ACCESS with Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger

Happy 2026 from all of us at On with Kara Swisher! We’re ringing in the new year with an episode of ACCESS, a new tech insider podcast from the Vox Media Podcast Network that’s hosted by two highly connected tech journalists, Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger. Each week, Alex and Ellis have revealing conversations with Silicon Valley’s most influential leaders, from the tech titans of today to tomorrow’s most interesting entrepreneurs. On this episode of ACCESS, they speak to Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev to discuss the rise of prediction markets, juggling priorities as a public CEO, and much more. For full video episodes, subscribe on YouTube Follow ACCESS on Instagram and TikTok. Follow Alex's ⁠Sources newsletter⁠ and on ⁠X @alexeheath⁠. Follow Ellis at ⁠Meaning⁠ and on ⁠X @hamburger⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from The Guardian and their new show, Stateside, where journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman use the entire independent reporting resources of The Guardian to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what is actually happening in the world. Join Kai and Carter three times a week as they utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has across news, international coverage, climate, culture, wellness, and more. And The Guardian, not owned by a billionaire, they fearlessly report the facts without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more. And listen wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.

• 0:44Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them ever talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting, to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try it today for free at Odoo.com/Kara. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash Kara.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  I'm Anna Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Chloe Mal. We talk all about her taking on the top job at Vogue, finding her personal style, and her favorite lunch order in the iconic Conde Nast cafeteria. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube, or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 2:05Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. Happy New Year. We're off for the holiday, but we've still got something special for you today. We're bringing you an episode of Access, another great Vox Media podcast. It's hosted by Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger, and it features conversations with Silicon Valley's most influential leaders. On this episode, they're talking to Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev about the rise of prediction markets, his priorities as a CEO, and more. Alex and Ellis always ask smart questions, so don't go anywhere.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  We have to remind ourselves to not get complacent. I try to remind our employees of that as well, and I'm saying it to the employees as much as I'm saying it to myself, right? Like, I know inevitably I've been through so many of these cycles. There's going to be a time in the future where everyone thinks we're shitheads again, hopefully less acute than times before. And generally, I believe the trend will be up. But, you know, it's always cyclical to some degree, and that's just what we sign up for.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  It's Access, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We're back, baby, from San Francisco. Day trip, feeling fresh, feeling alive. At least, I think I am, maybe more so than you, Ellis. Ellis Hamburger, what's up?

• 3:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm not quite as well-practiced as you are yet, Alex, with the, like, go-to-three Facebook events in one week.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:31Speaker 04

  All three separate day trips. This was my first San Francisco day trip. It was fun. I liked it.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  It wasn't a day trip. You spent the night with your brother.

• 3:40Speaker 04

  Yes, technically, but it was like 24 hours, I guess I would say.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a day.

• 3:46Speaker 04

  I need, we established, I need a cooler suitcase.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  Since toting around a 10-year-old TravelPro suitcase is like no Remova. I think, as you said, Ellis, at least get in-away suitcase. And I think you were 100% right about that. If anyone is listening, forming my Christmas list.

• 4:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  Hint, hint.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  It was great. We, uh, we had some good partner meetings, uh, and then we did our first live show with, uh, the fine folks at Google Ventures. Uh, that interview is gonna air next week. That was great. What did you, what did you think of the first live pod experience?

• 4:24Speaker 04

  It was fun. I mean, I'm not much of a stool guy. I don't love to sit on stools. I don't know. I don't want to do like the Donald Trump Jr. Like hyper straight sitting on the stool posture. But I also don't want to slouch. You know what I'm saying?

• 4:39Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 4:40Speaker 04

  I was also holding my daylight tablet, tablet, which was misbehaving a little bit and I could not get Android to increase the size of the font on the screen. So you were right, Alex. I was squinting at that a little bit.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:53Speaker 04

  But I thought it went well. I mean, it was a good vibe. Our guest Winston Weinberg of Harvey, which for the life of me, I cannot remember that name, uh, was a lovely guest. And yeah, I guess we'll see how the audio and video look and sound. First time you've done that thing live.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. AI for lawyers. Uh, I appreciated his candidness on things that CEOs normally dodge. Don't want to spoil too much, but I thought it was a pretty good convo. And you know what? We got like three or four Google digs in at a Google Ventures event and they loved it. So I say that's a win-win.

• 5:29Speaker 04

  I think we scared some of the Google Ventures folks a little bit with our first question about the worst advice Google Ventures ever gave you, but we, we brought it back around and they loved us by the end of it.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think for me, what it showed is that, uh, we should do live more often. Like I think when you and I are together, it's just way easier to pick up on little things and interject. And some of the most fun moments are when you can just react in the moment, you know? And it's just so much harder virtually.

• 5:56Speaker 04

  It is. I mean, with virtual, all I've got is like, are you marginally opening your mouth?

• 6:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  To indicate that you may want to speak. That's all I've got in terms of body language.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  We've, we've got Vlad Tenev, the CEO of Robinhood on the show, uh, coming up very soon. Very excited about that, uh, to, to discuss a lot with him, but, uh, there's some other news in your world this week, right?

• 6:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. Uh, had a big launch for a company I'm advising and have been helping since they were an itty bitty baby startup a couple of years ago. They were actually one of my very first clients at Meaning back when they were called M1. And they'd been building in stealth, which isn't quite as common these days. But the reason for that is because they've been evolving the product from something similar to maybe what Granola and some of the other note takers were offering a couple of years ago to being very vertical, specific, kind of in the way that like Harvey, as we talk about on that, on that next episode, is building for lawyers. I think we're starting to see that creating the right interface for different audiences takes something from being a rapper,

• 7:03Speaker 04

  which, as you say on the show, is like, used to be a derogatory thing, to actually being a potential smash hit. And so essentially what Beside is, is it's kind of like they rebuilt the phone and the messages app with a new phone number for you, for people who work on their phones all day. Like, as they wrote on their blog, there are like 100 million Americans, like, real estate agents, contractors, plumbers, truck dispatchers, who like, work on their phone, like, phone, phone?

