This Week in Startups - Mojo CEO Vinit Bharara on building a stock market to bet on athletes | E1566

Episode Date: September 21, 2022

On today's show, Mojo CEO and Co-Founder Vinit Bharara joins Jason to talk about his new stock market to bet on athletes, Mojo, which just launched in New Jersey. (1:39) Vinit breaks down the thesis (17:07), does a product demo (40:27), and explains how they raised $100M to build a stock market from scratch and provide instant liquidity! (0:00) Jason tees up today's interview! (1:39) Jason intros Vinit Bharara, who breaks down his past business ventures including Cafe.com, Diapers.com, working with his brother Preet! (13:05) Brave - Download today at https://brave.com/twist to browse faster, search privately and so much more (14:28) Managing Preet at Cafe.com (17:07) Vinit explains the thesis behind Mojo (24:40) Neo.Tax - Get $500 off R&D tax credit fees at https://neo.tax/twist  (26:02) Raising $100M from Thrive Capital, Tiger, and more (39:09) Spokn - Get 3 months free at https://getspokn.com/twist  (40:27) Vinit runs through a Mojo product demo (53:58) Building a team of handicappers and quants (1:00:56) Vinit and Jason share 9/11 stories

Hey, everybody. I've got an awesome interview for you today. Mojo CEO and co-founder, Vinnie Barara, is on the program. mojo.com is a stock market to bet on athletes. It just launched this week. They've already raised $100 million, and we're going to get into all the nitty-gritty of building a stock market from scratch and how they're handling liquidity. And it's a killer product demo. This is going to be the future of wagering, gambling, and investing. All of this is coming together. and with your passions for sports here in America, thanks to some Supreme Court legislation that passed. And it's a really great, fascinating interview. You're going to see the future today. It's going to be a great episode. So stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Brave is an internet privacy company on a mission to protect your personal info online. Download Brave today at brave.com slash twist to browse faster, search privately, and so much more.

all in a single click. Neo Tax. Don't leave money on the table. Claim your research and development tax credits with Neo Tax and get $500 off any service fees related to Neo Tax products. Learn more at Neo.tax slash twist. And spoken. Finally, there is a way to build culture and connection that is designed for remote. Spoken Stories. It's fast.

It's async. Yet it's human. getspoken.com slash twist to get three months free. That's get s p o k-n without the e.com slash twist. All right, everybody. We're excited for our next guest today here on this week in startup. As many of you know, I'm a huge fan of Preet Bihara. Bhaara. Bhaerra. Did I get it right, Benet? Barara, you got it right. Barra. I got it. Vinnie. Vinnie is Preet's brother. Now, are you the older brother or the younger brother? I hope you can tell that I'm the younger brother.

Who knows? Who knows at this age? We're old. Yeah. You do look at me. So, Preet's company was called Cafe and had the incredible domain named Cafe.com. I loved his podcast. I love iconic plastic thinkers, people who maybe form their own opinions from first principles. People always ask me, hey, what are your favorite pods? And on the top of that list, top five is Preet's podcast, which you pretty And you started the company. There's Stay Tuned with Preet, which is a free version. Then there was Cafe Insider, the paid version.

And your brother was, he ran the Southern District of New York's for the Justice Department. It was a pretty big deal. Yep. He was the U.S. attorney here in the Southern District in New York. Pretty big deal. Famously sort of fired by Trump, maybe. Not sort of. No, not sort of.

Yeah. Fired. Fired by Trump. By Putin, he likes to say. Exactly. Anyway, I always love the pod. You were the producer. I actually, you don't know this, but I was always talking to your brother.

Hey, I little love the pot. Are you ever thinking about taking investment, let me know. I'd love to put a million dollars into this thing. I think it's going to be successful. And sure enough, last year in the spring, you sold to my friend Jim Bankoff, who coincidentally bought Weblogs Inc for me. And cafe got bought. So congratulations on that.

Maybe before we get into your new company, we could talk a little bit about that experience of starting a podcast company and selling it. What was the origin story of State 2 with Preet and Cafe.com? Yeah. Well, even when Preet was still, you know, the U.S. attorney of the Southern District of New York, after I had sold with Mark Lurie, diapers.com, to Amazon, we waited there for a couple of years and worked at Amazon. And then when we left, you know, I wanted to start a media company.

And I would always talk to Preet about, you know, whether he would ultimately at some point join because I knew he would be great. It's not surprising having grown up with him that he would be a tremendous media personality. And so we would always get together and talk about what it would look like, how he could join, once he left the office. And then like you said earlier, he got fired. So it was premature. And right away, we started brainstorming again.

And we decided, you know, let's start with a podcast. Initially we're thinking, maybe we'll do video or we'll figure out what kind of media company we would do. and he decided he wanted to start with a podcast. And we pitched it to a bunch of different folks. And we created Stay tuned with Pre. In 2017. But you decided to go independent. At that time, I guess podcasting was kind of just starting to get the networks going.

Why did you choose to go independent? I mean, you're an entrepreneur, so I kind of can understand. And he's kind of an independent thinker. But did you get offers and they just kind of sucked from the other podcast networks? Or they didn't bring a lot of value and you thought, let's just go acoustic here? Yeah, no. we wanted to create our own. So we already had our own company.

And like you said, we're entrepreneurs. We wanted to have all the ownership with our investors. And so we did produce it with the company called Pineapple Media. I don't know if you know those. Oh, yes, I have heard of them. Yeah. Terrific to terrific producers. So they helped us do it.

But they weren't owners, you know, in cafe. So that was a standalone entity. In fact, just the details of it is I had had a preexisting media company called SomeSpiter. At some point, once we created Cafe Studios, I spun that out as it's, a separate entity. And that's when Pre, you know, became a significant owner of that company, Cafe Studios. Now, Cafe.com is a hell of a domain name. That's a million dollar domain. Anything in the English language, that's, you know, six, seven words or letters or less,

and it's in the dictionary is going to go for six figures, possibly even seven. How did you get Cafe.com and how much to pay for that? Yep. So if you, for a longest time, my co-founder, at my last company, my best friend, Mark Lurie, who I grew up with in New Jersey, all the companies we've started like to have very good, easy to remember short domain names. That's been a founding principle in some ways for us creating a brand. Why? Why is that a founding person? Yeah, I think it's important because I think, look, it's so hard to break through. And one of the things, in my opinion, you want to do is you want to have people be able to talk about your company.

And when they talk about it, the person hearing it knows what it is and doesn't have to ask any questions like how do you spell that or what was that again and because then they tell other people and they tell other people and so you definitely want a name that's easy to remember and easy to spell in my opinion to the extent you can obviously it costs capital like you said that's just been something we've tried to do with all of our companies. What did cafe.com cost? What did that go for? Yeah, so it cost 240 grand. Great deal. Not bad, right? I would have 500 without an idea. I would just pay 500. I have inside.com. I had 20.com. I've had an annotated.com. I've got a lot of good domain names in my day.

How much your inside cost? I got that for 60K, 7, 8 years ago from the Guardian. That's very good. I would have paid a million for that. That's a million dollar domain name. They didn't know that, did they? What happened was they had bought a company. There was a media company in New York in the 90s called Inside.

That was a magazine. And then a friend of mine, Rafat Ali, another Indian entrepreneur, he had worked for me at Silicon Island Reporter, worked it inside. He wound up buying it when that company went default for, a guy named Steve Brill who had owned Content.com, if you remember that. Of course. And then Guardian bought paid content, the newsletter that Rafat had started. And then I tried for multiple years to buy from Guardian.

And then at some point they wanted to sell assets and I was able to get it from the meta. Great deal. They didn't know. They didn't know you'd pay a million. That's what you got to do with these domains. At that time, I would have paid $250. But you got diapers.com. That's a million dollar domain.

