This Week in Startups - E1032: News Roundtable! Robinhood Snacks’ Duo Jack Kramer & Nick Martell on Coronavirus’ impact on public markets, Iger out at Disney – Buy or Sell?, link-baiting Tesla crash, defining Cult Stocks & more!

Episode Date: February 27, 2020

0:42 Jason intros Jack Kramer & Nick Martell of Robinhood Snacks 1:06 Starting Market Snacks as a side hustle after rooming together in college 13:24 What Series of Robinhood were they acquired at? 14:11 Jason's origin story meeting Vlad & investing in Robinhood 18:38 Coronavirus impact on the public market... worrisome or no big deal? 30:16 Iger steps down as Disney CEO, will this hurt them long-term? 35:40 Star Wars movie rankings 37:00 Is $DIS a buy or sell? What about the next CEO? 42:11 Bloomberg or Bernie? 46:56 Tech-lash: Link-baiting Tesla crash 53:02 Growth vs. Profitability in the Private & Public markets 54:34 How are Uber, Lyft, etc. combatting this? 1:01:55 How will Airbnb handle the shift? 1:04:10 VTOL vs. self-driving 1:07:58 What are "Cult Stocks"? How are they defined? 1:11:09 Millennials & Gen-Z are voting with their wallets 1:23:46 What are Jack & Nick's favorite stocks right now?

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Go to Fiverr.com and use code twist to receive 10% off your first order. That's F-I-V-E-R-R dot com and use promo code twist. Hey, everybody, welcome to this week in Starvice. We've got a news roundtable for you today. And I'm lucky enough to have the team from Robin Hood Snacks on the podcast. Jack Kramer and Nick Martel are with me. Welcome, boys. Great to be here.

All right. Now, just point of water. One person talks at a time on the radar or not the same. or not the same time. You can't be in sync the whole time. And we'll go off names here. So this is Nick. This is Jack.

Right. We should make that clear. Yes. And you started market snacks as an independent podcast. We started as a media company back in 2011 in secret when we were working at banks. November 2011. But we started our friendship four and a half years prior. That's true.

Fresh media roommates. Anything about this bromance. Clearly you guys. Straight to the Wikipedia. You guys roommates as well? Pretty most. You're roommates at some point? We were.

Total serendipity, freshman year roommates. Walked into the room, Jack had the same protein shake as me and the same daily show DVDs. No, I had season three of Seinfeld. You had season four. That's true. And we were watching the Daily Show on Hulu, which had just launched. That was like a cool new thing. Little do we know there was going to be a Roku, a Hulu, a Tibu, a Fubu, a voodoo.

Where would you guys go? Columbia. Middlebury College. Met at Middlebury College. Where's that? Vermont. Beautiful state. John.

They have colleges in Vermont. Mark? All right. Just take it easy. All the fan from Vermont or emailing. Stop composing. I'm just trolling. So you start this market snacks. It becomes a podcast, a newsletter. What is it? Trolling on Twitter. It was a blog. We had a WordPress 1099 a month. We started a blog in November of 2011. And actually, on that day, we wrote our first blog post. We have not missed a day of market action when the New York Stock Exchange is open since. And that began with us. Literally, we'd get out of our bank jobs. We recognized one day that business news just was not communicating with our generation. We committed to doing it every day since then. And we literally would like get out of bank jobs

be on the subway, texting what stories to cover, curating the stories relevant to our generation and getting it out later that night. The daily blog became a daily email newsletter, which expanded to video like TV appearances, giving the millennial perspective on finance, which expanded to a podcast. And would you say the millennial perspective on finance? You mean, is this the month where I get off mom and dad's Netflix and go on my own and take My credit card. We did a whole segment about... Trick question, Moe.

You never get off the Netflix password. Okay. Password mooching is still strong. Yeah. Now, do you have driver's licenses? Yes. When did you get them? 16.

Actually, in Vermont, you get a learner's permit when you're 15. In New York, I was one of the very few who got a driver's license. God. Yes. Okay. Now... When Nick drove up to Middlebury College to meet me as his freshman year roommate, it's the first time he had ever made a gradual turn with the wheel.

I don't know. In Manhattan, it's 90-degree angles. Yeah, yeah, you have really. Square is the entire time. It's a grid. It's a grid system. It's easy to understand. It's thoughtful.

I mean, Broadway does go against the grid. But in a very specific way, which hits each of those, Columbus Circle, Harold Square. It does it very organized fashion. The only road that goes tip to tip on Manhattan. Now, as millennials, you go to college, you guys meet each other, and then whose mom's basement do you move back into? Right. Do we find another mom? There actually should be like a platform for that.

We both got gigs actually in finance. You both got jobs and finance. Where'd you go? Morgan Stanley. I went to Comance Bank or Commerce Bank, which is a German bank with the New York branch. And I was at UBS. So Jack was down in the financial district and I was up in Midtown. UBS.

This is the bank that backed Trump. That was Deutsche. Oh, that's Deutsch, right, right. UBS is a legit bank. It's Swiss. It's Swiss. They're not like criminals. No, well, yeah.

They're not laundering. They're not laundering money? Yeah, no one, they can't talk about it. They can't talk about it. But Deutsche Bank. Different story. Different story. They might be very into Russian money and turning it from roubles into U.S. dollars.

What's a great way to do that? Real estate. Yeah. It's a great city to buy real estate in New York. New York. Yeah. In Florida. Oh, wait.

Interesting. I think Georgia Bank actually owns a couple casinos. They do, in fact. Because they lent to casinos, not just Trump's casinos, but other casinos, which went bankrupt and they repossessed casinos and are running casinos. Really? Interesting. Okay.

Now, at some point, Robin Hood. Oh, my Robin Hood. Yum. Full disclosure, I'm an investor in Robin Hood from the early days. It's done okay from what I understand. I don't get very many updates from Vlad. But from what I understand, I read in the trades and doing okay. How does...

Does Vlad update investors, actually? He doesn't. He doesn't. He doesn't. If you had a preferred way, we can deliver a message. Yeah, just an email every year. Okay. Just how many paid members we have or somebody?

I don't really ask them. You know, when you're an investor, an angel investor, when you don't get updates, it means one of two things. The company is going to go public and you're going to make a ton of money, or the company's about to go out of business and they're going to be asking you for a bridge any minute. Yeah. It's one of those two. Yeah.

So you just take the good with the bad. If you don't hear from them, you just hope it's the one out of 20 times that this is Uber. Didn't hear from Travis for six months. until he was like, yeah, by the way, we just closed that $20 billion. Close what? He's like money, revenue. The infrequent email seems to be optimal email. Well, the funniest moment with Uber was they had asked them what the share price was.

They told me the share price. And then I went and I calculated what I had and I said, wow, that's incredible. And they said, oh, you, you, where did you get that share count from? And I said, well, I'm just looking at the documents. I said, oh, you don't know about the seven to one? And I said, what's the seven to one? And they said, we did a seven to one stock split. I say, what does that mean?

It says, well, you have seven times a number of shares. Wow. Whoa. And I was like, hold on one second. I put on a hold on us. Angel life. Right, Jesus. All right.

So at some point, you guys are chugging along. Did you get to like multiple people? It was just a two-man show and then Vlad wants to buy it? What happens? How did this go down? Well, this is a few years down the line. We've been, we were growing as a side hustle. Like, there are points where Jack is on business in Germany.

I'm on business in Brazil. And we're like, still, we're making market snacks happen. There are times where Jack and I are like, before we go to work, we're putting, you know, going down to New York Stock Exchange, having makeup put on our face, appearing on Cheddar TV, doing a hit at CBS, then going to our day jobs and then running the newsletter in the evening. We both disclosed outside business interests to our banks. Very true. Eventually. Yes, right before we monetized. And that's when we started going with like an ad-based media model.

And how quickly did they pull you into HR and what is that conversation like? I came up voluntarily. We actually didn't have our names on MarketSnacks.com for the first, like, year and a half. True. Because we were nervous. We just didn't want them to shut it down. But then we had our first advertiser, our first revenue stream. This was back in like early 2013, I think.

And then we're like, this is clearly a business. Oh, and we opened an LLC at that point. And that's when I went to Henning von Gersdorf. Great guy, my German boss. And I would like, sure he's got a great set to you. I pitched it with my buddies. I pitched it with my buddies. Check out this.

So I convinced him that market snacks, you know, we're covering financial news every day. I will be able to talk to my clients about the financial markets. I'll be a better writer. I'll be a better worker. There we go. That's why you should approve this and he did. And he didn't say to you like,

well, you built this while we were here and so we own it. Yes. What percentage do we own? No, Nick and I respond enough to use our personal email addresses. Yes, and texting. You know, this was actually a key.

Did you update the blog from our laptop? Ed and Nicklis. This thing we learned early on, which is I think really different from a couple decades ago, which is companies are really much more open to the idea of you having a side hustle. And if you're up front and communicate this properly, this is a great way incubated idea. The opposite of what you did.

As for forgiveness and permission. That's another option. No, wait. You went to your boss as well? I actually had by chance just changed company to work for a venture firm in New York. Oh, really? Which one? It's called Endeavor.

It's actually a nonprofit structured like a venture firm. They have an arm out here called Catalyst, which is very cool. Chilbonny is an Endeavor company. He's in, no, it's not, but that'd be really cool. You mean the Greek yogurt, Trubon? It's focused on emerging markets and basically reaching scale of entrepreneurs in emerging markets. So you guys start making a little cheddar? Yes.

And then what, Robin Hood's like, we want to create something? You guys got them as an advertiser, how did you mean? So we were the two-person company. We were the host of the newsletter. We generated our own revenues through our own ad sales. Eventually, we went full in on market snacks. And we gave it our 100% focus in the summer of 2000. You mean you quit your job.

