This Week in Startups - Howard Lindzon on public vs. private investing psychology, “great unbundling” of index funds, Robinhood & more | Angel S5 E4

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

FOLLOW Howard: https://twitter.com/howardlindzon FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

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And this season, season five, we're talking to Super Angels. Super Angels are angel investors who've had either great success, a large number of investments, high profile, know what they're doing. And on episode four here, we have Howard Linson. You know him from Stock Twits, but you may not know that he also has done. Pretty amazing as an angel investor was in Robin Hood. Obviously, co-founded stock twits, angelist, wag, rally road, which I missed out on, two mogul back in the day. That was acquired by Adobe.

I remember that buddy media. That was acquired by Salesforce. TweetDeck back in the day. That was acquired by Twitter. What else? Rent.com was good, yeah? Yeah, customer and golf now. Customer was just acquired by Facebook.

Congratulations. Now you started, welcome to the pod. You started angel investing 10, 15 years ago? When did you start angel investing? I started early. I was the first bubble. It's a good story, Jason. First bubble was 99, 2000.

And back then I was trading. I had a hedge fund. And back then it was like the internet, as you know, you were early there. I didn't know who you were. But, you know, all the deals were getting a pass around series Q, series Q, And what does it even mean? What does it even mean? And I'm trading stocks and I just wanted it in.

All the hedge funds wanted in. So there was a deal called, it actually was called Viva.com at the time. And the only way to get Viva.com was to buy Cars Direct and you probably know Scott Painter. And so they raised like a crazy round that was the top, pretty much the top of the market. So I wired my money and that was the top. So that was my entree. The money went to Mary Meeker's bonus, I think. It's basically like taking a package of $100 bills, like a brick, and just throwing them on top of a bonfire.

Not starting one, but just tossing it right in there. So I think eight years later, Cars Direct went public under the internet brands thing. I got 10% of my money. But as part of the ugly stepchild bonus of investing in Cars Direct, I got shares in this V-V-V-E-B. which was a good friend of my Scott Ingram now and he turned that into rent.com which sold to eBay for almost 500 million. So I got lucky in that the crippled, crippled bad word, but you know what I mean? The ugly stepchild of Cars Direct made me a lot of money. The wounded, the injured. Yes, we have to be careful with certain words that people don't. Come at me. I can't believe it. Can't believe it. Of all the

things that have canceled me. And the lesson, I think, from there is you're never out of the game, right? Like, if you have equity in a company and a company is still fighting, you're never out of the game. So I called, and again, I'm passive aggressive as most investors are. I think people who aren't are lying. But the, because we hate losing and we armchair quarterback people in hindsight. We see it all day on Fin Twit and Stock Twits.

But the fact that I reached out to Scott and was helping him and was like, I was there, even though I was a small investor through this whole thing and asking him questions, see how I can help. And I did nothing about the Internet. Maybe I still don't. But we became friends. And it was to be part of that journey, even though it was not the original investment. And Scott's an LP. And we work on stuff together. So it's great.

And that passive aggressive is not one word. Passive comma aggressive or passive period. aggressive. These are two different concepts in investing, correct? I think they are. Like, I think I've learned to manage the true passive aggressive, which is like not giving good advice, you know, holding back and just because you're mad versus, hey, you know, you have our money. Let's figure out, it's up to me to keep that relationship with the founder because it is my money and I like to win. So you have to bite your tongue a lot. And you only learn that from getting absolutely annihilated by certain founders.

But you bite your tongue a lot because you do it for your help. You have other people to bring along to the goal life. And you do a lot of public market investing, obviously with stock twits. And did you create the dollar sign hashtag on Twitter? I remember you were the first person ever saw use it. Was that your innovation? Yeah, it sent Fred. So what was funny is the hashtag was interesting, but there was so much spam on Twitter. And like is hashtag Apple, APPLE, how do you decide if it's a some guy saying I went to the fair and bought a green apple or I went to the to the corner store and bought a green apple versus I was in the Apple store fucking I love Apple.

So you had to figure out a way to- I'm short Apple. I'm short-out. Yeah, people were contextually talking about stock. So lucky for me as someone who came from the hedge fund world, I lived in the ticker-based world. So Apple didn't mean A-P-P-E. Apple was A-A-A-P-L. So we put a dollar sign in front of it, and another than the symbol Hitachi, which became shit, which is rappers. And it really worked for pretty much everything. And I sent Fred on, you know, back then Wilson, a Blackberry message

saying, you know, dollar sign, I love, he goes, black then it wasn't Apple, it was Blackberry, was the king. Right. And I pinned him and I was like, dollar sign, I love Blackberry. And he literally sent me something back right away. It was RIM at the time, R-I-M-M. Yeah, yeah. And Fred literally within three seconds, this is genius. You know, because Fred's Fred.

And he just... We're talking, obviously, about Fred Wilson, founder of Union Square Ventures with Jerry Clona and then... And Fred had been an investor in Wallstrip. Flat-Hen Partners, then Union, yeah. Yeah, so Fred had been in a personal investor in Wallstrip with Mark Pencos and Brad Feld. And so I got lucky Fred had introduced me to his whole mafia.

and so I remember texting or BBM or pinning Fred who was already in Twitter. So I said, Fred, what do you think? Will you invest? And Fred obviously has the foresight to say, you guys are like kids to me. I'm like, we'll be in a boardroom and we'll be fighting over Twitter or stocktwits. So I can't invest. So I went to Foundry and they invested. But the dollar sign came out of that exchange.

When you look at public market investing and then the psychology of private market investing, What is the key differentiator when you have to shift your brain and say, okay, I'm in a private market investment. This is my psychology. I'm in a public market. This is my psychology. This is my tactics. What changes when you shift those gears? It's the question.

It's the mission of what I try and educate and teach because we're all wired differently. I think you love private investing. I don't know if you trade stocks. Yeah. And you've obviously had a good head. I feel like I'm at such a disadvantage. But you're not because you were early in Tesla and you probably had some other great hits. But they're kind of the same.

But what happened in 1999 was staggering and that like some of the greatest investors just got so turned off by public markets, be it at Union Square like Fred Wilson. Because back then, everything was going public, right? And so the VCs of that era probably did think they were smarter than they were because the public markets are very intoxicating, as we've seen. seen now, all the new fresh newbies thinking they understand the markets. And I think even the smartest people in the world got carried away in 1999. Okay. And we're not there yet, but I'm saying in 1999, we all thought we were smart, meaning I'm doing cars direct deals and I'm paying up to get it to get the ugly step.

Like, it was crazy. And so I don't think people really can remember that, that weren't literally trading it. And so the investors of that era stopped public market investing because they were so birth. Like they saw stocks go from like $20 billion to like zero in weeks, if not months. It was very strange to see a $200 stock go to $3. And then quickly, quickly. Like in weeks.

And the other thing that was crazy about it was there was this thing called book value. I remember I was a journalist doing Silicon Air Reporter. Somebody's like, well, this company has a billion dollars in cash. and they're worth $100 million. I'm like, so if you shut it down, you make $900 million? How does that work exactly? Well, jumping around,

that's why SPACs are popular now because cash has zero, because there's zero percent interest rates. And if, you know, these crazy kids doing, and this is what I, you know, this is what I live to talk about is because I'm a loser, but these kids yoloing GME, but it's very upsetting to me when they can literally,

go and play very close to book value before they have a merger and bet on, like, bet on people, right? Like, you literally have fantasy stock market going on with SPACs, which is happening. Don't get me wrong. A lot of smart kids are speculating on Shamath and me and other people that have SPACs, but yet they're wasting their time, in my opinion, like speculating on AMC and GME. But, you know, again, that's the game. I don't know.

