FULL SEND PODCAST - Vladimir Tenev | Ep. 184

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

Presented by Happy Dad Hard Seltzer. Find Happy Dad near you http://happydad.com/find (21+ only). Video is available on http://youtube.com/fullsendpodcast/videos. Follow Nelk Boys on Instagram http://instagram.com/nelkboys. Part of the Shots Podcast Network (shots.com). You can listen to the audio version of this podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts & anywhere you listen to podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All right, guys, welcome back to the Full Send podcast. We have Vlad, the founder of Robin Hood. Very, very interesting episode. Before I get into it, you guys know the deal. The big game is this Sunday. I am absolutely nuking, nuking a prize picks lineup this weekend. I don't know exactly what it is.

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Use responsibly. For help, call 1-800-426-2537 or visit nCP gambling.org. I like that one too, but I just, I don't want to get a John Mayor, or like a watch name John Mayor, you know? Are you AP or no? I know a little bit. I don't have any. Is it a ceramic skeleton? The, is it a Royal Oak?

Yeah. I don't get paid quite enough yet to get that, but yeah, hopefully in a year or two when these guys Well, Stadis won timepiece trading hat and shirt on the last three points. What do you have there? Is that also a presidential? Oh, shut. I thought it's on me. Yeah.

Look at mine. I know yours. So you're a big watch guy? Uh, I wouldn't say big. I kind of got into it recently. Yeah. I like the mechanics and the engineering of it, you know? Yeah.

So I started just like, um, getting. complicated complications. Yeah, so sort of got into it through that. What's that piece you got there? This is a Skydweller. Wow. Yeah. That's nice.

It's the most complicated Rolex ever made. So it's like a big, thick, complicated guy. Not to talk about other podcasts, but the acquired podcast. I do, yeah. Yeah. Have you heard the Rolex one? No, I have that one save. I'm in the middle of the Google one right now.

Oh, the three-parter? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's a good. good one too really good one part three really good oh it happened there but yeah basically like Rolex hasn't made a new watch in like 75 years this is kind of the first one really yeah wow like a new fundamental mechanism so this is a it's a big I think the sky dweller is like a relatively big deal because they just like they're a company that it's like a Porsche 9-11 right once you get

the basic design you just kind of like makes small tweaks so so how many are you the first one to have that no no no I got this retail. Yeah. One of the last to have it. Well, we all got a roll his on, right? Yeah. No.

John doesn't. John's got a half. Aalohi. Yeah, I got to get my steps. We got the president of Happy Eye with us for this one. John, we had to sub-Salem out. And we also got Vlad, the CEO, co-founder of Robin Hood. The biggest, the biggest platform in the world in your space, right?

Thank you guys. Yeah. Glad to be here. Harmonic, too. Harmonic, too. Harmonic, too. Harmonic. We want to talk about that, too.

Yeah, yeah. Do we know how many users Robin Hood currently has? About 27 million. Yeah, 27 million accounts, mostly in the U.S., but large and increasingly growing international presence, too. I'm really interested. I just would be sick to take it back and just kind of get your story of how you started. How did you get into launching the app, Robin Hood? It was a bit of a meandering path.

You know, when I grew up, I didn't really know about entrepreneurs. So I came to the West Coast to go to Stanford. And Stanford, as you guys probably know, is sort of a epicenter of entrepreneurial activity. I mean, you not only have the school, but you have the venture capital industry. You have a bunch of big companies like Google and meta now, but like a long history. So I came to Stanford to study physics and switched to math. So I was sort of like outside the typical entrepreneurial lane. You know, I didn't go there with the intent of being an entrepreneur, but you're exposed to it, for sure. And I think that planted a little bit of understanding.

So actually, when I graduated Stanford, I went to UCLA to pursue a math PhD. And my career goal at that time, or my perception of what I would be, would be a math professor. I thought I would be, you know, one of those guys that sitting in an office with a couch and a chalkboard thinking and coming up with new math proofs. And my first month in grad school, Lehman Brothers went under. So you had the start of the global financial crisis. And my co-founder and best friend from college who had gotten a job, he was also a math and physics guy. So we met through that. He had gotten a job at an algorithmic trading firm.

Basically, you can think of it as a hedge fund that trades its own partner's money. So no customers. But he had gotten a job at an algorithmic trading firm up in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. His first month on the job, my first month in grad school, Lehman Brothers went under the start of the global financial crisis. So he calls me up and he said, hey, You know, this might sound like a crazy idea. If you ask your parents whether the global financial crisis would be a great time to start a financial company, they would probably think that it was a terrible idea.

But I think we should do it. And I thought about it a little bit. And I said, why the hell not? Let's go. Let's, uh, let's, this is new. I'm young. Let's try this thing. And one thing led to another. So Robin Hood wasn't the first idea we had. It was actually the third. We had a couple that were relatively fast failures. But, you know, it's like an animal that I really appreciate is the hedgehog, right? The hedgehog just like finds a spot on the ground and it just keeps digging and digging and digging.

And eventually you get this like big elaborate underground structure. And I think that's what ended up happening with Robin Hood. We sort of like started understanding the financial problem. And then you get deeper and deeper and deeper. And you can kind of draw a straight line to where we are today. Would you say part of the problem that you also solved at the time was most banks and most brokerages, their mobile presence was very, like, bad? Like, yeah, and I remember once when, you know, we have a mutual friend Ron Rolfing, he was telling me about Robin Hood. And I was like, well, what's the difference?

You know, I think at the time I was trading on e-trade. Yeah, like, did it way easier, way simpler. You know, this new generation is going to understand how to use this. And I remember when I download Robin Hood, I was like, wait, that's it. So I think that's a big problem that you had solved back then. Now everyone's trying to duplicate it, you know, you see the- Well, also at the time, I don't know when you started, but up until, relatively recently, E-Trade was charging you $7.95 a trade.

Yes. Yeah, and you didn't have it. And I remember he told me that. And I said, how's that possible? How do you not pay for a trade? He said, no, there's no fees. Trust me, go buy something and you're not going to pay anything. So, yeah, so there was that pain point of the transactions.

But I think, you know, that was a big thing. You know, even going back to social apps back then and everything, you just made everything so much more intuitive as well. And I think that that's where the young people were able to understand Robin Hood. I think there was a perfect storm of three things. Number one, the mobile revolution, as you point out, financial companies were late to adopt mobile. And it was kind of like, I don't know if you guys remember this, but when Amazon first came out in the 90s, it was a little bit of a, people had to get over a hump to be able to put their credit card. into a website to buy things.

There was just like this idea that it's a new thing. It doesn't really feel particularly secure. Of course, now we understand it's probably much more secure than reading your number out over the phone. But back then, there was a lot of hesitancy. And at the time, when we started Robin Hood, a lot of people didn't think that their serious financial matters could be done on a phone app.

They thought phone apps were for games. And so we had to overcome that. The other thing was the commission. right everyone else was charging seven to ten dollars per transaction we lowered it to zero which was very disruptive and then the third thing was people were just kind of like disillusioned with the state of the financial system after the financial crisis so the financial crisis sowed some seeds of disillusionment because a lot of people saw their friends maybe their parents losing their jobs And then the recovery over the next five to ten years was very much unevenly distributed.

So the financial crisis itself was kind of perceived as this sort of like screw up by the financial industry. You know, there were these subprime mortgages, these risky bets that went the wrong way. And, you know, the entire market collapsed as a result of it. Nobody was punished. Nobody went to jail, right? and the recovery just accrued to the wealthiest people, the top 1%. And so you had a lot of, you know, lack of trust. You had the Occupy Wall Street movement.

You had all this sort of like societal frustration that manifested as just a lack of trust in the big financial companies. And so I think a new brand, the door open for a new brand in the space. And I think Robin Hood really resonated with people because it was a little bit more of optimistic view. It wasn't, we weren't saying with Robin Hood that, you know, the entire system is broken. Let's burn it to the ground. We were instead saying, if we make it easier to plug as many people as possible, and you become an owner in, you know, the best companies and one America's building, then maybe that could lead to, not just you doing better as an individual, but like a stabler and more prosperous society. Yeah.

When did you notice more active monthly users? Like, how did you get to 27 million? Is that what you said? Yeah. I mean, I think that... Like, was there a moment when you guys looked at the stats and you're like, holy shit? Oh, how do we end up with 27 million? And how did you achieve?

What did you notice that you guys did to achieve more? Yeah, I think the story of Robin Hood was really, you know, consistent product improvements that led to compounding growth. There were also these moments that were sort of like these seminal moments where we had huge increases in growth in a relatively short amount of time. So, for example, I still remember the SNAP IPO. And SNAP was very much sort of like a Gen Z younger millennials company, and everyone was excited about it.