• 7:33Speaker 03

  Journalists.

• 7:34Speaker 04

  FaceTime audio.

• 7:35Speaker 03

  I'm on calls.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, journalists as well. And yet, they can answer less than half of the calls that they get just because they're working all day.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  I have too many sources calling me, Ellis. I can't, I can't answer at all. Yeah.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So it's kind of like a combination of an AI receptionist with an AI note taker that deeply gets to know you. And apparently it's taken off. Yeah, they just raised $32 million. And so, yeah, I'm excited to have Maxime, the CEO, on the pod in a few weeks.

• 8:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  I think my favorite thing about their launch today, though, is they did like a fashion photo shoot with like, less glamorous users, I guess I would say, like, in tech. I mean, we just got back from San Francisco and like, every single billboard is for like, your chief people officer.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:20Speaker 04

  Like, how about the grandma who runs the winery, or the, you know, Joe the plumber? Or someone who does insurance or something like that? Like, these are people who probably need the tech more than we do to increase our to-do list efficiency by 8%. People who like, can't stand the busy work that they have to do all day, every day. And so, yeah, I like that they're trying to build for a different customer than the average.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I saw your tweet. What is grandma-centric design?

• 8:51Speaker 04

  I just like the idea that everybody in tech always talks about user-centered design, but the user is usually like a designer in San Francisco that they're designing for. See, I'm bullish on grandma-centered design. I actually think AI is like absolutely perfect for this. Like grandma doesn't know how to vibe code nap, or even what that means, let alone create her own receptionist for like her, her small business. But with this software, you can essentially tell the AI how you want to answer the phone, what questions you wanted to ask, have it input it all into a document or a form for you, and then it's done. It's like, is that not the dream of like natural language programming or coding? And for an

• 9:33Speaker 04

  audience that, like I said, probably needs it more than we do.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is funny when you go to SF. We're at Shack 15, which is this new buzzy kind of coworking space in the Ferry Building where GV was having the, the live pod taping. And man, the stuff you just overhear in there, it's like, yeah, this is such a bubble. You know, like you, I was walking to the bathroom and it was multiple people talking about their VC funds. You like, you'll walk by, I'll be like, oversubscribed, the round's full. Like, you know, just like, things that would feel meme-y or like something on a TV show, if you were outside of San Francisco, but are just so normal. And I like leaving and coming back. I am going back tomorrow for another AI conference, Cerebral Valley.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Shout out Eric Newcomer. It's a great AI conference. But I like leaving and, leaving and going because it gives me a little bit of a outsider's perspective, even though I'm there a ton. And I still am routinely like, I can't believe this is actually this place. I mean, maybe this is how San Franciscans feel when they come to LA and they go to a coffee shop and it's people talking about their script or something, right? Like every city has this microcosm, but just the opposite of GCD is what we experienced at, at the Ferry Building, I think.

• 10:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, if you're into this stuff, it's pretty fun, right? Like, I remember my first trip as a reporter to San Francisco, and I went to This coffee shop called The Mill and there's Mike Krieger, like the co-creator of Instagram, just like doing something on his laptop. And you know, to us, those kinds of people are celebrities, right? And then on the plane ride back today, I'm on the plane with Aziz Ansari and Queens of the Stone Age.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Are you serious?

• 11:21Speaker 04

  On the, yeah, so I guess I got a bit of. Yeah, yeah, we make an eye contact a couple of times. Shout out Aziz.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  Did you get him to subscribe?

• 11:30Speaker 04

  Oh, I played it cool. I played it cool. So what are you going to tomorrow? Worth going to San Francisco twice in one week?

• 11:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it will have been over by the time this comes out, but Eric Newcomer, who does a great newsletter on Substack, Newcomer and podcast, does this Cerebral Valley AI Summit every year. This is like the third year I've gone every year, I think. And he has a bunch of great AI founders, investors all get together for a big powwow. And there's a bunch of like networking and it's a really good for me just temperature check on the state of the industry. It's fun to look back at each year when I do my recap to see how the conversation shifted. Like, I think the last time I went, everyone was paranoid about the scaling laws and has AI hit its limits?

• 12:18Speaker 03

  You know, this was, I think, you know, this was way before GPT-5, but it was like, are we going to keep getting gains out of training? And, you know, because it's also like a bunch of researchers are there. And so it's always fun. I'll be curious to see what the the temperature is. I imagine it's going to be a lot of AI bubble stuff this time. But yeah, I'm going to go back for that. And I mean, Lord willing, right? I tweeted this the day we left for SF, protect Flighty at all costs. It actually went pretty viral because, you know, the flights are, flights are rough right now. And if you are not a Flighty user, they are not sponsoring us, but shout out Flighty.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  It is a great app for tracking your flights. It actually saved me from being stuck on the tarmac until about 3 a.m. last night. So I moved my flight up because of the tarmac shacker it's got. So that's a great app, really great app.

• 13:12Speaker 04

  How many hashtag sources are you hoping to come out of this event with? Do you have like a quota for each event you go to?

• 13:18Speaker 03

  No, I'm gonna see existing sources. I always make new ones. You know, I really think pounding the pavement, so to speak, is the returns are very hard to quantify in the near term, but very real in the long term.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  It's almost impossible for me to point to the impact of all of this in real life networking that I have always made a concerted effort to do, like the impact of it on my career, but it's been immense. I mean, it's obviously easier when you don't have kiddos, but and your flights make it on time. So we'll see, but for now, I'm gonna do it as long as I don't keep getting sick, so.

• 14:03Speaker 04

  What does one say? I would love to add you as a source on Signal. Like, where do you add someone these days?

• 14:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, Signal is where it gets real. You know, sometimes the best sources, you never have that conversation. It's just a natural thing. It's like falling in love, you know? It's like falling in source.

• 14:24Speaker 04

  Sure, yeah. Can you give us a pick-up line for making a new source?

• 14:29Speaker 03

  I usually lead with like something I've heard. It's not a line, but I lead with like a little gossip to try to stir the pot. You know, you can't just be a taker. You gotta be a giver.

