From Slayer T-Shirts to Louis Vuitton: Ian Rogers on Selling Culture

Welcome to Dialectic Episode 54 with Ian Rogers. I met Ian in early 2020. I was in Paris just before things got weird. We were building an esports team called 100 Thieves. Ian was the Chief Digital Officer of LVMH at the time. There was something he said that stuck with me, which was to not forget that ultimately you are selling culture before you are selling product. I think that was relevant for what we were doing, but I also think it's broadly representative of Ian in his career. He has had a career that's probably too long to list here, but to give you a sense of his path, he started as a skateboarder and kid who was into punk rock in Goshen, Indiana. He created a fan site that became the Beastie Boys website and he became their webmaster. He worked with Justin Frankel and co on Winamp and Gnutella. He then went to Yahoo Music where he created the first streaming all you can eat music subscription, was at Top Spin for several years as the CEO and then joined Jimmy Iovine as the CEO of Beats Music before and through their acquisition to Apple, which became of course Apple Music. In some sense. Ian spent the first 15 years or so of his career trying to get music on the Internet and certainly succeeded alongside the folks at Spotify.

Shortly after joining Apple, Ian zagged and was recruited by Bernard Arnault and LVMH to become their Chief Digital Officer, helping the various maisons modernize when it came to E commerce and the Internet. He then zagged again and joined Ledger as the Chief Experience Officer. Ledger, if you're not familiar, is a crypto hardware wallet company where Ian still works today, although he changed his role recently to the Chief Human Agency Officer where he is focused on thinking through how we will manage and work with wildly powerful agents, especially when they have access to secrets, information and value. Ian has spent his career at the frontier of technology and what's cool and I spoke to him about this and much more. We talked a lot about music as that is his first and true love and this was an honor. If you enjoy the episode, please share it with a friend. As Ian says, the best way for creative works to spread is through word of mouth. Thank you so much for listening.

Before we get into the episode, I'd like to thank Notion Dialectic's presenting partner. Notion is a collaborative workspace for your life's work. Many of you are probably well familiar with it as an amazing note taking tool, collaborative database tool, and much more, and they have spent the last year and a half or so integrating AI and agents in a way that feels native and obvious. The reason Notion, I think is so valuable when it comes to working with AI is that context matters not only when you're using it alone, but when you're especially when you're using it with your team and collaborators. Being able to have a single place where all of your context and data is where you're actually doing the work, and where you can work with increasingly powerful agents and models, whether that be open source or the most powerful frontier models in the world, the day they come out is truly powerful. It's also been amazing to watch the Notion team evolve over the time that we've been working together and get to work with some really special people. Notion's co Founder Akshay Kothari recently told me that There are nearly 50 ex founders now working at Notion, which I think Speak speaks to not only the quality, but the level of scrappiness and resourcefulness and agency amongst the various people who work there, many of whom I get to collaborate with. If you are interested in working with the team there, whether it be on product and marketing, engineering, storytelling or otherwise, please reach out to them directly or to [email protected] you can learn more at notion.com dialectic and by supporting Notion, you support Dialectic and me and the show with that. Here is my conversation with Ian Rogers and.

It's funny, it's. I think that's just a message that could be quite resonant with many young people today. It also, like. I mean, the first thing it reminds me of, despite him, at least on the surface, not being a very punk rock person, maybe he is spiritually. There's that old Steve Jobs video where he's like, when you realize that the world was created by no one smarter than you and that you can, like, poke the universe and, like, get some feedback. Yeah. Like, it's the meme of the. You're sitting back of the chair and you lean forward playing the video game. Like, what? Call it Agency? Call whatever you want. What a. What an amazing thing to, like, internalize. Totally. And probably not something that really leaves you once you get it, regardless of how you get it.

So there's a cultured mag profile on you from a little while ago. And in it it says, despite hopscotching across fashion and music and crypto, Roger's skill set remains singular. He gets to know a cultural scene, then he brings more people into it, maybe to start what makes a scene.