So the real difference to answer your question would be public and private, obviously, is Private investing suited me much better because I don't like seeing the price. If behaviorally seeing what your account is worth, the great traders have the ability to separate looking at their statement live in real time, their P&L, and being able to shut that out and think about what it'll look like in five years. I didn't have that gift. I was the kind of guy that would count his chips. I never was a Vegas guy because I just counted my stack.

Instead of paying attention to the game, yes. Pay attention to the game. And what the market does, like kind of the dead sea, if you go to Israel and you go to the dead sea, no matter how many times they tell you not to shave your balls or your pits the day before your face, every fucking teen shaves, and then they go into the Dead Sea and that salt finds your fucking, you know, yes. And that's what the market does do.

It goes into every pore and it itches. That's okay. And so I'm saying the market will do that to you too. and private market investing can do the same thing to you, but you're directly talking to the founder, you understand the cap table, and you're not looking like with the Robin Hood this weekend.

You know, if it's a public stock, would Robin Hood have traded down 90%? Or double. No, but then you wake up Monday and it doubles. But like, if that was a public stock, it would have been a disaster for a couple days. Yeah.

And then you, so that's the biggest difference. And what's becoming very cool, now Jason and we see it with Altimeter with Brad and we see it with like Rahm, a friend and like these tech guys that actually do crossover investing. And I think that's the future. We had this super angel period. But now we've entered this period where there's venture capital type returns back in the public markets. And see, this is weird. This is something you have to explain. This is a very interesting moment. As someone who's invested in over 250 companies

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So go to O-D-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-com.com slash twist, and get the $1,000 in credit right now. When we look at venture capital, our goal, and I just closed my third fund, and I'm, you know, now in decade two of angel investing slash now being like a venture investor, you're trying to hit 20%, 30% annualized return. In the stock market is traditionally, correct me if I'm wrong here, as 7% is what it's done. 10. 10%. And so you're saying now we're seeing people in the public markets doing what venture capitalists

can do. Is that sustainable? or is this a moment in time? Great question. So this is what makes the market so fast. And to me, every day is it switches. Like Tom Tongass at Red Point's a great writer because he kind of likes public markets too. And I think, like I said, in 2000, we lost a generation of great venture capitalists who had public companies because they were like, motherfucker.

Never again. Never again. Have you talked to Fred Wilson? He was like, what? What's the stock market? You know what I mean? And so it's really interesting when I talk to Fred because he realizes stock market is interesting again with zero interest rates and yet, yada, yet, yet. But he just doesn't want a part of it.

And so these young VCs, and I consider myself old, but the young BCs who don't know the public markets are a serious disadvantage right now. And so the VCs who are crushing it happen to be coming out of the hedge fund world because they understand emotion, they understand pricing, they understand overvaluate. They understand everything that you need to know. And finally, the public markets are actually offering them small cap technology opportunities. And so there's a whole new game. So the public markets and the private markets are coming together much better than they were. They were over here for way too long. And when you say over here, these were two separate entities.

And crossing the chasm was like this giant effort. Uber and Airbnb stayed private longer for 10 years, 11 years. And then somehow they make this miraculous cannonball jump across the ravine like evil can evil to public. Yes. Now with SPACs, our bestie Chimoth and others are saying, here's desktop metal, which we were lucky to be angel investors, or here's Virgin Galactic, which we didn't have exposure to. And let's watch and see if these emerging technology companies that are worth low billions of dollars that in some cases, I guess Virgin Galactic is not doing commercial flight yet. they're really like, you know, they're taking orders, I guess, and they'll be doing public fight soon, but you're investing essentially in a private company, right? Like, that would typically

have been a private investment. So I'll tell you a story because it's fucking genius what they did. Okay. Because, you know, when I, Stocktoch isn't genius, Twitter was genius. What was genius about Stockton's was the cash tech. Like what you just brought up at the beginning, what you recognize about Stockton's was the hack, the dollar song, right? And that's why I never really wanted to raise money. I was like, Twitter is going to co-op. that. It's not a real thing. It's a feature. It's a feature.

And it's elegant. It's actually just an elegant, clever. Fred says genius. But whatever the word is, it's clever. Okay. So it was the hashtag. So I'm born in Toronto. So there's two things that Canadians know. They know that there's donuts, Tim Horton, and they know about SPACs. And they know about SPACs. That's all and musky guns. So that we know two things. When you're born in Canada. I went to the Tim Hortons. Yeah. And you can buy a SPACs. add at a Tim Horn. So Canadian. Two donuts, a coffee and a SPAC. That's the family meal. That's the family plan there. Yeah. And you get the right off of the SPAC because they all go to zero and can because you just invest in some mining copper mining company in Saskatchewan. Right. So spacks have been this elegant in the wilderness

feature that was misused because there wasn't the cloud. So it was a very speculative tool used by like backwater banks by really smart. people that created it. And it's kind of like Tinder. Tinder, the swipe was an elegant thing that needed the date to make it a thing. Right. It was a device searching for like a mission to accomplish. Yeah. So Brian Norga, who you know and my friend, it's like the swipe is useless, but on a dating thing, genius. Okay. So the SPAC is a very elegant feature. But it wasn't used for growth vehicles most of the time. It was used to do a promote to get people in, so to go dig a hole in Belize or in Houston or in Nevada or, right? And there was, or oil, it wasn't used for growth, right? It was used for ugly duckling companies. So the, the spec had a really negative

connotation. So it would be the equivalent of doing Tinder for ugly people is what you're saying. Which is perfect. It was, you're getting the analogy. segue into me. So what Chimov, I think that, I haven't talked to him about it, but what I think he did is he recognized this feature as elegant, obviously understands finance. And, you know, you have this culmination.

You see it in the market, the markets tell all. You have guys like Masa in an Uber writing a $400 million check after one meeting of WeWork. So me as a home player, I'm like, what the fuck? And in Wag, for example, I was a receipt investor. and whack. The dog walking marketplace. Yeah.

So when they... Doing fabulous. Doing fabulous. When they got that offer to put $300 million in from Massa, Tom, Gary and I looked at each other and said, we should just sell because this is now a binary event. They took a company that was growing and said, put a gun to his head and said, here's $300 million. If you don't take the $300 million, we'll give it to Rover.

Right? So it was like, it was series D&E were being used as weapons. There was no elegance to it. So people don't talk about that, but the real story of WeWork is also the story of SPACs, because the timing became, why would I, I'd rather have Chmap as my Series D person. And I'd rather have that Series D lead be a public company where at least my employees can sell stock and I can, I can retain my employees and I can talk about projections or I can talk seven years out. And so it became a story where, man, if you could convince you.

the founder what a SPAC was, which was the hard part. Right, because they had been... Well, you have Gurley talking about, oh, IPOs are fine and direct listings are the thing. No one was talking about SPAC. It was like direct listing. And I'm here as someone in a crossover investing world saying, you fucking talking about Bill. Like, tell me about your direct listings. There's two.

Spotify. And Slack. And Slack basically traded at its price for two years, so that's dumb. And Spotify took three years to break out. So I'm saying the track record of direct listings we already see it There's hundreds of SPAC

Small sample size No and I think Listen if you're asking me to fast forward 10 years I would say direct listings will come back And you will settle somewhere in the middle Between IPOs, SPACs and direct listings Because you can raise money with them now right You're going to be able to the SEC said it's cool to

Do a primary offering Or I'm sorry it would be a primary or a secondary offering I guess it would be a primary offering with you your direct listing. So it used to be direct listing if you had cash in the bank, but you're not raising money. But now you can do that. And so the way I see the world is just converging, you know.