• 14:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's actually interesting. That reminds me, back when, I feel like back when I was at Snap, sometimes you would say something to me, like, oh, I heard blank. And you wouldn't even ask me a question. But what am I gonna do? Just sit there and then I just start talking? Not that I shared anything.

• 14:56Speaker 03

  No, you didn't.

• 14:57Speaker 04

  Exactly what you were doing.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  But it is a good strategy because no one wants to like be awkward when someone says something and they share something interesting. Like, it makes you wanna say something back, so.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  Sometimes the best question is not a question at all.

• 15:15Speaker 04

  Perfect. Okay, well, let's ask Vlad some questions. Shall we kick it to Vlad?

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's kick it to Vlad.

• 15:22Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from The Guardian. Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack these days. Social media feeds, cable news, and subscription-based news outlets might be able to give you one version of the news, but not in the way that you need. You want news fast, but slow enough to actually absorb the information. Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman is here to do just that. The podcast tries to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions regarding the world at large at your own pace. Three times a week, hosts Kai Wright and Carter Sherman bring their expertise together to showcase different and engaging perspectives regarding the world today. They will use their collective knowledge to discuss the news, international affairs,

• 16:05Kara Swisher?

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• 16:26Speaker 05

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• 16:56Kara Swisher?

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• 18:03Speaker 03

  Vlad, good to see you. What's a, what's a post-earnings week like for you? I'm curious, especially lately. What's, it's only Tuesday when we're recording this, but what's it been like?

• 18:12Speaker 02

  It's just back to work. I think we spend very little time actually

• 18:18Speaker 02

  digesting the earnings. I mean, we know them ahead of time, so pretty much that same day, we're, we're back to work, working on what's the next product we're shipping, you know, now, now we're towards the end of the year, so we're finalizing the product roadmap and the financial plan for next year. So back, back to business, you know, and we've got a product event coming up in early December, just in a couple of weeks. So kicking, that's starting to kick into high gear.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  I think where we'd like to start, though, is prediction markets, because it's something that everyone's talking about. I think a lot of people are starting to experience it for the first time through the context of sports betting. But elections, I was at Kalshi HQ in New York with Turek last week for the New York mayoral race, watching them, the dashboards kind of live and seeing how that was playing out on prediction markets. It was really interesting to see how early everything was getting called and how definitively it was getting called before traditional media. And I know you have a lot of thoughts about prediction markets and how to relate to the future of media. But for people who are new to this idea of prediction markets, can you just kind of take a step back and

• 19:30Speaker 03

  help us understand why you think the world needs this, why this is a, I've heard you call it a new asset class, is that right?

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's definitely a new asset class. They're also, I've called them truth machines. They're, they're actually a mechanism for discovering truth when you're talking about the future. And what I mean by that is it's not, there's all sorts of times where we want to know what the likelihood of something happening is. Presidential election, probably the best example. What's the likelihood that, you know, Trump or Harris would have won the election? The New York City mayor was a recent one. What's the likelihood that, you know, AI will achieve superhuman performance? We have all these questions. And, you know, this is a mechanism where it's not a guess.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  It's not a poll, but it's a real price set by market actors with real skin in the game. And as you've pointed out, they've turned out to be pretty remarkably accurate, especially when compared against alternatives, which are just opinions or polls. And I think the reason this is needed is there's so much information out there right now. I mean, it's easy to create content and to share one's opinion on the internet. Uh, social media has enabled that at large scale, and you're just flooded with content, flooded with opinions. And it's become much more difficult to actually sort out

• 21:08Speaker 02

  what's reliable and what's not. Back, you know, thirty to forty years ago, you used to have Walter Cronkite in the CBS Evening News, and you basically knew that if Walter Cronkite was telling you something, that not only should you believe it, but everyone else around you was probably watching it and would believe it as well. And, and now that sort of like uniformity of shared belief and opinion is gone. And I think prediction markets are a digital and financial answer to that. It's kind of like social media and financial markets coming together to give you really reliable forecasts about the future. I think as a trading product, um, it's, it's interesting because

• 21:53Speaker 02

  a, a lot of people talk about, you know, it as a trading product, and you get these questions about, well, is it just gambling? Is it trading?

• 22:03Speaker 02

  But what you have is the traders are actually creating the information and the information is digestible by a much wider audience. So actually, the vast majority of the people that are touched by prediction markets are those that just want the information. And the folks that are trading and generating that information and doing the work are a minority of the participants. And I think that's what makes it super interesting because, you know, the traders are actually creating this ecosystem, which has much broader mass market value and appeal.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  I want to know what Alice thinks about this. I have a lot of things that I love about the idea of prediction markets and some questions. But Alice, what do you make of this?

• 22:48Speaker 04

  I have a lot of questions, but first, I'm just so fascinated in this idea of accuracy. Why would they be accurate? I realize the incentives are there, but why are they accurate, would you say? If they're kind of taking the temperature of what people think?

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Well, it's empirically demonstrated. I think there have been studies put out there that, you know, the accuracy is quite high, even one month before the event closing date. So obviously, as you get closer, the accuracy typically improves. But what surprised me was, I saw some numbers that, you know, 90% of the time, they get it right, even if you look one month before the closing of the event, which frankly surprised me, the degree to which they're accurate. I think that they're accurate for many reasons, probably the most important of which is,

• 23:48Speaker 02

  people are actually putting money on to, you know, the informed decision and the trade. And so if you're putting money on something, it indicates that you have, you don't just care about it, you're not being flippant, you're not answering a poll. But that's probably the best expression of belief that...