I've had this conversation with a few different people, maybe with the ncaa. I can't quite remember. The, the meta point that I think a lot of people have made is because everything's so much less frictionful, it's harder for the boundaries that sort of create a scene to hold. Makes sense. So any, like, yeah, maybe you could have a Discord server or a thing here or there, but like everything on the Internet is much more legible. And one of the theories that I have and I think others have spoken about is like, that friction is part of what, like creates the, the, the connection that says we're, we're part of this group, we're not part of that group. Yeah. When everyone can move super freely, it's, it's harder. I wonder if it's also, you know, if you think about kind of moving from living in public on Instagram and like sending up your beacon to being in group chats. Right. You know, like, is the group chat a scene or is it not a scene? Because it doesn't need to advertise itself. You know, it's closed by default. Right. To be a scene. Yeah. Does it need to advertise itself? Does it need to, does it need to recruit? My initial response would be it depends on what stage. Like, my sense is that there are a lot of group chats that have started as these sort of private containers and have gained a lot of power over time. Yeah. This is kind of the classic Yancey thing is this sort of, like, I forget who first come it was Venkatesh Rao, somebody like this. They're talking about, like, you have this kind of cozy web, or you have this group of people, and then when they go participate in the public arena as the gladiator or whatever, it's almost like there's this conspiracy of, like, people. And you don't like people responding to the tweet who you don't know they're actually already in cahoots with. Yeah, but it's a different thing for sure. You know, the responding to a tweet is such a. A great thing to say because you realize, like, we just don't know at this point, like, if they're like, that has very little purchase at this point, because that. That response is probably a bot, most likely, you know? Yeah. And so now. Now that, like, it's the. Those waters are so muddy. I was thinking about, like, what is a scene in this term? Because, like, Harper Reed has an amazing AI builder group, and I love it. It's, like, really an honor to be a part of it. Also, you know, there. There are some of these, like, kind of Silicon Valley, you know, groups that I'm in where you're. You know, for me, I feel like I'm in there with, like, people that are building things that I use every day, you know? You know, and so is that a scene or is that a professional networking group? You know what I mean? Like, what. And what's the difference? Exactly. And I think about, like, the Beastie Boys example is actually an interesting one, because I feel like they were a part of scenes. Like they were part of the punk rock scene in New York. They were part of the hip hop scene in New York. And to me, the greatest part of the Beastie Boys book is, like, really getting a feel for what it was like to grow up in New York in the 80s when, like, culture happened there. And everything that I experienced in Indiana was downstream of those things that were happening there on the ground every day. And they were really a part of those scenes. Yeah. Meeting me in the bathroom. Same idea. Yeah, yeah. Like, those are real, real scenes. At the same time, the scene the Beastie Boys created, I almost feel like it was almost like reluctant, like they, you know, they. They kind of. They created Grand Royal, because in Check youk Head, they put a little note that said, if you'd like the lyrics, send a dollar to this address. And they ended up, by the way, that's some friction. Yeah, exactly. Well, and. But also they kind of thought, like, well, we'll see if anyone does that. I remember, like, we had trash bags full of those dollars, those envelopes in the Grand Royal offices. And, you know, it was quite a. Like, a difficult thing to respond to all of them. And I think that also to their credit, they looked at that and they went, if we just send these people lyrics, we're idiots, there's more we can do here. And they created Grand Rail magazine out of that impulse. Right. Out of going, like, wait, we have an audience here. And so now. Was that a scene? I guess so. They created it, but it also included X Large Mike D, used to have a record store on Vermont. You know what I mean? Like, you start, like, then you start putting pieces together. But, yeah, I think technology has always been a limiting factor. And maybe now. Yeah, to your point, it's. I think it's really, like. I think that's a great way to put it. I hadn't thought of it before, but, like, because of the lack of friction, then the. You. The these. The friction was kind of the guardrails that kept it. And I have to say, like, I was always a part of scenes. Like, I was like, very much, you know, if it wasn't on these labels, I wasn't going to listen to it sort of thing. And then there are these two, you know, friends I made in high school that just taught me that. That actually it's all nonsense. Like, 99 of every genre and every scene is garbage. And actually your job is to find the. The 1% of everything. That's amazing. Traverse. Yeah, exactly. And to traverse. So I think that, you know, there's also, like, you know, I think some people are just more oriented that way. Right.

Another cut on this would be There's Been People. One person as an example, I don't know if you're familiar with him, is W. David Marx, who wrote Status and Culture. And there's a new book kind of on, like, it's called Blank Space. Right. I know the name, but I haven't read it. He and many other cultural commentators have kind of made this point that, like, we're sort of like an end of history for culture. Like, there's no new culture being created. Everything's derivative. One theory for this, if it's true, which I think is probably a grand statement, is the lack of subculture or the lack of scenes like this. To what extent do you see new culture forming, particularly at the edges, like, where one theory behind this could be, like, it has to Be low status. That's harder for those things to materialize. Maybe it's good when something like crypto is less popular than whatever. But as someone who seems to have been very much on the edge of what was really interesting or cool is a challenging word, but the edge of cool for many years, long after you were 19. I'm curious if there's anything or where you would even look.