And at the time, that was our biggest day ever, right? The when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, one, when, one, because it was so long ago. And, uh, but, uh, but, uh, but yeah, like that, that was like a company of our generation going public for, for the first time. And then we had, uh, big elements like Brexit, uh, the 2016 presidential election, where he had spikes of, of growth. We had COVID.

obviously, which was probably the first time we had growth that we weren't prepared for. I was going to say COVID was the first time I used Robin Hood. Yeah, I mean, that was just like three big waves converging to make it so that investing goes from maybe like the 15th thing in line that people think about to like top three. I was going to say I had no background, didn't know what I was doing, got Robin Hood, and it was just so easy to use. Like, once you deposit, I remember I was like Penn Gaming

win resorts for the two I bought. I was like, of course, you want to make money, but I was like, yeah, this is so much fun and so easy to use. And everyone in my circle was kind of doing the same thing. So I guess just that time is when I started using it. I don't know if you ever used it, but that's really what changed for me.

And then it makes you so interested, but it was just how easy it was to do it. I couldn't even figure out E-Trade. I don't know if E-Trade was tough, But something about... Is it a redoubt around still? Yeah. I know it's a dumb question, but I never hear about anyone using e-trade.

Yeah. So what happened with the retail brokerage industry is you have a bunch of these companies that basically were not prepared for Robin Hood's entry into the space. And but at first they sort of weren't taking us very seriously. They're like, well, you know, our customers... don't really like mobile trading. They prefer to pay commissions. I think if you read the reactions to, you know, the industry to Robin Hood in the early days,

it was a lot of just like dismissal, right? Like how Blockbuster looked at Netflix. Yeah, I think very similar. And then what happened was in 2019, they had to scramble. And pretty much all of our competitors had realized within a period of a couple of weeks that they had to replicate our business model. which was crazy. I'd never seen anything like that.

I didn't think it was possible, but like one after the other, within the span of a couple of weeks, all of our big competitors replicated our business model. They said, we're going to zero commissions. And what happened was TD Ameritrade and E-Trade when they announced this,

and they kind of had their hand forced because it wasn't just us anymore, but their other big competitors. their stocks went down by like 35% in one day. So, I mean, it was a bloodbath. The best analog that I can give, and this hasn't happened, was let's say you're a legacy carmaker, and all of the legacy car makers within the period of a couple of weeks said,

we're going fully electric. That's like the equivalent of what happened in the brokerage industry. And as a result of that, two of the big players, E-Trade and TD Ameritrade couldn't continue on as standalone companies. So they got gobbled up by by bigger conglomerates. TD Ameritrade became part of Charles Schwab. E-Trade became a part of Morgan Stanley. So there's just a wave of industry consolidation into these like large asset managers.

I feel like Robin Hood has and I was the reason I was talking about like the COVID is it has like this perception that it's like a beginner. app. So it's like first users that want to get into stock market. Would you agree that it still kind of has that representation of this is for new traders, people new to the game? Yeah, I think that for a while that was our number one focus. We were laser focused on being the best place to get started investing. And that was just all that like 100% of our energy. And you can think of our marketing went toward that. But it's not the case anymore. Now, Rob, The governmenthood has expanded. And we have some of the most sophisticated tools for active traders.

So people go through different paths. Some people start investing in trading, and then they want to get more sophisticated, more active. They start getting interested in things like options or futures, other derivatives. And, you know, they start trading on desktop with like their six screens with the charts everything. So we have a path for those customers. We rolled out a product on desktop called Robin Hood Legend, which I think is the best and also the fastest improving active trading product. That's been doing really, really well. And we have some people that, you know, they want to invest. They don't need to be at the absolute frontier. They just want to be able to

buy stocks, build a diversified portfolio. We have tools for them. We rolled out this awesome product, Robin Hood strategies, which you can think of as a just invest button on your phone. I want to put money into an account. I want, you know, Robin Hood to handle everything for me and put me in reasonable stuff, completely set it and forget it, reasonable tax optimizations, things like that. So we do that. And, you know, a big part of what we've also been doing recently is just expanding to fill all of your financial needs. Like, you should not. never have a reason to take money out of your Robin Hood account, and we should be able to help you with good products across all of your financial needs.

They got excited speaking up taking money out of Robin Hood account. The scorebed app here with trusted stats and real-time sports news. Yeah, hey, who should I take in the Boston game? Well, statistically speaking. Nah, no more statistically speaking. I want hot takes. I want knee-jerk reactions. That's not really what I do.

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Oh, yeah. The partnership with GoPuff. Oh, yeah. That is crazy. That's so. It's just a cash delivery. Can you explain that to us? Yeah.

So, I mean, it's pretty simple. There's a product called Robin Hood Banking, which I think is the best banking product out there right now. It's different than the other neobanks. The other neobanks tend to go after a paycheck-to-paycheck customer, right? So it's sort of like you go to 7-Eleven to get cash. We wanted to do it differently. We wanted to give you a digital private banking experience.

So imagine you're a high net worth individual, and you go into sort of like your business, beautiful private bank lobby with the marble columns and mahogany desk and you get treated like a VIP. That's what we want to recreate. One thing that wealthy people have is they're not going to like the ATM in the tenderloin to get their cash, right? They have a truck delivering cash to their house. Actually, there was a there was a great company called, um, got a, uh, uh, uh, uh, First Republic Bank. Maybe you guys have heard of it.

It didn't survive the banking crisis of a couple years ago. But their schick was great service, private banking, high end. And they served a lot of founders and entrepreneurs in the Bay Area in particular. But not a great digital experience, brick and mortar. And they had this. They had like the cash truck, deliver money to your house. So you don't have to go to an ATM. So then we asked ourselves, can we take that experience, which is really nice and legitimately

very useful and make it available to the mass market? And then we realized, well, you can get your food delivered. You can get, you know, a car coming to your house to take you from place to place. Why can't we do the same for financial services? Why don't we? And there's been sort of this idea that the bank branch is obsolete and should be replaced by technology. But we're not quite there. There's still a lot of things you have to go to a bank branch for cash being the most important. So you can think of of cash delivery as our first step

and the biggest step to digitizing the entire banking experience with no compromises. Like it should be better, not worse, to remove the branch. And I don't think a lot of people have gotten that right about digital banking. But can you just like walk us through? So if I need a couple grand. I can go on Robin Hood and then it's partnered with GoPuff and I can get 2K just delivered to my house within an hour. Yeah, you can within, uh, I did it a couple weeks ago. It was like 15 minutes. Is two grand the the max? I think two grand is currently the max. And it's still rolling out. I think it's live in California and New York and expanding from there. So there's nothing magical about the max. It's just we have to start somewhere. Is there an hour limit on it?

Like, is it work at like 3 a.m.? I think I'm just wondering Why would I need two grand At 3 a.m.? I'm wondering the hours of operation. We do get this question. I think right now it's not 24-7 But nothing's stopping it from being 24-7.

Are you guys the first ones to do this? I mean, I'm sure others have There are ways to get cash delivered, you know, First Republic sort of like being an example. We have our ways as well. Yeah. But yeah, I don't think anyone's doing anything like what we're doing, which is sort of like a digital, almost like, call it door dash experience for getting your cash.

I think that's the coolest thing ever. Nothing's worse than having to go sit at the fucking bank and wait for maybe 30, 45 minutes to get. Also, if you think about it, if you're in a major city and you need cash and let's say, like you're a young woman, right, and you have to go to the ATM, there's a legitimate safety concern, right, where it's like, well, I need to find someone to go with me. This is kind of sketchy. A lot of the ATMs are just covered in graffiti.

You have the card skimmers. So, yeah, I think it's obviously people like to talk about it, but I think there's legitimate usefulness for a lot of people. What's the future of cash in America? Will we ever be like a cashless society? I think that's a really good question. I think that a lot of people really like cash. It's still very large.

I forget what the latest statistic was. I had it when we announced this product. I want to say it's like a huge amount of money, like tens, hundreds of billions, maybe even more, are transacted in cash on an annual basis. Now, the percentage is going down, but is it going to go to zero? I mean, you probably, I don't know if you guys heard this, but I think AOL just shut down dial-up like a couple months ago. I thought I saw that. I thought it's a parody. I saw something on X.

Yeah. Yeah. I thought. Dial-up internet was one of the leading revenue streams for AOL up until like relatively recently. And I think they just shut it down. Who the hell was still using dial-up? I don't know. I thought it was a joke.

Mostly older people. Wow. Right? Like if you're in your 80s and maybe you don't really need the, you're used to it working a certain way. So will we have cash in 100 years? Probably not. I mean, I'd be surprised. But are we still going to have it in 25 years? I'd probably take the over. Well, just real quick, too, there. It's like, it pisses me off these restaurants that are cashless. You can't even use cash at certain restaurants. I don't know if you've had that experience, but it's the biggest pain. It kind of works when it's cash only, though. Yeah. You get both. Cash only is more annoying.

