making lots and lots of innovations. And the goal would be to get the best customer support experience delivered to the mass market with AI. And eventually it won't just be chat and email, but you'll be able to call our AI. And some people actually don't like it. You know, they immediately, when they figure out they're dealing with an AI, they want human, human, human. But the AI is getting very good.

1:37:28And even now it'll probably, I think we should probably do a better job of the AI convincing people that it can be helpful. Let's say, are you sure? I can really help you solve your problem. I think over time, the percentage of people that don't want to deal with AI, as they get confidence that it's actually going to solve your problem, is going to go down. I think once your account gets beyond a certain point, it should unlock automatically a live rep where it just goes to a cell phone or something like that, just immediate pickup like Amex Platinum. That's essentially what Robinhood Concierge is.

1:38:02And what's the dollar amount that you have to have? I don't know if we've publicly shared it. If it is, it's on our website. But if we haven't, I think it's still early. So we're kind of like tweaking it. But it's not just the dollar amount. It's also you can have a low dollar amount, but be a very active trader. Yeah. And that qualifies you as well. What would you say are the biggest levers Robinhood has pulled to get ahead of the competitors? For example, obviously, initially offering the free trading and setting that standard, the 3 % cash back and the credit card, the 2 % ACATS match. That was a massive one.

1:38:43That was huge. What would you say are the biggest levers that Robin Hood has pulled? And how are you going to stay ahead of the competition from here on out? Yeah, I mean, I think at the, and it's funny that you mentioned the ACATS match, that's gotten more and more sophisticated over time. And now we actually have personalized matches. So if you look, you know, on social media, sometimes there's confusion about this because people post things and they're like, well, I got this match. Well, I got this other one. I think we'll still run our broad marketing matches around events and certain product rollouts.

1:39:21But yeah, they're personalized. And I think that takes a lot of technology sophistication to actually deliver people personalization in a safe way. So I think we're investing a lot there. But I think the underlying thing is just technology. Like we want to be at the forefront of technology innovation. I think compared to the incumbents, that gives us a big advantage because we can just be more efficient, roll out products faster, learn from our customers, learn from, you know, what's worked and what hasn't worked for us in the past and iterate more quickly. So I think that's been a big advantage.

1:40:00And, you know, relative to the smaller startups, which do tend to move faster than big companies, I think the scale and the reach and the fact that we have so many customers and so many assets is an advantage as well. So we want to do a lightning round and we're going to mention a few different offerings. And then you can say if you plan on implementing them soon, if there are plans far out in the future, and we're just going to go through a list. Yeah. Solo 401k. solo 401k is interesting um so we we've done a lot on the retirement side um i think the ira covers a lot of needs and then there's um a big business opportunity which is slightly different of 401ks which is essentially a b2b offering i think that one we've been thinking a lot about And we know that we want to expand our offerings to serve businesses as well.

1:40:56But our first bet there is registered investment advisors. I think that's more interesting. So registered investment advisors is the near-term opportunity that we're tackling there. Business accounts. business accounts is on our radar yeah yeah um and i think there's a lot of things that a business account could be uh but yeah we're definitely we're definitely looking at it i wouldn't say near term but on on the radar trusts big request big request uh yeah we've been hearing we've been hearing a lot about trust. I think that for a while, Robinhood was just one account. Big focus has been on making it so that people get the benefits of retirement accounts and all the different things.

1:41:49So it fits into the multi-generational strategy I was telling you about. So I can't give you a specific date, but definitely on our radar. Yeah, that to me is the biggest one and you'll get huge account sizes doing that. For sure. Yeah. Insurance. Not in your term. HSAs. I think that, yeah, not a huge request. Long term, yes, but not, not, uh, I wouldn't expect it very, very soon. Some sort of a social platform. Well, you know, I talked a lot about how the origins of Robinhood were as a social network. I think that you'll see elements of that that are useful to customers. But in terms of full-fledged social platform, I think you'll have to be in suspense.

1:42:41Yeah, I think that one, if it comes, it'll surprise you guys. Robin Hood dating, account size matching, portfolio strategy matching. That would be dependent on social, I think. That would have to be a fast follow to the social network. Robin, so you could have two high-risk individuals or two low-risk individuals with covered calls. Anything with messaging, I think, eventually evolves into a dating app. Wealth management. Ah, we already offer it. There you go. Yeah. Financial education. Already offer it. But I'm talking like a YouTube channel sort of thing. We have a couple of YouTube shows. We have like options content that I think Obi is still doing.