Part of this maybe, too, is that you have to be looking. I. I think I was texting you about this. I recently interviewed Tyler Cowan and my friend Nabil, and I currently have a viral Instagram reel going crazy because Tyler was saying. I think he literally said rap is basically dead and electronica is kind of born out. And he's like, waiting for AI music to get good. I think part of the implication here, too, is, like, you can't look in the spot you were looking prior. Yeah. And there is something really fresh and interesting and new, but it's probably not quite 2025 shaped, let alone 2015 shaped. It also might not be your taste. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, I'm experiencing that with. With hip hop generally. Right. I was like a. Like a 90s hip hop nerd, right. I listened like, you know, Pitchfork tells me this is a great new rap record. I put it on, and nine times out of 10, I'm like, oh, this is not for me. And that's probably just me. Not. That's not. Well, maybe. Do you think it's possible that hip hop is significantly less artistically innovative than it was 10, 15 years ago? It makes sense, given how. Yeah, I think you could say that about every genre, Right. I mean, like, just actually start with the oldest, right? Like, go. Go put on, like, a new blues record from Alligator Records. Is it innovative, right? No, it is not innovative in the slightest. Right. There's always these moments when art forms are new, and the best thing about them is there's no rules. Like, I would argue that hip hop is dead, since you could say that's not hip hop. You know what I mean? And then everything else is exceptions to the rule, you know what I mean? Like, as soon as you could say, oh, that's not hip hop, like, well, now actually, now you've made a box and you tried to put the art in a box. And it's only the people that escape that box that are gonna be interesting. Right? And so I. But I. And I think all, you know, certainly electronic music is that, like, electronic, like, electronic music was so exciting when it was new and it was like, what is this? Like, the first time I heard, you know, Richard D. James album by Aphex Twin, I was like, this is the future of music, period. Like, I don't even know what. For what it's worth, Tyler was definitely praising Effects Trend, but it's a great example because, like, if you. If in the 90s, you were like, oh my God, this is going to be so exciting. And then ultimately you realize that electronic music wasn't even a genre, it was just an excuse to take drugs, then you were super disappointed. Right, Because Apex Twin really felt like the future of classical music, you know, like, wow. And so now you're just like, oh, no, it's just like, you know, it's just people, you know, like four on the floor. Like, like getting high in a 90 of everything is boring. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So in other words. Yeah, exactly so. And I think. But I think it's the same. The same with. The same with hip hop, right? Like, like every other genre, most of it's terrible. It's not like a genre is good. It's not like hip hop good, country bad. No, most hip hop is terrible. Most country is terrible. And guess what? There's amazing in both too, if you're willing, you know, to do the filtering and, and look. And also, like, I love the exceptions that prove the rule, you know, the one for the past year is Clips. Yeah. Best record. You know, I mean, I don't. Best record. One of my favorite records of. Of the past couple of years is the Clips record. I mean, Push is so talented as. As like just a rapper. He has everything that I want. You know, he's, he's, he's, he's clever, he's wordplay, he's swag, he's smart. He's also dumb. You know, he's not dumb. He's. He's super smart, but he knows when to play dumb and to. And to like have it drug talk or, you know, and you know, it's. To me, it's like everything that I want, like having Malice back. Like, everybody, I could tell you, like, we saw clips in LA and like when Malice walks out on stage, it's like I feel like everyone in the room wanted to start crying, you know, because. And to me, like, Clips doesn't even sound contemporary. It sounds like the hip hop I grew up, you know what I mean? That feeling like something you used to love also new versus just feeling. Feeling nostalgic. Yeah. I think. And I think, by the way, I'm comfortable at age 53 saying I don't know. And I don't feel like I need to know. You know what I mean? Like, it's all about tier one to you. And having kids teaches you that as well. It's like, I don't care what they listen to. I just love that they love music, you know? And so we all realize that, you know, like, there is not a. There is. There are no absolutes there. You know, there isn't a. There isn't a good. I mean, I'm a music snob, but I also know there is no such thing as good or bad. Why did you. I think Old Dirty Bastard is the most talented vocalist of the 20th century, and I probably will be hard pressed to find anyone who agrees with me, but that's okay. Why do. We're dangerously close to the taste discourse, but why do across artistic mediums. It's almost a recursive question. But the people with good taste seem to converge on similar things. Mojo magazine, I read my. I don't know if you know the magazine, but it's a British magazine. It's