And so we had it too good in the private markets. It got abused. I think the top of that was seeing T-roll price fidelity and soft bank kind of corner the market in series D and E, right? Like you had to put them on the cap table. Right. And then we saw all those deals go to bonkers. And like, first of all, it was misallocation of cap.

Wag didn't need 300 million. All these companies didn't need that money. Brandless was the one I remember having Tina Sharkey on and it was like 200 million to make generic foods. Like what's going on? So it's a complete misallocation of capital. So Bain and Chamath figured this out. I don't know if that's a true story.

That's the way I would believe it happened. And I was sitting with Bain in February right before COVID in New York. And we were laughing. I was like, Bain, if you could do a SPAC, anybody could do a SPAC. Like, you know, Bain. Like you're so funny. Adam Bain. We're not upset Adam Bain.

You cannot upset. at him, right? Like, he's just a gentleman's gentleman. Cool. Yeah, he's cool as a kid. Like, he'll laugh at it. He'll laugh at himself. And, you know, you can't say that to Chamatha, I imagine. But with Bain, it was like, tell me what you're doing with Virgin Galactic. And he told us how they were doing it. And my friend, Doc Horlick, who's a Goldman banker was sitting there picking his brain. And I just said, wow, you know, it's fucking genius. And Adam said, we'll help you, like, we'll teach you how to do it, yada, yada, yada. And so someone who was very skeptical on specs in February. And I was writing about this in my blog, up until because of Canada,

I don't know all the other bullshit that was going on. Once I realized the hack and the feature, I knew it was an elegant product, but to see it applied to like a big vision was something new. And so kudos to Chimoth and all the people that are running with this. The new year is here. Thank the Lord. It's February. We're getting to work.

Everybody is grinding and your business is growing. I know your business is growing. You're listening to this week in startups. You're getting these incredible culture tips and growth tips. and at launch, things are going bananas. The podcasts are growing. And what does that mean? It means I knew video editors.

I need a community manage because nobody's managing the Slack. It's chaos over there. We need a social media editor. We need an archivist. I mean, we need people. So where am I going to find my candidates? What am I going to do? I'm going to go to LinkedIn jobs.

Of course, that's what I'm going to do. And LinkedIn is global. They're national. They're international. And they have over 722 million members worldwide. What that means is it's easier than ever for you to find great people because LinkedIn knows everybody's job description. They know the size of the company they work out.

They know their soft skills. They know their hard skills. LinkedIn Jobs is going to put your job in front of the right people. It's never been easier if you're using LinkedIn jobs to find the right person and to find them quickly. And that's what you're looking for. Just use LinkedIn jobs. And when you're ready to do that, you're going to get a free job listing.

That's because LinkedIn jobs has been a huge supporter of this week in startups and my podcast Angel, go to LinkedIn.com, A-N-G-E-L, and you will get to post a free job. There are terms and conditions that apply because they're letting you post for free. So thanks again, LinkedIn jobs. We found so many great people on your platform. We love the product. We love the service. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. And what it does, which is really, I guess, paradoxical in a way, we have these very paternal accreditation laws. If you make $200,000 a year, you got a million dollars in cash, whatever it is, you can invest in price. private companies. Now, you can not invest in those private companies, but you can go to Vegas

or, you know, bet on sports betting, poker, whatever, if you're the other 96% of Americans. Then SPACs come out and you take the same inventory of private companies that are pre-launch in some cases or, you know, have modest amounts of traction. And then you make them public. And now you can invest them as, you know, somebody who works as a Uber driver, a post-based driver or is unemployed and got a stimulus check currently or is, you know, whatever, a developer making $75,000 working from home, you couldn't invest in private companies. Now you can. So that is part of the magic is that you get to get in earlier on companies. Yeah. At the macro level, Jason, it's a supply demand imbalance. Explain what that means. Meaning for 10 years, I was the idiot yelling into the wind

and obviously you saw a little bit of this, whether you know it or not. Because Wall Street and Main Street told you to set them forget. They said, you're dumb, 08, you should buy Vanguard, you should buy BlackRock, you should just fucking be dumb. Like they basically said, be dumb, pay no fees. And for that, we will deliver your 10% return a year. Set it in for that. Talking about the biggest con of all, first of all, first of all, it's a great product.

There's nothing wrong. Again, great product, but I think a shitty choice for millennials. Why? Because isn't it the truth that if you said it and forget it? It's a choice. Yeah. Okay, just hear me out. Yeah.

It's still momentum packaged as passive. Meaning the S&P 500 is still a momentum strategy. They drop out companies that drop below a certain level and add another company. That's very active. It's packaged as passive. Oh. Yeah. So they're just,

so everything's momentum. manager there saying this No, it's a formula. No, it's a formula. Based on if you drop below a certain market cap, it's the top 500 market cap company. So all of a sudden, Tesla gets added because it's a momentum stock that people are betting on the future.

And now if I want to buy the S&P 500, I own a lot of Tesla. And so the product just became, to me, not the original intention. Okay, because you wouldn't wake up in the morning. Yeah. No. So imagine you're, here's the,

top in Vanguard investing to me. I wake up in the morning and I own the companies I hate. Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo. The companies you know are abusing you and you can't unsubscribe from them. Yes, correct. You can't unsubscribe. These are the ones. You know they don't have a great product when you can't unsubscribe.

If Vanguard had come up with the product that said, here's the S&P 500, deselect the companies that you don't want. and we'll rebalance that, they win. They fucking are this close to of winning the game. Hold on a second. This is such a brilliant idea. Roll your own Vanguard or customize it.

So it's like, here's your sneakers, but you could change the colors on them. Hello. If fucking Fidelity and Vanguard and BlackRock had just not sat on that feature. And so Robin, and so we have this era in VCs

that I was just talking to Jeremy Phillips at Spark. I was yelling at VC. sees. Like, what am I, you know, I start stock twits. I'm way ahead of the curve. Because back then it was set and forget. The crisis happened. You're an idiot. Don't pick stocks. You're an idiot. You're an idiot. You're not qualified. You're not qualified. You can make 10% of you're giving your money to Vanguard. Behind the scenes, Vanguard and BlackRock are doing their thing, which is like cutting deals with the lobbyists and making sure every 401k plan has time dated, target dated funds.

So when you sign up at whatever company, Fortune 500 company, you have five choices of your, you can't, God forbid, you should be able to pick stocks in your 401K. So they did their job. They did their job of locking you in. Okay. Now, what that behavior created was Wells Fargo, meaning if I'm Wells Fargo CEO,

who cares what I do? Because every day, every month, when Betty Lou puts money into a 401K, she's getting an allocation of Wells Fargo. So as long as... You don't have to earn it. Don't have to earn the shareholder. You literally get shareholders for free.

Money for nothing. And you can behave as badly as you want. And you can't vote them out of... You can't vote them off the island because he owned the S&P 500. It's like you're forced to buy... Bananas. Yeah. It's bonkers.