Actually, we had gone to business school, both of us. I was the University of Michigan. And I was at Warden, and we saw business school is actually an accelerator, like a way for us to take classes, put the info right back into the product, which we actually were doing, like with the marketing class in particular. So instead of taking a typical MBA internship, Nick and I, I like saw financing from the Entrepreneur Center at Michigan, they gave me some money to do my own thing. And we put everything into Market Snacks, and we launched our podcast in May of 2018.

and that took market snacks to a new level. That was our second core product, and that was our major differentiator. Is there like a move where you blink with your left eye to let him know you're done talking? Because the amount of time between when you stop talking and he starts is the same as the time between your words individually. It's a wavelength interpretation thing we established freshman year.

Look, he visited me in Berlin when I was studying abroad. There we go. We played a whole bunch of drinking games in college. Can I get in a lot of. on this. So wait, you do it to him and then you do it to me. Go ahead. And you, you got to do it to him. So tell me about when you met Vlad. So we met Vlad after we, so actually, let me just back you up for one second. Robin Hood approached us and said, hey, you guys have a cool newsletter. We'd love to reach your audience with an ad. Perfect. So they were the newsletter

sponsor for one week. But they were asking questions that seemed a little beyond the realm of the business transaction. Right. It was like much more like we had taken a round of investment from a company called Rough Draft Ventures earlier that summer. And the meeting we had with Robin Hood's marketing department was much more like that fundraising round. They're asking us. Then they said, hey, at some point, what do you guys think about the future of market snacks? Have you thought about your future? We said we're thinking big. We want to be the top financial source for people under 36. And then we shared more that we basically would have put in a pitch deck to an investor. And did you get stock or cash when you made the acquisition? We can't talk about all the details of

the acquisition, but it really was a unique moment because that entire summer and the few months afterwards negotiating it were just an incredible experience. So do you regret taking some cash instead of all stock? We had no regrets about. No regrets now. I don't think so. No regret with the acquisition. How big was, did Robin Hood, that was pretty funny, by the way. We'll watch the video on YouTube if you're listening. On Robin Hood, did you take, what I want to know is at what point did Robin Hood buy, were they between their Series A or the Series B when we get back on this week and start us. Shipping can be complex.

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We use it. We love it. It works. I send people copies of my book all the time. We save a ton of money, which is important. You're on a budget. You want to make sure you're frugal. Go ahead and go to pb.com slash twist. Okay. Let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, Jack and Nick from Robin Hood Snacks, FCA Market Snacks are with us. They sold their newsletter podcast, media conglomerate to my Robin Hood, which I'm an investor in. And they may have taken some cash in stock, so they're pretty happy. about themselves, which is smart move. I think selling to Robin Hood was a good idea. If you get a chance to get on a rocket ship, why not do it? Were they at Series A, Series B? How big was Robin Hood at the time when you guys sold to them?

Well, we announced Robin Hood Snacks was launching in March of last year, March of 2019. And I think the most recent fundraise occurred in the summer after that. So not at its current valuation, but the one before that. Got it's $4 or $5 billion. Nicely done, boys. Nicely done. Well, I think it's 10x from here. So we're here to talk.

a little bit. You guys know how I met Robin and right? I told you a story. No, we would love to, we would love to hear more. All I heard was Antonio's. All right. So a friend of mine Adio, and by the way, you're not getting any commission of Deo, so just calm down. I know there's a long text message coming. He runs something called the Founders Institute, which basically is like you pay 500 bucks or a thousand bucks and you go to what would happen before an accelerator, like launch or tech stars or Y Combinator. They kind of teach you how to be an entrepreneur. So you don't necessarily have to be a, you don't necessarily have to have your idea there. Anyway, he asked me to come speak at. I speak at it. Turns out

Adeo was roommates with Elon Musk in college. So they're good friends and I'm friends with Elon as well and they said, hey, let's go to Antonio's Nut House after the Founders Institute. So I go with him. So it's me, Elon and Addaio sitting there and Rob and... Is that the dive bar on... It's the divest of dive bars. It basically... Coronavirus is already there. It's just waiting. Coronavirus is waiting, having a beer. No handshakes there.

It's all fist bumps. You don't want to even walk in the door. I think they took the door off. It's just because the handle would be... There are better uses for a door at a bar. You don't want to touch this door handle. Anyway, we go, and this kid comes out to me, and I said, hey, two guys. I said, what do you do?

And they say, we're quants. And I say, what's a quant exactly? And they say, you don't know what quaint is? I was like, no. And it's like long before billions. It's a finance term. It's a finance term. I figured that out.

Yeah. And he said, well, more quantitative analysis. I was like, is that where you write an algorithm and then you beat the market? He said, yeah. I was like, oh, okay, tell me about your startup. And he goes, how do you know we have a startup? I said, well, you recognize me. It's only one way.

And I said, so what's the idea? And he says, well, we want to get millennials to trade stocks. Let me stop you right there, kid. Millennials are still on their parents' Netflix accounts. They're living in their basement eating fish chips, you know, fish sticks and plans. and playing Xbox. You're going to do what you've got to do. Like, this is the last thing they're thinking about is their retirement and like what stock to buy for 60 years from now.

He's like, yeah, that's the opportunity. If we do get them to trade, we'll own them. We'll be the first people to do something directly for millennials to trade stocks. Yeah. I said, okay. Okay, I'll go with it. Sure. Big market.

Untapped. Everybody's afraid to do it. Sure. Retail investors went away after 2008. Was there a product yet, by the way? No. Is it still an idea? That's an idea.

And I said, what's the business? He goes, that's the best part. We're not going to charge people. I said, okay, let me just make sure I got this. Let me repeat it back to you. You're going after a group of people who have never bought stocks before, and by all indications, have no interest in planning for their future. I mean, the most planning a millennial is doing is like weekend two of Coachella or weekend one.

That's kind of a lot of heat here, Jeff. We're taking a lot of heat. I'm butt in my left. Which weekend do you go to? Weekend one, Coachella. weekend too. Anyway, you always go weekend two. It's when your roommates out of town. Well, no, because then you know which stages we did a good

performance last week. You know, you know, Beyonce killed it, so you want to make sure you get there early for Beyonce. You don't know that week one. Millennials killed Woodstock is what you said. Absolutely. Pro tips. So anyway, pro tips. I said, so your plan is to go after a group of people who have no indication that they want to plan past Coachella and then you're going to monetize them by making it free.

He said, yep, I said, I'm in. Nothing no-brainer. What was going through? Contrarian. Very simple. This is a one percent. chance this thing works. But if it does, it's worth $10 billion. Great quote from like a mentor and friend of ours, John Steinberg from Cheddar. That the only ideas worth having are the contrarian ones. The only bets worth making are the contrarian. At my little angel forum, I introduced Travis and Uber to 20 to investors. Three said yes, including me, 19 said no. Wow. Took Airbnb 45 meetings to get their first yes.com.com met with 80 investors. I was the 80 first. I

said yes, the other 80s said no. Those are my three best bets so far. So the crazier or the idea, the better. Speaking of crazy, the stock market has crashed. Yep. Or corrected. Three days in a row, largest point drop, which isn't really what's in now. We're going right into the news right now. This is it. Enough about you guys in your story and my story about Vlad. I wound up putting a little bit of money in. It's worth 300x or something. I don't know. I put a little bit money and it's worth of a million bucks or more. So coronavirus is obviously affecting the market and went down two days in a row. I guess it's the largest point, but it's not near the largest percentage. I guess everybody likes to talk about the points because it's scarier.

Right. But the points keep going up. So, yeah. Right. But the percentage drop isn't as scary as a thousand points. We're not even at 10% I don't think. It did have its worst day in a couple of years, but it's been an extraordinary number of years. Do you see this as a, just to give people a additional background, we're taping this on Wednesday, and today is the 24th. In the U.S. has only been 57 confirmed cases. Two people got a person-to-person worldwide. 81,000 people have it, 2,770 deaths, 95% of the cases are still in China. But I guess the CDC did scare the heck out of everybody yesterday by saying, make sure you have 30 days worth of food.

I was like, is that what they said? Because I was warning, they warned us to prepare. It was pretty ambiguous at one point. It was just like prepare for virus. I know. And does that just mean get stressed out? Yeah. It was weird.

Don't touch people. Don't talk to people. I was like, it's just kind of like the prequel to the walking dad where they're like, Yeah, it's probably nothing but get 30 days with the food. And the only thing they didn't say to get was ammunition. So they left that off the list. So I got a huge order coming. They got time, though, apparently, to put that in.

Yeah. And ticking ahead on the slides here. We got some context. So what do you think? Is this a chance? Is this real? CDC recommend shaving fish on the protective coronavirus. Really?

Your beard. Yeah. I mean, gentlemen. I feel like I'm a threat right now. So what are these absurd? No, don't worry about guys. I'm sending you back up. I'm sending you back up to makeup to get a quick shave.

Oh, man. What do you guys think? I mean, you cover the markets. I don't know if you guys actively trade the markets, do you? We always share what stocks we're holding, but we don't actively day trade or anything. Right. Right. So it's public what you guys own.

We always disclose it, yeah. Right. So you're not like trading. You're not like talking about something on the pod and then making a trade before or after to trade on that. Exactly. But generally speaking, do you see this if you're advising your mom, dad, cousin, brother, close friend, would you say, yeah, you wanted to get in the market? This is a good time. Or do you think, I would wait three or six months and see what happened? A couple things on that. In 2018,

you said it was the last day we had a thousand drop from the Dow. That actually, we had two thousand day drops that week in 2018. Was that the flash trading thing? Does it? No, it wasn't. Do you remember what it was? No, because the same thing happened two years prior where there was like a sudden drop, but we're not talking about that right now. So these drops are like three and a half percentage points each. In 2008, we had three days between October and December with drops of over 7%. So these are much more minor than all of those things. Also, Nick, the trade war with China, markets are still at a record high. Right. The unprecedented election of Trump, markets are still at a record high. Brexit, markets are still at a record high. So, you know,

experts tell you not to try to time the markets. So kind of the premise of the question was, should we be timing the markets. The other thing is volatility, which it actually hasn't been up until the last week a very volatile quarter or year at all. In fact, when Jack and I got out of school and he had the European debt crisis going on, the markets were jumping around one, two, three percent up or down for like months on a daily basis. When they thought like the Portugal and Italy, Greece was going to like sever itself off. Totally. Yeah, go back or whatever. Yeah. So this two shall pass. The thing I was kind of wondering is I start thinking about the worst case scenario. Yeah.