been around for, I don't know how long, 50 years, I think. I feel like I. There was a Joni Mitchell cover a couple issues ago that I think said 50 years on it. I, I. Oh, cool. Hey, Mojo, I don't really know how old you are. I apologize if I got that wrong. But, I mean, I read it cover to cover every month. Wow. And. And they are. I say that because they are kind of like, we converge on good taste in a way. And, you know, guess who's on the COVID this month? The Rolling Stones. Right. Like, you know, like every other year. And. But it is things that are worth following, you know, and, and oftentimes I discover things through that channel that I wouldn't have discovered otherwise. And that is why it's important to me that that is what Pitchfork. That's the role that pitchfor. Right. For a very long time. Less so today, unfortunately, but still sometimes. But it's kind of outside of scenes. The people that I think are the coolest or the smartest or whatever seem to generally trend towards. Even if they're coming from very different scenes, they seem to converge on similar types of stuff, which I find really interesting. The fact that Tyler Cowen can talk to Rick Rubin about music, granted, maybe they both just truly love music, but, like, the fact that those two guys who are very dissimilar, maybe they're similar in age, have converged. You and Rick is maybe less surprising. But. But I think Rick and I probably converge less than you might think. You know what I mean? Like, one of my favorite things to do when I visit him is to just sit and Play songs. And I've never heard most of the songs he plays me and he hasn't heard most of the songs that I play for him. Also, I was just talking to someone about this and we were talking about kind of where we come from. And that's actually why I went down the, the, the path of talking about the rock and roll first side because it's like you kind of have to see the arena rock to appreciate the punk rock. And. And also, like, I came from heavy metal, so I never got pop punk. And you know, that doesn't mean pop punk is bad. It just means that, like, if you, if you, if you were into like, you know, Britney Spears and then you discovered no effects, that makes sense to me. Right? Like, you know, whereas, you know, when I was. Since I came from, you know, heavy heavy, then, you know, I'm more likely, you know, so I think that we all just have this personal experience and, you know, you. That. That's why I think tier one to the individual is. Is really much more important for me. You know, all the music stuff, I did digital music for 20 years. And for me, what was important was that we enabled people to do whatever they wanted to do with music. I never wanted to be a music critic. There's a, There's a time for that. You're sitting with friends, you're like, I love this record. Have you heard it? You know you want. But like, what I loved about Winamp was you could just play anything you wanted to. And I don't care what you play. I just want you to love music. And so if you're loving it, that is, that is, that is fantastic. And I think that then the other side of it is like, it really should just be about sharing another. Another way to put this is no three star reviews. The only. Like whenever. Like that. That's what pisses me off about Rolling Stone. It's like, like every. You look through it, I don't know if it's still the case. I haven't looked at Rolling Stone in God knows how many years, but it used to be all three star reviews. And I'm like, you guys are three out of four or three out of five. Three out of five. Yeah. This is why I love the four star scale is you have to choose. You have to go thumbs up or thumbs down. Yeah. Which is all the. It's only if you're. If you really want to do me a favor. Yes. If it's three stars, just leave it out. Who cares? There's only two things I care about. One is I didn't know about it and it's awesome. Awesome. Please tell me about that. Yeah. The other is I might have wasted my time on it. I would in the old days would be. Wasted my money on it. Right. Like, in other words, like, if that new record from that artist that I was probably going to buy really sucks, please warn me those are the only two things you need to do. This is kind of okay. Like, I don't have time for that. You know, I'm too busy trying to find the good stuff. Right. About it. Man. Don't tell me. Don't tell me something is mediocre. What is the point? Totally agree. But I would also say don't tell me something is bad. God. Duh. Just tell me the good stuff. Really? Like, people just talking about shit they don't like. It's really, at this point, like, what is wrong with you? What's the point? Like, tell me stuff that. Tell me something that's worth watching. I agree. We talked about it, or at least we talked around it a lot. You've been a strong advocate that the Internet is maybe, way I put it in the past is like, it's about niche at scale. It's not about the mainstream. There's an idea that, that, that you, I think, talked about with Rick some. A couple of interviews ago, which is the Blockbuster versus the Snowball. I'd love to hear you just riff on that briefly because I thought it was one of the more interesting cuts on this. And it just, like, so, well, feels like it's every year that passes, it's describing modern culture better.