• 24:10Speaker 02

  I can come up with at least.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  My skepticism hat is that I don't know who's on the other side of the trade. If I could see who was making all of these bets, I think I would trust it more. I mean, I trust the results. I mean, you're right. The majority of what I've seen, especially in the context of elections, is they do call it really early. I mean, I remember at Calshi, when I showed up, there was a CBS crew there and they had just called a race. And then Calshi had called it like an hour before. And that's pretty common. And so, you know, you see the results, but at the same time, just my journalist hat is, am I getting like fleeced here somehow? Like, is there someone making money on this other side that has information that I don't? Because this does feel relatively unregulated, right? There's not like SEC oversight.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  Is there of insider trading or even a concept of insider trading? Because like, as a journalist, I sometimes get non-public material information or report it about companies, right? Like, when is the next Gemini model coming, right? There could be a prediction market for that. If I get it confirmed and I report it, I could make a lot of money theoretically. I haven't looked into this. I haven't done it. I'm not saying I would. But I'm just saying it feels like this is a Wild West that doesn't have any regulation. And I'm wondering how you feel about that.

• 25:27Speaker 02

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

• 26:11Speaker 02

  So in my opinion, the best companies that are set up to do this are financial services companies that, or the stakes are so high that they've, we've had to build machinery to monitor transactions and to look out for market integrity over many decades.

• 26:28Speaker 04

  I was looking through your App Store screenshots and I believe that the prediction markets for some sports betting is like the very first screenshot at this point. How do you kind of prioritize the product development internally, you know, between something like this and then you've also got these products for like working on your, you know, IRA or, or something like that? How do you focus your internal team on where things are heading? So those feel like two pretty different things.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, those are under sort of separate teams. So it's, it's not a, it's not an exact trade off. I mean, we have to worry about prioritization and trade offs on a business level. And that's what I spend a lot of my time thinking about.

• 27:10Speaker 04

  Just even like the vision for the company. Those two, those feel like different paths conventionally, I would say.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Well, the, the vision for the company is to become your financial super app. And what we mean by that is, you know, for a long time, Robinhood was people's secondary financial account, right? But, um, uh, so I would say it probably does fit into the secondary financial account vision, but we don't want to just be your secondary financial account. We want to be your primary and secondary. So we believe that Robinhood can be the place where all of your assets and all of your dollars are, are held and we can process all financial transactions. And what we've seen is that, uh, as we add new products, a lot of times engagement and

• 27:59Speaker 02

  usage of our existing products increases. So when we launched retirement, for example, there's a big question internally about whether retirement was going to cannibalize our trading business. And the argument makes some sense theoretically, right? Some people have a certain amount of money. If you believe that, you know, that money's going into Robinhood and maybe before it was going into the individual brokerage account. Now, if half of it goes into the retirement account.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Maybe we would end up hurting ourselves because it would now be going to a place where we would monetize it less. But actually, that didn't end up happening. And what we saw was that the folks that were using retirement actually increased their activity in their individual brokerage accounts. They used us more because it started clicking in their heads that this is now my financial account, right? I do all of my finances here. We saw a similar effect with the credit card. You know, when someone became a primary gold card user with a credit card, we saw a positive impact to brokerage. And again, same reason. I'm a gold member. I'm doing everything with Robinhood.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Let me look around and see if my gold membership actually gets me any other benefits. And if those other products are good, I'll give Robinhood a fair shake and probably first shot at my business.

• 29:29Speaker 04

  I think when you've spent as long and as much time as you have on trying to build trust as you've built all these things over time, I think it makes a lot of sense that that aggregate value, you know, would be increased. The customer's consideration for each new product would be higher than it would have been had it would have been a separate app. But I saw an ad today in the Wall Street Journal that said, if you're looking for a broker that's not also your bookie, we invite you to try public. A different perspective on maybe some of the like conflicts from the producer of this product point of view. Do you have any response to that?

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a funny one. One of the differences between traditional sports betting and prediction markets is that the trades are happening on an exchange with buyers and sellers. And so there's no house that is incentivized to have customers lose, right? So that's sort of the retort to the specific bookie comment. The other thing is a lot of these brokers. You have to understand, there's a competitive marketplace here and not everyone can match our product velocity and how we serve our customers. And obviously, the business has been going very well, not just prediction markets, but you know, last quarter, we had record net deposits into

• 30:48Speaker 02

  the platform. Retirement accounts have just been on a huge influx of assets, 25 billion plus. Gold Card had half a million plus cardholders. So the ecosystem as a whole is very, very strong. Now, prediction markets are the fastest growing business we've ever had.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  And I think we've seen these criticisms before, but what's happening under the hood is our competitors are working as hard as possible to like replicate this. I mean, I think that company was making a lot of hay about how company, how you know, retail shouldn't be trading options and they were kind of against it. And then of course-

• 31:29Speaker 04

  Until they launched it.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  Until they launched options trading.

• 31:33Speaker 04

  Classic comms tactic.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  And now they're incentivizing, now they're incentivizing by giving you contract rebates and things like that. So I think this is just, people have their interests. If I was in their position, I'd probably try to have some kind of media strategy that stems the tide and prevents them from losing customers. And I do think there's a legitimate, like some customers just don't like to see it. And some customers don't like all the products we offer. So there's a legitimate challenge that we have. As we add more products, how do we make the experience cohesive?

• 32:21Speaker 02

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

• 32:50Speaker 03

  I think on the last earnings, you said that the prediction business in October was bigger for you all than the whole last quarter combined.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  It had been doubling quarter over quarter.

• 33:00Speaker 03

  What so what is what is driving this? Is it? Is it mostly sports? Is it? Is this just speedrunning all the sports betting companies? Or what is it really fundamentally?

• 33:10Speaker 02

  I mean, sports is a big chunk of it for sure, but we're also seeing engagement across in non-sports categories. For a while, our prediction markets business was like sports only. And we recently started rolling out to other categories like economics, technology, politics. Now we have over a thousand contracts. And one of the things we believe is that the non-sports landscape is going to evolve very, very rapidly. And there's really interesting things that you'll be able to do that haven't been built yet. But yeah, sports has been a huge driver. Also, anytime we roll out a new product, it takes time for customers to understand it. A lot of people have never heard of prediction markets.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  It's a little bit more technical and arcane. And, you know, the dynamics are different than than what they're used to with traditional sports books. So as as they become familiar with it, as there's more events that they hear about, as we get a little bit better at incorporating it and integrating it into the product experience, which I think there's a lot of room for us to improve even further. We see growth. So. And I think there's tailwinds as well. And I don't think that there's so many ways we can continue to improve it and make it more useful and better.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Look at you. You're a veteran public C E O already. Tailwinds. You got all the words.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  I love the word tailwinds, actually. That's I think I picked that up from my CFO. It's like, it's a romantic. It's like you're a sailor out at sea, you know?