Yeah. Diapers we got, I think, for $600 grand. God, I love it. I got, yeah, I just love buying great domain names. Yeah, so we think I like on that. The other thing that's great about it is, I'm curious if you agree, it will make the stature of the company in the eyes of a consumer go way up in an age where people are, you know, a little cynical of new products and services.

Maybe they're a little cautious of online brands. You come out with diapers.com, it's like, well, they've got to be good at selling diapers and kid stuff where they wouldn't have the domain. You got cafe.com, it's got to be legit. It legitimizes and reduces cynicism. Exactly, right. That's, you know, to be funny about this or honest, we actually started out with 1,800 diapers when we first started. And we didn't, we didn't, in the very beginning, we didn't have diapers.com.

Once we got some traction is when we went out and bought the actual diapers.com domain name. Amazing. I mean, can you imagine if they had taken a little bit of equity? Yeah, no. I had. So that was good. the founder of Calm, the meditation app on my podcast in 2014. And I said, how'd you get Calm.com?

He had gotten it for under 100K. And I was like, can I invest in your company? Because then I told them privately, I was like, the fact that you gotcom. And you figured out how to get it, to me, makes you investable. Yeah. Like, period, full stop. Yeah. A lot of people don't believe in what you and I seem to agree on that these domain names are worth it.

Because some folks will say, oh, you know, the dot com is irrelevant. The dot com's going away. people are, it's less, it's less important than it used to be, but to your point, just that not only the memorability and the word of mouth factor, but like you said, that the legitimacy when you're trying to break through and create that credibility at the outset is important. So it depends on the owner. There's no market in some ways. It just depends on, it's like kind of a scarcity thing.

It's whatever you and the seller agree on. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. I do like some subdomains. I got founder. Dot university and angel. I teach two courses, one for founders, one for Angel, investors and I just love the dot university. You got any other subdomains that you like of the new ones?

A lot of kids love the dot code, the dot I. Yeah. You have one you like? No. You're dot com. You're old school. I'm done old school. I'm 51.

I'm so old school. Oh, you and I have the same age. How old, wait, so your brother preets, what? 54 or 55? He's 53. He turns 54 in October. Yeah. I just turned 51 about three days ago.

That's so amazing. My brother Jamie is like a year, a year and a half older than me. And we're right behind him. And we grew up in Brooklyn. You guys grew up in Jersey, am I right? New Jersey. That's right, near Jersey Shore by Asbury Park. Exactly.

And now you guys grew up, or at least your brother, with a huge love of the boss, Mr. Bruce Springsteen, correct? Yes. I like the boss. Preet is obsessed. He's obsessed. He is obsessed. I don't know how many concerts he's been to. I went to a Bruce Springsteen concert with Preet in Connecticut.

And during the concert, Springsteen actually called out Preet's name. name. I heard it. Yes, I was there. The clip. That's unbelievably next level. My mom, a huge Bruce Springsteen fam, at the age event, at the age of 12, 13, 14, she would regularly take us to the Brendan Byrne Arena in New Jersey, the Meadowlands. Yeah. And we saw Bruce, I think the first tour I saw was born in the USA, which must have been 84, 83. Yeah, 84. Yeah, and that was the arena tour, which eventually, he then came around after doing the arena tour. That album was so big, he played the stadium. So he played Giant Stadium, the old Giant Stadium.

And I saw him there too. So you're a big fan, too, Bruce. I'm a huge fan. In my older years, I have become a Mark Knopfler-Diastrates fan. So I was always Bob Dylan, Bruce, Dyer Straits. Then it went like, and then I just had the collection of Dylan. I had seen Dylan so many times. I kind of needed a new obsession.

And I kind of got into Mark Knopfler and Dyer Straits, which I talked to your brother about just a week or two ago in LA. We were both in LA for a conference, code conference. And I started telling him, like, you know, you got to look at this period from 78 to 88 of Mark Knopfler.

Because Knopfler was producing Dylan at the time, infidels, et cetera. Bruce was involved with Dylan on the margins, obviously a huge influence on him. And Knopfler got introduced to Springsteen, and he heard like across the river in some of these songs. and then if you listen to Telegraph Road,

your latest trick, you start to hear Bruce's influence as a contemporary of Mark Knopfler. He started writing long 10-minute songs, which they both obviously got from Dylan. Wow, yeah. Yeah, I'm down the rabbit hole. You know who I saw in concert a couple weeks ago,

Duran Duran. Fantastic. I mean, underrated. They were at the garden. You know what I really want to see now is Billy Joel at the Garden. You know, I haven't gone to the residency, see, but he was my favorite in the early 80s.

I started seeing all the Billy Joel concert at the Billy Joel. That led me to Bruce, Dylan, and Dire Straits. No, that makes sense. There's an entry point for everybody. It could be Neil Young, could be Jackson Brown. Yeah, yeah, Jackson Brown. Yeah, I love Jackson Brown too. User privacy is my jam.

It is also one of the biggest topics in tech right now. And if you care about your privacy at all and by privacy, I mean not getting tracked all over the internet by targeted ads, you need to check. check out Brave. Brave shields you from ads, trackers, other creepy stuff, everything that follows you across the web and shares your information with all kinds of people that you don't need it shared with, puts a stop to that. They have three core products, the core browser, a search engine, and a browser native crypto wallet. Brave's browser has over 60 million users and thousands of daily downloads, and it's all built on Chromium, which is the open source

Chrome project. So it's still super fast. And all of your favorite Chrome extension. work in Brave. When I say it's super fast, by the way, I mean three times faster than Chrome because Brave doesn't slow you down loading all those ads. You can also import bookmarks and passwords and settings from Chrome with one click. This is actually the biggest reason that people don't switch browsers and all of that. The one click situation is exactly why the entire Twist team, including myself, is now obsessed with Brave.

If you've been putting off making the switch, it's so easy. Now you can just bring your password manager just like that. Brave search is a truly private and independent search engine. So download Brave today at Brave.com slash Twist to browse faster, search privately, and so much more all in a single click. Now, your brother, and then we'll get off your brother for a minute. But I do love the fact that you have this collaboration with your brother. Easy to manage? Because you had to run the business.

We got hardworking. Very hardworking. We didn't get into one fight. Not one fight. I'm trying to think how long we worked together. I think it was four years because we sold it last year. And not one fight, not one argument. I mean, we didn't always agree on everything. But there was never a time when there was some sort of, you know, hang up the phone or close off the Zoom. No blowout. And I remember he said that. I kind of feel like there should have been an argument about emergency pods. And I've talked to your brother out of this. I feel your brother could work a little harder. Yeah. I feel preet needs to do an emergency pod when things break. Yeah. Well, I mean, I may. manage him with kid gloves. I mean, you know, he was the talent and there was no way. Yeah, you can't ever mess around with the talent. The talent is king. And so I knew better than to kind of ask him to do something he didn't want to do. I mean, you know, there was plenty of times when

maybe some of the other team wanted, like you said, to do an emergency pod or something else. What was his objection to the emergency pod? No, he would do. He wants to be prepared. Is that it? Let me tell you where we would really, where if we would have come to below, it would have been on video. He never really wanted to do these pods like you do with video. And every once in a while we would do it. But that was the thing I could never really get him to do on a regular basis. He's handsome. He looks great in a suit.

He's in great shape. He's fit. I know he is. He is. He is. He looks good. I know. I mean, he didn't want to do it.

It looks great. Yeah, exactly. He didn't want to do that. And so that was maybe the only thing. I know why. I have a theory. You tell me if I'm right. Yeah.

He wants, he is a very crisp communicator. Yeah. You know, he's, he's not like Howard Stern, Joe Rogan. He's thoughtful. Yeah. I can tell he's got papers in front of him. He's well prepared. He might have the glasses on.