Do you think I'll ever make anything that good again?

I want to talk briefly about brand. We. We briefly met in early 2020, and I was building this gaming thing, and there's this line you said that stuck with me for years and years. Um, and I don't even know if we totally followed the advice as much as we should have, but you said, never forget you're selling culture, not product. What does that actually mean?

It's also funny, it's telling that Apple products have very little on the back of the box.

The funny thing is that I would agree with you and there's this classic, I don't know if you ever read, Ben Thompson has this piece, what Clayton Christensen got wrong about the Apple, not about the iPhone not getting compressed from the bottom. And, and basically it was almost both of those things.

Also on the brand note, you've kind of classic line, maybe it's from you or maybe it's from Arnaud, but storytelling plus time equals value. I thought about this a lot and I thought about this a lot while we were building this gaming thing. 100 Thieves in part because we had so much of the brand was we had the brand and then we had all these influencers and creators underneath it. We live in the age of the individual in so many ways. How can brands accumulate value or maybe accumulate meaning in a way that people can't? Because it's so much easier for Mr. Beast to get the low hanging fruit of attention compared to a brand or a label whatever whatever. And Mr. Beast is an individual, not a brand in this conversation.

I love this question. I don't find it convoluted. I think it is that challenging of a question. I think actually maybe it always starts around an individual. And I think that you're right that I think there's always few brands that get created relative to the number of people who try. It's just like music where you're always going to have more aspirants than you have success stories. And the winners are maybe also somewhat unlikely. It has to do with timing, has to do with other things. In other words, you're right. The brands that you're talking about probably did start out as individuals and then over time they live on. You know, like I had that conversation with Rick and I. I really. I would love to see people do this with, with music. Probably harder with music than a product.

The defining trait, at least as you're describing it, as patience. I think that sounds right. When and how. My assumption is certainly from Bernard, but probably for Breeze too, is that there's a intensity and aggression that shows up amidst the patients, for sure. Is that true? And if so, yeah. How does that, how does that show up?

I think you said you aren't patient. My sense is that in some sense you are definitely impatient, but in another sense you've actually been like very patient, particularly on the technology side. You've had the right level of patience to see out maybe things that felt inevitable to you but certainly weren't inevitable on an obvious time horizon, not the least of which crypto and streaming music or Internet music really like you basically wrote Internet music for, for 15 years, maybe longer.

You did it for another 12 years after you had already.

You have a great thing on your blog about the, the context talk. Yeah. 2007 or 2008. It's kind of like right in the middle of that period, you're like, come on, people, that, that one keeps coming back to me. The, the content versus context thing.

You kind of did it. I mean, from my perspective, I.

That's my point, is you were patient enough to see that through. Whether or not it was fully.

I think you are someone who's spent your career communicating these new technologies that. That might be inevitable in some sense, but are certainly not here yet to the world. And I think you've done a good job of communicating, particularly outside of the existing kind of community. It's in my sense, is that while there are some notable exceptions, most people in the technology world are decidedly bad at this, at talking to the rest of the world. Yeah. Why do you think that is? And what do you think has made you good at it?