• 34:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:47Speaker 04

  Any particular contracts you hope to see personally in the near future?

• 34:51Speaker 02

  I'm really interested in contracts that are more personalized. And what I mean by that is not that, you know? You'll be trading a contract on Alex's status or whatnot. But really that, you know, let's say you were concerned about flood or fire risk in your primary residence. I mean, maybe you submit some information about yourself to a transparent market and you get a real time price for market makers. And I think you can imagine that that could be disruptive to the insurance industry. Right? Like, there's no reason why I have to pick up the phone and, you know, have

• 35:35Speaker 02

  these giant companies pricing my risk in a opaque way when, you know, the entire financial market with all of its liquidity and everyone plugged in can can kind of do that.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  Regu- I mean, regulators are going to come crashing in on this if it gets to that level, don't you think?

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Well, I think you already see it with weather contracts, precipitation. You have it sort of in a generalized sense. There's there's fire contracts, wildlife. Uh, that's the whole purpose. That that's how this industry started, right? Is people hedging their their risk. Now, why does it have to be only available to farmers and people running large institutions? When individuals would like to have certain risks that they're legally required to to hedge in some cases? And so, yeah, not not to say that there's not going to be stakeholders that are going to fight prediction markets. You're already seeing it.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  But but I think the power and the efficiency is just undeniable.

• 36:39Speaker 03

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

• 37:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, farmers, hedge funds, what they already do and bring it to everyone. And that is disruption in the classic sense, and it has positives and negatives to it, no? I mean, I'm sure you're also thinking about like, yeah, there are going to be unforeseen externalities of this at scale, right?

• 37:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. And by the way, there's no leverage in in our prediction markets currently. So they're they're they're fully cash collateralized. Um, oh, it's a longstanding criticism of every financial market that they're speculators. But I think, I mean, when you look about, when you look at the futures markets, when they became accessible to retail several decades ago, it was the same thing, you know, people were trading uh grain and oil and orange juice futures and pork bellies. And, you know, there there were speculators in there and a lot of people had concerns about that. Uh, every financial market had speculation, but I think the thing most people don't understand is

• 38:23Speaker 02

  speculation is actually an important part about uh it's necessary for the functioning of these markets. You can't just have people hedging, you can't just have arbitrage.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  Even if you read The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, you know, one of the seminal books of value investing, he talks about how speculation is actually integral to the the proper functioning. So I don't think we can get rid of it now. I don't think everyone should be speculating and certainly not with a huge chunk of their capital. But, you know, we we believe in markets, and so I think this this activity is actually crucial to the proper functioning of of all of the markets.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  Would you ever bake that idea into the products where Robin Hood says, hey, like, you can do this, but just FYI, you're about to put forty percent of your portfolio in something that's a little YOLO. Like, are, could you guide people more that way?

• 39:18Speaker 02

  We we actually do a little bit. I mean, um, for example, when you have a leveraged ETF or, you know, a similar high risk instrument, we let people know, you know, that this is something that's that's leveraged, it's not for long term holding. Um, we also.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  You know, indicate if something's like gotten to a point of of large volatility. Like we, we give those little alerts if a company is bankrupt. You know, or has filed bankruptcy. So there's examples where we definitely let customers know. I think it's also a delicate balance because if you're an active trader and you know what you're doing. We don't want to put so many frictions in your way because then you'll just get annoyed and start, you know, using the products of of our competitors that don't do those things. You know, the, the state of Massachusetts was like historically very protectionist about this stuff.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  So I, I don't know if you guys remember, there's a story about how they banned their citizens from participating in the Apple IPO in the eighties. You know, at the time, it was like, oh, this is risky. Most people shouldn't be. And I think in general, it was from a good place. But then imagine multiple decades later, this is like an example of, it's sort of a negative example of nanny statism gone, gone completely wrong. I mean, you've, you've prevented people from like exercising their point of view and in hindsight, making a lot of money.

• 40:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's true. But I also feel like there's a big difference between like an outright ban and like those commercials you see on TV that say, we're going to give you $500 for free if you bet five. That know that when someone shows up, they're probably going to lose it because that's the only way that they can make that offer, you know? How do you think about that stuff when you see it on TV? Or maybe even when PMs come to you with, with ideas that you know would work, but might feel a little icky.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  I think we're generally pretty conservative about, about those things. I mean, obviously there's, there's always a gray area where there's discussions, but we benefit. I mean, if you look at Robin Hood as a business. Our revenue scales with assets under custody. And so the healthy customer relationship for us is someone whose account balance monotonically increases over time. So, you know, it doesn't bother us if you're allocating some of your portfolio and you're trading options, you're trading futures, you're trading prediction markets. But we're actually quite aligned with our users in the sense that like we we benefit

• 42:06Speaker 02

  as their account balances grow and their relationship deepens with us. And that's kind of how we've been successful. If you look at asset growth on the platform over time, it's not a churn and burn business where people put money in and then their account goes to zero. Like this is a compounding asset business.

• 42:27Speaker 04

  I'm just, I'm a product person. I'm just so fascinated by, you know, this kind of conceptual idea that maybe you bring some money into a product and there's two buttons there. One is to put it in retirement and one is to put it on the Packers. You know, if times were ever tough, you could see a world where someone comes and says, hey, let's make the Packers button a little shinier or a little bigger or make it number one in the rankings. And that's what I think brings some interesting decisions, being a platform that includes both. So yeah, your job is not an easy one.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think that historically it's been very difficult for a regulated business to actually make recommendations at that level, right? Because the areas where you could make recommendations are pretty circumscribed. You know, there are all kinds of things, govern, making a recommendation to open a new account or how much money you should invest in a certain thing. And our solution to that is not to get away from it. We we make recommendations, but they have to be in specific areas where we make it clear that, yeah, we're we're telling you we have a fiduciary duty. We we think that, you know, you should invest in this.