So what we're seeing here is kids are not that done. Right? Why do I need 500 stocks to be doing? diversify. Wouldn't 15 do the job? And say I'm wrong about three and they go to zero. But if I pick five good ones, just like a venture portfolio and just set and forget those, Nike, Lulu, Pelleton, whatever, the brands they use every day, Snapchat, all I got to do is get three of those right. And I'm a venture capitalist and I'm liquid. And so this is what you're seeing happening. I call it the unbundling. Ben Thompson talks about unbundling and bundling. We are going from a bundle.

channels, right? If you get to pick, now you're like, you know what? I want Disney, HBO Max and Netflix, 10 bucks each, let's roll, as opposed to my bundle, which was 150. Yeah, and some people will still like the bundle in Vanguard. I'm not saying it's a horrible thing. I'm just saying for someone who likes, who hates giving my money to criminal organizations, I would prefer to choose my bundle. And if Vanguard and BlackRock had just offered this feature, there'd be no Robin Hood. Wow. You and I are angel investors in Robin Hood, correct?

Correct, correct. You invested before the product was launched like me, I think, or shortly there. Yeah, so I had seen, you know, obviously because of Stockwoods, I had, I sit in this weird seat where I get to see things because people come to Stockwoods and say, hey, help me get 10,000 users. So Blot in Baizu, ping me. They didn't know me, but I guess they knew me from Stocktwitz. And they ping me. Yeah. So they ping me and I flew.

I was like, I was an investor. E. Toro. So, so Robin Hood is not the first company to do this. The most innovative company, I think you know who they are E Toro, which a guy named Yoni Asia, him and his brother, are E Toro, which is Robin Hood meets Coinbase for the rest of the world. There are 140 countries started in 2009. It's like a mobile trading app. You could trade. Forex. He could trade. Everything. Anyways, I wanted that to exist. And for some reason, the VCs in America were all busy knocking off Vanguard. So the VCs got caught up in betterment and Welfront.

So they were like, oh, Vanguard's going to win. Let's do a better software package around the Vanguard. User interface. That was their hack. And I kept looking at those deals going, wait a minute, that's not good enough. Like, what's your margin? Like low switching costs? So I passed on all those deals and I didn't make fun of them, but I was like waiting,

waiting, waiting. And I believed in the E Toro model. So when Bajou and Vlad hit me up, I flew up to see them. And they showed me the app. It wasn't live. And I said, that's going to work. I said, if you can build that, you have a billion dollar company. Wow.

And I wrote 100K check. Yummy. I think it was 10 million valuation. And then I helped promote like the first. I got so many users from stock to it. And then a funny story is so when the A round, we're seed investors only. And our first fund was six million. And so, Beijing and a lot, we're just so smart at optimizing valuation.

So they call me and they said, listen, you love Robin Hood, you got stock twits, you were going to raise an A round. Why don't you guys do a term show? I said, our fund is only $6 million fund. Oops. Yeah, so what I had taught, we did a term sheet. We sent them a term sheet for the A round, an $11 million term. I called Fred Wilson, my mentor, and I said, Fred, what would you do? He goes, well, do you believe it's going to be a home run?

He says, don't worry about the valuation. write a term sheet. And I said, Fred, I don't have $11 million. He goes, well, you'll raise $11 million. Sure. Get the term sheet it. So I think I faxed a term sheet on like July 4th. And I think to their credit, they shopped the deal.

And I didn't know how to like corner the deal. And an index beat me out on the deal. Well, that's the, you know, you became the stocking. The stocking horse. And, you know, that happens to me sometimes. And what I learned about that is you have to have the follow through. So what you have to do is send that term. sheet and then harang and hound the founder that the wire is coming here's the wire we're ready

to ship the wire are you ready to go let's go because i have had the same thing happen to me i send a term sheet and now i understand why people do exploding term sheets which i thought were dumb but you do need to have this pressure to close if not it gets shopped forever if you're an accredited investor you need to understand what a special purpose vehicle is this is how i have made my career what is a special purpose vehicle well it's an investment vehicle that allows you up to 250 investors to invest up to $10 million into one entity on a cap table of a startup. Nice and clean, not 250 names, but one name. If you're an angel investor with a bunch of rich friends, you could start your own syndicate powered through SPVs.

Here at launch, we could not be more pleased with our partnership with the team at ashore. They power my syndicate, which is the largest one in the world, over 6,000 active members. The syndicate.com is the back end that I rely on to. get all of these syndicates done. Assure is the leading provider of SPVs, special purpose vehicles, and fund administration, people running venture firms, with over 2.5 billion in AUA, if you're wondering what that is, assets under administration, not management, that's what I do. And over 5,000 completed transactions. Amazing. They've developed an innovative software called Glassboard. It basically automates everything. It makes it really easy, breezy for you to make sure everybody

gets their documents from the entity formation all the way, hopefully please to the IPO. Not only do investors like it, founders love it. They love it because it just keeps their cap table clean. That's the number one thing for a founder. They managed the entire process over the life of the investment and you are going to get 20% off your first SPV. What a great deal. Assure.com. That's assure.com slash angel to get 20% off your first SPV.

Here's a great story. So this goes to learn by doing and why I love Robin Hood and all this stuff. Learn by doing. This is the critical lesson of 2021. Well, it's a critical lesson of life. Sure. You ride a bike. You don't watch a video. You could watch videos now and that makes you better. Like you know what the, you can three-dimensionally see what it is riding a bike,

but until you pedal or fall over or understand it. Okay. So learn by doing applies to finance too. Learn by doing applies to languages, dual lingo. If dual lingo is no different than Robin Hood, it's a trading app to teaching you the language, right? Robinhood's teaching you the language of money. You may hate it. You don't understand the rules.

I get it. Okay. But the best way to learn how to do options, trading and shorting and the stuff is to actually go short something. Because you can have, I've watched 100 YouTube videos on shorting, puts, longs. I've never put $3 on it and see that you owe 20. It's like poker, right? If you start playing poker, you start to understand, wow, my aces did not hold up.

And there were three hearts on the flop. I should have known. Yeah, Matt beat you there. Yeah. So in, but I was going to say something important and I'm old. And now I forget. We were talking about, oh, Robin Hood. So I learned by doing it.

So I send the fact, I send the term sheet. I don't hear anything for a day. And this had happened to me back with Henry Blodja, too, one time when I was really early on in the game. But the Robin Hood meant more, because I'd be a billionaire, is that we send the $11 million term shoot. We don't have the $11 million. By shoe and Blodd knew we didn't have $11 million. They trusted me for sure to do it. But I was kind of scared.

I'm like, fuck, if they signed this, I got a lot of work to do, I'm going to be calling it. You know, and it was at a, we wrote a term. sheet at a $60 million valuation at the time. There was no products, Phil. Like, it was not shipping. It was a, I think there was maybe a wait list. Okay. So, they were, they were working on.

So kudos to yon. I invested right between those two points. Yeah, they were doing notes all the way up. So, so. I did like $20 or $30 million before they launched. Yeah. So, and they brought it. They were just so good at the cap table stuff, but very dangerous game.

And very few can pull it off. So, because it's a momentum game. So anyway, so we send the term sheet. I'm shitting bricks. I mean, I'm happy to go raise the money. And then we get a call that, hey, Yon's coming in. It's like a 15-day close instead of like a Howie Linson's six-month close where I got to call my mom to give me 50 grand to fill the term sheet.

So it's like, I probably would have called you Jason. And the, and index was like, fuck you. Who's social leverage? Like, Yon was like, I don't give a fuck who Howard Linson is. No, he didn't probably say that, but he was like, no, we want to put in all the money. Right. So, so in, you know, people may say things about by June and blah, but they, they came back to us and said, listen, you guys gave us the term sheet. You can have as much as this deal as you want. Oh, nice. And so we put, we put a large check into the A round as well.