Worst case scenario, they said if everybody basically sheltered in place for 30 days, it can't spread. Therefore, it kind of dies. And in six to nine to 12 months, they'll have some kind of vaccine for this. So if we lost a month of economic activity or it was muted. Global. I'm thinking, imagine nobody went to work in person. Nobody went to school in person. Yeah.

Everybody was on Zoom. And all shopping was limited to, you know, deliveries. And people were pretty cautious in deliveries. The delivery people wore masks and people, you know, wiped everything down and maybe didn't order from restaurants. You would lose whatever that is of a year, 8% of a year. And you would still gain some of it because people would still be working. So maybe it's, you lose 4 or 5% of economic activity for the year.

Would it kill the human species? No. We've had wars that have gone on for years. that killed millions of people. So it feels like we can get through this. It feels like we can get through this without necessarily taking the extreme measures you were talking about, too.

Right. That's why I said the worst case scenario to me seems like we would still get through it. Although Slack investors and Zoom investors would probably love that scenario. Well, there was a theory that they created it. Yeah. Yeah.

Is that too dark? Was that too dark? Can't make light of the coronavirus? Sorry. I like that worst case scenario that you just described. Is that the worst case? I haven't heard that described yet.

Well, they said what they're doing right now is they're containing people, right? Because after 30 days... I think there is a worst case scenario, actually. Well, yeah, if a lot of people die and don't contain in place, then it would spread. But in terms of measures to stop this, if everybody stayed home for 30 days, it can't spread. Well, in a way, we have the case study, right? We have the provinces in China where you can see they've basically done that. Yes.

And they've ebbed the flow to some degree. Oh, no, it's plummeted. New cases have plummeted. You've seen this work on a certain scale. The question is cannot even function at a global scale. Absolutely, you could. I mean, this is just unprecedented. Like, we've covered a lot of weird crises since we started markets now.

We've not covered something like this. No. And the way we were looking at before in our podcast, we were like, okay, if you have to think of every country in a way as like an individual citizen, an individual shopping mall. Like the big- individual factory. Yeah. The weird thing here is that in China, the impact has been that it's affecting Apple because they're, factors are there. It's affecting Apple retail because people can't go to the stores. But then it's

interestingly affecting like retail in France because Chinese consumers who are traveling are a big portion of that. So unlike any other thing that we've kind of seen in our coverage of the markets for the years, this is able to kind of scale and spread in a way that no other kind of contained disaster really does. And that's why Monday stocks dropped by a thousand points because we thought it was contained to China. Right. But that factory shopping mall, tourist shut down. Italy shut down and Iran where they're like Iran's not going to be able to handle this.

And South Korea. And then was it the IOC guy yesterday who said if this isn't contained by May, the Olympics? We'll be canceled. We'll be canceled. In Japan. Yeah.

You had Warren Buffett weighing on this as well. They brought Warren Buffett in the day the market was crashing. Was that time, do you think? Is that like a Warren... It's like a bat signal. They're like, oh, we're going to be down 3%. Press the Warren Buffet.

We've compared Warren Buffett in here. He's the Albus Dumbledore of Finance. Yeah. It makes everyone feel safe. And whenever he speaks, we're all just like, okay. Yeah, he's kind of got that like, well, I buy companies and companies if. Get me a Coke. If you want, seize candy.

This is not the Nebraska accent. I don't think. No, we're just doing a Texas accent right now. We're just basically saying Warren Bob is a hillbill. But he does speak in a slow, reassuring twang that is sort of like, well, if you wanted the peanut butter chew and I wanted the chocolate walnut. Well, the coronavirus is not going to get the chocolate walnut. They may get the Carmel, so. He simplifies everything.

So look, with all of these crises, including coronavirus, if you sell because you think something really bad's about to happen, you would have done that with Brexit. You would have done it with the election 16. You would have done it so many times and you miss out on all these gains. When other investors are greedy, you got to be scared. And when other investors are scared, you want to get greedy. That's Warren Buffett, actually. Yeah.

Yeah. I know. That's the Warren Buffet right there. All right, when we get back, we're going to talk about the other major tragedy occurring in the world. Bob Higer has stepped down as Disney CEO. We'll get back on this week at startups. Hey, everybody, have you been thinking about upgrading your workstation? Do you want to be more efficient at work? Well, Dell for entrepreneurs wants to help you level up your tech hardware.

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All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. My guest today, Jack Kramer, he is T-B-O-Y Jack. T-Boy Jack. T-boy Jack. T-boy is the best one yet. Wow. Was that your college Twitter? No.

It actually recently changed. Jack's recently changed. What did you do with your college Twitter? You put it on private? Yeah, I just told you about your college Twitter protected. What did you guys did? I didn't have Twitter in college. You guys did.

Did you put your college Twitter on protected? No, I was summer of Dutch because summer of 16. was a big summer. It's when I met my wife. Wait, wait. Summer of Dutch was your old handle? Dutch was my nickname until the summer of 16. Not surprising.

Dutch. Yeah. It makes total sense. I have a very round face. Yeah. Amazing. But what happened to that handle? Is it on private right now?

No, it was... It will be by the end of his podcast. I think it was challenging my discoverability. So I changed it to T-Boy Jack. Didn't roll off the tongue like T-boy Jack. And Nick of New York. Kind of a play. Yeah, kind of works.

On Nick of King of New York. Yeah, yeah. Have you seen? I have you seen, A. Ferrar, King of New York, with Christopher Walken. Oh, you boys got fat when I was away. You're not the only one with a good walking voice.

Wow. Fellas, let's talk a little bit about IG stepping down. That's good. We all love Iger. Boy, did he go on a run. Iger is arguably the most powerful person in Hollywood, media, sports, and toys. Okay, he's got ESPN. Gotcha.

He's got Star Wars toys. ESPN and ABC, which had two of the top 10 most watched things in 2019. Both football. Both football. Super Bowl? What do they have? They had the college football national championship and one of the college football Final Four games.

Got it. And he's got Baby Yoda. He's got Baby Yoda in the toy department. He does have Baby Yoda. He's got a streaming network that has taken off in just a few months. I think Disney Plus is like the national parks. It is just a wonderful. public service. Seven bucks a month. Have you seen that library? That is hilarious. The fact that they

came out at $7. I thought they were going to come out at like 12 or a 10 maybe. When they came out at seven, I was like, this is going to go right to 250 million subs. Yeah. And you know what other service has had 250 million subs before? Nothing. Nothing. Correct. Trick question. It's like Verizon over 100 million subs. No, the same thing. AOL hit 35 million. Well, Netflix 150, right? Right. Yeah. Nobody's never had a service that got to a billion subs. I think it will be a billion subs. In 10 years, 20 years, we're sitting here. There'll be a billion.

One in seven people on the planet will have a subscription to it. That's the incredible thing about Disney. It's like nonpartisan. Everyone loves Disney. It could be a dollar a month. If there were a billion people on it, they can make $12 billion a year at a dollar a month per user. You can make a $12 a year.

And they can jack up the prices then at the theme parks. Right. I mean, they can lead with this kind of a thing. Well, it all goes back to, what, 1937 or something when Walt Disney drew up that thing. The ecosystem. Oh, yeah, the ecosystem. The characters in the middle. The theme parks over here, the toys over there, the musicals down here, the movies right there.

It's unbelievable those characters you mean. Yeah, IP. It's amazing. It's the writers, actually. It's the writers at Disney who are creating this unbelievable IP. I had an idea for this. When I read about that, I just thought, and I actually thought about Kurosawa, the Japanese director there, there's biography, something like an autobiography.

Toho Studios used to own the director and the writers, the producers, the lighting. It was all the same company. So it was like you went to work every day and people punched in and one of the people punching was an actor, Tashira Mufuni. Another person checking it was Akira Kurosawa, the director. And they would just make movies. They said, yeah, let's make this movie next. They were just going to work every day making movies.

They weren't like working in Hollywood where they would, you know, get hired to do one movie. And I just thought somebody should just get a hundred million dollar like venture fund and just hire every comic book artist and just say, here's a building in a beautiful place, here's, you know, whatever it is, $500,000 a year, which is probably... Create.

And just make characters. That's basically... This is the Imagineers. Isn't that what they're called? The Imagineers. Oh, at Disney. Yeah, they just mixed. And when they couldn't,

and they couldn't meet those goals, what do they do? They went out and acquired a bunch of things like Marvel and Star Wars to mix it. That you're going to say they fired those writers. No, no.

Those are great writers. On Disney. Incredible writers, but they built up the whole content asset-based to drive the ecosystem. They didn't fire those writers, dude, that's so cold. I'm just kidding. No, I love. Who do you think serving that lemonade? Frozen lemonade.

Remember Tom Hanks as Walt Disney and saving Mr. Banks? Yes. It's a delightful movie, isn't it? It's great. Absolutely delightful. Who's the taxi driver? It's almost as delightful as like the lighthouse. Yeah.

Paul Giumati. Finally, somebody saw the lighthouse. I'm scarred. It's dark. You saw it, right? Yeah, it's scary. The lighthouse was dark. Yeah.

was intense and it was awkward. Very awkward. There were lots of awkward moments. You're uncomfortable the entire time. Wait, is this Wilhelm Defoe? Yes. William Defoe and the Batman. Oh, the Batman?

Or are you going to say the vampire? The Batman. Okay. What's that kid's name again? The Christian Bale? No, no, not as cool. Not as neat. He was in the vampire movies.