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• 46:01Speaker 03

  Another thing I know you're thinking a lot about is tokenization. And I know this is a big priority. You've tokenized quote unquote, a lot of companies so far. You want to do more. As someone who is even, you know, versed in these topics, it's a little heady for me to understand why the world needs this.

• 46:21Speaker 03

  And I know you're, you know, crypto is a big thing for Robinhood. It's a huge business. This has, you know, synergy with that. But explain it to me like I'm a middle schooler. Like, why in the world are you trying to tokenize companies?

• 46:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. On public companies outside the US, it's quite difficult to get access to public companies. A lot of people don't have a traditional broker that's available in their country. But they do have crypto firms. So crypto firms have become the gateway to get access to US dollars. I think in the same way, tokenized stocks will become the gateway to US assets. There might not be a local broker that is low cost. But if you get the stocks on the blockchain, you get certain benefits like 24/7, instant settlement, better economics on stock loan and borrow. But the main thing outside the US is is actually just access.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  Now, within the US, it's a little bit more incremental. And so I think adoption will be slower. I think this will be, I think tokenization of public stocks will be an ex-US phenomenon first. As we've demonstrated, I mean, we've gone live with it ex-US, right? But in the US, it's a little bit more incremental. You're going from 24/5 trading, which we offer, to 24/7. You've got instant settlement, which means that a GameStop situation can never happen again.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  Oh, thank God.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  That's a nice benefit for me, maybe less so for for most people.

• 47:53Speaker 02

  I think stock loan and borrow could be disrupted. It's a very opaque lending and borrowing market for shares that I think could be improved. And you have some benefits of portability and self custody, which, and this is maybe slightly contrary interest to say, but you can make it so that your stocks can just easily leave your brokerage. Like, you're, you're not going to be dependent on a broker. You can transact and trade tokenized stocks as long as the blockchain is up. So private companies are a different story, very hard to get access to even in the US.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  And there's problems because even if you're accredited and you want to transact in private shares, your options for doing that in a simple and easy way are pretty manual. And the alternative trading systems that exist that try to provide real time matching generally don't have very much liquidity. So you could be waiting quite a while before you could make a trade. And when you do make that trade, it's it's kind of a manual process where you're sending DocuSigns to people. If if you guys have done that.

• 49:05Speaker 03

  Not a ton of liquidity in the secondary market unless it's like a really hot name.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, but if you plug it into crypto technology, and and I wrote a piece on this in the Washington Post a little bit under a year ago, you solve the liquidity problem because you're plugging this into a network, a global network where, you know, you've seen meme coins get billions of dollars of of liquidity within a few hours. And I think I think blockchains have shown that they've been very effective at directing and aggregating liquidity to assets that people actually want. So you don't have to build a whole exchange from from the ground up. You can leverage the existing usage and liquidity on crypto.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  That makes sense, but I've heard you also say that there's this digital nimbyism going on with companies to this idea when you go to them and you're like, let me put your stock on the blockchain. They're not huge fans. You you first, I think, pitched this with OpenAI and SpaceX. I don't think they took to it too well. Do you find that you're still meeting a lot of resistance here? Or are you optimistic? Where are you at now?

• 50:10Speaker 02

  I I think eventually it'll happen and we're looking to accelerate it, but.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  I mean, we, we, we know which way this is going to go. It's, it's very, very clear. We have a product IPO access, which we launched for our own IPO in 2021 and our own IPO was for its size, the largest retail allocation at the time that, you know, north of 20%. And we had some other companies use it as well, uh, who are willing to, uh, go on the journey with us. But by and large in 2021, when I had this product, it took a lot of cajoling and, and a lot of just like asking for favors to, to make sure retail gets access to these IPOs. And we've got, when we would get the allocations, they were pretty small.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  It was like, okay, well, we'll do, we'll, we'll do Vlad a favor. We'll give them, you know, 1% of the IPO, 2%, whatever. But there was skepticism, you know, executives were hearing from their bankers that is a bit of a strange thing. And if you're an executive taking your company public, most of the time it's just, let me get through this so I can focus on my business. I don't necessarily want to be an innovator in providing retail access to, to these instruments. But I do want to be an innovator in that. So I worked very hard and, and I, I pounded the pavement. We got a good IPO suite. And then the market basically shut for a couple of years.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  And an interesting thing happened in the interim. I think it became more obvious to, to the public. It had been obvious to me for a long time, but more obvious to the entire startup community that public companies that have retail fanbases and followings, uh, get rewarded in some cases with pretty, pretty high multiples, right? You see Palantir, you see some others. And now when the IPO window opened, basically everyone's coming to us and asking us if they could have feedback on their retail strategy. How can they engage retail more? And, you know, a large number of the IPOs that have been on consequence have come to us and actually listed on the platform and in some cases given retail bigger and bigger chunks.

• 52:26Speaker 02

  And now they're talking about it. So I think the same thing's going to happen with private markets as well. We're kind of in the phase where it's a new thing. We're kind of the only ones that are, that are trying to do it. Nobody really wants to innovate when they're raising a financing round, but. The setup is very similar to IPO access. Like it's, it's the same set of constraints. And my prediction is within the next two years, it'll probably be faster than IPO access. Probably even, probably even one year, it'll be normalized. And, and you'll have the best companies available to, to retail. Because they'll just see that having that retail fan base and, and the supporters as early as possible is going to be immensely valuable.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  You look at AI in particular.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  Where are the fans? I mean, it's a very popular technology. Adoption is very, very quick. But who's defending the AI companies in public? It's basically their investors and like the community of AI researchers. And the general perception, I, I would say, if you're looking at, you know, what's happening in the media and even in public discourse. There's a lot of fear and uncertainty and it leans negative. I think there was an article talking about how this is like, at the same time, the fastest adopted technology, but also the least popular. Right? And, and that's, I don't think that's a healthy combination because I think that if the public is against AI.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  It's gonna, it's gonna, it's gonna be a headwind, not, not a tailwind for, for the industry and for innovation. And I think the best way is, is to get people owning this stuff and not just have it go to the, the high net worth individuals and the institutions. But get it distributed to, uh, regular people. I, I think it'll be good for the technology and I, I think my opinion will, uh, at some point, hopefully be a little bit more widespread.