He might ask for two takes. He doesn't want to be on camera trying to be like, you know, real time or, you know, politically incorrect or whatever. He doesn't want to be a performer like that. No. No, and he could wake up, you know, 10 minutes, of course, during the COVID time, with 10 minutes before go to his basement and get right to it. Yes.

You don't need to take a shower. That is the other thing being camera. I mean, maybe it was taking it. But anyway, yeah. Great success on that. Yes. Do they own the cafe.com domain name? They own it.

God damn it. I would have carved that out. I hope I transferred it from GoDaddy. But I, they should own. I hope you got to lock on that one because that's a, you don't want to lose a four-letter domain in today's era. Which we have one again here. You do. And let's get to that.

So mojo.com. M-O-J-O-com is your new company. That's the website. It's an app. But we have, again, the dot com because we think it's important. So tell me what is the new company? Why did you start? Yeah.

It's a sports stock market. And very simply, when I say sports stock market, what I mean is the everyday fan can use his or her sports knowledge to invest in the careers of athletes like stocks. So we'll say sometimes it's where Robin Hood or Coinbase meets draft kings. And instead of looking it up and investing in an Amazon or a Google, if you're a sports fan, you can invest in LeBron James or Joe Burrow or Patrick Mahomes. And we can get into exactly how it works. And we'll show you some of the product and how beautiful I think that the product is that the team created.

But in its simplistic form, it's a sports stock market. So I buy a share in, let's say I'm a big Knicks fan. I got R.J. Barrett coming into his fourth season, every year he gets 20% better. People don't look at him as an all-star. He's a little quiet. He just kind of does the work. but he's got work he's got to do on his, you know, finishing around the rims.

You know, he's in development, but I think he's got really good upside so I can buy a share in RJ Barre. That's right. With actual real money. That's right. How many shares when you do an IPO of RJ Barrett are there? So this is an interesting thing.

There is no, the way we structured this market, there is no scarcity. There's no limit on the number of shares. The fundamental premise here is that when we constructed this market, if you own a share in R.J. Barrett, what we guarantee you is we guarantee you a payout based on the end of his career, six objective. Well, we haven't started basketball, but it'll be a certain defined number of statistics. And in that regard, it's not based on supply and demand in the traditional sense, scarcity. It's based on the statistic that you were trying to project. Yes.

So you're doing this first with football players, correct? That's right. The NFL. So I'm buying a share of a football player, knowing that their career has an arc. Yep. And at the end of the career, when the person hangs it up, then you get your money back. Well, two things. The first thing we wanted to do, so again, we say sports stock market, the first thing I wanted to do was define the stock like I just did.

It's like if you own stock, you're a guarantee to pay out at the end of their career based on these statistics, which to us was really important because it gives the stock intrinsic value. There's lots of things out there. In fact, we did a business 20 years ago. That was a sports card stock market. And one of the flaws was that the customer really didn't know, you know, what the intrinsic value of this asset is that they're trading. Now, that's the first thing. But the second thing is the market piece, like the liquidity. And so even though the value is anchored in the career, people don't want to hold stock.

You know, most people don't till the, for such a long duration, they want to be able to trade in and out at all times. And so we also, Mojo has a price that you will always be able to get in and out of, which provides that liquidity. So, and that price is basically sort of what the market thinks where the career will end. So if that, if that makes sense. Got it. So how do you make money then? You take a little piece of every trade that occurs in the market. Yes.

Yes. So the primary source of revenue for us is as the platform taking a small transaction fee on every trade. Now, this is something where it is wagering? So where is this legal? And what does this fall under? Is this a game of skill? Is it gambling and betting? Where does this fall?

And I guess this is quite ironic. what your brother has done in his career. I don't know if he's your counsel, but where does this fall on the regulatory spectrum? Because we did have a couple of years ago, the Supreme Court made a judgment, hey, listen, it's up to the states to, like many other issues these days,

to make their own decision. A bunch of states have said, oh, wow, we can have sports betting. We have a sports book. We can have wager, have poker, whatever it is. So the regulatory framework has been cleared up, I think, by that. Yep.

You educate me. That's a huge thing. So remember, I talked about the intrinsic value. I talked about the liquidity. The third pillar is making sure that it's legal. And to your point, very, very important for me, you know, being Pete Barrara's brother. And so when we did this company. Yeah, no, when we did this thing 20 years ago with the sports card stock market, we had the same idea.

And like you said, online wagering was not legal anywhere. And so our lawyers said, look, if you do this and it's super successful, the way you want to do it, you could be in trouble. And so we created the sports card stock market. We used the trading card as a proxy for the athlete. And then he fast forward 20 years later to about two years ago. And my co-founder and best friend, Mark Lurie, who I started the pit with and I started diapers.com, I grew up with them in New Jersey as well.

He comes to me and he says, this idea that we had 20 years ago, I think it's the biggest idea we've ever had. I think we can do it right now. We don't have to do it with trading cards because the regular. regulatory framework has changed, and we can do it under the online wagering laws state by state. So that's kind of what happened. Now, it's kind of interesting because what the mechanism here, the shares and how it works on our platform, you could argue that maybe we should go to the CFTC to get this regulated, like as a futures contract.

And that would have been preferable in some ways because it would have been a federal, kind of like Kalshi, if you know, these guys. we could have gone that route, but the CFTC says they will not oversee or regulate sports. So they punt that now to the states. And like you said, a couple of years ago, the Supreme Court basically said the states could decide if they wanted to make online wagering legal. So that's the path we decided to take. It does mean we got to go state by state, which is hard. And so we decided to go.

Is it not? Like if the fact that it takes, it's going to take it two or three years probably to get to all 50 states or whatever. How many are legal? I think it's 35 or 40. I think it's around 30. Yep. And they're coming fast and furious.

Every six months you got another state coming on. So I agree with you. But it means that you had to raise a lot of capital, which we did. It takes a long time. And we got to go state by state. And so we decided to petition the New Jersey Division of Gaming first. They're the most innovative in our view. This product is not so obvious what it is necessarily when you come in.

And it doesn't, it's not, it's not, it's not similar. sounding right to a conventional bet. This is a long duration and we're talking about making a market in this thing. So we convinced the New Jersey Division of Gaming to regulate it under the sports wagering laws and that's what we debut today in the app store while it's available to download in all 50 states. But today is the first day at scale. Anybody 21 and over in New Jersey can open an account deposit and trade.

Amazing. So you're just getting started. Based on my experience, guys, in Brooklyn and Jersey, they might like to, you know, make a bat once in a while. I mean, just, you know. Yeah, exactly. Well, they can come on over. They can come on over to Jersey. It's very quick and easy. Right now, it's so important for founders to save where they can. And one source of capital that's rarely used is R&D tax credits. Yes, according to Neo Tax credits, 97% of USR&D tax credits go unclaimed every year. So NeoTax is going to have. So Neo Tax is going to

help you get up to $250,000 if your business qualifies. And there is literally no downside to using Neo Tax. The application takes less than 30 minutes, and you'll know in the first couple of seconds if you qualify. Plus, you only pay if Neo Tax finds you the money you're owed. And their app integrates seamlessly into most accounting and payroll software. These tax credits do not roll over from year to year. And October 17th is the last day to claim your R&D tax credit. So don't wait. See why NeoTax is trusted by hundreds of startups. They turn R&D credits into cash flow. In fact, WorkOS, another twist partner that we love, got over $48,000 back last year. It's free to qualify and zero commitment to get started. Head to NEO.t.ttax slash twist

and save $500 on your R&D tax credit claim. Neo.tax slash twist to save $500 on your R&D tax credit claim, Neotax puts tax dollars back where they belong in your business. So you raised a war chest, 100 millie, 75 million from Thrive Capital. Thrive was the lead in a series A, Tiger, a bunch of other really great investors also. Amazing.