And now we're going to get a millennial joke thrown our way in a second. Twilight movies. The Twilight Kid. There you go. I met him in Hollywood. A cool kid. Nice guy. But Bob, our buddy Bob.

I didn't mean it with Bob Iger. No, he's in the fourth Harry Potter. No, he's not. Yeah, yes. He is that Christian Bell is not in. Oh, we're not talking about Christian Bell. I know. I'm just mixing Matt.

I'm totally mixing Batman's up. What the heck is that kid's name? Nick, you're the pretty... Patinson. Patt. R. Pat. My boy, R. Pat. Really nice guy, though.

So Iger, man. Iger is gone. Byger. Iger is gone, but he's not going anywhere. He's staying for another year. The stock went crazy. People are a little scared. Yeah.

But I guess it's... The stock dropped 6% yesterday. Which is double what the market went down, I guess. Something like that, yeah. He's been on for 15 years. The stock price is five times higher than when he took over at the home. He led the company through cord cutting, the financial crisis. Right.

And he got Star Wars, Pixar, and Marvel. Yeah, which are... Which is bonkers. And he bought those all for what? Two to five million... Last time you were on an airplane, was there not ever... seat watching an Avengers movie? I think it's the most watched thing I have a Delta Flight.

Yes. Seatback. Every seat back is end game. And not only did he buy those assets, he has scaled them. I mean, what have they done with Star Wars? They came out with like one every, what, two decades? Those three are terrible. The Star Wars purists are not happy about it. We actually... Hold on a second. When did you guys watch Star Wars, the original

trilogy for the first time? First time in college, senior year. I watched college. Yeah, I mean... You watched Star Wars in college. In the 21st century. Did you know that Darth Vader Spoiler alert. I did. I did.

My buddy, at that point, it was like cultural. Yeah, it was bad. My buddy was a meme at that moment. It was an appalling spoiler alert. During,

um, episode one about the emperor. Yeah. It wasn't good. That's not good. Oh, he didn't know the emperor was. No,

I didn't know. I was watching for the first time. I was like, who's Senator Palpatine? Yeah. Oh, he's the emperor. Are you like,

what? All of my buddies is like beat Kyle. What? So what is your favorite Star Wars film? Number one film of the nine. It's got. You can include solo and Rogue One. It's got to be three.

Got to be three. You underestimate my power. You like Revenge of the Sith. It's actually dark. I like it too. I like it. I liked the one where I know people didn't like it, but with the, uh, where they're doing the racing in like, the pot race, the worst one.

In the drug, I know people don't like it. Your favorite is the worst. It was, it was a very entertaining race. The thing is I watched four, five, six, and then one, two, three. And the way that three ended and fed into four is great. Did you see Rogue One? The one that goes and bridges the two. I did, yeah.

one is amazing. Well, the Vader scene at the end. The Raiders scene is incredible. Spoiler alert. Okay. All right. So, Disney would you, in the next 15 years, will Disney do as well as it did in the past 15? If it 5xed, over the past 15, over under, that it performs the same

under or more, everybody's going to write it down. Okay, I'm writing down mine. I think it's going to do, okay? Is it going to do under 5x, over 5x, or around 5x. Over. Over, because it's not about the leader. It's not about who's leading the company at this point.

For the record, this is not a stock recommendation. Also, we should point out that Bobbiger has not left. I think it's a great buy. He's still involved in the content. He's doing one more year. No, he's actually doing two more years. He's going to be involved in the 2020, and he's the head of content. So he actually soothed investors concerned pretty well during the earnings call.

I thought for sure this had. This was so quick, though. People were freaked out that it was early because he had just signed this one-year extension or something. But he had done like three or two or three of these one year extensions or something. And he had made it clear. And the book came out. So when the book came out, you know, that's like a legacy play. He's like putting a cherry on the top. I'm going to tell my story. I'm done. Defining it. I'm going to spill the tea and I'm done. Like that was like, that's always the power move. Like Bruce Springsteen's doing his Broadway show. It's like, I think we know what's

going on here. He's about to retire. You go out on top when you have the opportunity. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So we all think it's going to do better because why? Okay. What is the lead driver going to be? What we don't think the lead driver is, is necessarily the new CEO. It doesn't necessarily have to be the core leader at this point. And the thing that surprised us, though, was who the new CEO is, which is a guy with a theme park experience, not a future media experience. Right. So to you, that's a problem. That would be a, you would assume that's a problem. To quote my buddy, Nick Martel, he's a good guy up in New York. I would say that this Nick Martel tweet is like legendary. The new Disney seal led to Disney theme parks. Feels like Netflix promoted the DVD I to be their lead.

and you included the image of Tom Wamsgan, who is married to Sloan, Shiv. I'm not a succession guy. And he ran Parks. And Parks had cruises, which had problems. Full disclosure. It's a small world after all.

Full disclosure, I had not included that photo originally, but I liked the idea that we got credit. Also, this is like kind of a Jack and I brainstorm these things together. So I don't want to take full credit on this. You know what? That was Nick. Producer Nick did that. The line at the end is Nick, and I'm trying to get into Extinctually get it out there on Twitter.

Jack was like, dude, get that out. Jack and I were talking about Disney and we're like, we've got to get this out there. You guys finish each other's sentences, but now we're learning you finish each other's tweets as well. It's a, hold on a second. Do you have each other's Twitter passwords? We have common law marriages and forced dates. No, but wait, this is a totally separate thing. Do you have access to each other's Twitter handles?

Are you going into drafts? No, so it's not that intent. Execution relies on the individual. You guys have your own sinks in the bathroom, or is it one sink? Is it two sinks of vanity? We've got two separate sinks. Okay. That's what I'd make sure we know.

We used to have bunk beds. Yeah. You got to do in college, yeah. This is going to a weird direction already. Iger, 2020 election. That's the first thing I thought was Bloomberg Iger. You guys are Bloomberg? You guys are Team Bloomberg or you guys Bernies?

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and for making the lives of all the startups and the founders who listen to this podcast, making their lives easier and giving them that 10% off. It's a significant discount. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, welcome back to this weekend startups. During the break, the boys told me they are team Bloomberg. 100%.

They said they do not want to live in a socialist country. Isn't that right, Nick, Jack? Seriously. Do you guys identify? My Twitter avatar is Mike Bloomberg. He's got a lot of mean advertising out there. Literally people ask me that. I'm like, really?

My first response was, does Bloomberg have enough money to pay me off? I got off the couch. Actually, the answer is yes, he does. But I believe Bloomberg's the most qualified. And I don't want a socialist running the country into the ground because entrepreneurship and capitalism makes this country great. What do you boys think?

Are you boys socialists? Capitalists. I honestly think it's been hard to watch all the debates because there is so much bloodshed going on with them. It is brutal to watch. It's too many people on that stage. Yeah. But are you fiscal?

Let me ask this. I'm going to just take you down without, I'm going to take it down through some very basic. Yes, no questions. Do you believe everybody should have health care in the country? Yes. And it should be paid for by the state. Okay.

Do you believe we should, give everybody free two-year associate degrees at state schools, city schools. Two-year. Like an associate degree, like community college? Community college, two-year. Do you think everybody should get that for free as part of being an American? Two-year trade school. Well, you did tell us during the commercial break to be careful what podcast we announced

our political affiliations on. Absolutely. But I'm just asking this one, which is very simple. I believe that for trade school, two years, the government should provide it if it's with a trade that we have a reasonable percentage chance, let's say 60 or 70% chance of knowing you'll get that trade. It seems like an easy to make, because it's only state school is only 5,000, 10,000.

Question for you, because I'm not as familiar with this one. Where else has this been done, by the way? We did it in America back in the 50s and 60s. We paid for like a state school, and city school used to be free. Or close to free, depending on the city and state. So it used to be free here, no fact. Look, I'm for equality in opportunity.

Okay, here we go. Now we're getting somewhere, because you guys didn't, you immediately said health, care you're four. And you did not answer on the two-year college. And not being terrified of your bill, your medical bills. Perfect. That's an opportunity. That feels about the right balance. Yeah. Also, the community college thing, Germany does it so well, like kind of having these, these light college experiences for people who don't need like a full four-year thing. They do a great job there. And I think we should, I think our community colleges could do a lot more than they do.

Yeah. Now, should we forgive five trillion dollars or whatever it is in student debt. The only precedent that we have here is the government's bailout of Wall Street and the auto industry of 2008 and 2009. And the airline industries. When was that? It's happened multiple times. After September 11th?

Yeah, there's been multiple bailouts of the airline industry. So I like to think, like, it sounds so insane the idea of bailing out like student debt. Yeah. We do have that precedent 12 years ago where we bailed out financial debt. How much you owe in your loans? over 50 or under 50? I put it as over. How old are you?

26, 27? No, but I'm flattered. I'll tell you. We got to promote them. Oh, wait, you guys went to business school too. So you guys are 34. 32. I'm very, very close to 32.

Okay. So you guys have over. But I'm going to round. And you guys went to business school, so you have over 50K and student debt each. Business school is expensive. Yeah. So you're both over 50, which means you're paying at least 500 a month of student loans. I don't have student debt right now.

Whoa. Did you sell you? your Robin Hood shares to pay that off? No, we're not, no sell share. No, no sell-y-sheries. That's exactly what I told you, boys. Don't sell you shares. That's the takeaway.

Don't sell these sherrys. Hold. When you got a winner, you hold. You know what's easy to do? Selling is easy. You know what's easy to do? Buying. You know what's hard to do?

Hold. Warren Buffett would love you. Holding is hard. This is like the, this could all go on a pillow. Holding is hard. Just hold, boys, hold. and when it goes public, you know what you do? Hold.

Hold. Just hold it, boys. Don't Google, Netflix, Facebook, the people who held their shares. Oh, my, yum, yum. Tesla. Tesla. Hold. Tesla went public at $14 a share.

Whole. I think it was 14. So you're not socialist. You believe that health care should be provided, some baseline, but you don't believe that it should be a free-for-old. You guys, believe we should break up the big tech companies, break them up? Well, this is part of a broader theme we're actually going to talk on later was the just in general, the tech lash momentum right now.