If you're in New York, you know, you still go to a lot of places there are cash only. This is kind of off topic, but one of my favorite phases, I think it was during COVID, was like the 4x trading. Did you ever see that where people would gather it like a house and they would raise money for 4X? 4x like currencies, trading currencies. Yeah. Did you give any knowledge on that?

I know what 4x trading is. People really came after for being like the biggest scam. I was just curious if you have any opinion on it. I don't think trading currencies is. inherently like nefarious. A lot of people do it. A lot of institutions do it. I think the challenge comes in when you put in like a lot of leverage. And if you couple the leverage with, you know, selling trading courses and other services to people that don't really understand it. So, you know, there's a lot of people on the internet that are, you know, promoting trading courses and strategies.

Yeah. Yeah, there's no shortage of unscrupulous characters for sure. As with anything, anytime you have a tool and the potential to make money, I think there's people that abuse it. You guys are coming out with a cool future, the Robin Hood Social. Yeah. And what's that? I saw something, I don't know if it's out yet, but the whale watch?

Yeah. Is that out yet? Like, or? It's coming out soon. Yeah, we're kind of like putting the finishing touches on it internally and testing it. So we have it internally. and the next step is to start rolling it out. And I think that's part of our thinking for traders,

for a long time, Robin Hood was a tool. So you'd get the idea elsewhere. And then you'd just go on Robin Hood to trade because it's low cost and easy to use. But I think we're increasingly going to move to all in one platform where you're not only trading, but you also get the idea for the trade. either from our AI tools like Cortex or our community. Is Whale Watch? Like we have a partner prize picks where you can go on the app and you can see like

someone's picks for Sunday football. Yeah. So Whale Watch is that like on I can go on Robin Hood and hypothetically see what Elon Musk is buying? Yeah, or Nancy Pelosi. Yeah, Nancy Pelosi. That's got to watch, right? Yeah, that, yeah.

Yeah. So it's going to start out with, you know, politicians and the other investors that have to report their their trades but then also if you're on the platform and you're trading and you choose to opt in you could so I can opt in my portfolio yeah you could opt in your portfolio and so I'll be following his but I will not be following yours because when I follow your price fix oh it's bad well yeah well you know there's the inverse Kramer right so sometimes someone that trades badly yeah yeah yeah yeah because you could just do the opposite um But yeah, and the other great thing about it is we're adding more assets.

So we have stocks, we have crypto, we've got options and futures. Now we have prediction markets. I think one of the reasons that these things haven't worked particularly well in the past, talking about sort of financial business social networks is the variety of content isn't super rich. But with prediction markets, now you have trades around pretty much anything. So I think that's going to be a great tool for for social trading and social media. Yeah, I think it would do good there, but I do think there's a big void of portfolios. You know, my friends will always ask me like, what are you buying?

What are you looking? Like, you know, instead of like texting them, like, oh, look at this specific, you know, sector or this company. I would love for them to just follow me. Yeah. Yeah. Without knowing the balance, just like this is what I hold, you know. Yeah. And I think that's the great thing about it and why Robin Hood is uniquely positioned as a social media platform.

It's because we have that signal of what are your actual trades. So people know that there's some verification that you're not just bullshitting and putting random things out there. How fair is it for like a beginner on Robin Hood that's a college kid in his room as opposed to like a billionaire getting access to like IPOs and stuff like that? I think the most fair in the industry by a wide margin. In fact, one of the criticisms we get with IPOs are that, you know, we hear from a lot of people, hey, I've got, you know, $5 million or more in my Robin Hood account, and I got one share of this IPO, right? And I think there's a balance, if anything, the feedback that we're getting is we've gone too far the other way and that we have. actually don't value or really prioritize customers that have been with us and grown with us.

And we've shifted a little bit. I mean, we've heard that feedback. And it's like if someone started with us when they were 20 and now they have a big portfolio, now they use us for a lot of stuff, they probably should be getting a higher tier of support. And so we launched programs like Robin Hood Concierge. Obviously, we've got Robin Hood Gold. I think I'm still on the waiting list for that one. For Robin Hood Concierge?

No, for gold. Oh, for the gold card, you mean? Yeah, for the gold card. I'm waiting for a while. We can hook you up with that. That's why I came here. Cards been very popular. Yeah, we've been rolling it out aggressively.

We announced recently crossing half a million card holders. The problem is more and more people keep joining the list. We can't roll out fast enough. Been looking at this for a while, Vlad. Yeah. I'm still. How many employees does Robin Hood have? It's between three.

and 4,000. Wow. So what have you learned as you've scaled on the best attributes as a leader? I think a lot of the conventional wisdom about leadership that you read about is kind of wrong. Yeah, I think you really have to look at that stuff from first principles. Yeah, because there's a lot of things that are safe to talk about publicly, like being nice and sort of like being employee friendly. And not enough is spoken about having really high standards. I think this is changing a little bit.

I think recently the environment is shifting to where more and more people are talking about this stuff. But getting achieving really hard things is is not easy on people. It's tough. It requires long hours. It requires like a lot of attention to detail. So yeah, I don't think Robin Hood is like. a great place to optimize for work-life balance by any means. It's a place where people come to work intensely and they want to have a lot of impact and they want to do in one year what would take

a normal company 10 to 20 years. How far out are we from like AI dropping like tips on one to buy or sell? You can do it right now. You can ask grok for a stock tip. It'll give you a stock tip. Now whether it's trustworthy and whether it'll make you. you any money. That's another question. There was a study done, I think it was last year, benchmarking performance of AI models in picking stocks. And it was funny, they underperformed because they missed the AI boom. So, yeah, I think it's a tricky thing. I mean, if everyone's using AI to buy the same stocks, will those stocks outperform in the long term? I think unquestionably people are using it across the entire life cycle, idea generation, and then, you know,

some enterprising folks are automating things and in building these bespoke strategies. Robin also has a future when I'm looking at a specific stock that I hold says others have also purchased similar stocks. Yeah. And these are like similar stocks to what you're holding here, which is pretty much very similar to the answer I get from Grock as well. I'll tell Grock hey, I'm holding this company. What are some other companies that I should be looking at similar?

Then I'll go into Robin. And Robin, it's recommending me those same. Similar. Yeah, that one people also bought. Yeah, yeah, that's what is people also. Which is pretty pretty cool. Yeah, we can look at with our system overlap between holding of different stocks. And we can just surface that information.

That's a great place to look at like other stocks you want to get. Or, you know, if you're looking at, let's just say, for example, Tesla, like people who hold Tesla, what else are they buying as well. And I'm assuming it's real data, right? It's real data. Yeah, one of the things we work really hard to do is we don't want to, outside of certain circumscribed areas, we don't want to make recommendations or push customers in a certain direction,

but we want to give them all the information that they're looking for to make the decisions. So we have some areas where we do make recommendations, like first trade or upon request, And then Robin Hood Strategy is obviously a fiduciary advisory product. And then we also acquired an advisory platform, Trade PMR, where you could get a human advisor to help you with your finances. That's cool. But yeah, by and large, the core of the offering is self-directed, meaning you should just use it to get information, but the trading decision has to come from the user. One of my favorite phases was Roaring Kitty with GameStop.

Yeah. And I know that Robin Hood faced a little bit of backlash for not being able to buy GameStop at a time. Is that accurate? That's right. Yeah. For one day, you couldn't buy GameStop. And what did that do to the Robin Hood brand overall? I think it hurt it quite a bit.

I mean, to some degree, we're still sort of recovering from that. Or I should say, it was probably not until 2025 that we, you could say, fully recovered from from that hit and that was a tough moment for me you know that was five years ago so i know now i look like a confident you know uh executive that's on top of everything back then i was kind of a kid you know and it's sort of like i'd been in the lab working on this software not really talking to the media yeah yeah you weren't public facing until after and suddenly it's like oh you got to go on CNBC, you've got to go to testify in front of Congress. And, um, damn.

I mean, I think if, if I had to do that now, it would probably have been much better handled because I think the core of the GameStop issue, like if you look at what actually happened, it was like risk management, us complying with regulations. We, we, our hand was forced essentially. Uh, and I think our competitive. editors basically had to do the same thing, but they had a, they kind of did a better job of explaining it. Plus, they were just much smaller. So we were the brunt of, uh, of, of, of, of, of, of all of the anger, even though it affected pretty much everyone in the industry. Yeah.