When you raised that last, you raised that in March, right after the market collapsed? We did. We closed it. You must have been in discussions for a couple of months before that. Yeah.

I mean, it was, listen, we basically went out to the market in the winter of last year, and it was a very fast exercise prior to the market. collapsing in some ways. We closed it all up, or at least that first tranche of $75 million in March. And then more recently, we took in another $25 million of capital. A little top off, same terms as the last round, I assume. You go flat. Yeah, exactly. Market, like you said, you know, had some issues over the summer earlier. We decided to just

smarter, raise some more capital. So we feel really good about that. You're going to need it. Flat is the new up, as we say in the business. A flat round is the new up. I got a lot of companies, they're like wishing they could raise capital at what they raised it last year. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Now, listen, I happen to know a lot of the, I'm collecting, I can connect a lot of thoughts here because I do this for a living.

Now, I'm looking at Thrive Capital. Uh-huh. Correct me if I'm wrong. Is this run by one of the Kushners, Thrive Capital? Josh. Josh and a few other folks. He's, I like, love Josh. Josh.

Josh is good. You love Josh. Now, you love Josh. Uh-huh. And Josh's brother is Jared Kushner. And your brother's pre. I didn't realize that. Yeah.

Your brother's Preet. Yeah. Josh is not Jerry. You're not Preet. But Preet and Jared got beef. Oh, I don't know about that. I have somewhat critical of Jared Kushner and Mr. Trump. No comment.

Does that ever come up in business? No, it never comes up. It really doesn't. It has never come up once. No. Not once. It's just a business transaction. Because Josh just got Bob Iger to work for him.

Yeah. Josh is great. Josh is really, I mean, Thras one of the premier. Well, there's really no story, but other than Thrive is one of the best VC. And you know this, right, one of the best VEC. They've done a good job. Yeah. Great.

Josh is great. And he's got a lot of other great partners. Bob, like you said, Bob Eiger just joined. So it's really a preeminent of venture capital firm in the country. And so, you know, we're thrilled to have them as our lead. They're good at the series B and C. it seems to thrive team. But they are diametrically opposed, I think, to the brothers.

So these are two brothers who have completely different political leanings, it seems. Oh, I don't, again, I don't, we don't, it never comes up. It never comes up in a board meeting. It has never come up, never come up. Is Josh on your board? No, they're not on the board. They put 75 million and they didn't take a board see? They're not on the board.

They're not on the board. But we're close with those guys. We chat with them all the time. And again, there's another guy, Vince, that we, that we love. So Josh, Vince, we chat all of them,

but they're not on the board. Wow. Well, you know, not awkward for you, but I think at the Kushner House so it could be an awkward Thanksgiving. Who knows?

So let's do a product demo here. I'm fascinated by this. And before we get to write to the product demo, I just want to ask you, people have tried similar things to this. You must have studied them. The one I remember from when I was a journalist in the 90s was there was a crazy guy,

like a really mercurial guy who's now a Bitcoin maximalist. I forgot his name. I think his name is actually Max. I can't remember. But he did a company called Hollywood Stock Exchange. I'm sure you're aware of that. So when you looked at Hollywood Stock Exchange, they were trying to let people buy and trade, you know, Hollywood careers.

You can buy Tom Cruise. You can go short somebody else. But that was done with funny money at the time. So what, I don't need, and that's still operating, I think. When you looked and you investigated this stuff and there was also in trade, which was a futures predictions market. I was obsessed with that one. You could do any kind of a bet there,

like bet on who was going to win the bachelor or something like that. I think these things are very popular in Europe, right? Yeah. So maybe you could set the table of what has failed or had modest success before and what you learned from studying those. Yeah, sure. And like I said, we did one of these. We did a sports card market in 2000,

and we sold that to tops. And so that was one of the anchors because we understood how this could work. We had to use this trading card as the proxy. The problem with that, as I mentioned, was that the intrinsic value was questionable. Like, it's unclear what you own. And so the promise we always want to make to the user is if you know sports and you are right and you predict correctly, you will make money. When the value of the asset is a little unclear like what it is, you could know and predict that, you know, Joe Burrow was going to be great last year and buy his card.

But the market, because of how that operates and. scarcity and other issues, you know, the price could go down and vice versa. So one corollary is the sort of collectible NFT space. That's one. The second one, like you said, is the fantasy space. And there's been these versions, the Hollywood Stock Exchange, there's been a few others. And that's great too, but it's like, it's funny money. Like you said, it's not, it's either a competition, it's not real money, maybe there's prizes. Why is that important that it's not real money because that seems to be without the skin in the game, people make suboptimal decisions. Like when people are...

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it's fun and it's a game and that's great. But when we wanted to create an authentic stock market where you could deposit, like right now you can deposit $25,000, ultimately you should be able to deposit, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars and take a real position in a player, put in, you know, if you have the capital, 50 grand on a player, $100,000 on a player, and just that player. Like, you're not competing against somebody else. We wanted to make it as close to the actual stock market as possible.

And so these other versions, either again, it's a collectible or an NFT. We know about the issues there. Or it's fantasy. It's not real money. It's a contest. And I think that's great. But it's definitely not the same as, you know, a real stock market where you could put in a few thousand dollars on a player and have it operate just like it would be an investment

you're making in Google. You think GMs are going to look at this? Because, like, if you're a GM, you know there's smart people out there. Yeah. A lot of smart people. People start making bets on things because this gets to Moneyball, which I'm sure you're a huge fan of the book, the movie, the concept. I think, you know, when you look at wisdom of crowds, they're, you know, wisdom of crowds, you know, I have my doubts. Usually it's, you know, a little bit of chaos.

But once you put money on the line, now you've taken the wisdom of crowds down to just skin in the game. Now we're going from Michael Lewis to. Nassim Taleb, you know, well, we got skin in the game. That's a different subset. That's 1% of the wisdom or crowd. Now you've got the wisdom of people making bets. I'm going to- I 100% agree.

I think once, you know, at scale, when we have hundreds and millions of dollars, you know, being traded and wagered, and you'll be able to see the arc of it, you know, when they're coming in, when they're coming out, what's the most actively traded, what the positions are. I would think that that would be useful information to a GM or anyone. else, you know, that's trying to study, you know, who to give a contract to or who not to. I'm not saying it's the only data point, but it should be a pretty valuable data point if you've got a lot of capital going into a player or coming out of a player. So I think that'll be really interesting.

Can I short a player? Can I short a player today? You can short a player. That was important, too, just again, for the integrity of this market is there's a, you know, there's an ability to go long and short. and I think that, again, gives credibility to the price so that, you know, if you don't like it, you could take the other side. You wouldn't want to take the other side. Basketball is my sport, so I'll just bounce over basketball for a second.

You know, you start looking at some of these players who are tall, but injury prone. Everybody gets amped up on Porzingis. Everybody gets amped up on, you know, Anthony Davis, etc. And then they play 40 games a year at max. So how does that, because you said the payout will come. come from their career. How does ability to stay on the court impact career? Because you could have the averages.

Their averages can be off the charts or a unicorn. But if they're not on the court, right? Exactly. So remember, the price on our market is always the latest projection, expectation for where the career is going to end. So you look at it. And if you think a player is injury prone, like you said, or whatever other reason, you just don't think he's going to have the amount of games.

That's one of the metrics, right? Games played. Yeah, of course. Games played is going to be a big thing about where that ending price will be. Then the price, then you should short that, right? Because like that, you should basically take the under. And so the career is the great neutralizer, really, or equalizer, I should say, about performance. Because it's very hard to find someone that has, you know, long duration and isn't a great player.