• 54:27Speaker 04

  You're working on a lot of things right now. I saw you launched 10 new product suites in 2025. Curious how you're running the company differently now than previously. I, uh, feel like I heard that you don't have any one on ones. You have over 20 direct reports. How do you think about all that?

• 54:45Speaker 02

  I, I've got a great, great GMs, a great team. The core Robin Hood team, the, the people that are running the company, making decisions. A lot of them have been around for, for a long time and gone through our share of, of crises together. Right? Uh, not just GameStop, but also.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  The IPO and the subsequent, you know, market correction, um, you know, the crypto market and the SVB crisis. So we've gone through some ups and downs and I think.

• 55:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. How's your blood pressure? That's a lot of crises right there.

• 55:23Speaker 02

  I stopped tracking it, you know, for a while I was very, I don't know if you guys felt the same. I was wearing my Apple watch and I was thinking about all this health stuff and now I've gone very mechanical. I'm like, I don't want to see it. Um, yeah, I, I kind of know when I haven't slept well, so I don't, I don't need the device. I'm, I'm becoming more of a Luddite as I, as, uh, as we, as we keep rolling out more business lines. But yeah, that, that's really the short of it. I think I have a great team around me. I think we're, we're working well together. Culture is something you evolve over time when you make mistakes and you, you, uh, you fix them. And I think we iterate pretty quickly. I think you, you have to, but we're sort of not apologetic about being a company that wants to move fast.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  And actually innovate and.

• 56:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, you, you, you've seen some crazy lows and it feels like right now you're at this insane high. I think you're the second top performing stock this year. You're on this product tear.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  I know. I wish we did the interview a, a week ago.

• 56:24Speaker 03

  You were the top?

• 56:27Speaker 03

  Well, you, well, there's still weeks left in the year. Um, but do those lows.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  Let's recheck it. It might've changed today. I don't know.

• 56:34Speaker 03

  We'll recheck it. Um, and also on the last earnings call, I caught the joke about your, you had like a CO award that kicked in because of the stock gains. And I think your salary is going back to like 40K or something. Is that right?

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, but pretty much. I think this was a, um, not, not a lot of people caught this, but I had some grants back in 2019. We were a private company that had share price targets of around $50 and a hundred. And, you know, a year ago, the stock was trading at, I think in the twenties. And then, of course, with the tariffs, it dipped back down. So I don't think that we had forecasted all of those rewards hitting, but here we are.

• 57:15Speaker 03

  There you are.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  So that was the cause for our mix, our miss on tax expense and employee bonus accrual.

• 57:21Speaker 03

  What's your bonus? Okay, cool. How do you keep yourself grounded in a moment like this, especially when you're going into next year? You are full on founder mode.

• 57:33Speaker 03

  I'm sure your board trusts you immensely after this year, not that they didn't before. But how do you, how do you ground yourself and keep looking around the corner for what could disrupt you, so to speak?

• 57:45Speaker 02

  Look, there's, we have to remind ourselves to not get complacent. I try to remind our employees of that as well. And I'm saying it to the employees as much as I'm saying it to myself, right? Like, I know inevitably I've been through so many of these cycles. There's going to be a time in the future where everyone thinks we're shitheads again.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  Hopefully, less acute than times before. And generally, I believe the trend will be up. But, you know, it's, it's always cyclical to some degree. And that's just what we sign up for.

• 58:17Speaker 03

  Who didn't want to talk to you before? Who wants to talk to you now? Let's name some names.

• 58:21Speaker 02

  I mean, honestly, I don't know. No, I didn't get too many podcast invites back in 2019.

• 58:28Speaker 03

  That's fair. That's fair. Well, we're glad to have you on. We met over a year ago. I don't remember where the stock price was, but it was early on in the predictions markets thing. It was before the US really opened up.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  Before the election.

• 58:40Speaker 03

  Is, yeah, before that. And you were talking to me about it in the context of the media and how you were thinking about the media. Because you have a media arm, you're doing a social network now. And I hadn't really heard of it that way. And actually, yeah, we should, we should actually just go to that. The, the social network thing, I think Ellis and I are both fascinated by me as someone. Well, we both covered social networks and then Ellis worked at one. But you're, you're rolling this out. It's not fully out. But are you, are you really taking on finance Twitter here? Is this, is this the goal? You're going to go toe to toe with Elon on this?

• 59:14Speaker 02

  I mean, maybe. It's not the way we think of it, but the, I think we have certain advantages. We have a highly engaged customer base that's rather large. We have the ability to to build great technology. I mean, you you might have seen where we've been live streaming our product events.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  And our earnings with live video in the app. And and we've been able to include interactivity as well. So we could run polls and and different sort of like UI elements.

• 59:48Speaker 04

  I thought you were gonna say the users could slime you or something if they felt like it.

• 59:51Speaker 03

  Next earnings.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  It felt like it was too boring. Yeah, we we should add that. But um, Open Door last week actually livestreamed their own earnings in our app. So um, we we've been, we've been working on building this like earnings, information and data ecosystem. You can ask shareholder Q and A. And I think the the interesting opportunity for us is actually becoming the place where the ideas are generated and shared. And can we be the first place where you actually post something interesting? That has like financial or business or economic content. Um, and and I think the advantage that we have is because we're gonna be where the social

• 1:00:34Speaker 02

  network is and the transaction. We we can solve the verification problem to make sure people aren't, you know, faking their their trades and posting inaccurate information. And the more assets we add, so now with with prediction markets and options and futures and equities, you can imagine the the stronger kind of that network effect would be like you could actually get diverse content, it's interesting, lots of opinions. And can we become the place where you actually post first? Um, I I think that's gonna be the challenge, but if if we get that, I think it could be the best source of business and financial content out there.