So let's start it with, we'll go right to tech lash. Let's go to tech lash here because it is also the anti-capitalist thing. Way to avoid the question. But you guys are capitalist because you started companies, went to business school. We study capitalism every day. Yes. And you were smart enough to sell, sell, sell and get yourself those sweet, sweet Robin Hood chairs. Smart move, boys.

Questionable reporting on this 2018 Tesla crash. I saw this story. I've been driving on autopilot in the model X and then the model three. I've had the first version of autopilot. I've got the most recent version. I just had the computer upgraded in my model three. Jason, is that a model X right there? That's the X.

No, no, no, on the shelf. On the shelf, that's a model three or Y. Yeah, that's a model. I got to say it's an X based on the grill. And the doors. I can see the doors. That's an X. Yeah.

So anyway, I see this New York Times article. Tesla autopilot system found probably at fault in 2018 crash. The National Transportation Safety Board called for improvements in the electric car company's driver assist future and cited failures by other agencies. And then the picture is tragically an Apple engineer who ran into a divider that didn't have the safety cushions that are normally there that would have saved his life. National Transportation Safety Board Investigation Concerned a 28-Acts

incident in Mountain View, California that killed the driver of a Tesla Model X spaceflight. At no point in this store, in the first three or four paragraphs of the story, do they mention, the driver was playing a video game while on autopilot.

Now, this wasn't any driver. This was an Apple engineer who knows exactly. He was a superfan of Tesla, and he had been in contact with Tesla about autopilot. He knew exactly how autopilot worked. Well, I know how everybody who has a Tesla knows how autopilot works. It blinks and it turns off if you don't move the steering wheel. So this person was moving the steering wheel while

intentionally not looking at the screen playing a video game. Jason, I need, I need self-driving technology because I need a self-driving podcast studio. Yeah. Seriously. We need this because that would just be cool. If we could shuttle to the ski resort on Friday afternoon, while, while recording our podcast. We could be doing both of our podcast on the way to truckie. So look, we could kill two birds with one side. We could be in one X right now, one model X.

Absolutely. When I was at Michigan, I studied self-driving cars. Can I throw out a couple quick stats? Yes. There were 35,000 car deaths in 2017. It's probably something similar in 18 and 18. We have pretty well stabbed in the United States. So if self-driving cars can reduce those.

death by half. Easily. We're still going to have 17 or 18,000 people die in car accidents, right? People will die. We can't treat each of those deaths like it's the cars. Like we need to have some, we need to contain our emotions and realize that even with progress, people are going to die. And so when Tesla has an accident, they are so under the microscope.

The greatest comparison I've seen for this. But like, let's remember there's thousands of people die all the time. Would you say this headline was unfair? I'm shocked. It doesn't include the video game. And then I email the writer, Naraj Chochi. Sorry, Naraj if I didn't pronounce it correctly. And I said to him, like, shouldn't this headline say driver was playing a video game?

New York Times leads with Tesla being at fault and buries in the ninth sentence that the driver's playing video game. He wrote me back to his credit and says, that the timestamp on the article you link to, say, 2.30-ish. The latest version is here and includes the driver's role in the first sentence. looking into why. So I guess they, I guess enough people told them like, this is tech backlash. Yeah. Anti-Tech. But to say that Tesla's at fault is so unbelievably disingenuous and ridiculous when it's an engineer from Apple who knows exactly what the limitations of this technology are. He knows the limitations. And you know what? And he played a video game.

We've seen this kind of thing happen about a hundred years ago because history is the best way you can study this kind of thing. Yeah, it rhymes. We referenced on our Snacks Daily podcast. When you had elevators for the first time in New York City, this is the economist put out this article a couple years ago. When you had elevators first come out in New York City, they were guided by a person every single elevator because people were scared about it letting them drive themselves

vertically. Right. But it wasn't until you could get over the fear, the PR challenge of the actual elevators that it became expected that you would not have a person driving your elevator. But now you guys saw last. week the infer I'm sorry the recode journalist who was like asking the Silicon Valley venture capitalists like about shaking hands and the coronavirus and they literally wrote a story like Silicon Valley doesn't want to shake hands ha ha what?

It's the responsibility of journalists to provide context so that people can understand the facts in a way that makes sense we also know how this author did it and it sounds like you have your opinion made up on it but what do you I mean how would you Well, I honestly, I just, I don't know enough about this story, but I don't even know why we're covered. Why is it even a story in the first place? Like, that's, that's kind of what I'm saying. There are car accidents all the time. And this isn't the first autopilot related car accident. He'll pull up the other article. But anyway, we also got to separate the journalist here probably from a team that comes up with the titles. And one of the benefits, Jack and I get to do is we get to do our own titles and we get to write our stories. And I asked him actually, I de hemmed him and said, did you write the title? Because that's a bad title. And he didn't report. And he didn't report. fly back. Remember Mitt Romney wrote that op-ed saying we should not bail out the auto industry? And then they changed the title to let Detroit go bankrupt or something. Yeah. It's just ridiculous. And I, you know, I had this debate with Henry Blodgett at Business Insider. I used to write my email. He'd say, can I place your email? He placed my email and then he would write this crazy headline.

And I said, you could only take it if you use my headline. And we got this big back and forth. All right. Let's talk a little bit of growth and profitability, private, public markets. This is kind of the story of I guess the last year since SoftBank came in and splashy cashied all over the place Yep growth and profitability

Obviously Uber got hit pretty hard Lyft got hit pretty hard after going public We were collapsed Everything since rebounded What do you guys think about this transition From growth at all costs In the private market

Staying private Till you have billions of dollars in revenue and suppose to 50 to 500 million. And then the public market's saying we're not interested. Well, it's been a bummer that I haven't had the opportunity to invest like you have. Because I was waiting and waiting and waiting for some of these IPOs. It never has the private market versus public market difference been as extreme

or clear in terms of who can get in and where and what those companies look like then right now. You've got. So it's unfair in a way that retail investors can't get access to these companies. earlier. Yeah. You guys are lamenting. We applaud kind of some of the exchanges that are like pitching right now to figure out ways for companies to be able to go public easier because it is a fairness thing.

I mean, I agree. Like wealth creation doesn't come from getting a paycheck. It comes from investing in things and owning things. And it's a shame that some of these amazing companies, you know, by the time that they finally go public, they're going down. That's such a disappointment. I mean, I was just bummed. It arguably would have been so much better off for Uber to have gone.

public, two years earlier had the conditions been stronger and maybe mature the company in a different way faster. Which company? Oh, Uber. Uber. Uber went public when it was 10 billion or 20 billion and people could ride it up from 200 cities, 300 cities to 1,000. And I know you're connected with Travis, but maybe if there was different public pressures on Travis

as opposed to what the VC community was putting on it. Yeah. I mean, when you put that amount of sunlight on a company and that amount of scrutiny, you know, things need to be tight. You can't be loosey-goosey. I got to say, one of the favorite stories we've had on Snacks Daily in the last year, actually we covered this week, and we're probably going to cover later this week, is on, well, it's on the on Lyft.

And how companies you're noticing now, public ones and even the private ones, that are under this profit pressure, are doing some kind of creative side hustles to kind of maybe eke out a little more profit. Lyft's acquisition of Halo, a company that does the outdoor ads on taxis. Yes. Yeah. Like maybe a way to get. a little more side hustle income and also attract drivers in kind of a creative way.

And you got Byrd, the e-scooter company, which is also desperate to like turn into a profitable company. Because their scooters are like fall apart within 26 days or something. They're trying to become a FinTech payment. True. Yeah, they're launching a payment system essentially. I would ask you though, Jason, like what what is the profit path for Uber or like as it grew was the idea that it would grow and become the dominant place?

and then be able to control prices. Sure. What you're trying to do is just see how big the market is and induce as many people to participate as possible. And you want to beat everybody in the market. If you have a big chip stack and you're playing poker and somebody else has small chip stacks, you want to put them under pressure and test them because you can. And if you keep testing them, they might make a mistake and they might, you know, pop off and, you know, when it's a bad timing. So it is a way to maintain your lead is to lower prices, increase the number of people who have your app, now you've got this incredible moat, a foundation. So if you were profitable with 100 million people and you say, you know

what, for five years, it'll be unprofitable, we get to 500 million, i.e. Disney, let's make it $7, not $15. Yeah. And they're playing catch up. Now you build this big base. Okay, yeah, you may have lost money for three, four, five, six, seven, eight years. But boy, you have a base of users, i.e. Amazon Prime, i.e. Apple, not Apple, Uber having this large group of people who have it on their phone. Once it's on your phone, like, that's 90% of the battle is getting somebody to put a credit card and install an app. That's massive friction when you think about it. But except in one industry, and we've really noticed this with food delivery apps, where they are splurging money on customer acquisition. The problem is competition exists. That's the problem. And that moat that you're saying could be created, even when, like, like a DoorDash builds up an audience in a particular market, it's actually not that deep a moat when it's a pretty commodified product.

Jason, can Uber acquire Lyft? Well, regulars wouldn't prove it. A terrible idea. Well, isn't it has a second player? Isn't Lyft's existence the reason Uber is an unprofitable? No, Uber, I mean, it was. They were both in this death match, lose a little bit per ride, gain market share. I think it's changing because Lyft's running out of money.

Uber has, I think, $11, $12 billion in cash at this time, and they believe they'll start to hit profitability by the end of this year. Adjusted profitability. Adjusted profitability. Okay, so let's call it, you know, instead of three-quarters six. It doesn't matter. They have plenty of money to get there and the ability to raise more money if they need to. Lyft doesn't.

DoorDash doesn't. DoorDash is running out of money as well. So one of the nice things about the public market saying, you know what, we're not into this money losing thing, is that that benefits whoever's in the head of the race because now people have said, okay, everybody has to behave rationally now. Okay, great. We all have to behave rationally. Great.