So you're doing cumulative, not just averages, because you get sometimes people play 20 minutes, 30 minutes. at their like rebounds per game, blocks per game. And you're like, oh my God, they lead the league. And it's like, yeah, but they're not on the court. So what's the point? Exactly. I mean, like, let me give the example. Like in football, right?

Like, I'm an Eagles fan. And Jalen Hertz has been this question. He's a great fantasy player. Like, he's usually a top. You're from Jersey and you're an Eagles fan? That's a long story. But yes, I have an Eagles fan. I thought you're supposed to be a Jets fan, which was a shirt off drinking vodka in December in the stands.

No, I'm a Yankees fan. Long story. What are your Knicks or next? He doesn't care. I like, but now I like the Timberwolves, right? But what were you originally? You grew up? No, Knicks.

Nix, yeah. Of course. Yeah, I'm Knicks, yeah. I'm Nix Giants. Oh, there you go. Okay, well, listen, you get, you're 2 and O'N-O now. Two-N-O-N-O-Nange. How about baseball?

You like baseball? You know, I used to watch a lot of Yankees games. Go to a lot of Yankees games in the 90. I was very blessed to see some of those incredible games because I knew some people went ownership, yada-a-y-y-y-darder. So, all the Michael Jordan games. My dad had season tickets to the Giants forever. But then, you know, life, I wanted to have a career, I got a family.

I just said, you know what, that's it. I'm just going to focus on my Knicks and then my local team Warriors. And I just gave up the other sports because it's just too much. It's too much. Yeah. Well, so you're a Warriors fan too, huh? Well, here's the thing. I live here, some friends of mine own parts of the teams.

I go to a lot of games. And then I became friends with Draymond, yeah. Oh, wow. David Lee, Bogget. And, you know, I became good friends with those guys and play poker with them, hang out with them. And so it's just, it's hard to not be a fan of the Warriors. They're just, they play such an elegant form of basketball. And it's like, I feel like my life is blessed. I got to see Jordan versus Ewing, Alonzo Morning and all of those players in my 20s and 30s living

in New York. And then I got to watch Steph, Draymond Clay, during this era and everybody they played. And I got to do it, you know, in some of the best seats in the house. And what a He didn't miss anything. And he didn't miss anything with the Knicks. Well, yeah, that's for bringing that up. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe your guy, Lori, can put it together part of the syndicate.

We can buy the Knicks, get them out. That's a bit of a problem for us. Yeah. All right, listen, I think I get it. So now these GMs are going to start looking at this data. You're going to have some interesting data there. People are going to, now hold on a second. Now, I've got to think about the gambling lines, the betting lines here, how this affects

that. And then I wonder if, because it's going to affect betting lines and this data, and then I wonder if the GMs, if they had access to this information and they were making bets on this, what if a GM went in here and started placing bets on careers? That's going to be banned from doing that. I don't know if they can do that, to be honest. If I think because betting on their own career. Yeah. Talk about a hedge. You could short yourself. Yeah, that's all restricted. Yeah, that's all restricted, as you can imagine. There's some, there's some, um, what do you call it coming up? It's a documentary about Tim Donahey.

I don't know if that's out yet. Oh, really? You remember that guy who was... Yeah. He wouldn't... Allegedly, he didn't... Um, he didn't affect the game in terms of like giving fouls, different teams.

He just gave the mob who was going to ref the games ahead of time because they didn't release that data. So then they could place games that. So you have to think through every permutation of this. We do. We do. That's similar to, you know, remember, we're regulated as a sports book. Sportsbook's got to do that too.

And so we have to have the same processes and procedures in place. And so compliance for us is super important. And we got to just do it like everybody else, best in class. Well, if anybody named Annie Dange sets up an account on the system, you got to flag that. Because Danny Aang is the best, he's the best most sharky GM in the business. Whatever bets he's placing. on Mojo. Mark it down. We'll have to be on the look at for that. You've got the email. I mean out.

Because that guy is fleecing everybody this year. All right. Let's do a demo. Yes. Do your remote employees feel disconnected? I bet they do. Well, Spoken is the workplace podcasting platform loved by startups like Robin Hood, Udeme, and 155. And Spoken just launched a new way for companies to build connection and community remotely. It's called Spoken stories. You might know stories from Instagram. where only you can add to them. But spoken stories are different.

Spoken stories can belong to a company or a team. In fact, your entire team or smaller team units can add to that specific story. And you can create stories about anything. Maybe you want to celebrate wins. Maybe you want to do some shoutouts, give people credit. Maybe talk about your travel or birthdays, anything. Product updates. And you don't have to wait for an off-site or hold awkward Zoom happy hours to connect with your team.

Nope. Spoken Stories is designed for remote teams. It's asynchronous and it's fast, yet still human. Leaders, this is a really easy way to get to know your employees and recognize them. They want you to try it so you can get three months free at getspoken.com slash twist. Remember, that's spoken with no E. Get spokn.com slash twist. Get spokn.com slash twist.

Getspoken.com slash twist for three months free. Take out the E for excellent. I'm super fascinated by what you're doing. Let's see the product here. What are we looking at? What am I seeing here? Yeah, so right here, hopefully this looks a little bit more like Robin and you see the athletes, right? This is, I'm just, this is the page where, yeah.

Yeah, so you search and like, as you can imagine, right, this is priced high to low. Right now we started with the NFL and predictably who's number one. It's Tom Brady. Yeah. Right. Tom Brady, because this is about the career. Right. And we can go into Tom Brady here for a second and you can take a look at it.

I'm going to look at his, his, this is like a graph. showing his. Now, we back tested some of this. Obviously, we weren't live. So this is a simulation of what his price would have looked like on Mojo. But this is the kind of thing, right? He would have debuted at around 327 as you see it. And now he's almost at 180. There's your 60x. Does everybody debut at the same number? No. So everybody debuts always at what the expectation for how his career is going to end. So our view would have been, you know, what was he trying to think if he was a sixth round pick, I think. Was he a third round pick? Sixth round pick. And, you know, at the time, right, nobody, people thought his career, what?

I mean, these guys are even going to make it in the league. So he's low. Those are your value socks right there. Yeah, exactly. So this is the kind of guy. You get your fourth, fifth, six round guys, they're going to be super low. You hit that right. And obviously, this is an iconic player.

But you get this kind of, you can see where you can get the 60x. And you can also sort of see, you know, sort of the ups and downs of, this is over the last year of kind of, again, the price is changing based on what we think the end of his career is going to be. You got someone like Patrick Mahomes. Similarly, he right now, his price is $1.1789. And again, that is a projection of where he's going to end his career. If you look at his last month, he's up 24%. You know, the prices are telling you what the expectation for the career is going to be. And you can see it moving as they play. You know, let's actually look at the top movers just because, you know, yesterday was kind of interesting. And if you look at it,

Right. Unfortunately, Tray Lance went down yesterday, you know, for the year, and he's down, looks like, almost 15%. And that's just because, of course, and you can see it actually during the game probably. If we go to the 24 hours, you see how he dropped, you know, right there during the game, that steep decline. So we actually, you can, you can, you can be trading during the game here. And it's kind of like live odds on the career. You know, you look at the wide receivers. here. So if you're a Jets fan, you know, you could see... Jets fans. Well, you can see the incredible move there by the Jets receiver there, right?

Yeah. God, the Jets are terrible. I mean, are they the worst fan base in football? What's that? They're the worst fan base in football, right? The Jets? Oh, the Jets fans are horrible. Oh, my co-founder, Bart Stein is a Jets fan. So I don't know. That's the guy in the room right now. He's with you? Oh, my God. Just tell him to put his shirt back on and do not write. Nobody needs to see a 40-year-old write the word jets across their chest at the Christmas game. And they all bring vodka in their water bottles, the worst fans in the world. Well, Pete would always have a giant jet games in preseason.