Yeah. So, so learn by doing. Yeah. We put a quick million or two. Yeah. We put 800 grand. And so, so, so you can tell the returns that has been. And so that's why I'm very, so, so you could say what you want. This is why you're so relaxed. Robin Hood. Well, it's not that I'm so relaxed because I Toro is even a better company in many ways. But it's that they did the right thing. Yon did his thing. Learned by doing means I called Fred. Fred's the expert, right?

He's the fucking OG or whatever you call. It's the Yoda. Fred took my call and he said, Howard, write the fucking term sheet. Guess what Howard does? I write the term sheet. The next thing is Yon did his thing as a VC as like, who the fuck cares about social leverage? We have our chips. This is our chip.

We want every dollar. But by writing that term sheet, they didn't have to. This is why I like them. No, they do the right thing. I mean, they're getting destroyed. They get the right thing.

They're getting destroyed right now. But when we look at what happened with Robin Hood the past week, it is a good idea for us to sort of deconstruct what happened here. I'd love to. Yeah. So you have a group of people who identify this opportunity in GME. They think it's undervalued, yada, yada.

they basically create a, I don't know, I don't want to say mob, but they can, they create a voting block to then go after the voting block that is short. What, is that a proper assessment of how this started? And then what happened? I will be honest, I'm not an expert at the mechanics of this. The reason I love what I do is I try and stay up here. I know the messy, Robin Hood put a beautiful package on a very complicated back end. That didn't change. That's what people are learning right now. just because it's beautiful does not simplify what's underneath. Just because Uber is beautiful, the chaos that must happen to get a car to your fucking place. And that's why it's worth $100 billion.

God bless. They all hate Uber, love Uber, Airbnb. Airbnb will be the biggest company. Could be the biggest company in the world at Ventron because they're taking some of the most. It's such a big market. It's such a complex thing. And they've turned everybody into Donald Trump. And if Donald Trump could be president, that means every fucking.

fucking person is now, could be a landlord. And I also hate Airbnb for that reason because people don't, just because you can be Donald Trump doesn't mean you should be Donald Trump. No, please don't. Please don't. We all have neighbors. So, but, but Airbnb's the hardest company to stop in 2021. Because it's so, it's so distributed. And so messy. It's so much chaos and they organized chaos. And I think what the VCs, whether that they flinch this weekend to put up their three and a half billion. I'm not in the room. I haven't been in that room in a long time, but I do speak to Yonni at Eatoro.

So I know what's going on, but not directly. Okay, because I have a very close relationship with Eitoro is fuck. That many people pushing the same button, forgetting about GME, it was going to happen. Yeah. Okay. That many people, and that's why I hate about the S&P 500. And that's what happened in March. When everybody pushes the same button to sell the S&P 500,

You get me out of vanguard at the same time. You have moves that never have been seen before in the worlds of Donald Trump. Never have I seen what happened in March. You haven't. It was chaos. Like literally the market loses half its value instantly. And that's the market. And so apply that to GameStop.

Anything can happen. Now, the good news is we distress tested. This is why the markets are the best game in the world. And everybody's talking about roadblocks. And I keep saying the stock market is Tam is completely undervalued. what you got right in Robin Hood and what I got right in Robin Hood is Tam. Total addressable market.

People thought wealth front and betterment were the only, we're going to be the winners. Retirement. And I looked at, yeah, well, no, just set and forget in a beautiful UI. What I believed was the Tam of do it yourself was undervalued and that Robin Hood was unlocking, unbundling this. And so that was my bet.

I didn't know what would happen in 2021 with GameStop. I'm not smart enough to know that. But what I do know what happened is when you put 20 million new people into a game in nine months, yes. Fucking shit will fucking break. Yes. And GameStop broke the system. Not just Robin Hood.

They broke everybody. What happened with Robin Hood coming out first was they gave cover to everybody else to throw them under the bus. Right. And to tell the story that Robin Hood probably should have told. But remember, if Robin Hood tells them. the true store, not that they should have told the truth. I don't know what happened. If Robin Hood tells the story that there's a run on the bank and we found a hack in the system, more hedge funds would have piled in to drive Robin Hood out of business. Right. Because that's the way Wall Street work.

If they say we have a weakness, if they say reality, and I'm not saying they lied because I didn't even watch TV, but if they truly told you what was going on, do you think the fucking mob cares? And do you think the hedge funds care if Robin Hood goes down? If, If Robin Hood's an institutional business, they're out of business. They're Lehman. But Robin Hood is really an important product because it's an educational product. It's an onboarding system. It's democratizing everything and educating people. Yeah. Is there messaging off? Maybe. Well, I mean, if you had a choice to give your kids $250,000 to go to college, or give them $100,000 to bet on Robin Hood, a hundred thousand to, you know, bet on startups and $50,000 to have a buffer to live off of. You know, go to some trade school.

If those two things don't work out, you'd obviously pick that, right? And my son's living that side of the business. He works at Stocktwits. He works at a restaurant. He golfs. He trades. He's 21. He's learning way more than he would have learned in college.

He hated college. My daughter is the other person. So this is for people with kids. I have two kids. I don't know how many kids you have. Three now, man. Okay. You have three kids.

No one put a gun to your head. But I have two kids. And my daughter is like directly on the rails. It's like, whatever. Whatever the system says to do, she does. Check in the boxes. Check in the boxes. Life is good.

My son is like over here. He's like, there's no trains. I don't fucking trust anything. I have Uber. I have Netflix. I have Tinder gold. What are you telling me about the system? Of course I'm a socialist.

I have everything that I want on my phone and my parents pay for it. And health insurance. I don't get sick. And I got my parents health insurance. Of course he's a socialist. he's not socialist because he leads the news. He's a socialist because every single thing he needs, other than his pillow.

Provided for him. It's provided for him. The warmth of that smartphone. Okay. So he now looks like a genius because COVID has shown us how fucked up the system is. And so my daughter is working from home, doing her first job. There is no office. Chaos ensues.

She has no mentorship. She did her four years of college, straight A's yada, yada, yada. My son has got two jobs. He's out. He's golfing. He doesn't know. He's not a wage life. He's not showing up for work, punching a clock.

And those folks can tend to go further because they have opportunities. So I don't know. But what I'm saying is the Robin Hood, we're getting back to Robin Hood, they opened up a language that was locked in this, like, don't fucking worry about it. Yes, you own Wells Fargo. They don't even tell you, yes, you own Wells Fargo. But just trust us. low fees, don't try and do anything. You know, Vanguard's got your back.

Let me ask you a question about what the right thing to do is. They were told to stop all, I think, according to reports and Elon's interview on Clubhouse with Vlad, hey, you got to shut down buying and selling because you need to put more money up. So they put them more money up. And in the meantime, they say, listen, we're going to let you sell. You can't buy any more because that's going to sink our firm. But we don't want to lock you into not being up to sell the thing. goes down because you'd be really upset because when they went down in March, that's what happened.

They had to shut down both sides of trading. And I think that was technical issues in March because they couldn't keep up with it. And people went crazy. Oh, you can't sell. So that was the right thing to do, I guess. Again, it's so easy to be armature quarterback. That's what Twitter. Twitter should change its name to armchair quarterback.

But no skin in the game commentary. In the end, that beautiful UI led to a fucking. what do you call it? Somebody broke the code. Right. But, you know, if you let people just bang the button, if you let my mom who doesn't know how to use a phone, claw away at her phone, shit will break.