What I like about you though, is, uh, you know, during that moment, because I remember, and I even remembering you going on X or Twitter at the time. Yeah. Going on TV. And like, there was two things. It could have either been the end of Rob, or you keep winning. And like, you know, I always tell everybody, like either content creator friends, founders, and I always even talked to Ron about this is like, he won. Like, you just, if you just keep winning, because the whole GameStop situation, which I don't think we need to talk about much longer because it's five years ago, but I forgot about it. To like last night, like we were talking about topics. And I even went to Rock. I was like, hey, what are tough questions

we could ask Vlad? And the first thing it came up was GameStop. I'm like, GameStop. That was so long ago, but like people forget, if you keep winning, people will forget. And, you know, and that's what you did with Robin Hood. And I'm not here to gas you up. I say this behind your back all the time with Ron is, you know, if you just keep winning, people, and learn from mistakes, of course, don't ignore the mistakes, but learn from the mistakes fix them, but just keep winning. And I think that's where Robin Hood's at right now. To some degree, it's almost, it's good in a way that it came up with that because it just means we haven't had any big controversies, knock on wood, where's this, in the past.

five years yeah right now we've had that's the best time could come up with is asking about game stop five years ago and i god bless you it was a big moment too like i remember when it went down oh yeah and i'm just saying like i'm not throwing shade to you i'm just saying it was like you know like a lot of people saying why are you still on robin hood when that happened so oh no for sure i mean um it was a big brand hit to your point i think that um what happened was there was the uh very sort of sexy false narrative of hedge fund collusion like oh robin hood was colluding with all these guys and there was a rumor i don't know if you guys remember this that the white house called me and asked me to shut down trading of game stop now this this thing went nuts on

social media there's a redid post about you know so long i didn't in the white house made a call to Vlad Tenev. Some fake engineer had posted it saying, I overheard the conversation. The White House was on the horn. Great source. And Sequoia Capital, one of our investors, had to publish a statement publicly saying that they weren't involved in this White House Robin Hood thing. So, you know, the juicy narrative that's like simple and sort of like nefarious, people love conspiracy theories. So that took hold and I think we didn't do a good job of like Quelling it. Yeah. So you ask a random person on the street. They're like oh well GameStop wasn't that just like the hedge funds in Robin Hood. Yeah, but yeah, no matter how much we do or what we say people have that That thought. Yeah. And it's it's hard to dispel the the false rumor. It was five years ago and you still got to hear about it.

Well, thanks to you. Admittedly, it's a little bit less and less. Some shit just sticks, right? Yeah. I forgot all about that. What are you doing now with, like, crypto's becoming so popular? Moon Pay does a great job.

Like, that's the platform I use. And how are you doing to compete with, like, the Moon Pays of the world? Well, so MoonPay, their number one business is a fiat on and off ramp, right? So if you want to get dollars into native crypto, into like a wallet, MoonPay is almost like an infrastructure provider. And we have a product that is competitive, maybe a little bit less known, but it's called Robin Hood Connect. We partner with some of the biggest wallets.

We use it, obviously, for ourselves, and significantly cheaper on average. And I'd say crypto and Robin Hood evolving in a couple of different ways. And it's a big business. Like if you look at us by market share for retail crypto, we're kind of like top two, but pretty close to number one in the U.S. And we're expanding outward. The thing that I care most about is actually using crypto technology to power real things. So tokenization of real world assets, we call it.

Can we take a real asset, like a stock or a private company, which is the thing I'm most excited about, and put it on crypto technology where it benefits from 24-7 trading, global liquidity, and just like integration with the existing large crypto customer base. You're doing that a little bit in Europe right now, right? Yeah, we've tokenized about 2,000 public stocks in Europe. We also piloted private stock tokens. So we were the first to tokenize OpenAI and SpaceX shares, and we gave them out to European customers in the form of a giveaway, which worked incredibly well. So we've got the technology to tokenize private companies

and make them tradable 24-7 just like stocks. The obstacle is really regulatory clarity. Yeah, I was going to say, when's that come to the U.S., but are you? We're working on it. Yeah, with the U.S., there's two barriers, actually. And in Europe, there's less, incidentally. In the U.S., you have to solve private company accreditation laws that make it so that right now you have to be an accredited investor, basically a high net worth individual to invest in private companies.

And there's also tokenization of securities, which falls into crypto market structure, which right now, right now you're not allowed to actually tokenize securities in the U.S. and make them available to retail, which is actually why you have so many meme coins. It's sort of, you know, connecting real stuff to crypto technology is illegal. And that's why the lion's share of the market in the U.S. is just things that aren't backed by real value on crypto technology. All right, guys, I want to interrupt the pod really, really quick to tell you guys about Moon, Pay whenever I'm doing anything in the crypto space, if I'm buying crypto, if I'm selling crypto, I am using the Moon Pay app.

What I love about the Moon Pay app is they have every form of payment on the planet. If you guys were new to crypto too, you can own a piece of a Bitcoin for as little as $20 and you can get it in seconds. Also, MoonPay's been around now for six years, so they're forming some crazy partnerships in the space. One of their partnerships is with Trust Wallet. Trust wallet is one of the most popular self-custody wallets in the world with trust wallet, you control your crypto fully, no compromises. And thanks to MoonPay, you can fund your

wallet instantly using your favorite payment methods. It's the fastest way to go from cash to crypto, all while keeping full control of your assets. Also, every Monday, we do MoonPay Mondays on our Nelp boys Instagram where we give away a thousand in Bitcoin. All you got to do is just DM us your MoonPay wallet address. We post proof that we send $1,000 every single Monday. So if you're looking to get into crypto, or you want to shot at winning $1,000 in Bitcoin every Monday, just download the Moonpay app. Do your own research, obviously, and shout out to MoonPay, the best crypto app in the game. Let's get back on the pot. You don't want to say which one, but have you, like, fired on a meme coin? I have some meme coin exposure. Yeah, yeah. I mean,

yeah, I won't, I won't recommend my favorite one because anytime I do that, I get a little bit of, I get a little bit of grief from pretty much the fans of all the other coins. Yeah. I love all. all of my meme children equally what makes you like want to get a meme coin if i really believe in the community behind it yeah yeah i mean um there's a lot of i think a lot of people are flippin about meme coins and they're like what's the point of this but i think if if you actually look at what's happening here you have uh someone with the the ability and the power to create an asset that trades 24-7 globally, gets billions of dollars of liquidity in five minutes or less, it's a huge capital markets innovation.

I mean, compare that to what it looks like to IPO a company. You have to spend a year and tens of millions of dollars and work with teams of lawyers. And by the way, it's still only available in the U.S. on a limited set of exchanges, primarily during East Coast working hours. So I think like if we combine these two things, it becomes really interesting. And that's where I think Robin Hood's focuses on crypto. It's not actually the pure crypto technology. It's the intersection.

How can we apply crypto technology to trading and holding assets that have fundamental utility that people really care about? Is that the future of stocks, tokenization? It's the future of private markets for sure. I think from the standpoint of a normal consumer, they're not going to be aware that their stocks are tokenized. I mean, they'll just see that, you know. It's just a bill of.

Yeah, I mean, if you look at it right now, Robin Hood has a pretty good experience for trading stocks. Of course, one of the benefits of tokenization is another game stop cannot happen. But of course, nobody is sitting there worrying about another game stop until it happens, right? But yeah, you'll have instant settlement, which is one of the technical reasons why the whole game stop fiasco occurred. So there certainly benefits, but I think if you ask, what can I not do now that will be made possible by tokenization, you'll be able to tokenize a private company, you'll be able to tokenize a peccanize a peccatio. or a work of art. So it's these like assets that aren't liquid right now that are really hard to trade.

You can plug them into an existing infrastructure that instantly makes them tradable 24-7 and liquid. This is kind of off topic, but something that's so hot right now, and I'll just see it every day. And I'll use Logan Paul as a specific example. Yeah. But you've seen like his Pokemon card that's worth $5 million. I have seen that. Do you do any sort of like the card investment? because it's like really hot right now.

Me personally, I'm not a Pokemon card collector, but there is a class of investments, which are sort of like investments that also have utility. So it's not just sitting there custody in an account somewhere, but you're also wearing it. It's like a piece of jewelry or you have it in your house, like a piece of art. Even real estate maybe is in that category.

So there's definitely like investments that you want to see in a spreadsheet and you want to watch the value go up and down. There's certain investments that are like collectible or or have utility that you also want to use. So we're definitely thinking about that. And the goal would be for Robin Hood to give you the ability to invest in in everything. And not just invest in everything, but anything that relates to money moving in and out or being held in your account, Robin Hood should help you with, whether we're holding it for you or you're doing it yourself. And you should expect tokenization. I mean, all of those assets are in scope.

Collectibles, which you can think of as, I mean, NFTs, one of the original crypto use cases was digital collectibles. So tokenization can help you digitize real world collectibles as well. I do think a card to look at, though, Michael Jordan, PSC, 10 rookie. You have one? I don't have one, but there's only like 300 and something of them. And a year ago, they were worth 250 grand each, the least expensive one right now you

can find a 600 grand. There's only like 300 of them. I think there's like a whole economy around Michael Jordan. I say Michael Jordan, there's a lot of athletes, but like Michael Jordan is just always going to be a legend. I think Dana has one. I'm running shows his case. Yeah, he has a lot.