There's no more Joker's wild. Great. We're the largest player. Great. Take the Joker's out of the deck. We'll play rationally. Right. That's what's basically happened.

So I would have, what you'll see happen now is when Uber does hit profitability, everybody's like, where's the growth? Why aren't you growing? Why aren't you investing more? Why didn't you shut down India? There's too much growth pressure. And it was too much growth pressure. Private market, we're just like, well, if there's more money and listen, if the DJ's still

playing and it's 5 a.m., he'd give the DJ another 100 bucks. Let's go to 6. Like, let's go to 7. Let's keep growing. Let's keep the party going. Let's keep growing the base of users. Yeah. And it kind of pisses me off that.

The markets are like, oh, my God, you're losing so much money. It's like, they did $1.7 billion or something last quarter of the quarter before, and they lost a billion. It's like, it's 50 cents a ride. It's not a big deal. You raise the price is $0.50. You think it changes anybody's behavior? I don't.

Is that how the map worked out? 50 cents a ride? Yeah. Two quarters ago, they did $1.7. This last quarter, they did more. And this quarter was a billion in change. So it's somewhere around $0.50 cents a ride. ride. It's historically been 50 to 60

cents a ride. Pretty stable what they lose. And for the food stuff, I think it's $2 everybody's losing per delivery. What would you say about a company like a Casper that's out there that doesn't have a lift to its Casper, but doesn't also have the pockets or maybe the accessibility to

cash that an Uber's getting out. I don't think anybody has access to the cash anymore. I think it's over. I think unless the Masiochison comes back with and he convinces the Saudis to give another $50 billion, I think it's going to be you know, a smaller fund. So I think that part, this part of the party

where we go to sunrise and we'd like then get to lunch, like, that's over. I think the party's over at sunrise now. We're not going to go to lunchtime. I think company's going to go public earlier. Company's going to go public with like a billion in revenue, $500 million in revenue. I think it's going to be healthier too.

It was fun though. It was a great party. It was kind of like the 70s. It just got a little too out of control. And the 80s, they were like, yeah, we're going to pump the brakes on this. Too, too crazy. But I liked it.

It was fun. We agree. would be healthier for the companies probably to be going public energy. I think so. Also, having some liquidity is good. So, you know, we had to hold our Uber shares for a long time. And some of us had the ability to trade. Most people didn't.

And to your point, like, you know, Robin Hood, I could sell my Robin Hood shares. It's a little bit of a secondary market, but I like the idea of these shares being more freely traded. And they'd be healthier for everybody. But for private market investors, there's something special about being forced to hold. And that was what Travis wanted to do with Uber. did not want to let people sell. And they fought letting people sell in secondary. And they had bylaws, just like Zinga did,

where you couldn't sell your shares. And if you did, they wouldn't recognize the transaction. So if the three of us want to trade our Robin Hood shares, we can let the CFO of Robin Hood know. They put it on the cap table, and they'll record the change. Uber and those other companies, like- Wouldn't recognize it. They wouldn't recognize anybody doing those shenanigans.

And now they have orderly process. So my understanding is like SpaceX, Airbnb. They just do it twice a year or something and have an orderly process for you to sell your shares. But, I mean, how many times do you guys get emailed asking to sell your Robin Hood shares by like these weird third party brokers? You ever get those emails? People on LinkedIn love reaching out about a lot of things. They're like, oh, Robin Hood, yeah. I mean, I get people all the time trying to buy my Robin Hood chairs constantly.

And I'm like, who is this person? And I just forward them to Vlad. And I'm just like, hey, just so you know. Or like years ago, I would. Just to see, you know, these people are trying to sell large blocks of shares. Do you think this is legit? Yeah, I'm not sure who's selling. Well, this brings us to an interesting moment with Airbnb, which now may have a market

timing moment or market timing issue. Yes. Yes. And now they've gone, the awkward thing was when they went out in the fall and basically declared to their employees that they were going to go public. It was a bizarre press release. They said, we will go public next year with an IPA. We haven't really seen that.

Yeah. We have not seen that before in that degree. Yeah, that's pretty straightforward. I think Uber and Left have good businesses. and eventually this unprofitable fear, I think it'll pass. But companies like Casper and Harries and Warby Parker, the ones that are making physical goods. And you need to build that physical good every time you sell it.

There's a lot of cost with each product you're selling. No, it's not a marketplace where you're just like getting a take rate. And they were being valued like a company like Facebook, which just makes an app. And then the more people use that app, it's just pure revenue. It's all about margin. and the margins are different on these businesses. And then it's going to be really cool to see the spinoffre.

When is that going to become maybe the driver of the whole thing? And it's going really well. Yeah. I mean, that's been maybe the most exciting thing out of Uber in the last five years. Based out of Chicago. True. With the big hub. But with Uber and Lyft and Airbnb, they're all tech, of course.

And they're all marketplaces, of course. And you think that it's just like pure revenue, the more people who take it on. Yeah. But there are costs too. I mean, with Uber and Lyft, of course, you have to pay the drivers. Yeah, for safety security insurance. Safety security insurance. It's almost like with every single person who signs up to host their place on Airbnb,

Airbnb has promised to check that place and like verify that the pictures are real and that it is. That benefits them. So when you get that big, the benefits of every. Yeah. It changes the market, the profitability calculus. You'll do it a little bit, but they're going to cement. This is what happens. When you get to the scale and then they add regulation, it's just the top leaders are basically pulling up

the ladder behind them. they're like, okay, ha-ha, now you try to go start the next Airbnb. By the way. Because it's going to cost $100 every time you put somebody online. Right, regulation benefits the incumbents. Exactly. The more supply you add, the more, the quicker you go bankrupt. X factor we haven't talked about here?

Yeah. When there aren't drivers of your cars and we're talking self-driving cars. Fifty to 20 years. The map is completely changed. 15 to 20 years. Okay. Yeah. Well, then you've got a time issue.

I think we'll have Vitol, vertical take off a landing before we have full self-driving. Okay. Vitol. Vito. I love. Sounds like a. Pet name. Vertical, takeoff and landing.

Those are the, you know, basically like it looks like drones. They're quadcopters, but they actually have eight voters. The ones that are like kind of tested out a bit. Yeah, they've been testing them in China, and they'll be in China and Australia and places like that. They're going to work really well over water. China, and then they test them out in Scottsdale, Arizona, usually. Yeah. No, but over water, they're great because you really can't run them over like Brooklyn,

but you could run them from Bay Ridge at 69 Tree Pier to one of the heliports on either side of Manhattan. Where are you from? Bay Ridge. original. Yeah. No way. Wow. That's right.

I grew up. Arizona Narrows. Right by there. They had just finished it. I was born in 1970. They finished it, I think, in 60, late 60s. Underrated bridge. Beautiful.

Stunning. It was the largest suspension bridge in the world for a while. It's gorgeous. Stunning bridge. Yeah. But yeah, these vitals, that's the thing that's going to be super exciting. Because over water, they can just land. And if one of the rotors goes bad, you have eight rotors, 12 rotors on these things.

They can actually compensate. You could lose two or three of the. the rotors from what I understand from people who have invested in these companies. And the other seven will compensate. So they can just power this one up more to compensate for the one that went out and that it rebalances itself. And if you watch some of these videos online, Nick, pull up the video of the Chinese company that was going public and that I had emailed you about.

I mean, these things are really safe. And they're going to be safer than driving in cars, which is crazy when you think about it. In the air will be safer than cars because cars run into each other. they hit things. These things, there's nothing to hit. You know, you're in the air. A chance of hitting something, like collisions are very rare. So this Chinese one is from a company called E Heng.

And you go to the YouTube channel is just phenomenal to watch. I think I've got to go to YouTube to watch it. It would be easier. But these things are going to be the huge game changer. And they're testing them in China. And you can see multiple videos in China of E Heng. remotely operated. Yeah, they'll be, you just go in and they're remotely operated.

So they can fit, I think, one human right now. They'll eventually get to four. Are we going to do this before we're doing delivery via drone? Yeah, delivery by a drone is stupid. The thing that's going to really work is delivery by R2D2 or like those little kind of, you know, looks like a big. Yeah, postmates. Yeah, there's plenty of those going around. Yeah, they're going to be doing the last mile stuff.

It's going to be fantastic if you have a burrito place in Brooklyn. Yeah. And you're like, you throw five burritos into five compartments. And it's downstairs and they just text you. We're downstairs or your burrito. We'll be here for three minutes. Come down now. And then you just go and you type in your...

What's that? Go to drawer number three. Go to drawer number three and pull it out. Yeah. And so this company is called E-Hang and they've been really doing these vertical takeoff landing things and flying them. Between self-driving cars, this thing, hyperloop. Yeah.

And holograms. It's exactly. and Zoom. Like travel in the future, you know? Hallgrams make it so you don't have to as much. Or Dina. But you see how we're looking at the E-Hang right now? You see how many blades there are?

And there's two in each one. So if one gets knocked out, the other one still works. And there's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight rotors there times two, sixteen. So it is pretty amazing. And Larry Page, I think, invested $100 million into each of three of these, Kitty Hawk being one of them by Sebastian Thrun out here. And so these things are just the game changer of all. game changers.

And over water, if it lands in the water, you're going to survive and it's not going to kill somebody by landing on somebody's head. You know, that's the problem of going over cities. Hey, as we get towards rounding third base here, cult stocks. Yeah, now a thing. A lot of people are looking at millennials coming into the market and buying one share of Tesla, one share of Virgin Galactic. Yeah, Virgin Galactic.

Yeah. Galactic, my friend Chamaut's company. that went triple. It tripled. It tripled over the course of like a month or two. A month, yeah. It went public at the SPAC was out for a year at $10. And it traded between like $10 and $10 and $0.50.

And my friend Schmoth had done the SPAC. He was like, took him a year and a half to find something. He did Virgin Galactic. And now people on Reddit are going crazy talking about it. Is this the future, these what they're calling cult socks? No. What is your take on them? future.