And everybody figured out how to get into the system. And once the sharks are in, they were mixed. It's like the rate on the Capitol. There were some normal people mixed in with some fucking crazy people. And in the end, they were all insurrectionists, and they were all upset. It's like January 6th. have some normal Trump supporters. You could have some fucking people

cosplaying. And then you could have some people who are like literally... That's the markets, 24-7. This is the beauty of it. Like kids are saying they love Roblox. Roblox is what, $30 billion dollar valuation? In that world, Robin Hood's $200 billion. No, you can yell at me for saying that. I get it. But that's my argument. If you're saying Roblox, which is for eight-year-olds to what, 20-year-olds, who plays Roblox? I don't even know. I don't know anybody's ever played it. It's like my... Okay, but Roblox is going to be the the hot IPO. What age group is Roblox for? Eight to, okay. Apply Roblox to 18 year olds to 100 year olds. That's a big fucking tam. That's a big tam. And that's just the bat. Wow. That's

crazy. Now, let's shift to the pandemic because this is a Black Swan event. Have you gotten the vaccine? My wife does a lot of charity. She has. I haven't. Got it. But you're close. I'm assuming you're age-wise a little ahead of me. So you're getting close. And we're doing 1.5 million shots some days. We've got 600 million shots on order. The vaccine seems to have been undersold. Not one person who was in those first 75,000 in the trials has died from it.

Only one got hospitalized and it wasn't a ventilator or anything acute. They got sent home very quickly. Basically, it's a miracle. I think it's a miracle. It's a miracle, right? I think even Phoenix is a fucking, Phoenix is very organized. organized right now. Like, we were a hot spot, but like, I can go do eight hours of work next week at the fairgrounds or whatever. And, and at the end of my shift, get a, get a shot.

What? Yeah. So, wait, explain this again. You can go work for eight hours shift. You get a shot. Yeah. So Phoenix has figured out how to get people their shots. Well, I'm saying, I don't know. It's not my fault. I'm not going to clean toilets for a week. I thought that's what you did. Regular. really. I do that for fun on weekends. And they would love you at rest stops. Yes, absolutely.

As someone who doesn't even like you that much, don't do that. Don't even do that. Don't even do that. We like each other. We remind each other too much of each other and that's why we fight. What is it? Like siblings? No.

I just don't like your haircut. Really? I've felt that haircut was a little Third Reich. I've always felt it was a little third way. I got it. So, you know, it's interesting you bring that. As a Jew, I always worried that. That haircut had...

It's interesting you bring up the Nazis. I didn't say, you said it. I was good... No, literally, I'm both going to get in trouble. On the subway, this is a true story. I'm on the subway going into work in the 90s, and this old woman comes up to me, and she puts her hand on my forearm. And she pulls herself close, and she goes, Hitler Youth.

You've seen the sound of music. And I'm like, what are you talking about? She's like, you look like Hitler Youth. And I'm like, I don't know what Hitler Youth is. And I'm like, looking up Hitler Youth later. Like, what is Hitler youth? I've never seen the sound of music. I don't know what you're talking about, lady.

Just a tip from one Jewish guy to I'm sure you're not racist. Right. You scare a lot of people. And I'm just finally telling you that. You go buzz cut, your followers will double. Now, you're going to lose the Q&OM support on the Twitter feed. So I don't know where you stand on that. But if you want Jews to embrace Jason Calcanus,

right fix the hair got it okay i'll talk to my rabbi i feel i'll talk to mordecai i'll talk to mordecai i'll talk to mordecai and so one thing mortycai is my rabbi on twitter and now we become friends in real life and we go for walks in crown heights and he brisk it and talk about life well keep your enemies close you know how mortaqi keep your enemies close so so here's what i was going to say coming full circle to the markets we're at this beautiful point you asked and i apologize You're at this beautiful point where all the alpha was in the private market. Yes. Okay.

Alpha meaning smart people like Chamoth, you, me, Fred. It was like a party. It was a fucking party. Okay. And we were hoarding. Yes. The IP room. We were hoarding.

And Drison's like the new Goldman Sachs. He's genius. He's like going on Bloomberg and saying, oh, it's a bubble. He doesn't want people in the game. No. His fucking whatever the word is, the guy's, We're going to have to beat that one. Yeah, beep that.

Please beep that. But he's got $6 billion. He goes on Bloomberg, just like Goldman would say and say, why would you invest in private markets or a bubble? And then you get a call from your LPs and going, Mark Andreessen just said it was a bubble. I'm not giving you money. I go, no, he's trying to not let me have money. He's like, you don't want to go skiing here. Don't move to Austin.

It's terrible. The water is cold and there's like dead fish. And so I'm like the little private guy going, Mark Antrient, just shit. my pool. But so, so the, so the, the, the VCs had it all. Then Masa got carried away and all the he raised 45 billion from MBS. Because he could, because he could, because he could. In 45 minutes. Like in an hour, he raised 50 billion. If you're MBS, if you're MBS, and I see this living in Coronado with Mexico, wealthy Mexicans, they set up a retail shore. It's kind of like the show. They don't care if they lose 80 cents on the dollar. They just clean 20 cents.

Okay, so yeah, I mean, it's a money. I mean, I'm very skeptical and very cynical. Just like people want to burn down the system, I'm very cynical of dirty money. Everything's dirty. But if you're MBS, what do you care if you make 6%? You just cleaned all that money. Yes. It has laundered it.

It's like they're a better looking Trump soft bank. And again, I'm sure they're great people, but that's how money works. It just creates all kinds of fucking evil. And so the private markets had all the fuck. And God bless. They hoarded it. They did it. And then it got crazy.

And then the public marks are like, fucking bank. And then the millennials came along and said, why the fuck do I want to own 500 stocks? Like, I want to own Peloton. I want to own fucking Nike. I want to own Snapchat.

And so they're unboggling it. Give me some Disney. But they'll learn that Disney's not a better stock than owning Netflix because I'd rather own a pure company. I don't want to own conglomerate. So I think we're also going from the era of the conglomerate. to the peer play. And that's where you see with SPACs.

That's where you see with SPACs. It feels like Disney is in sync with you where they're just like, you know what? The entire organization is now being reorganized around their version of Amazon Prime, which is Disney Plus. No, the market's giving them a chance. And if they don't truly sink and spin off Disney Plus,

Netflix will eat their lunch. Really? Because of focus and because of, of accounting and because of scale. See, I'm in a great, this is weird. I'm in agreement with you. I'm not saying Disney isn't a great stock, but if you give me the choice between a peer play,

digital content company and Disney, I'm going to go with the pure play. If I want theme parks, all about Disney. Yeah, but here's the thing. This is what I think they should do. I'm hashed this out with you. They have 87 million page.

Wait a minute. I solved your hair problem. Yes. Is that a thank you or is that something that you're going to consider? Of course. You think I want to be put in that bucket? No. Yeah.

Well, you've been, I mean, it'll take a few months, and I will help you. So you're saying shave it. Just go for like police officer. Or wear a hat. Or wear a hat. Or wear a hat. Continue on your Nazi ways. Here we go.

I'm ready. I got my night. You're almost lovable with that hat. There you go. Okay, so go ahead. What if they said when you buy your Disney Plus, you get X number of tickets where each Disney plus gets a ticket to the park? Or you can buy this and you get five tickets, five days in the park, whatever it is.

Guess why the stock is back where it was or above because of that. The market's already pricing that in. They'd be stupid not to offer that. Of course. You're absolutely right. And if they're not thinking of that, they're idiots because the stock market has already said that's assumed. It looks like Apple's doing that now, too.