And if the Giants were the home team, we just sell the tickets because all the jet fans come to the arena and they're just horrible. Well, you know, most people would say that I've, you know, the Eagles are the worst fan. Even though I'm an Eagles fan, I love the Eagles. But if you recall when they won the Super Bowl, I was in Philly at the time. Yeah. There were some folks that were eating poop. That's true. Yeah, that guy did.

You could cut that out of the pod. No, I think you'll leave it in. They're deranged. They're deranged. I just think, on average, if you had to sit next to a fan, yeah, that's a tough one. Like, if you, would you, which fan would be worse to sit next to in a playoff game? Yeah, you're probably right.

Eagles fans would probably be a little more insufferable than the Jeff. So here's the two co-founders, right? We basically root for the two worst teams. It's pretty terrible. Well, here's Garrett Wilson, right? So Garrett Wilson, we're launching in Jersey Jets, huge, you know, pick for the for the Jets last year in the first round pick, 10th pick. And you can see yesterday he had a breakout game and he's up almost 11%. So this is the kind of thing. Even though it is an investment, a prediction about the career, you can see the volatility that happens week to week. I'm actually going to go back. The other thing is some people will say, oh, there's not going to be a lot of volatility in your veterans. Let me go to Aaron Rogers for a second. let's say I hit trade. And remember here, you can go long or you can go short, like I said. If you go long, we have this thing here called multiply your returns.

And this multiplier allows you, we try to add volatility for a user. They want some more action on the veterans that you can get a 15X. So let's say, for example, his normal movement's going to be, you know, 1, 2%. Now you do the 15x and you're sitting there and you can kind of get this 25, 30% action. So our objective is to ultimately. That's kind of like leverage. Is that what that is? A little bit.

You know, it's kind of like our version of an option. It's not exactly that. But it's our version to kind of allow you to multiply and get, you know, it's just, it's also, you know, you go on the downside too. So if Rogers is down 2% and you took the 15x multiplier, you'd be down 30%. But we wanted to make sure that ultimately the vision is every sport, every player in the country should be on this market. There should be a price and there should be an underlying price and there should be this kind

of multiplier on that player. So if you want more action, almost like an option on every. And you want a little choose, because I'm betting on the, let me see if I can spend it. I'm betting on the career. If most games, the players are just going to have, you know, a slight uptick, slight down tick that doesn't make it exciting to bet week to week. But if I say, hey, give me 15x, whatever the action. The movement is if on average people are moving 2%, well, that's not fun.

I bought it at $100. Am I going to sell it on Monday after the game for $102 or take a $2 loss? But if I put 15x on it, okay, now it could be 130 or it could be 805 or something. Yeah, exactly. And that's, I mean, so you do have, so this is like I'm showing you right now, the wide receivers yesterday. This is independent of the, of the multiplier. But you saw Tyree Killies up 9%.

Right. And so this is, if you had the multiplier on that. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You're getting it super fast. Exactly.

So we wanted to make sure that there's an underlying price that ultimately can be used in media and in conversations, which reflects the relative value. you of all the players. So informationally, right? There should be, they should also be like, yeah, there should be like a CNBC here, right?

There should be a whole financial media cottage industry covering. Are you going to launch like, are you going to launch some podcasts or shows around this? So we are. We have a daily show and we're doing some stuff. I mean, I think ultimately we want the other folks to be covering us and we run the market. But in the beginning,

we're seating it. And so just to show how it's done. So we can show you some clips of our show that debuted today. I think it's pretty interesting, but it's just like CNBC. But now it's much more interesting, right? Because it's players that you see as opposed to stocks and companies. Well, here's another idea for you. You got somebody who's a great handicapper, right?

Now they can make a mutual fund. So you could start mutual funds on here, a collection of 10 players, 20 players, whatever it is. And I could say, hey, listen, I'm going to bet J-Cow's 10 best players and I get like mega action on it, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So you can see, and we organize this throughout the app

on movers daily, daily, folks that are up daily, the folks that are down daily by wide receiver, quarterback. So it's very easy to use, super simple,

and I'm like it overcomplicated. You got the graphs, that the one week, the, you know, their career of the year. Just go into the NBA players. This way you know, you got a good idea,

is you got a lot of ideas. You get a lot of user-generated content here. Let's say we got a bunch of Knicks fans. We're all debating, right now because we got a lot of young guns. We've been incredible at drafting. Emmanuel Quickly, Obie Tompin.

Yep, you know, Mitch. We really quit and grimes. That's why Danny Age wanted all our picks for Spider. So we got all these incredible young guns. You know, we could run some sort of, again,

back to user generated. We could say, hey, pick your best five players who are not these vets on the team. You know, take Derek Rose out. You take,

you know, Randall out, Julius Randall out and say, hey, just pick amongst the 23 and undergrad, 24 in undercrow, who you want a bat, and then you can put a duration on and say, hey, we're going to make a five-year bet. So that's the other thing. You could add collections of players and then do a five-year bet so we could do the draft class of last year and say, let's make a long bet.

Let's put a three-year, you can't sell for three years. Oh, my Lord. So many fun things. Yeah. I mean, we plan on introducing college as well, college players, but it's based on their professional career. So you can have guys on there and you get the, you know, freshman. And it's not based again on his college statistics.

It's based on how if and when he makes the NFL. And so those are again, those are the penny stocks. You get in super early. You could, correct me if I'm wrong. You have stock price based on career. I wonder if you could insert other, you know, vectors here as in the season. So I could bet on, you know, RJ Barrett's season. I could also bet on his career.

So you could have like two outcomes in here and you got two different prices. You could. We wanted to make it and that comes up a lot. We wanted to kind of set the foundation for it being, you know, like in the stock market, like the indefinite futures,

how you should be thinking about these companies, the career we think is the way to do it. How many people have to own it to make it have liquidity? You know, a player have liquidity. How many? I know you're in the backstop of liquidity with the big work. So in the beginning, yeah, think about it in the beginning, right on day one here, it's us providing the liquidity. And so at some point in time,

we can just, you know, behind the scenes, the transactions will always occur with us and we take on less risk. But there's no sort of magic number in terms of how many people have to own it. That was one of the key things in terms of the value prop to the user. It doesn't matter how many people are on here. There's always going to be this price for you to get in and out. That's key, right? It's not like a ghost town. Some of these other exchanges that you have, it's sort of You get in and you can't get out and you're waiting for somebody else and it takes two days and then you don't like the price. So you provide the liquidity. People want to sell and it's up.

You provide it. You take a loss, whatever. Exactly. In the beginning just to get things going. Yes, you got it. Pretty great. How do you create a stock market from scratch? What did you have to study to understand this?

It's very rare that somebody launches a new stock market. I guess long-term stock exchange, Eric Reese in our industry has created a long-term stock exchange. I don't know if you studied that. But what did you have to study to architect this? And what are the dynamics of starting a market? Yeah. Well, obviously, even before you get to the creating of the market, we had to do this in a regulated way.

So that was a whole big exercise with our engineering team and our product team. There's all these protections that you'll see with your account, we have reserves and there's responsible gaming practices. You know, you can't log in. You can't trade if you're outside of your. So there's a whole engineering challenge. But then when it comes to, you know, basically like setting the market, if that's what your question is.

Yeah. In the very beginning, you know, we're launched, we've launched here with about 280 players. And because it's a chicken and egg where, you know, you don't have the user base yet and these prices are being guaranteed by us, we're taking all of the risks. So we have all these market makers and data analysts and quantitative folks making sure that we're pricing it as accurately as possible to project, you know, what the public demand would look like. So that's us doing it. And there's a lot of modeling that goes on here in the beginning because, again, you know, we don't have millions and millions of users so that, you know, you have that perfect price in advance. We have to do that.