Why are you so into Interfaces, Maybe you wouldn't put it that way, but there is a through line of your career that is maybe the LVMH side a little less so. But it seems that your particular cut on technology is like, I'm going to help people. Maybe part of it is that it's these obscure technologies that aren't quite ready yet. But, yeah, I think that, I think that, you know, the best example of this is like, when I, When I came here to Ledger and I, I told Tony Fadell, you know, I'm going to go run the consumer business at Ledger. And he said, said, there is no consumer business that's not B to C. It's B to G business to geek. And your job is to build a consumer business. So that speaks to what you just said, which is like, you're going in early y. When there is no interface. I mean, when I started building for the web, there were no background colors, there was no css, there was no layout. It was like an image was a character in, like, you know, you, you laid it out like, as if you could lay out the letter A or you could lay out a J, you know, a gate, gif, not even a jpeg. So I think when you're starting in those days, then you're like, now you're, you're in the business of building a better ui. Yeah. You know, it's just kind of what. You're in what you're in the business of whether you want to be or, or, or, or not. But also, I think since you are trying to, like, bring the technology to more people, you know, I, I think it's hilarious that, like, when we thought we were doing big stuff at Yahoo in the early 2000s, and we had, you know, the number one music video service before YouTube and the number one radio service before Pandora, you know, we were like, we're, we're huge. Right? But like, you're just getting people to listen to music on a Windows PC. Like, what kind of interface is that compared to. I remember the first time that I heard that people were like, just driving to work with Pandora on in their car. You can't imagine how absurd that sounded. You're like, wait, first of all, you're getting that good a bandwidth to your car? Like, whoa. Second of all, what's your data plan, dude? Like, like, can you do that for what, two days? And. And then it's over? Like, you know, I mean, that was just insane. Yeah, the kids are never gonna know how good. Yeah, it's just like, man, the fact That I can like download Lossless, you know, while I'm walking to work is just. I remember counting text messages. Oh, my God. Brutal. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, yeah, people, it's people can't, can't remember, can't understand. But yeah, so I think when you're in those days, then you're in the business of interface, right? Because, I mean, I can't even tell you. Like, I, I built like, music app, just trying to play a song on like an old flip phone. We're talking like 2002, you know, like a phone that, like, what they call it wet, you know. You know, so. And, but you know, at that point though, you are like, okay, I don't even say it's interface. You're at that point, you're just like, can I make it work? Like, is it possible? But yeah, that's. And I like that part of it. Like, I feel like we're there with AI right now and I'm, I'm, I'm having more fun right now than ever in my career. But a lot of it is like, like, can this work? And then, you know, you know, it's funny, like, we're talking with one of the guys on the team yesterday because we're finding things in cursor that are just don't work at all. And you're like, this company just sold the SpaceX for 60 billion and you know what I mean? But we're just in such the early days, you know, we're. Yeah, it's so new. We're. We're in. And by the way, you, you have. On one end of the spectrum, you have a thing that doesn't work at all. On the other end of the spectrum, you have the craziest capacity that has, like, ever been had ever. Like, and you can't even imagine that it's. That it's real. Which kind of explains why some of the things might not work. Yeah, well, I mean, this is, this is just like where we've been with AI for a while and you know, where, where you're like, how can you be so stupid and so outrageously smart now? You know, the outrageously smart is like, you know, starting to really dominate the feeling. Right? Whereas a year ago, but a year ago, it wasn't at all. I mean, I remember, you know, coding with AI last summer super well, and it was like, so frustrating. Like, fist on mouse, like, oh, what are you doing? Why did you do that? And, and then it was, you know, end of last year that it became like, no way. Wow. Yeah, get on. Wow. Hang on. Yeah, well, I want to talk about the agent stuff, but maybe first on the kind of broader theme of Ledger and crypto, we talked about that old piece about convenience and your kind of argument is like, convenience. There's so much hubris. Like you have to trust that people ultimately are going to go where the thing is convenient. It seems to me that consumers have voted with their feet, certainly against privacy and to a lesser extent against security, in favor of convenience. Ledger almost by definition is a product that is about offering, hopefully offering you a fair amount of convenience, but really saying like security is. We're going to be almost ideological. How do you think about that? Like, how is that the, the, the, the, the. Depending on who you ask. In crypto for the last, and, and Maybe soon in AI, like for the last 10 years, there's always been the people who say we're going to find a way and the other people are just saying, like, there's just no way everybody's going to have a hardware wallet. I don't think we've ever thought that everybody's going to have a hardware wallet. Again, like, find yourself a nickel anytime you use the word everybody, right? And also remember that, that the richest man in Europe is not trying to address the majority of the market. So that's never been my vision. My vision has always been that it's a very big sky and you want to make the premium product and you want, and a. It's just better business. Right? Like leading people down the wrong path is ultimately bad business. Business, you know, so if you're, if you're making a software wallet and convincing people