They have some sort of family package. The only thing Apple has wrong is the narrative. If they had like... What does that mean? Meaning Tim Cook's not out there talking like Elon Musk. He's not in Clubhouse saying you don't understand the narrative. Apple is unstoppable because we have recurring revenue. If he was out there pounding the table like Elon Musk taking bullets like Chamath,

the stock would be a much higher multiple, period, end of story. I own it as one of my biggest positions, if not. But they're terrible at the narrative. They're really not good at narrative. I agree. The products they launch are, you know, between average and awesome, depending on the product. But they don't buy any companies and they have all this cash

of the largest hedge fund in the world, right? Like, what should they buy? I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that. They could have bought Tesla for $50 billion, $75 billion. Because I'm okay with it. It's working. What's not working is they're not playing the story. And the market is rewarding storytelling. I mean, your bestie Chama tells stories like a fucking professional.

He's playing the narrative. He's got Adam Bain who's like, you can't hurt Adam Bain. He's like fucking kryptonite, right? You want to pick on Chimath? Well, you can't pick on Chimot. Fucking Adam Bain's like snow white.

Yeah. Like he's got his fucking podcast with you. He's got like, he's talked to his arch enemies. He's like, he's running for office. He's like fucking power to the people. He's doing topless shirts.

Like if I sent a shirt with me without my shirt on, career under. Exactly. It's like your hair. If you put my body on your hair, hair, the two of us are canceled. We'd have no followers. Actually, I think we'd be deplatformed. I think right now, Amazon.

No, Q&O will love us. We'd be the new hit spokesman for QAnon. So the pandemic is going to end quicker? I think we're like so close. Because people like me, I love, I can't say this publicly, hopefully you block it out. COVID's been phenomenal to Howard Linson. And I've been super lucky. Like I joke, it's not a joke at all because I'm doing

giving money away and like you can't do much right i'm trying not to get covid we're all playing a game right now is like how much do you want to risk getting covid right i've been the somewhat good citizen i go bike riding haven't been on a plane have not been on plane myself right i don't go to restaurant but i i take i go shopping i know i take i write big tips i go to my local restaurants i don't know what i'm supposed to do i'm listening to the news i don't listen to the news but my job is to survive okay so now that we're so close, I'm even more of a hermit. And I'm ready to get the fuck out, meaning I want to get my shot.

If people don't start behaving, I'm going to not butt in line, but I'm going to play the game and get my shot. You know what I mean? Have you wanted like take the narrative? Let me ask you this. You got some. Did you get any inside offers of how you might be able to get a little bit of those? Never.

Never, no. Nobody. Because of my chakras, because of my chakras, it's like you talk to Fred Wilson and stuff. we're not playing that game. I'm not. I would never jump the line. I got to have an opportunity to, but then I decided not to. Yeah.

So I don't know buying all the drama. It's, you know, we build our own networks. Getting it now would be stupid, right? Like if you get it in the 11th month and it's ending in the 14th, you're an idiot. You're literally, what were you thinking? So now I'm more careful than I ever was. Me too. Because it would be so dumb to step outside and get COVID.

Not that I'm scared of it, but it's like my job was to survive. My job from my LPs is to fucking manage my. And my job is to be on Zoom and to try and get smarter and to like talk to really smart people and try and accept just like our name of our firm social leverage. Our job is to be armchair quarterbacks with skin in the game. It's like, tell me your problem. How could social leverage help? When you come to social leverage for capital, Tom Garrett and I, there's three jobs of a CEO. The most important one is don't run out of money.

Yeah. So our most important job at social levers, we're going to be the best that we can be. It's not so much recruiting. We'll do that. But it's like, if you do your job and you keep the lights on and you keep building this product and you go get those 10 customers and you recruit good people, we got your back. Because our LPs are the smartest people in the world. We're like individual LPs from Fred Wilson to Mark Pinkis to Chris Sacka.

Like great guys, not huge, just great people. And so everybody knows who you are. So get the fucking product. shipped, get your 10 customers, right? And recruit good people and social leverage will do the rest. And so we've done a good job of that as a firm. And that's why we're on fund for. And you have, have you met with anybody, any founders in person?

Are you doing all your investing on Zoom? So we haven't written a lot of checks on Zoom. I'm now actually, just like my own personal life, I'm like ready to fucking not write any more checks. And I want to get on and start seeing people face to face. Yes. Gary's younger than man. has done a great job on Zoom. I'm struggling to write checks based on Zoom. Because?

It's just, I'm set of my ways and I'm like, the alpha's in the stock market now. It shouldn't like, this is the crossover fund. I look at Brad at Altiminer who is doing SPACs and does growth equity and does trading. And I'm like, that's who I want to be. Like, he gets it. He has total freedom. If he feels like trading, he trades. If he feels like doing a growth stage, he does a gross stage. He's truly the man right now. He wants to go on scene He goes on CNBC. He's what I call a crossover investor, which is like his LPs trust him to try and create alpha.

You had the same idea I had. Uber bought Trisley. Genius. Genius. They can deliver beverages. What are restaurants make their margin on? Beverages. You're ordering your, you know, Mexican.

First time I felt like buying Uber in forever. Right. So now we're starting to see, okay, Amazon is two-day delivery. Uber is two-hour delivery, one-hour delivery, 20-minute delivery, totally cool. But you made the next logical jump. If you are going to buy Drizzly, you should buy weed. Of course you should buy weed. Lots of it.

Mike Lazaro is kind of the lead. Mike and I are really good friends. Mike and I are working on a SPAC together. He's on my board. I was an investor in Buddy Media. Mike's one of the best entrepreneurs I know. And he and Adam Bain did put together the Ease deal, I don't know, a couple years ago before the fucking tailspin.

And they stayed with it. I feel like ease is it now in the right place at the right time. And if Uber, I don't think Uber needs the risk right now, but I think weed is on a path to for sure being in every state. And I think it's much safer to get it delivered under the Uber brand than it is. Of course. So I just think Uber has now that vision and chance to tuck in things that makes so much sense that will increase people's joy

fucking Netflix should buy ease at this point and Cheetos. They should just go and just Well, I mean if you're going to Netflix and chill you kind of need a gummy. You might need a nice itiva and you probably want a beverage and you're going to need some casadilla. I mean, it's pretty obvious. But they covered everything we did. GME, weed, booze, Uber, Robin Hood. Is there anything we have here? Nazis?

There's nothing we haven't covered. Come for the Nazis and we'd stay for the SPACs. Do you have no, you've had no guests that have gone this wider range of topics and still talked about nothing. And we've still, it's like Larry David. Nothing has been a complex. Nothing has occurred. You remind me of Larry David in a way. And that's a compliment.

And it is a compliment. You do make people uncomfortable. I don't. You don't. So Larry David does it, which his genius, obviously, is, can't thank you for even comparing me, because he's an idol. Well, he's an idol of mine, like David Lennerman, because he makes you uncomfortable. Yes. I do not want to make people uncomfortable. I want everybody to, not on purpose. Your hair, you're not on purpose looking like a, no one's told you this.

It's not like you wake up in every day and go, oh, I'm Third Reich. You just like the way, no, your wife hasn't told you, by the way. Jews don't like you. No, I'm saying, I'm not trying to cause fights, but I will stick up for my friends to cyberbullying, and I will stick up. But I don't like it. I don't like fighting. You and I've been in Rose and Mike Arrington. I didn't like it, but I felt people, you have to push back sometime.