Okay. Markets get manipulated. Markets get manipulated. Yeah. For us, you know, for us, there's two things, but there's two huge things here, right? Because you got the intrinsic value, like it's based at the end of the day, like Jimmy Garoppola, you see him here at 3329, first of all, there's a, you can go long where you're, You can go short.

And then secondly, there's that check because at the end of the day, you're guaranteed the payout at the retirement based on, and I can show you what the formula is. This is the share price right here. This shows you this basically, like there's no way to kind of like mess around here because this tells you what you will be guaranteed upon retirement. So you can't mess around. You know, these prices in the regular stock market can get out of whack. Well, if this gets out of whack and you can take it both ways, there's going to be a natural market

movement to go the other way. Does that make sense? Yeah. So here you're saying for every 10 yards, you get a penny added to their overall value. Turnovers, you take money away. 40 plus your plays. You get a little bit. What if somebody changes position? You do have people maybe who have different positions. Yep. Yeah. So these are pretty neutral because it's yards, touchdowns. Got it. This is not, this is not position based. They're not going to become a defensive player overnight. And if they, yeah, if they do, then yeah, they're not going to here accumulate any more value. It's almost like they were tired if they just, you know, all of a sudden changed to a defensive player and didn't have any more. It's interesting. So you studied all the players and figure it out,

hey, what would the payout look like for this player in this position over time? And you have the average player, the average lifespan. And this is your version of handicapping. Your handicappers are making this. Where did you get the handicappers from? Where did you get those people from the Yeah, so we have this whole big team. You know, you raised the capital. The first thing we had to do not only was create, you know, hire these amazing engineers and product folks, but we had to hire a bunch of quantitative people who know sports. So we've got an army of people that are way smarter than I am doing the math on, you know, setting the initial prices and then moving them, you know, again, in the early days here to try to reflect where you'll have basically a balanced book. We don't want to take the risk. You know, we're long or short something. We're just trying to get to a place where there's equal buyers and sellers on both sides. Love it. And, you know, our guys got to do that. Where did you recruit those folks from those quots?

We got our head of trading from Goldman Sachs is from where the head of trading is and all these fancy, fancy institutions. Any of them come from sports books or did you just go quads from the last year? I don't think we have a person from a book. I don't think, you know, we might have a couple of folks, but most of them are coming from the finance world. Interesting. You know. Yeah. the banks, the hedge funds, and the traders.

We've got traders here, too. So it's a, again, a fancy group of people over here that are smarter than me. How do the app stores look at wagering apps today? I know that originally places like Apple and Google were like, no way. And then obviously, it's fantasy sports. They started letting folks in. The leagues are getting into this. The NBA is talking about this during the game.

So my lord, the regulatory space, which is quite ironic. I mean, bring up your brother for the last time. But Prit shut down illegal poker, whatever, 10 years ago. Now here we are 10 years later. The stuff's all illegal and it's on TV. They're incorporating into league. They're going to put an NBA team in Vegas. Something that like the original commissioner was like, no way ever.

So. Yeah. To your point, even to Prit, you know, that whole thing, this is making sure, like, you got to go through the hoops and you got to get the license and you got to be compliant with the rules. And so now the rules are in place. so we go to the app store or anyone else, we have to show them, you know, that we're compliant, we have the license,

and that gives them the confidence that the customer's protected. And I think that's the thing. Even with Crete, he was shutting down offshore illegal enterprises that didn't have any protections for the customer or at least clear ones for the customer. So I think that's the advancement.

And it wound up being prescient. I mean, you had all these scandals in poker where, you know, FullTilt was merging, like the player holding accounts and the operation. accounts allegedly and then ultimate bet, somebody had God mode, and then there were people who were on various VPNs, IPs, who were sharing cards in tournaments. So you get two people at a table and they start sharing two cards, man.

That could be like all the edge you need to win the tournament or to just be massively EV positive. So you really do need to have regulations in here. Thank God this country has started to look at this and say, hey, regulate instead of banning the stuff. Because when you ban it, all you do is create corruption and suffering and consistent. consumer harm. Yeah, there's all this underground.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Consumers get some protection. That's right. That's right. And so I think that's kind of how we approach it with anything, whether it's the app store or anybody. You know, this is where you look at what, Robin, who gets a little criticism, we were

early angel invested in it. I still, early angel investors in and I still owe my shares. I still believe in the company. We're like, oh my God, young people betting, young people doing stocks, young people doing crypto, stonks. You know what? I feel like this next generation, you know, we. were Gen Xers, the idea of us trading stocks, it was like, well, it's going to cost you

$30. You got to call a broker on the phone every time you want to transact. You're transacting $50 in shares, so you just lost 60% of your position just for making the trade. And what these new services have done is made this next generation. Millennials and Gen Zs are so sophisticated when it comes to thinking about money and understanding bets. And life is a series of bets. Your career, what school you go to, start a company, go work for the man, whatever it is.

Because life's a series of bets. Let's educate young people. If I had my druthers, every high school kid, day one of high school would have $1,000 put in a stock market account, a betting account, and let them gamble away two grand. And let's see what they come up with at the end of their four years. They'll learn more from that than they will from school. Yeah, you'd give them the 2000. Whatever. Give them a little bit of money.

Listen, let's say education costs 16, the public education costs $16,000 a year, I think on average in the United States. So times that by four, you know, whatever, 65 grand. Take the 65 grand. We'll give them 10% to put into an account. And if they start of each year, they get $100 the first year, $100 a second year, $200 a second year and the other $300 the last year. So they get more sophisticated of a year at the beginning of the year. They have to make five bets or whatever it is.

They make some number of bets. They hold it for a year. At the end of the next year, they have to make five more bets. Literally let them gamble and let them keep the amount of money after four years. now they've got a financial education and all of that goes towards their college education. That's what I would do. I would teach kids how to gamble.

You running for president? No. Is your brother going to run? He's going to run for governor, isn't he? I shouldn't have brought this up. I shouldn't have brought this up. I told you last time for pre. You know, I'm a pre-stant.

Your brother would be incredible, incredible governor of New York. He would be. He runs, I'm telling you right now. We will ask it. I'm telling you right now. Are you going to get him on the pod? Are you going to get him on the pod?

Yeah, I'll definitely have him on the pod. Here's what I'll do. I'm guarantee you right now, I will raise a quarter million dollars for your brother. I will come to New York. I will bring my Silicon Valley. You're from here, right. You're from here. Yeah, from Brooklyn.

You can come in. You can kill the product demo, by the way. We'll do full screen here. So I get your big, beautiful face there. That's Garrett Wilson. I wanted you guys to see that. There it is. I will raise a quarter millie for your brother.

I will do a Peking duck dinner in New York. And I will tell internet people to come $2,500 a seat. boom get a thousand no have a hundred of them to come boom raise a quarter million for your brother to run for governor my lord would be great just a quarter million that's all you can pull off i could probably pull up 250 i don't know i don't know how fun i thought you had a limit of 2,500 a person but you but you know so many people i could probably get a thousand truth be told i could get a thousand i don't know what i'm allowed to do as a super fundraiser but if i said yeah i'm going to do a thing for prete i could get a thousand people to show up 2500 for sure i think so as soon as this

pod's over i'm going to call them and tell them about this Listen, your brother is hardworking, honorable. He's got very sane positions, and he explains himself, you know? And he's got like a high moral ethical bar. Like, he really thinks about these things. And, you know, here we are. You and I compulsive cameras. This became an advertisement for Preet instead of Mojo.