that it's secure and you're kind of leading them into danger, then ultimately they'll get wrecked. And that's just a bad way to have a consumer relationship. And I also think that like, you know, the, the strength of Ledger has been that it's always, it has been ideological, that there's, you know, no compromise on security or self custody. Those are like the two tenants. And it's really handy to have those because there are lots of times over the last 12 years, we're kind of the only company in crypto that's been saying exactly the same thing for 12 years. Right? Like the wind blows. People move from this to that. There's lots of things that we could have done. You know, we could have done software wallets, we could have done mpc, you know, but we've always said, look, that doesn't meet our security Standards, standards and also doesn't mean our self custody standards. We've said if we stick to those two things, we think that those things, there's a cohort that will always find those things valuable. Interestingly, the choices that we made on those play perfectly into now where digital security needs to go broadly because that's another lens on it would be to say that actually what Ledger is, is it's a digital security company with where crypto was the need for digital security. So what is Ledger really? It's a, it's a piece of hardware with a secure element chip in it. So it's the same chip that's in your credit card or your passport. The one that's in your credit card protects the secrets of the bank. The one that's in your passport protects the secrets of the government from you. By the way, that's the point, like you're not supposed to have access. And the one that's in your ledger protects your secrets. So you have secrets as an individual. If you think you don't have secrets, then please email me the password to your email. I'd be happy to see it because I know you don't have secrets. So just email me your password to your email and I'll be happy to validate the fact that you don't have any secrets for you. We all have secrets, right? And we deserve a right to privacy. Privacy is, is normal. And that's fundamentally what Ledger does. It uses this technology that was created to protect secrets from us and it uses it for us. It's as if your credit card has an operating system which is over the air upgradable and you can load arbitrary apps on so you can make security applications. So you know, if you build this level of security 12 years ago, 2014, what's the application, you know, for that ledger of the. For. I'm sorry for that level of security. And that's where, you know, bitcoin was the first and then other digital assets come after that. And by the way, I'm still a bitcoin bull. I'm still a digital art bull. You know, like these things mean a lot to me for the same reason that they did, you know, 10, 10 years ago. And you know, but there's, there's also, if you think about it as the only operating system and open development environment on top of smart card technology on the planet, then in a, in an era where, you know, it's funny because last October I stood on stage here in this building in Paris and I said an agentic future is coming. And an agentic future where you give your passwords, your identity and your credit card to an agent is a security nightmare. And it was just crickets. Like, nobody. I heard. I was gonna say October was like, right before. Yeah, nobod. Nobody heard me. And now this year you've got Marc Andreessen running around saying, we are poised for a computer security apocalypse. Right, yeah. Mythos is gonna. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So here we are, you know, in the computer security apocalypse. So having a, A, you know, a, A better security solution, you know, having, in other words, an operating system, an open development environment on top of smart card technology is extremely valuable. Valuable. You build something with that sort of ideology and then you've. You end up finding different, different use cases for it. Right. I mean, why, why did you. Why this from lvmh? That whole, that whole ideology story is great. Hopefully somebody's going to build it. Ledger was already going like, yeah, we, you know, for me, Covid had had something to do with it because I actually, my story on this is quite specific in that, that, you know, there's. There's someone in my office at Topspin, Parker, Todd Brooks, who told me about Bitcoin very early. I took a look at it and I was like, this is amazing. But like, the government, Governments won't allow this to exist. That was my take, you know, but that means. Actually I went deep on it enough to like, yeah, have that feeling. Oh, yeah, this, like, I was like, I get this. And this threatens sovereignty warranty. Right. And so that will be. I mean, I've lived through like, Napster Gnutella. I'm like, they can shut that down. And my lesson from Napster Gnutella wasn't like, you can stop the code, but you can stop any business from being in the business of this. Yes. Right. So I can't stop, you know, the government can't stop Gnutella, they can't stop Pirate Bay, but they can say that, hey, guess what? You're not in the business of Gnutella or Pirate Bay. So that was kind of my take on it. Then there was a point which it got kind of like big enough where I was like, this is going to be hard to stop. Like, this is big enough. And that to me was around like 2013, 2014 is like, kind of when I felt that. And I bought the, like, programming bitcoin book. The, the. And like, I came at it from like a developer mindset. But, you know, I was like, still like, well, you know, okay, we'll, we'll like, kind of see what this does. But during COVID I was like, this is it. Like, the technology's here. The technology is good enough. We had these ideas about smart contracts and stuff, but, like, now it actually exists, you know, and, you know, you've the money. Money printer is like, fully on. Like, we were in. I remember, you know, the, the CFO of, of LVMH telling me, yeah, we are in unprecedented territory. Wow, 2 trillion of stimulus in the US a trillion in Europe or whatever the numbers were. But, like, no one knew what comes next. It's never been