• 1:01:16Speaker 03

  You know, if this works, you are gonna get the call from Elon and he's gonna go, what the hell are you doing? You know that's coming.

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  I I don't know that that's the case necessarily. And I think to some degree, a lot of the big social media products are looking to add finance in there. So, you know, ra- rather than us just sitting around and and getting disrupted, can we try to figure out what what the best way is to integrate that into into one experience?

• 1:01:45Speaker 04

  It's definitely a compelling package with social 24/7 markets. I think I saw the top replies to one of your tweets about, uh, you know, these kind of always on markets idea. It was a bunch of memes of people looking very tired, like, I'm tired, boss. You know, we all know this is fun, but it's also addictive. I mean, I I don't even bet any money on fantasy sports, but I had to stop because every single time I was on the toilet or up late at night and couldn't sleep, I'm looking at it, you know? I wonder what advice do you give to young people today to kind of come up with these new norms and modulate that behavior? You know?

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:22Speaker 04

  Because it is fun. You feel like there's always more to learn, uh, whether it's with stocks or or, uh, uh, the the prediction markets.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I I think it's very, very tough for for a young person now when you have so much. You're bombarded by digital stimulus.

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  And, you know, I I recognize that I have a mobile app that people use, but I actually legitimately don't think. I mean, if if my if my kids spent more time, uh, investing and learning how to trade on on Robinhood, I don't think I would feel as bad because, you know, it's just there's social media, there's YouTube, there's Minecraft and.

• 1:03:02Speaker 04

  Better than shrimp, Jesus, doom scroll, what we're saying?

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I I just think that, um, it it is a problem and it's something that I I worry about. And I'd like to contribute to making it better for sure and, uh, eventually scale that. But yeah, if if I had to think about like one personal cause that I legitimately really am worried about, it's just like. Digital addiction. So I don't have all the answers.

• 1:03:34Speaker 03

  You said, yeah, you said as Robin Hood scales, you found yourself wanting to be more of a Luddite. I mean, that's interesting, right? A lot of the founders who run these digital products and these platforms, you talk to them and it's like you get drained yourself, right? It's a lot.

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's unnatural to be in front of a screen for so much of your life. And, you know, when the smartphone came out, it was just this superpower, right? The people that were good at using smartphones, I think, had an advantage. But now, you know, we're spending so much of our time on smartphones that it's become a tax. It's almost like, you know, if the person next to you is using it more, you're at a disadvantage. And I think it's unfortunate that technology kind of evolves in that direction.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  Well, maybe we can end it here. You're live streaming your earnings. You just did it at the Chase Center. I imagine these will get more ornate each earnings. I'm expecting more spectacle. Are we going to get a pre-earnings walk-in where you've got the designer bag, the jacket, you know, the shades?

• 1:04:37Speaker 04

  Final countdown is playing.

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, final countdown is playing. Are we gonna, is that coming or are we just gonna do post?

• 1:04:43Speaker 02

  You know, the inspiration for earnings was an NBA post-game interview.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:04:48Speaker 02

  Right, where we thought to ourselves, okay, after, let's say, the analogy is like game three of the NBA Finals. It's not over. It's not game seven. It's actually, you're somewhere near the beginning of the series. But if you have a good quarter, it's sort of like interviewing LeBron after the Lakers win. He's got a little bit of swagger, you know, he's thanking his teammates. He's looking good. Maybe he's wearing his shades. If the Lakers lose and you're interviewing LeBron, he's got the towel on his head. Maybe he throws some shade on his teammates, but it's informative and entertaining either way. So if they could make it so that an NBA post-game interview is worth watching,

• 1:05:33Speaker 02

  we should be able to make earnings worth watching as well.

• 1:05:37Speaker 04

  I mean, it's not easy, is it? It's like, how much can you really say that you aren't prepared to say?

• 1:05:42Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, we've been able to do quite a lot. Turns out quite a lot and it's been baby steps. Like, we went on video and now I'm at the point where. If I'm reading a script, it's hard for me to not sound robotic. It's hard enough even without a script, to be honest. So I operate best when I just have like an idea of what I want to talk about, but the rest of it is kind of extemporaneous in a sense. So I think we've been able to make it more engaging while still obviously providing the necessary information and communicating the results well. And hopefully it leads to an investing public that's more informed because they're actually watching and listening to the earnings calls.

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  And I think in order to do that, we have to make them a little bit more engaging. It's a nice microcosm of the Robinhood product strategy as well. It's like, you know, yeah, if people are more interested in this stuff, they'll engage with it more. And I think in the same way, if people are more interested in their finances, they'll engage with their finances more and you'll get great outcomes as a result.

• 1:06:48Speaker 03

  Well, next time if you walk out with the shades on in the pre-game walkout, we'll know that it was a good quarter, right?

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  Well, I've tried the shades thing. Actually, if you saw my France event, I wore shades. Now, there was a debate about this and, you know, the folks that I was working with were like, don't do the shades. If people can't see your eyes, it's untrustworthy and they're not going to like it. And the funny thing was after that event, if you see the Twitter photos, the ones where I'm wearing shades, people are like, oh, he looks like a scammer. And then, you know, the ones without the shades were fine.

• 1:07:27Speaker 03

  Okay, that's bad advice.

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  I learned that it's actually true. Yeah, shades are no good.

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  Shades are no good. Vlad, really appreciate this. Thanks so much.

• 1:07:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, always a pleasure.

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  Thanks to Vlad for coming on the show.

• 1:07:40Speaker 04

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• 1:08:00Speaker 04

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• 1:08:04Speaker 03

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• 1:08:13Speaker 03

  See you next week.

• 1:08:14Speaker 04

  Bye.

• 1:08:16Speaker 03

  You always got to do the bye, don't you?

• 1:08:23Kara Swisher?

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