Look at this. Pre. You know what? It's for both. It's for both brothers. Your parents must be very proud of both of you. All right. Listen, Vineet, aka Vinny, I don't know what you prefer.

You call me J-Cal. Which do you prefer? What are your friends called? I prefer Vinny. I like Vinny. I like Vinny. Yeah, because you know, people are always good. Yeah, I'm from Jersey.

I like Vinny. What was it like growing up? Were people a little racist in the 80s towards you guys? Sometimes. Sometimes. We went to a small school, but yeah, we got some. Private Catholic? Would you go to?

No, it was a private school. Not Catholic. It was really small. I was 40 kids in the class. I was just telling my daughter had to ask me, questions, she's a 17, and she had to ask me questions about 9-11. Oh, yeah. Yesterday.

And she was asking me this. And she told me to me, take me through, you know, that day in the next few months. And I told her that was the one time someone called me Osama bin Laden. That was the only time I, yeah, back then after a car. Man, man. Where were you in Jersey or are you in Manhattan? No, New York. I was in Manhattan too, man.

People tell me about that day. How was the scariest day. Where were you? I was on 26 on the West Side Highway. I'm listening to Howard Stern. and getting ready for work. I'm about to go to the garment district. And Howard says,

oh, look, some dips shit just flew his, you know, a little sassan into the World Trade Center. I live 26th on the West Side Highway. I look out my window downtown. I see the smoke. I put on CNN,

boom, second plane hits. Yeah. My brother's a firefighter in Williamsburg. He's on the job for less than six months. He had been a cop. Then he went to be a firefighter. I try to find my brother.

Can't find my brother. No. He's at work. No. I'm like, oh my God. So I just immediately go into a pale sweat. You know, I'm like, oh my God. I mean, I just, I'm going to lose my brother. I come running downstairs. I come down. The elevator operator in my building is outside. There's people in shock on the streets, guys in suits with machine guns. I'm like, what are guys in shoots and machine guns? It turns out my building on 26 on the West Side Highway had a CIA FBI Depot in it for all the equipment. all the trucks and stuff like that. Anyway, the guy grabs him by the house, he goes, Jake how, we're under attack. America is under attack.

They just got the Pentagon. Man, I mean, it was like a movie scene. And so finally, I find out two hours later, you know, I'm talking to my mom. All the phones went down. People don't remember this either. I was telling my daughter that. Phones go down.

I finally get word. My brother, his shift was ending at eight. So the first plane hit 740 something and the second one hit eight something. So he had asked a half hour early because my sister-in-law, Carrie, her car broke down on the belt parkway. She got a flat. My brother, who's a probie, is on probation. He's just starting. Asked his boss, may I go?

My wife's on the side of the right. He says, of course, go. You can leave work early. He leaves work 15 minutes before. No. He's on the belt going to see his wife. he sees in the review mirror the plane

and the world trades are on fire he starts to turn around to go back wow he has to walk through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to get back there

he spent 30 days on the pie every other day smoke the whole thing and he's got lung issues now you know but he's okay oh no wow look at that man that's an amazing story

what about you what's your story then what did you tell your daughter you know the funny thing that story so I'm down on Bleaker Street that's where I lived We had just sold this company the pit.

Yeah, we had just sold the pit three weeks earlier, the sports card stock market. I'm supposed to meet Mark and my other childhood friend, the other founder, Lacks, at Topps because we had sold this company and we're supposed to do some meetings. Topps is right there, a few blocks away from, yeah, a few blocks away. And so what happens is that, like you said, it was a beautiful morning that day. I'm getting ready for work. The Christmas September day ever. Not a cloud in the sky. beautiful air, perfect.

Amazing. Amazing day. I turn on the TV like you, like so many others. Before I leave to head down to tops, I see the one hole in the one building. And so I'm watching television. It turns out Mark, Lori, my co-fad has already down there because he was coming in from Westchester. And so for him, he's down there when the second building fell, you know, obviously the plume of smoke is all surrounding down there. He leaves.

He runs across the Brooklyn Bridge with his shirt off to cover the sun. smoke from from from from his eyes yeah the story I couldn't get hold to him I wind up funny enough going back to Preet he lives on 22nd Street I live on Bleaker I walk up fifth avenue a lot of people did I remember once it was like an exodus exactly and I stayed with thousands of people yeah so I stayed with Preet for the next few days and of course the next like a couple days you just didn't know whether we were going to get another attack it was scary the empire state building it was scary and they also don't realize they shut down Manhattan Nobody in, nobody out.

That's right. For a week or two, and then they cordoned us off in sections. So you couldn't. I wanted to meet my friends at Pastis in the meatpacking district. I was on 26. I walked down to 14th Street. There was a cop there. I said, listen, I'm going to Pashticee.

You're not allowed in there. I was like, listen, my brother's on the job. Da-da-da. He's my card. He's like, all right, just go there. Whatever. So, you know, but it was, Manhattan was weird. It was crazy.

Like, there was no cars. And then, I don't know if you remember this, but I remember walking by St. Vincent's hospital, there were ambulances everywhere. Along the West Side Highway, ambulances from around the country were there. Amazing. Everybody from around the country came to Manhattan. They drove for two or three days. They get there to help. There was no survivors. So everybody came to help. No survivors. It was really tragic and insane, but we got to I was turning 30. I was turning 30 that Friday, September 14.

And so my whole 30th thing got canceled and all this. I remember spending it with some friends. You probably sound like your same age as me. So you probably also turned. I was, I just turned 30 because I was born 1970, November 28. So I was going to be 31. But yeah, it is really is interesting having to explain this to our kids. And for them, it's like this abstraction. And now it's really disturbing to me. Like people are making memes about it or on TikTok. I'll run into a meme about it. I'm like, really, this is. I mean, it's too soon, folks. Like you can't make jokes or memes about 9-11. I'd be like making. Holocaust jokes or World War II jokes. Just don't. Vietnam jokes. Like, it's not cool people. Like, have some respect, you know, for what she asked me about, what she asked me was like, you know, how New York centric was it?

And I said, I just remember that at that time, right? Really, Giuliani was the mayor. The whole thing, we all came together in a way that was unbelievable. There was another this right left. It was super, everybody was getting along for a short stretch. Yeah, she's like shocked about that. I'm like, look, I can't tell you how the world. love New York everywhere.

It was incredible. You can go everywhere. Remember that? Like that was the thing. I remember like in New York, people honk at each other and I remember like the week after, two weeks after, shortly after and I'm walking through an intersection and somebody honked at somebody. This one cars were Laura Bucking.

The guy stopped. Everybody stopped and looked at the guy who honked. The guy got out of his car, went to the car and from him. Like, oh my God. He said, I'm sorry. Amazing. I shouldn't have honked. The guy got out, gave him a hug.

It was like the greatest New York moment ever. Yeah. The idea of a New Yorker. honking at another New Yorker or in any way displaying anything other than love and a hug because everybody knew somebody who died. Everybody was mourning collectively. The idea that we would be anything other than super compassionate for people, it's a defining moment of Gen Xer's life if you're a New Yorker or anywhere in that area.

And then for other people, it's not. Like people who were in California tell me like they felt terrible, they were whatever, but it doesn't define their life. I think for folks like us, it's the defining moment of our lives in many ways. Like our kids, graduating college, all of those. that is like amazing. But if you just think about an emotional resonance, like I think about the world before 9-11 and after 9-11.

It's like two different things for me. I agree. All right, listen, this has been a great discussion. Awesome. I can't wait to hang with you. And I'll see you when I'm in New York. Maybe we'll catch a game. No, not an Eagles game.

Absolutely not. We could do both games. Catch a next time or something. Maybe when they're playing the giants themselves, when they're going to play each other. You know what? I can talk to my dad. All right. All right. Listen, great job on the company.

I wish you great success. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.