I have a Charzard, but it's like PSA negative one. It's like, it's so bent up. I had a Lou Gehrig rookie card. No way. I swear. You did or you dad did? I did. That shit's gone.

Any Beanie babies? Oh, yeah. Are those up in value, too? I mean, I, I think so. I saw something about it. Someone asked me, like, if I'm into beanie babies. I just don't know enough about it. I just think Michael Jordan will always and forever be a living icon.

Yeah. Yeah. I agree with you. But, oh, not a living icon. Just a legend. For a while, I got into collecting, uh, signed books like signed first editions what do you got um i've got some good science fiction i've got some signed assimov's hindline are you guys science fiction fans no assimo's foundation it's uh

yeah legendary books so yeah yeah sometimes one interesting thing if you had to guess what percentage of books sold in the US are digital like Kindle version versus physical? What would your guess be? What percent are digital? Yeah. What do you think it is? Do you think most are digital or? No, I think physical still. I feel like it's got to be digital. I think physical. I think most people would say it's like digital just aid into the market,

but north of 80% are still physical. I believe that. Because if you're going to read a book, if you're into reading, you want a physical book that you can read. And most people that buy books don't actually. actually read them it's like a gift that's something to put a bookshelf it's like a piece of art like 90 one 90% of my books are yeah yeah I have a huge bookshelf and people come over like do you read all that like no yeah I didn't know how I got yeah so like digital book sales grew fast initially but then it kind of plateaued at I think something under 20% of total book sales what else

are you working on like any AI companies you're gonna start up monic yeah all right yeah yeah but we should talk about harmonic I mean it's pretty fascinating. Yeah, a couple of years ago, I started a company called Harmonic, where I'm the exec chairman of, so I don't have an operating role, but I'm still very involved. And Harmonic's goal is to build mathematical superintelligence. And what we mean by that is AI that can reason mathematically and where you can verify 100% of the reasoning. So no hallucinations. And the first area where we sort of like pointed harmonic at is,

well, the end goal is to actually solve really big, important problems in math and science, research level, big problems. But where we've started was math competitions. So there's this high school competition. called the International Math Olympiad you're nodding maybe you're a are you a former math lead oh no grade four I ran times tables okay but after that when it came to high school when it came to like calculus and shit I yeah yeah so times tables days I was popping yeah so around grade six there's this thing called math counts which which is sort of like the beginning of it then you go

into the math competition circuit so you can think of it as like a Olympic qualifiers. So there's the AMC, there's the AMC, the AMI, the American Invitational Math Exploration. If you do well on that, you go to the Yucamo, the USA Math Olympiad. So I tapped out at the Amy. That was like my run of, that was my ceiling. And then if you do really well in the USA Math Olympiad, they take like the best five people and they represent the U.S. at the International Math Olympiad, the IMO.

So this year, Aristotle, which is Harmonix math model, got a gold medal on the IMO. So there's six questions. They're ridiculously hard. Our model got five out of six of them, correct. And then we were like, okay, we don't want to just keep this as a research result. Let's open it up. Let's actually release it to the public and see what people do. do with it. And people have done some incredible things. There were these, there's these unsolved

math problems, research level called Erdush problems. Have you guys heard of Erdush? So he was like very, the world's most prolific mathematician. He would travel around the world and basically stay at his friends places for a couple of weeks and his friends were all mathematicians. And he would work on their math problems with them. So he was kind of like a traveling mathematician. He was so prolific that there's a thing called an Erdush number, which is basically your Erdush number is zero. Well, Paul Erdisch's number is zero. If you've co-authored a paper with him, it's one. If you've co-authored a paper with someone that's co-authored a paper with Paul Erdush, it's two and so on. So it's kind of like the Kevin Bacon number.

Okay. How many degrees away from Kevin Bacon? If you're in a movie with him, your bacon number is one. Funny enough, there's also a thing called an Erdisch Bacon number where you add the two. And there is someone with an Erdisch Bacon number of three. Wow. So they co-authored a paper with Paul Erdush, and they were in Goodwill hunting. So they were like two degrees away from Kevin Bacon.

Anyway, over history, they're about, 1,100 Erdush problems that were collected from his travels. And there's a guy that made a website collecting them and everything. About half of them are solved already. Half of them are unsolved. And Aristotle, our model, either solved or assisted in the solving and verifying of something like 11 of them. So it's like, it's crazy. And, you know, I would have guessed it would have taken maybe a year.

after us getting the IMO gold medal to make these types of contributions, but it took two months. So we're now at the point where like new knowledge is being created by AI and it's not just pulling things and and putting them together. Dude, I want to, can we go to Vegas and play blackjack after this? I feel like you've spent some time playing blackjack. I have played a little bit of blackjack. I don't think we can't think I'll take out of very subtle. We got to keep. Well, he's a good math guy.

I was just what was going through my mind was I don't think we can use Aristotle to play back blackjack I don't know if you ever heard this you remind me of the guy from 21 but I went to MIT I have seen that movie yeah yeah that movie yeah that movie's yeah you have the gold card on you Taylor does you guys see the rob of the gold card no it's actual real gold wow what are your thoughts on gold in general gold and silver through the roof these days yeah what do you that's pretty crazy isn't it Ryan Hood push is buying gold don't they we do have uh I mean, to your point about sometimes you have an investment that you want to hold in your hand, physical gold you can get through Robin Hood. And it's been incredibly popular. Oh.

Yeah. Wait, that's not the waiting list I'm on. That's the VIP banking client. Let me see that. Heavy. And how do I get in on that? Ask Mr. Tennant. This is a huge flex.

How much gold is this? I think that's 37 grams. So what happens if I lose this and I got to replace it? You'll get. The cards. worth 7K? All right. How do we get one of these?

That's why I can't have this because I'll lose this. If you leave us at a bar. If you lose it, you can't spend any more money. But so is it 7K to replace it? Yeah, you can replace it with a solid gold one. You can also get a less expensive but still very nice metallic gold. That thing's heavy. And there's also a 24-carad gold variant that's sort of halfway in between.

What happens when you pull this out at a date to pay? This is actually 10 carrots. That probably works like a charm. It goes well. Yeah. The one disappointing thing is that people pay for so much, so much with Apple pay and digital that you have less occasion to actually take your part out. Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, restaurants, people love it. And, you know, whenever feasible, I prefer to pay the old-fashioned way rather than just. What kind of perks do you get as opposed to like an MX? One big one. Yeah. 3% cash back on all categories. That's huge. Yeah, best cash back of any card.

I'm in. And you can use your rewards to buy physical gold. So gold bars. Yeah, that's a big thing right now. Physical gold and silver, copper. And silver has been having a moment as of late for sure. Can't identify why, but. I think multiple factors, you know, there's like geopolitical supply constraints and shocks.

There's like the data center build out, which uses a lot of these precious metals. I think like copper's up but I think silver is used in data centers if I'm not mistaken to And then you also have just like inflation fears So it's a company perfect storm yeah probably mostly geopolitical though friend of mine told me once Crypto's great because it's made by the people dollar is not great because it's made by government Gold is great because it's made by God. Yeah, it's always like stuck with me You got that written above your bed or some shit? No, I just heard it like two days ago actually yeah, yeah Well, some people think crypto was made by God, too.

Well, I guess, yeah. Nobody knows who made it. Yeah, true. Bitcoin. It's the guy that no one can find him. What's his name? That's what he's talking about. Yeah.

Can we go find that guy? Do you think he exists or no? I don't know. I mean, how would I know? Yeah. I don't know what happened. Is there no one knows how crypto started? No one knows.

No one knows. Well, if he doesn't know, then. Isn't it just the worst? This guy was on message boards in the late 2000s talking about Bitcoin and you just put it out there and then eventually he just disappeared stop posting on the message boards Relatively early I think his last message was 2010 maybe 2011 The internet loves to show those poor guys that like forgot their their code or lost their ledger that has like 50 million on it and they've been searching for it Yeah, like the guy that paid what was the pizza dude didn't he? Oh yeah, that's the worst story. I that my heart hurts for that

pizza with like five bitcoins or something no way more than 10 thousand Yeah, bro, 10,000 Bitcoin. Oh, my God. Yeah. I feel so bad for that guy. When did you first buy Bitcoin? So back in 2011, I became interested in mining it. So I started mining some Bitcoin.

But back then, of course, it was less sophisticated. So there weren't mining pools, and you had to get lucky and get 50 Bitcoin by just solving a block. I don't know if you guys looked into detail how it works, but it was hard to get. So I was like, all right, let's run it, see what happens. Never mind anything, never got any Bitcoin. And I was about to like sign up for one of these websites, these kind of early, sketchy websites that sold Bitcoin. There was one called Mount Gawks.