1:43:32And then a podcast called The Week That Was, which is market commentary with Steph Guild. And then we also have Sherwood Media, which is our media company. Fixed income products. So you can trade and buy fixed income ETFs. What about like annuities or like you could buy a certain fixed income product? Yeah, bonds don't currently offer. But yeah, on our radar for sure. What ideas have you shot down recently? I think there's a lot of great ideas that just with minimal, with relatively few resources and the ability to focus. It's more of like a do it later sort of thing. So I think we've looked at things like 401ks.

1:44:22We've looked at employee stock purchase plans. So if you're an employee of a company and you want to buy that stock, could we be the platform that offers that? I think that's an opportunity. I mean, a lot of people get accounts in business that way, But it's just our focus from B2B standpoint has been RIA custody. And I think that's such a big opportunity that we want to make sure we feel good about nailing that before we expand to other businesses. What ideas do you want to do but regulation blocks it? I think right now in the U.S., tokenization and private markets are the big ones. like accredited investor rules prevent clear and simple access to private markets.

1:45:10And I think eventually we'll have to get there. So that's far and away the biggest. I mean, there's probably little things here and there, but I don't think they're as meaningful as private markets access and tokenization. One of the things that I found most interesting about the Robinhood story, because I went and did copious amounts of research, I've listened to all of your podcasts, all of your interviews. And it seems as though the strategy of Robinhood was to simply take less profit than competitors. That was basically what you guys did with like, you know, free trades with a bunch of different things with the credit card, the 3%.

1:45:48It's just like do what the other people are doing, but just have less fat in the process. I think that's certainly a part of it. I'd say the user experience and just building great products is the core. But in financial services, the pricing model is a key part of the customer experience. It's not like, you know, selling iPhones, for example, where the price point of the iPhone, whether it's$1 ,000 or$500, is a big driver to your decision to purchase. because I think people are less sensitive. That's more of like luxury product. And the pricing is further away from the value prop. But in financial services, the user experience and the price are very, very tightly coupled.

1:46:42So, you know, conventional wisdom is you don't want to compete on price. You want to compete on value. But in financial services, I think price is really intricately tied to value. So I don't think for commission-free trading or for a first product, it was solely offering at a lower price. I think that was a part of it. But it was also having a really nice mobile app. Yeah, I agree. Nobody was doing that. I agree, but still to instant onboarding. Oh my gosh. Being able to like onboard and buy your first stock in one session rather than having to like fax documents. For me to go from Scottrade to then taking a bit of a break to Robinhood, because I believe Robinhood is the first stock trading app I downloaded, I think was Robinhood.

1:47:26And I remember it being so incredible that like, oh, my gosh, I could buy a stock for free. Like that was for me at the time life changing. There were other apps, but they were mostly like scrunched down versions of their websites and web view. So they didn't work particularly well. And for a while we were getting questions. How did you guys do your onboarding? so good. Like even things as simple as onboarding, I think we put a lot of craft and care into the design. And, you know, you mentioned the credit card. There's lots of ways that you could work with the economics of the credit card. I mean, some people look at APRs.

1:48:00Should we adjust the APRs? There's the annual subscription fee. There's, you know, the cash back. And so even like making the pricing really good is non-obvious because you have to figure out what the levers that work well for your particular customer is. You would be so disappointed to see my Robinhood portfolio. So disappointed. Like I'm such a better investor than what my Robinhood portfolio indicates. Well, I mean, I don't know. I think, yeah, I wish I could become an investment advisor that now I would be able to talk to you about the stuff. But I have a feeling that you'll do fine. It was funny though.

1:48:47It was the exact next day as soon as he sold it. It's actually uncanny. Uncanny. I had so much. I had a lot of Robinhood stock. I had a lot of Robinhood and I have a ton of Palantir. And I had long calls on all of it. And then, you know, this is, I like went all in right at the peak. I remember it was December of 2020, whichever 2020 the December peak was. And then everything started going down. Someone got margin called. They lost, I'm not going to say who. they lost all of their Robin Hood long calls, Robin Hood equity, as well as Palantir stocks and calls. Also, I do want to mention, since we're wrapping this up, we are going to be donating to Team Water.

1:49:25Mr. Beast is raising$40 million this month. And it's something that would mean a lot to us if you're willing to help out down below in the description. Come join us. We even have Jeff behind the camera helping us out the winner of Beast Games. So given that, it would be really neat if you donated. And Vlad, we really appreciate your time on this. Thank you, guys. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Thanks so much. And join us for Hood Summit in a couple of weeks where we're going to announce some new stuff that I think you'll really enjoy. Deal. Sounds good. Thanks for watching. Till next time.

1:49:54Till next time.