No. Because the fundamental phenomenon that we're seeing that helps us explain inexplicable stock price movements. In fact, the best thing we can do is kind of call it out, which hopefully brings some rationality to it. Ah. So there is some irrationality to this because of super fans of Elon's or Richard Branson's. Well, one thing.

And the products. One thing we've seen with companies like Uber or with WeWork is that ultimately you kind of the fundamentals have to hit. And with these situations. Yeah, in the time being, no one's paying attention necessarily to the fundamentals of the business. No one's actually gone off and done space tourism with Virgin yet. And it's probably not going to happen in a robust way for a while. However, stock prices are about future profits.

True. So it depends like how far in the future we're thinking about. But there is, it's how can you explain that these companies stocks tripled in just a few months? You can't based on any fundamentals. And so we're seeing a pattern where these stocks. that are having insane spikes, the correlation is that they're all being chattered about on certain like online platforms. So they're inspiring, or as you wouldn't be chatting about them, or are you saying

there's a cobble of people chatting them up with bogus accounts, or we just don't know? Oh, it almost doesn't matter if the accounts are bonus or not, or bogus or not. It's really more about fitting this pattern that is a bit further removed from the fundamentals of the business to the point where it's more air than it is substance. some of the is Tesla the number one trading stock on Robin Hood you guys don't Robin Hood lists the number one two and three there's a couple websites that like yeah yeah yeah it every day yeah it's really interesting though because people can own an eighth of a stock now or a tenth of a share fractional shares great so people

can own if Tesla's at 800 they can own a tenth or Amazon yeah the way we say just to explain to the listeners out there interested in fractional stocks Apple shares are like over three hundred dollars right yeah that's like Apple only sell by the keg. Yeah. People may not want a keg of apple. They might want a little nip of apple. And so you can buy a dollar worth of apple.

It's kind of great. It makes the share price as a unit of measurement no longer matter. Yeah. Anyway, where were you? I was just curious if having a lot of young people, which was to take it full circle to the first segment, you guys started market snacks as a way as young people because you're passionate about investing. Are young people voting with their dollars and things that are so inspiring and saying, you know what, I don't care if it's overpriced by 3x.

I want to be in the most inspiring thing possible, space travel, electric cars, self-driving, whatever it is. If there's one thing we've seen from the millennial and now like the Gen Z generation, it's that they're forcing, in the realm of business, they're forcing like purpose to matter. And I think that's a great trend. Companies that have like a good social promise in some way or are behaving systems. sustainably, they're getting like the consumer spending dollars of millennials and Gen Z. So it actually shouldn't be a surprise to us that companies like doing inspiring cool things are also getting investing dollars. And you saw that with the business roundtable over the summer when they came out and like

revalued like what it means to be a stakeholder and who companies should be focused on. Now, that didn't have a material effect immediately, but that's not the kind of thing you would have seen 10 years ago. It does matter to your generation what the business is trying to accomplish. accomplish. Yeah. I would say so. Right. Yeah. I would say so. Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah. The generation before me didn't care at all. My generation cared about us having a seat at the table and maybe us starting the companies. And then this generation is like even as consumers, we want to have an impact on your business. We do not want to participate in businesses that we don't believe it anymore. Yeah. It goes all the way back to like the 70s. It was Milton Friedman, the Chicago guy who said profits should be the only thing. And if you think of about anything other than profits as a CEO, you're betraying your shareholders and ultimately you're going to betray everyone. But we saw in the past few decades that that was wrong. It seems like he was operating in a world where he thought people by default, table stakes would

be morality and ethics are like, there's some base level of morality and ethics. It was a little bit before, you know, people were just kind of lost all moral compass. But also, that was in an era before there was like an acute concern for climate change and like the impact it actually has on a macro level. Like that just wasn't a concern. People in the Scandinavian countries I understand. I don't know if it was, I think it was Sweden. Wherever, is it Greta Thunberg?

Yeah, yeah. She's the climate change activist. She came to America on a boat. I guess she doesn't want to fly. Right. She believes that flying is evil. You don't love the planet if you fly in an airplane. And my understanding is adults are now saying, you know what, I'm flying is selfish.

I'm talking about commercial flying, not private. Yeah. Commercial flying, like being on a plane with 300 other people with coronavirus, they're saying is not selfish. Therefore, if you're going to take a vacation, drive your EV and go local, don't burn jet fuel. And three, four, five percent less traffic in airline traffic that year. The airlines are scared to death that she might, in your generation, the generation after yours, what do they call them?

I don't know. Gen C. Plus? No, Gen C. I heard connected generation, Gen C. Okay. Anyway, the people after millennials. That's good.

Stets the alphabet over. Yeah, whatever. Gen C is, after them is Gen D. Dufus. They're going to have no concern about anything. They're going to be done. They're going to watch this, by the way. They're going to watch this.

I'm still waiting for those blobs from the movie. Think about that. Think about, like, your generation doesn't think like, oh, you know what? We should just not fly in airplanes. Well, but this changes the thought probably. Like, ideally this changes what leadership is focusing on. I would just jump in and say when you're, you know, this has nothing to, this is just my personal opinion, but it's also economic theory. Greenhouse gases are pollution and pollutions are supposed to be paid for by things.

And they're not currently. So it's up to the person and companies like Amazon and Microsoft and Delta recently to voluntarily pay extra money to fight. climate change and it's pretty remarkable that companies are doing that without any law or regulation requiring them to. What is the new thing? Environment, social, something. Yeah. Yeah.

Vox just did this story. Air travel is a huge contributor to climate change. A new global movement wants you to be ashamed to fly. Griddharmberg gave up flights to fight commonplace should you. Well, I wouldn't say be a shame to fly, but just be aware that flying contributes like 2% of the greenhouse gases in the wild. world. But also then you see Delta is now making it possible to offset like the carbon impact of your flight. That's not like a product they would have offered three years ago, let alone

10 years ago. The Delta is planting a ton of trees. Yeah. Wait, what is Delta doing? They're carbon neutral. Starting March 1st. So they're going to buy carbon offsets. Yes. Yes. Fascinating. Microsoft's of carbon offset. That's going to be a lot of carbon offset, right? I wonder what that costs. That's how Tesla made a lot of money in the early days is the other car companies. Yeah, the other car companies had to sell a certain cars. They were losing money every time they sold the vault because they couldn't get anybody to buy because there's a terrible car, bolt, vault, whatever these. I think they didn't sell a single one. They sold so many and they were costing them a hundred to make. They were selling them for 40, but they had to sell a certain percentage of their cars

as electric in order to hit the standards, especially in California. So Tesla's like, we'll just, just, we'll give you our credits, you give us cash. And you would see this like giant like hundred million market place of this. Yeah. And that could be very powerful. Renewable energy credits and that kind of thing. You know what one of the biggest things is. is these giant container ships from China to America. They burn like one type of fuel until they get out of, into the open seas.

And then they're like, you know, it would be good? Let's burn the dirty fuel because we're in a no regulation. It's cheaper and we're in a no regulation, you know, at sea. And so they burn this horribly destructive fuel and they're responsible for like a fifth or something crazy of the emissions. Just those container ships.

And there's not a lot of this couple of hundred. Well, you also saw similarly that New York Times report over the last couple weeks about the methane leakage and the impact that's had, and that hasn't even been measured or calculated into a lot of these climate scenarios. Just generally from certain industries, methane is just not, we don't really pay attention to how it's leaking, and it just does. So with the airline, you know, basically when you take a flight, you're paying 500 bucks, right, Jason?

But you're also generating some pollution. So I want to go back to that ashamed point. It's not that you're ashamed. You're just a little guilty that you know you're polluting, but you're not paying for it. Right. And so it costs $100 extra to plant some trees. Or $5. I don't know what the amount is.

Whatever it is. Yeah. Then at least you're having a full transaction that pays for all your costs. You know what it be really good is you know how the Bloomberg made people put the number of calories on stuff? That really changed my behavior. Because you know the maple scone at Starbucks? Yeah. That's like a whole day's worth.

It's like six. You're working that off. I love that maple cone. So this is called the nudge. The nudge. Yeah. Making the calorie count bigger. So that little like putting information in a different way, it nudges you to maybe

make a different decision. Well, and you know what? It doesn't force you to, though. You still have your freedom. They still had that maple scone. And then I noticed when they had to put the calories on, you know what they did? What? Minis scones.

And I look at the mini scones. I was like, those look like European scones. But they're 150 calories, not 600. But you're buying two of them. I'll take two. and I'm halfway to victory. So the nudge is different than the big soda ban that was in New York a few years ago.

Because a nudge doesn't limit your freedom. It still lets you buy as many as you want. So you guys are Bloomberg, aren't you? That was what we were getting to with the whole pod, right? I think that's... I know you guys are Team Bloomberg. Please tell me your team Bloomberg. Let me ask you it this way.

Would Bloomberg be a great president? Do you think you could do the job? start there. I think you could do the job. As a New Yorker, I can say it was very interesting to be living in New York when he was running the city. It was a great city. It was running well. Yeah, absolutely. Left it in a great place. It was a great place. And he really fought hard for education. Yeah. Mistakes were made on some things, but otherwise a great mayor. I mean, you think of where New York City was after September 11th and where it could have gone, where the financial industry could have gone where all those banks could have gone. Yeah. It's a miracle how some parts of the city were able

rebound and yeah he was a key part of that oh i think him and amy oh colbuchar i like i like her i like her i think she's kind of like right down the middle she'll get like the boring moms and you know like warren's a little bit too upset i mean would be a play for like you know you know you got the spectrum right here amy would be like we can win with this right in the middle the middle of america but that's not what's won the past elections oh no i think those there's some of those blue and those purple states that we need to win like Florida and Pennsylvania. I don't think Bernie can win that after all this. I don't know.

You're not Bernie bros, sorry. Not Bernie bros. That's good to know. All right. Listen, this has been amazing. Come back on the pot anytime. Congratulations on getting those Robin Hood chairs. Thank you for having us.