I don't know if you guys remember. This thing actually started as a magic the gathering. trading card exchange. People would trade their magic the gathering card. That's why it's Mount Gox, MTG, right? But it turned into, it was the biggest Bitcoin exchange of like the first era. And I signed up. I was about to put money in by Bitcoin in 2011.

It was like $2 a coin. And then before I did it, Mount Gawks got hacked. And the price of Bitcoin went down by 70%. And I remember I was like, dodged a bullet. I was just about to buy the stuff. It's dead. So I didn't buy it. And yeah, now I'm kicking myself. Oh, we all have those stories. Yeah, I have a little bit of Bitcoin, not much relative to my overall net worth. But, you know, I have a little bit, of course. But yeah, not as much as some of the early true believers. That's for sure. I don't think anyone's story

going to be worse than the pizza guy though no well now that thing pops up in my x feed like once a you don't think the pizza guy had other bitcoin i think if i were him i would just come out be like hey listen i had 200 000 like i had 200 000 jokes on you guys i don't know i might have been really they never talked about really craving pizza they never talked about the guy that that was the biggest that best transaction ever if you had a hundred thousand bitcoin would you be out there talking about it i mean most people probably wouldn't well it means made out of me and like Yes. The world feels bad for me like me.

Like every time it comes up, maybe. I don't know. Or maybe, yeah, maybe jokes on us. He probably wants the world to feel bad for him. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe people are giving him more bit more. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Who has a meme about him. Which one? The boy from Bulgaria. Oh, yeah. What is that? It was another GameStop thing where it was from my congressional testimony.

Which is actually a little bit of a strange thing happened. So the whole testimony was virtual. It was on Zoom. I really wanted to do it in person, but, you know, it was in the middle of COVID. So, yeah, one of the, so as part of a congressional testimony, every witness or, yeah, I think, I think you call it a witness. I was a witness has to give an opening address. And, you know, as part of my opening address, I think.

talk about my Bulgarian. I was born there and I immigrated and whatnot. And for the first time, I think in history, my opening address was interrupted by a congressperson. And I'm not exactly sure why. I think it was some technical glitch. But yeah, they turned it into a meme where they sort of made it look like I was dodging a question by talking about my Bulgarian humble beginnings. When'd you come out here? 1992. Yeah, it was five. Oh, wow.

Yeah, right after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. Yeah. Citizen now? Yeah. Yeah. You have a relationship with the current administration, like Trump? Yeah, up until... I know why immigration made me think of that, but...

Yeah. But we always got to talk about the president. I've been to the White House a handful of times in the past year, which was very fun. mostly around two areas. One is crypto, and the other is Invest America Initiative or Trump accounts, which is the $1,000 for an investment account for every newborn initiative, which is very cool, like right in line with our mission to make everyone an investor. Will Robinhood be integrated into that?

The details of that haven't been shared yet, but what I can tell you is, is we've had a bunch of conversations. And what I've told the president, we've told the administration repeatedly is we love the initiative. Like, we think that... It's so underrated. Like, no one talks about it. I mean, also, if you think about all the things that we do as part of just, like,

running a country, it's... We're racking up debt. Who pays for the debt, right? Future generations. So a lot of the things that we do, do as a society is sort of optimizing for our own self-interest at the expense of the future generations. And I think there's relatively few things that flip that. It's like, oh, no, we're going to take our money, put them away so that future generations can benefit more. So the fact that

it's like one of the few sacrifices of its kind, I think, is what makes it really special. So yeah, we want to make it really big. And I think some, There's things like this that have been tried, but they haven't had like the full weight of industry and the best technology companies behind them. And this one feels a little bit different. Yeah, hopefully. You've got Michael Dell and Brad Gersner and a bunch of people just actually deploying a lot of resources and their own money behind the initiative. So I think it's got a good chance of really moving the needle.

You guys are based in California still, right? Yeah. Yeah. What are your thoughts on all these big companies moving out of California? ever crossed your mind at all? It's crossed our mind for sure. And obviously, there's the whole billionaire tax. Yeah, I mean, I'm not intending to move out of California because I love California, right? I love what it represents. I think it's a great state. But I think it's becoming an increasingly more difficult place to do business, right?

Yeah, and I think that there's a big risk of like, you know, the fable of the goose that laid the golden egg? Yeah. You learn about it in school. Yeah, it's kind of like what's going on here, right? Like California, Silicon Valley, a lot of founders, a lot of entrepreneurship. It's a big part of the economy. And yeah, I think if we're not careful, yeah, you don't want to lose that. I think that that's like a big part of what makes California great.

So I'd like to see, and I'm obviously intending to stay and push for this, California to actually become the best place to do business in the country. I don't think that it should be, it should get complacent, right? I think there's a real risk of complacency and you know the weather's great for sure but like why not be great across the board and actually like recognize that what we have is good and lean into that and also you know we've got to figure out how to get the fiscal health better that's for sure the fiscal health is not good and And I think it's a structural problem. I don't think one-time taxes will fix the problem.

I think that the problem is on a structural level. And for sure, there's, like, a big effort to root out and weed out fraud and abuse and, like, mishandling of taxpayer funds. The fact that we pay so much in taxes and the schools and the infrastructure are sort of like mediocre and best that would be exposed our boy nick shirley's going after california next so i think there's a lot of problems for sure but yeah i'd rather stay and fix them yeah yeah i feel much prouder about doing that yeah i feel the same by the way i still live out here so everyone heard you're leaving no change my mind today yesterday when i got back here okay

where were you gonna go miami yeah a lot of people have been going there that's where i love that's where he is yeah but yeah and i was born and raised out here so You know, someone told me outside of taxes, which I do have some thoughts on that billionaire tax. I think the billionaire tax is not really a billionaire tax. I think they'll eventually go after middle class on everybody. I think it's just disguised as a billionaire class tax to get people to vote for it. Well, also, I think it's really dangerous marketing in a way.

I can see how it's effective because when people think of billionaires and I recognize It villainized them. I mean... Well, you know, I'm a billionaire, but I wasn't born a billionaire, right? I grew up poor and I created businesses that created value and hired lots of people. But I think most people's perception of a billionaire is someone that got their money unfairly, like through inheriting it from generations and generations. I think in California, it's particularly stark because most billionaires are founders. It's people that have created jobs and...

created businesses and industries and you have AI and chips and software all epicentered here. So really, it's a founder tax, right? And then you ask, well, do we need to be disincentivizing founding companies? Most people will probably tell you, okay, I don't like billionaires, but entrepreneurship and creation of companies and industries is very, very valuable. So I think it needs a bit of a reframe and people actually need to understand what we're talking about. Yeah, I agree. I see like Billy Elish talking a lot about that.

It's so annoying. It's like, fuck off. No, yeah. The acceptance features at the award shows, you always are going to get something about that. The war shows are scams. Yeah. Golden Globes. And I mentioned one thing about Iran the other night.

Like, that's crazy because it's not the trendy thing. There's been a lot of talk about the entertainment industry and how. you know, Hollywood and California has become the center of that, but over the past 10 years or so, more and more people are leaving to do like the entertainment business elsewhere. Oh, yeah. Whether it's filming in Canada or Atlanta, now increasingly overseas. A lot of people are filming in Canada for tax reasons. Is that right? I mean, tax maybe is one of it, but I think regulations, like, costs and regulation.

Like, there's so many rules and, like, unions and all that stuff in California. California just doesn't make it easy for anybody to stay in California. And that's why entertainment's leaving here. Entertainment's leaving. And then if you lose entertainment and tech, what happens? Is that the California that we want? Los Angeles right now. Los Angeles is dead because Los Angeles was really built on like, you know, nightlife and, you know, going out and, you know, all these different cool, up and coming aspiring actors and actresses and musicians being out in the town.

And that's what Sunset Boulevard was. But now it's like you don't nearly live in California or in Los Angeles, nor do you want to because of the crime. And it's kind of lost its soul for that reason because now they're scattered. They're in Miami. They're in Austin. They're in New York. Yeah. Nashville.

Find a big movie or TV show that's filmed here, right? I think you'll have a hard time. Yeah. And that's now like, you know, we call the Yellowstone effect where it's like, all right, well, they're going to go in other states and they're going to film more Western style, southern country style shows. And now you see the growth of like all the different Taylor Sheridan franchises because they're filmed in Montana, Fort Worth, Texas, Tennessee. And now that's the new genre of shows is those Western ones that, you know.