done before. Like, what are we looking at here? But I, I was just like, oh, yeah, this is the time. And by the way, we were right. You know, you look at 20, 21, you know, here at Ledger, we just couldn't keep the product in stock. You know, it was. It was. It was so crazy. And you had all of these, like, other narratives. You know, you had all of the altcoin narratives, you had the NFT narrative. There was just a lot, you know, a lot of. A lot of interesting possibility about what, what this could be used for. And I, And I don't, I don't. I think it's revisionist history to. To say otherwise, you know, so. And also, like, for me, talking to Pascal, who I'd made some friends here in Paris, one of them was Pascal Gauthier, first investor in Ledger. Other one was Tony Fidel, who's, you know, you know, inventor of the ipod, co inventor of the iPhone, creator of Nest. And we were talking about, like, what could this be be, you know, and, and. And the interesting thing is that now I'm having, like, a bit of a deja vu moment relative to, you know, when we were. When we thought we were building interesting things on the Internet, but we were only building them for Windows PCs. And then 10 years later, and there's a proliferation of iPhones, you're like, oh, this is why we built it. Remembering a very similar thing now where it's like, yeah, we built the best digital security platform, and the first application of that was crypto. And now we are entering, you know, again, what Marc Andreessen calls a computer security Apocalyp. And, you know, there is for sure a use case for this technology in. In this agentic world. And the interesting thing to come back to your original question about ideology is many of the decisions that we made have turned out to be very valuable in the AI world, where the fact that every time you connect a ledger, it phones home to an HSM which checks? Is this the firmware I'm expecting? Is this the chip I'm expecting that gives you proof of human? Human. It's the basis for our technology for, for proof of human. You know, the fact that you have a secure screen and we've never compromised on the secure screen allows you to approve a complex transaction that an agent is signing. Which is something that like a Yubikey couldn't do for kind of getting to pick all this fruit. Yeah, exactly. You know, you've, you've made, you've made decisions for ideological reasons in the past. They're paying off, but it turns out that they pay dividends today and that, that's like cool. Quite encouraging. Yeah. You know, to be honest, you've been at Ledger, I think for six years, five and a half. You've spent a lot of your career in these sort of cycles that equate to roughly five years. Ledger's come a long way. This other stuff is starting to work. One could have taken the view that now would be the time for the next thing. You've instead taking on a new role at Ledger. Well, I would argue that is the next thing. Right. I mean, so you know, when I was at, when I was at Yahoo, there was a moment where I was like, okay, I'm going to do something else. That thing I do might be at Yahoo. And I looked at that and I also looked at things outside and I left. It was similar at lvmh. You know, it was possible that my next job at LVMH was at lvmh. When I started at lvmh, I told them, I said, you know, I think this is a 10 year job and you should have me do it for five. Because, you know, after five you've heard all my jokes, you know, like I, I think that's normal. Like you've added to it what you're going to add to it. Your journey with the company. Your point is exactly? Yeah, I think that it's great to have, you know, if, if somebody's been in a role for five years, you probably really have gotten out of them what they're going to bring to that role. And, and so now it's actually great to have someone else come in because they're going to bring something different, different, you know, so. And if you get somebody really complimentary, you get somebody even better. You know that I think it's a really good thing for a company. I think similarly for me here I came in to look after the consumer business. We've Grown a lot over that time. We've gone from, you know, kind of these devices that look like USB sticks to these really nice touchscreen devices that are much easier to use. Actually, like, we've, we've achieved the goal of like, ease of use with, you know, with a secondary security device. And we've gone from a business that was kind of 0% services to 50% services. So buy, sell, swap, stake, lend, credit card, all of these services that you put on top of it. So we, we really accomplished something over that time. And then it's, it probably is good for the company to have, you know, somebody who wants to come prove they can do it better than me come in and that, that's a great thing. That's, that's the way it works it at lvmh as an example, right? If you're, if you're not performing as a CEO, they will bring in a new CEO. And you know, what that CEO wants to do is to prove they can do it better than you. And that's great dynamic for the company, for the shareholders. It's not a personal thing. It's like, that's the dynamic that works for the shareholders. And for me, look, I, I, I've been delivered this incredible gift in my life, right? I'm an old command line nerd. Like, I'm ambidextrous. I know VI and Emacs key bindings and that's just where I, I'm an old sysadmin. That's where I come from. And you know, like I started, you know, I had a, I used to have an Rs6000 under my desk and a Next on my desk. And I lived at the command line. So last summer, you know, when, when I started using, you know, Claude code, if you'd have asked me like, is this the next big thing? I'd have said, no, no, no way. It's great for me because I'm that guy. I love, I love this interface. I love like typing at the command line and watching it think like, this is just perfect for me, for the normal person. No way. So I'm completely surprised that I, I was, nobody was as surprised as me. As for sort of like Claude Code Winter, you know, you know, everybody that went away

I think it should. Don't. At least my sense is that the classic just spam approve on Claude.