We should do this conversation again, by way. I did you guys move out to San Francisco? Yeah, we're right there. Yeah, we're in here. Do you live in the city or do you live in Oakland? I drove, actually, to California from Vermont because I was ashamed to fly. Greta Thunberg change You went to driving

You did like a little Granite Thurbenberg Jesus On your desk for it The whole time Jack was in neutral The whole time Yeah, I put up the sail And then you go down

And then you go down And then you coasts through the planes I sailed on the land Like a kite You did you put up You went five miles an hour It took you two years To get here

But here you are Why does he get here But you guys live in San Francisco Proper? No, I lived in San Francisco For one year But then my wife got a job In Palo Alto

So I moved down to be Close to work And I live up in the north part of the city. So I got to go to Antonio's nut house. You do. So you're down in Palo Alto. No, I'm in Menlo Park.

In Menlo Park. It's great. It's weird being in California and there's like it's warm in their sun. It's bizarre. I miss my four seasons, man. It's a very subtle season change. You guys get those New York pains, don't you? Every two months, you're like, why did I do that?

It gets wider each year. When you get out of the subway in New York, you feel a lot. Oh, my God. You're part of it. You look down your phone. You're in the thick of it. 15,000 steps today. That's like a whole week in Milo Park. The best part about New York is like everybody's in it together. You get off the subway. You're in the middle of it. You walk into pastis or Balthazar anywhere. Odeon. And all of a sudden you're striking up conversation with five different people. You're having a beverage. And everybody talks to you. What do you do? Oh, you're in arts. Oh, what do you do? Advertising. Out here, New York bariters give more free drinks than any other bar. Absolutely. Out here, they give you free iced tea. But that's it. Jason, I'm curious for a take on this. I heard this over the weekend and I like it. New Yorkers, maybe not the most polite, but the most friendly.

San Francisco, maybe not the most friendly, but the most polite. Yeah, the reverse. Yeah, it is. There's a little bit to that. There's a little bit to that. I prefer, if I'm going to leave New York, I like L.A. As I tell people, L.A. is the love child between Hawaii and New York. You go right in the middle.

It's got like all the culture of New York. It's got all the vibe of New York. It's not one-dimensional, even though, you know. It's got the bagels of New York. There's some bagels to. Yeah. multi-industry town and it's beautiful and it's warmer. Out here, like, it's a little bit of a bummer.

It reminds me of New York in the late 70s, early 80s, just with the crime and the crazyness. Yeah, but I mean, where else, this is pretty cool. You know, you wake up, you walk outside. You know, you could be going to hike five minutes away from your home. That's the amazing part. Absolutely breathtaking. And then you're on the way up to Napa and then you're surfing. You're doing like the California hat trick in eight hours.

You could be skiing if you put your mind to it. Listen, I just did three days in Tahoe. And it was 50 degrees on the mountain during the day, 20 at night. And we're doing spring skiing and T-shirts. It was unbelievable. I think my neighbor's making olive oil. The next day. Yeah.

Your name is making olive oil. I think so. Yeah, it's crazy. It can do anything here. It's a pretty great city. Great place also to come and, you know, do a couple years for your career. That's what I think this is going to become. I think it's going to become like a college town.

You do four eight years. Boom, you're done. Here we go. This is I am heraldor. I just want to live in a city where with the diversity of New York City, the weather of L.A. And the tech scene of San Francisco. Is that too much? Same.

All right, boys. Continued success. Say hello to every. everybody and if you haven't signed up, go get the Robin Hood Snacks, the newsletter, the podcast, everything. Great job, boys. It's all to be. It's all. Snacks.com.

Snacks. Snacksdaily. Snacksdaily. Snacks Daily. Now, you don't make recommendations of what stocks to buy. No, we don't. But you talk about them. What's your favorite stock right now?

What's your favorite company? Well, we cover the news. So it's the most fun of new stories to cover. Personally, which company that's public do you each personally love the most? I personally love them. I personally love. You're not saying to buy it. just you personally love it.

You love the management, love the product, you love the brand. Oh, okay. I love the product of Lulu Lemon. The men's wear is incredible. I'm wearing their pants right now. I'm wearing their pants right now. Are you right?

Stand out. Let me see this. Let me see this. And everyone asks me, where those pants are. You know what? You look like you're wearing slacks, but you're really wearing sweatpants.

Look at those stretchies. You look great. You can dress it up. You can dress it down. You could do yoga in those, couldn't you? I have done it. You only do yoga in them. So you're really wearing yoga pants to work.

I think the market that they've conquered and women's wear, it's just going to come to men's, and then somehow they're going to expand the office-based. Look, I'm in the office. You're in the office with pants on? I'm not wearing pants! You guys watch Marvel with Miss Maisel? Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. I'm not wearing pants! Nick and I both on stock of Lula Lama. Yeah, we should say that. Okay, now, true. What is your favorite? I, and this is a stock I don't own, but I like to say, I wish I had, because I remember talking about when they were affected by a certain issue.

Chipolis. I'm so impressed with the level of, innovation that they've been able to do. And Jack and I covered this in the news. That is a company that was down on its luck. Stock had plummeted 40%. Sales had fallen apart five years ago. Completely different company now. They're recovered. They've recovered because they've got a new leader in charge. Taco Bell guy. Taco Bell guy. He's taken the lessons from Taco Bell, and it's been fascinating to see them play out. They created this idea of walking, or they popularized the idea of walking up and then just going down the line. The assembly line. Fast casual. Fast casual

assembly line though. There's the Chipotle of Greek. The Chippoor. Potele of Indian food. They have pizza, 800 degrees, whatever. You go down the line. Right. That's the going down the line. Now, that's a public company, but what Jack and I like to say is we probably think the most innovative food and beverage company right now, probably sweet green.

Yes, sweet green. You order ahead. Everything on the menu is so delicious. How did they front the table? I think the calorie counts are off, though. They're too delicious. The squash is too sweet. The squash is too sweet.

It's like a steroid injection of honey in there. Yeah. But I love the innovation of like how they deliver, how they get the food to you. Water ahead and they put it on a rack, you come and you just take it. And they're doing that to offices now. Panera is doing it too. Your office is filled up with sweet drinks. It's creative.

In China, they had a number of places that were doing like soup and noodles and they became incredibly popular line out the door. They investigated. Turned out they were putting opium. You heard it in the soup. People were going, getting H-A-F. That's what the millennials say. It means happy as frack.

I think Jen D says that. I think that's a millennial thing, right? You guys say it's lit A-F? No, we say things are Gucci. They're Gucci. Gucci again, Gucci again, Gucci again. It's Gucci, but people were getting their soup and their noodles and they were getting H-A-F, high as F.

That's what we call them moot. On opium. Can you imagine if that happened in America? Like you're in New York and we all go crazy for these Shanghai dumplings in Chinatown is the line out the door. This would be a great Seinfeld episode or a Larry David episode. And Larry David is putting. Whatever.

Oh, cocaine in the in the dumplings. This is a follow-up to the soup nazi. Six shrimp and this pasta print of there? I got 20 shrimp. Yeah, oh, good place for you guys to go in town. Hacassan. Have you been to Hacca-San yet? Which town, by the way?

In San Francisco, go to Hacchasan. And then when you're in San Mateo, go to T-A-I-S-H-O-K-E-N. Okay. Tai Shokin has dipping ramen noodles. The noodles come in one side. They have the broth in the other. This is a place that started in 1950 in Tokyo. They got two locations there.

The grandson brought it to America and opened the first location in San Mateo. They used, have you used Yelp waitlist? No. No, it's new, right? Yelp waitlist is amazing. You just open up the app, and it's like, there's a waitlist of six people here. Would you like to join the waitlist? You say, yes.

It's like, come to the restaurant at 7. I don't understand why that hasn't existed. How come to the restaurant at 742 and see the matri-D? And then you look at your phone, it's like, come to the restaurant at 737. Oh, my God. And they just text you. come quicker, your seats available. And then you can leave the wait list.

Or you can change that I want four people instead of two. Amazing. And then you show up and it works. But anyway, with Taishokin, you got to do the Yelp wait list. And Tai Shokin, oh, the dipping noodles. But the hakasan you want to get the dimsum. They make an amazing dim sum like sorted, but they make Peking Duck. We'll all go there at some point.

You know we've only been here out for a year. So this is, keep the recommendations coming, Jason. And if you want Indian, you go to Burlingame, Rasa, RASA, Rasa, Mishol. and starred, Indian food. You get the chicken Machne, non-bread, delightful. You know, the butter chicken that you get, like, on the Lower East Side? Same situation, but, like, batter. Michelin-starred Indian place.

Very rare. We should do dinner here and then back in New York. Yeah, we could do it. We could do it. New York, a place called Decoy, which is part of Red Farm. But anyway, it's called Decoy. DECO-O-O-O-O-O-O. So, Chinese?

Decoy, it's a Jewish guy who has mastered Peking Duck. And he also makes, like, dim sum with, like, Jewish ingredients. So he's got like a brisket inside of a dumpling. So he's mixing the metaphors and doing the psych fusion thing. Amazing. Decoy in New York. This is like that Ivan Raman. Have you heard of that in Tokyo? It's like a guy from Scarsdale, Jewish guy moved out there. Now he's got the top rated ramen in Tokyo. You want to go to Izzy's in Crown Heights. I go do it my rabbi. Don't get the brisket. They overcooked. But it's around by the Chabad in Crown Heights. And it's called Izzy's. It's kosher.

But you don't have to be Jewish to go. Okay. And they have the best beef ribs I've ever had in my life, including in Austin. They're the best, Jerry, the best. The best. Unbelievable. I'm huge. Unbelievable.

All right. Listen, boys. Everybody followed Nick of New York and T-B-O-Y Jack. T-boy Jack. The best one, yeah. T-boy Jack. We'll see you all next time on this ring service. Bye-bye.