They're filmed on location. Yeah. Yeah. So and that's why, you know, it's the Yellowstone effect. But, Vlad, the other thing I want to ask you, just always out of curiosity, I usually ask my buddy's a soft camera what is your AI chat bot of choice like when you use when you AI something when you go to chat the yeah like rock Gemini GPT it used to be chat GPT pretty much exclusively though now I've been finding myself using

Gemini more and more for a long time I was resisting it but then you keep hearing well you know Gemini has gotten quite good. And they've done a nice job. I mean, Google has really, they were kind of left for dead a couple of years ago with the whole AI stuff, but Gemini is quite good. And then what's really impressed me more recently is Claude Code. You guys ever tried Claude? Yeah. Yeah. So they had a crazy update this week. Yeah, the Claude Code for Not Code. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The amazing thing about Claude code is like you can write custom software to do tasks for you that chat GPT cannot do. So for example, you could say, you know, write a script to log into my bank account, log into

my email, pull all the transactions, put it in a table. And, you know, it used to be that a year ago that would just break and it would be frustrating because you'd be, you know, chatting back and forth with it. And you'd spend more time trying to get it to work than you would to write it yourself. But I think it's recently gotten to the point where it's legitimately useful and time-saving. So I think that surprised me. What are some jobs AI will take over that you think people aren't expecting? I can give you what job I think will be safe.

I think you guys are okay. I think podcast bros. No, it's so funny. I gave a TED talk on this. for sure there will be AI job disruption, right? Like, I wouldn't study to be a telemarketer right now. I told my lawyer to his face yesterday, I was so pissed that I can't wait until AI takes your job. I cannot wait.

Well, there is one thing, too, that you're, the only area you're wrong is there's this guy that spent like $70,000 on this girl's only fans. And she was AI the whole time. Oh, yeah. And you got exposed for it. And he's going through it right now. I met a guy in the sauna that does that the other day. For an AI girl? He makes AI girls and runs their only fans.

It's crazy. And people have no idea they're AI. Yeah. These guys meet. You never know you're going to talk about Masana at the gym. It is kind of a crazy thing to think about, though. Yeah. But I think there will be an explosion of new jobs and job families in the future.

And if we were to see them, we would think they're not real work. Much like if you think about our ancestors, 100 years ago. And if they were to look at what we're doing now, it'd be like, that's not a job. Nobody could possibly be getting paid for doing what they're doing. They're just sitting around chatting about stuff, right? It would look like not real work. I think in the same way, there's going to be jobs in the future that don't look like real work to us today. And I think what they'll look like is from a practical standpoint, it'll be a lot more entrepreneurship, a lot more single person companies.

You'll probably start seeing single person unicorns like very soon. I don't think we're very far away from that. I agree. So there will be more, there will be more wealth created. But, and I saw this, I've seen this with Harmonic as well. I think there's kind of two worlds, right? One world is the AI companies who own all these big data centers and all these GPUs and build the models are going to be like,

creating all the products and benefiting from the products in like a first party way, right? So they'll centralize and control all the value. The other world is they'll actually give AI tools to everyone, and those people will create products that capture value. And so in that world, it's much more distributed and kind of decentralized. So I think what we're seeing now is it's more the latter. And I think the latter is more interesting. I think it's going to be a better business opportunity.

So I think one thing nobody expected is we have such amazing AI tools on our phones, and it's cheaper than a cell phone plan. Right. So, yeah, I think even with Harmonic, like when we rolled out Aristotle a public, we saw people using crazy stuff with it, not just the airditch problems we were talking about earlier, but solving problems in computing in linguistics, stuff that, you know, if we manage centrally and we were doing ourselves, we wouldn't do as good of a job of. But if you open the tool to the public, people will do really amazing things.

So that's the world that I believe in and that we're pushing to build. And I think if we end up in that world, which I believe and hope we will, it'll be an optimistic rather than dystopian future. I'm optimistic about AI. I mean, obviously, everyone, every day I hear someone worried about AI taking our jobs, but I think AI is going to boost productivity. And I think if you're more productive at your job, you get paid more. And now, you know, you pay more.

And then people realize, like, this is now the new standard. Let's hire more people like this that know how to use AI. That's what about like AI replacing like education. That's what I was going to say, because you said you want to be a teacher. ever be like just AI teachers that I mean I don't know would you want your kid to be going to a place where an optimist robot is like teaching them I have no idea probably yeah but well I think there's ups and downs to that because you have teachers teaching kids in the classroom stuff that parents don't want them talking about I think the least safe is lawyers I think the most safer

sports I disagree I think lawyers are safe oh yeah your dad is safe your dad's a letigator no I'm talking about the lawyer, like, hey, can you look at this quick contract for me? Yeah. And I'll get back to me three days later, charged me $1,500. You could probably do that already, right? Yeah, I just sent it to you. Red-line this contract for me, basically. Well, I mean, I, yeah, but if I don't feel like reading it for you, like, I'll just send it to Grock real quick and be like, hey, what should I.

This is something my lawyer agreed on two years ago. Like, took a look at this and let me know what my lawyer would have said. That's what I do. That's what I do with Grock now. I don't know. I would be surprised if sometimes these things are. counterintuitive. My bet is there would be more lawyers 10 years from now and more software engineers. Back when I was a kid, my parents would tell me, you don't want to be a software

engineer. All those jobs are getting shipped off to China. So it'll be like a, yeah, China yeah. We used to hear that. Yeah, we used to hear that. You know, back in 1996, the first AI victory over humans was deep blue IBM's AI model, AI chess model, beating Gary. Casparov. I remember that, yeah. Right. And so it was like the end of chess. It's never going to go back. But now the chess industry is bigger than ever. It's like 5x bigger, three times as many grandmasters. The grand prizes are bigger than ever. Turns out, nobody wants to watch AI's playing chess, right? Yeah, they just want to, even though Magnus Carlson would get destroyed by the best chess AIs. Yeah. Chess is in that category of sports. You know,

I think sports are completely safe. I think that and I think that's why you also see these big sport deals, whether NFL team, NBA team valuations through the roof. I think NFL teams, you'll see your first $10 billion. NFL team sold soon. You know, the UFC doing a big deal with Paramount $8 billion. I think like, you know, I think that the networks know now like, all right, this is the one thing that AI will never hurt.

You can't AI a sport in the case of chess, which one could argue chess is a sport. um you know i think those real life ones can never will never be disrupted by i mean i agree with you there's empirical evidence like a i's are already better at it but we're not watching them yeah so unlikely that there's going to be some tipping point where oh well if they're only this much better then we'll start watching it i think it's the the human story that's the product there right but i think you'll see like cartoon series i mean we've talked about it like you know maybe using grok imagine for like a cartoon series or, you know, like, those could be AI. You know, you can make the net next.

I mean, degenerates could be, you know, you can make the next South Park of a family guy, you know, via AI. I think you could do stand-up comedy specials maybe even through AI, but sports. Yeah. What's your biggest worry with AI, if anything, if things are not handled correctly? My biggest worry is that the people aren't behind it. So you actually compare AI with crypto. And whenever there's like some regulatory overreach or something that's like anti-cry out there, either by the government or lawmakers, there's like a huge retail army of crypto fans that are fighting against it. And even you could argue this last election, the 2024 presidential election, crypto became a massive constituency.

that actually swung lots of districts and votes in favor of the Trump administration, which like openly embraced crypto much earlier than I think the Harris campaign tried some tepid efforts to reach out to crypto people, but they kind of felt flat and never looked genuine. So, and I think the reason crypto has this army is because from the very beginning, normal people could get access to crypto. You know, you got the pizza guy, but it started out as a retail phenomenon. Whereas AI, you've got companies that are private that are still only accessible to like a relatively small circle of wealthy individuals that keep getting wealthier. Now these companies are worth hundreds of billions.

And, you know, you do have Google. That's, it's good that now Google is being competitive. So now that if you're a public market investor, retail shareholder, you can get access to it. But Google's a $3 billion company. All right. So it's not like you can get in early. Three trillion. Yeah.

Sorry. Off by three over some magnitude. So three trillion company. So it's not like you can get in early and actually ride that appreciation. So my biggest fear is that you have all this fear about job loss. And I think the best antidote is if you own this thing, it's like if you're, if you own the thing that's disrupting you're kind of rooting for it a little bit. But the only people that are rooting for AI are the investors, venture capitalists and the like researchers that work there. And I think if that

continues to be the case, it's going to be the biggest problem because what's going to happen is there's going to be public pressure if we don't do it right is it going to come out again. against AI. And then you get into like national security risk and all of those, all of those scenarios. So I believe in it. But I think where I can help and what I'm really focused on is making sure that normal people can invest in these companies. Well, how would we as like regular people use Aristotle? Like how would a regular consumer like the three of us use Aristotle? I think in the first instance, it's a more specialized process. product. So it's very useful if you're a mathematician that's trying to do research in frontier math,

but then it'll expand. And I think as it expands, the use cases will get broader. So beyond mathematicians, the next use case is creating software that's verified and correct. And the first places where that's going to be useful is in mission critical domains. So domains where if your software screws up, the consequences are really huge. So think chip design, right? If you screw up the design of a chip and you're fabbing it, that costs hundreds of millions or billions. And if you could speed that up and increase the reliability and you can verify that the design is good, you might be able to like 5x the speed of development there, which is big.