And I'm not a fighter. You have your black belt. I don't have my black belt. That was a funny moment, yes. Yeah, yeah. I'll run from a fight because that's smart, fully. But on a digital space. I kind of run into the fight, yeah.

Yeah, because you have hands that work. Yeah. My hands, my hands would just be, oh, 10 seconds later, I would say, I would like, and I'm not smarter to have long nails. I cut my nails. I have no edge right now. No edge. So in digital, I have a bit of an edge because I have people who trust me.

You're waiting. It will come to my support. Yeah, you're ready. I'm not going to let myself get pushed. No, I'm just not going to let. There's a point where I just say enough. Like when Chamath, he's a fucking legend. But to go delete Robin Hood, when you also have SOFite, that's all push back.

And I'll say, what are you doing? Like, what's the point? Don't shit in my neighborhood because I thought we were friends. Like, I know you didn't do it with like complete malice. No, I mean, he addressed it on, he addressed it on episode 20. Yeah, but I don't want to listen to your podcast. He should address it on Twitter where he caused the shit store. Well, he did.

He did address it in the first 10 minutes. So you don't have to go that deep into it. Let me ask you about as we wrap up here, China, TikTok, in relation. with China, human rights. Should we ban TikTok? Should we be engaging with China and having them pick the ending of our movies in Hollywood because they're funding it and we're sellouts? Or should we start disengaging from them after what they did to Hong Kong and the genocide

they're doing with the Uyghurs? What's your personal take on that? Such a great question. I'm so anti-China in general. But the world is so, it's like money and soft bank. I'm like, I hate to hold myself out. I've been to China. I went, I saw, I went five star, still scared the shit out of me, still came away saying I'll never go back.

I didn't have a horrible time. It just crept me the fuck out. It creeped me out. It felt like Hollywood, if you peered right behind the set, it was fucking chaos. No matter how much they put a beautiful UI on your experience. Yeah, Shanghai is interesting, but the drive into Shanghai is weird. It's like, I don't want that. I want Uber.

I think China feels very fake to me. I don't like fake. We're just lucky to be in America. This is why I always like, what are people complaining about? I get it. Like poverty and equality. I totally get it. But let's focus on that.

Like China's got their own problems. So I don't like the fight because they got their own problems. They don't really want to come over here and take us over. That'd be nuts. They got plenty of money. Everybody's got money. They got digital. Everybody's got a phone.

These kids don't want to fight wars. So we're fighting the wrong war. If you wanted to mess with China, you'd play the same fight. If Facebook can't be used in China, why the hell don't we have a digital wall? We are so in sync on this. It is insane to allow TikTok-I-Ride-Fa-We built a physical wall with Mexico? Yeah, we have a physical wall we're working on. When we should have a digital wall with China. And by the way, Mexicans are absolutely- You should be building shit there instead of China. Absolutely. We have a neighbor who loves America. And we share tens of millions

of citizens who are overlapping in their citizenship, build factories in Mexico. Let's build battery factories. Let's build iPhone factories. Let's do it and save all these tankerships from having to take this giant run from China to America to Long Beach. To me, it's an easy answer. So I don't want to get into the politics of it because I just don't know how to, all I can do is not buy China. Right. Good luck with that. I don't. I love Tencent. because it's like, that's so smart and it's so creative and it's probably evil. But at the same time, they play them by the rules. Our rules are stupid.

Trump's idea of like not letting you buy Tencent and Alibaba is so un-American. It's ridiculous. Right. And that's why I hated Trump. He would float these things. He was like a kid in the candy shop and he was so destructive to our time. We spent four years worrying about what one person would say. That's terrible.

But on China, on China, it would seem to me easy. If they don't let us... To reciprocation. To reciprocation. We can build a digital wall. I know we can't. American can build a digital wall. Israel built a wall to stop missiles coming from Syria.

Absolutely. I mean, and look at a, like, was it Pakistan or India? India was just like, yeah, TikTok's out. Forget it. We're having conflicts on the border. TikTok out of the store, done. Like, there was no discussion. Yeah, kids don't have to at least go suit up and go to

up and die in a trench so they don't use TikTok. I think Trump, if he was good, could I ask people as an adult saying, this is a terrible war that we've entered. It's digital. It's not physical. Right. And we don't hate China. We hate the way they're behaving.

And this is the only way we know how to fight it right now. Right. If they want capitalism, we need to have fair capitalism. Fair capitalism. And they're going to play unfair. Speak to the Americans like they're not idiots. Correct. And I think he refused to do that.

I think America luckily voted him out. I say this openly because four more years of that bad hairdo would have been really chaotic. Yes. It's just like you, four more years of your hair. I knew it was coming. I was bracing for impact. You served the softball up to yourself and you just teed it out. Sometimes if you're not giving me softballs, I make them up.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is nonsensical that Trump took up so much space. And how weird is it to not have. him taking over the conversation every day. We can actually talk about other things. But how great is it that he bleep it out? He got it out. Who gets caught?

The guy could have printed money until the end of time. His only job was not to get kicked off the Twitter. Like, if you're Donald Trump, because this is where Elon Musk is now king, Elon Musk notes somewhere deep down before he pushes a Twitter button. Yes. I do not want to risk getting kicked off Twitter. Right. Trump literally could care of it.

Like, he treated Twitter like a garbage can. What was that counterworth? That bothered me about Jack Dorsey was he's shitting on you. Yeah. And you just keep backing down. And guess where Twitter stock is today with Trump off the internet? Higher than it's been. Yes.

So it was never about Trump. That bullshit that the, oh, all the right wingers, if you kick off Trump, Twitter's going to be destroyed. No, he wrecked their brand for four years. And now the mob is focused on things that are maybe just as unproductive, but at least something different. Well, it's a range of unproductive time-hanging things as opposed to one. We are now, hey, Robin Hood, and we hate this, and we hate the hedge funds, and we hate this guy, and we hate Chimots. Courtside Karen.

I don't know if you saw Courtside Karen yelling at LeBron. They literally let one row of people into the game, and what happens? We can't even have one row of spectators. And so America is very self-destructive, and I hope that Americans realize how lucky they are. It's not fair. There's a lot of inequality. I get it. But, you know, I'm bullish. I'm just bullish and optimistic. All right. Listen, Howard, this has been great. Let's do it again. Howard, L-I-N-D-Z-O-N. He's great on Twitter. And if you want to go back into the archive, episode 309 and episode 348, 2012 and 2013, he's back in 2021. on this weekend startups. And any plugs? You got any plugs? No,

I mean, I would like, if I had enough money, I would buy some plugs. Well, I think when Robin Hood gets liquid, you could sell in secondary. I mean,

how many secondary offers are you getting from Robin Hood a day? Let me just check right now. Hang on. I'm getting pounded with people who want to buy. It's all day. And honestly,

this is how frenetic public and private markets is. On the weekend, I was getting calls is they're going to be bankrupt. Like, We've gone from the company. This is why private markets are important and public markets are important.

People need to learn how to behave. And this has been a cool. All this is a great lesson in behavior. The markets are about behavior. Yes. Psychology. Not about how smart you are. It's psychology.

And I think it's why it's the greatest game. You get to match wits against everybody. You love poker. The reason I don't like poker, it's a grind. It's a little bit dirty. It's time consuming. It's kind of like, I get it. It's warfare.

The market, you'd be. be so you would love it because it's global thermonuclear 24-7 war you against everybody it's chaos it's like playing in that what's that game the kids play fortnight it's like a free for fucking all everybody is just sniping everybody kill everybody in your path all right this has been an hour plus with harold linds in what a great pod and we'll see you all next time on angel