Talk about automotive control systems for cars. Financial services and crypto. How many times do you hear about a blockchain vulnerability that leads to hundreds of millions of dollars being siphoned off of crypto protocols? So I think it'll start there in verifiable correctness in safety critical domains. But then we see a world where if the tools get good enough, the cost of provably correct AI code will approach the cost of just any code. They'll both go to zero. And so then all software will be verifiably correct. And then I think then it becomes much more broadly applicable.

So it's more of an enterprise. Would you say more of an enterprise? At first, yeah. I think it's mostly enterprise, but I think there is a path where if we actually succeed in this, then you could have something like a chat GPT or a Claude Code. Aristotle now feels very much like ClaudeCode. You could have one where you're very, very highly confident that what it's telling you is right. And it makes sense, you know, because you have Robin Hood as far as your consumer product,

but you've been so great at understanding what an average person, what their behavior. are that, you know, that's why I was actually eager to see if, like, all right, will I ever use Vlad's AI? Well, you can give it a try. It seems like it's a little bit over. Well, one of the amazing things that we've been seeing from Aristotle is amateur mathematicians. So if you're a mathematician or if you, like, start thinking about a math problem and start solving it, it's very difficult for a non-insider to do.

do that for a couple of reasons. One is it requires a lot of specialized knowledge. And it's very tough to get that unless you're in the math community. The other thing is, let's say you come up with something, you figure something out, who's going to read it? You have to convince someone to read your paper and you'll probably get dismissed as a crank, right? Yeah. Who's this guy? He's not even affiliated with the university and he thinks he figured something out. But with AI tools like Aristotle, you have these like citizen mathematicians, which is someone that maybe is a software engineer or retiree. They like math. They're starting to figure stuff out. And now they don't have to convince a mathematician to like verify and check their paper. The system will do it by

itself. So I think what you'll see is a lot more people doing math and also downstream of that, like you'll see normal people using AI to make scientific discoveries, which I don't think anyone's expecting, but I think you'll start to see that in the next six to 12 months. Very interesting stuff. Yeah, and you know, you'll have a normal person. And the thing is math is like the first step. Everything depends on math. Physics is dependent on math. I mean, modern physics. is just math that's applied in a way. And then if you want to think about like contraptions and gadgets,

that's all downstream of physics. So engineering depends on physics. Albert Einstein, you know, arguably the greatest physicist of all time, his job was a patent clerk. So he was like checking people's inventions. Why? That's how you could apply physics knowledge. Like downstream of physics is like creating little contraptions and patenting them.

So, you know, where does it end up? Normal people creating like actual things with AI that you could sell and that are useful. So you'll have the return of like citizens patenting things, which I think will be really cool. What are your thoughts on AI hardware? Like robotics, wearables. I'm excited by it. Like, I would be an early adopter of that. I am less excited about at least, oh, I have two thoughts about it.

One is I'm a little bit less excited about having these robots that I'm seeing advertised in my house, like washing my dishes or, you know, picking on my kids' toys. Well, I was like, why do all these things look like the Terminator? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They all look terrifying, right? Yes, right, yeah. Why do you make them look like the Terminator? Why don't you have, I would have C3PO in my house. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like a less intimidating one. Yeah, they all look scary. Yeah, make it look cute. My guess, if I had to, and I could be wrong, of course, maybe the product market fit for those will be picking up your kids' toys or washing dishes. So replace a little like. I would look at things where they're at your house, but you don't have to interact with them or you don't have to be home. Like construction site. I think humanoid robots and a construction site is probably like a better use case.

If I could just have them build my house when I'm not there or fix it, I'd much rather do that. So, yeah, I think it's clear that it's coming. We've been making a lot of progress. We're probably not too far away from being able to buy them. I think like the movie, Her, you know, you guys seen that with the AirPod thing. that's going to happen. Oh my God. Yeah.

You don't want to be that guy. I don't want to be that guy, but I think a lot of people, yeah, I think that form factor will happen. You'd say you'd be afraid to have them in your house doing like cleaning up in the house and it would just, you wouldn't be in favor of that? For me personally, right now, I haven't seen one that I would get excited about having in my house. Yeah, I don't think, I don't think I don't think I've seen it yet. Yeah. Yeah. The moment your robot starts talking back to you.

too, then it's going to be a real issue. You're not winning that fight. No. Yeah. You think people have like robot girlfriends one day? There was a movie on Netflix about that with Megan Fox. Did you see that? No.

If it looks like Megan Fox, then I might be interested. I mean, I think that you're already having people. There's been articles about this. I haven't seen it myself, but character AI. Have you heard of character AI? So this was this company. Noam Shazir started it. It got basically gobbled up by Google.

in some strange transaction. So someone told me, hey, there's a Vladtenev. There's three Vladtenevs on character AI. I'm like, what are you talking about? What do you mean? There's a Vlad Tenive bot on character AI. So I downloaded it to check it out. And this thing was a sex bot.

So do you guys know the movie that dumb money? You have your own sex bot. I deleted it once I. But yeah, it was like, all right, you're chatting with Vlad Tenive. he is at home when you come home from a hard day at work and he's, you know, making you a casserole, right? And you can see, I'm not going to get into the details of the rest of the conversation. But there are people out there that are chatting with AIs and a... Well, it's probably the only fan stuff you're talking about.

Well, no. My girlfriend goes to chat GBT for relationship advice all the time. And when I went over there... Girlfriend, no. It's not just my girl. Just do girl. And the chat GPT knew so much about me and it freaked me the fuck out. Yeah.

Yeah, I was like, what the hell is. I didn't even. She needs the AI to handle you. She was talking to the chat GPT in the living room and I thought there was another person in there. And then I walked in and she introduced me to the chat GBT and I was like, this is fucking crazy. Well, so that for sure is happening. That's where there's also people talking to chat GPT as their girlfriend. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what he's talking about. That's what I'm talking about. It's like her best friend. No, I know, but she's just getting advice where he's saying, like, it's actually a human, like, they're like emotionally connected to the person. Have you seen anybody that's at that, like, do you have any friends or anybody that's at that stage?

Me personally, no, but actually back in 1960, there was a project. It was an academic project to create, it was like one of the first AI projects called, Liza or Eliza. Did you guys hear about this? It was like it was supposed to be a therapist. I thought it would, they would design a basic AI therapist that you could talk to about your problems. This was in the 1960s and they cut that project off because people were developing romantic feelings toward the AI therapist. It was the most primitive AI. It would basically just like ask you how you felt about it so you'd be like oh you know I'm having this issue okay how do you feel about it thanks for asking yeah exactly yeah but how do you really

feel about it so the algorithm wasn't why'd they cut that off if it was it was it seems like it was working well because people were developing romantic uh feelings toward it so it got weird back then I feel like now then they would approve it now yeah probably yeah terrifying I don't know if that's good or bad for society but it's definitely happening yeah that's can't be stopped well they talk about too it's like now people don't even communicate it'll tell you one thing Aristotle will not do this yeah I hope I don't know not at this point I don't think anyone has a romantic relationship Aristotle is gonna want to make us go back to school I'm excited for that yeah excited

for everything man so well thank you Vlad we appreciate you yeah what is this happy dad fruit punch this is our alcohol brand it's a oh really hard seltzer hard tea lemonade so we launched it about four years ago it's no no no no mock tails. It's all alcoholic. Yeah, it's light alcohol, 5% alcohol, hard seltzer. That's our tea variation. We have a hard seltzer.

We also have a lemonade in partnership with RealTree. Yeah, our business is using our platforms that build CPG brands. So going in and looking at different categories that are growing, that could use disruption. So Happy Dad, well, Full Send merch was the first one. But then Happy Dad, which is grown. It's the top three seltzer. and most states opt for and some um you know just going after really a person who just wants a light drink you know getting away from beer or hard liquor totally i like the hats too yeah yeah we'll trade

a half for you guys dad are you guys dad for a gold card yeah i'm a new dad yeah i got a six month old right here oh yeah they're not dads that they know of we'll find out in 16 years hopefully not all right thank you appreciate you man yeah fun chat The CJ Pearson Show. Every week we'll take on the biggest cultural, political, and moral battles in America head on. CJ presents the most passionate voices in the black community.

When you're going around and talking to people in actual communities, you get to know what people actually care about. As a black man, why can't I be the first one in my family to graduate from college? Why can't it be me? Shift the way that I think about the world. Bold truth, real conviction, zero permission. This is the CJ Pearson show.

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