Google DeepMind Reorgs, Rainforest Discoveries, Monkey Prices Surge, NYT Stock Drops

Overnight success.

The place of 30,000.

Double.

Right.

This misinformation.

Clearing order.

Let's just roll.

We are surrounded by general. Hold your position.

Come on, get up.

Trust the experts here.

We are.

Founder.

Fine.

I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Standby.

UAV online.

Wave.

Double blades.

Triple blades.

Double kill.

By.

Win.

Team deathmatch.

We are experts.

Triple blades.

Let's just roll.

Right.

Clearing order inbound.

We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.

Strike one.

Strike two.

Activate.

Golden retriever mode.

Market clearing order inbound.

5.

I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by.

You're watching TVBN. Today's Wednesday, August 5th, 2026. We are live from the TVBN Alam technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

What just happened at Google DeepMind? Crazy, crazy morning. Uh, shakeup, a reorg, stepping down, stepping up, stepping left, stepping right. There's a lot of different terms. We'll break it down. We'll explain the organization before now, what it looks like going forward, what this means, where this goes. So this morning, Demis Hassabis, the legendary AI researcher, the founder of DeepMind,

a true scientist, uh, the subject of Sebastian Mallaby's book, The Infinite Machine. Um, he announced that he's stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind. He's also stepping up into the role of Google DeepMind chairman and he will also be Alphabet's chief scientist. So is it a promotion? Is it a demotion? Is he quitting? Is he getting fired? Who knows? But the most important thing is that he's still there at Alphabet. He has a different role and that's what's important. What is the nature of this new role? Uh, Google's CEO Sundar Pichai also announced that, uh, Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, uh, will be leaving the company after a 27-year run to start, along with Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, a public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in machine learning, science, and engineering. And if you're not familiar with Jeff Dean, he is the Chuck Norris of, of, uh, computer engineering and, and software engineering. Um, there's a whole, uh, list of jokes around Jeff Dean jokes.

Why don't you read some of them, John?

What are my favorite Jeff Dean jokes? Uh, jokes. There's a whole bunch. Any opportunity to repost the, the Jeff Dean Informatica link. Compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers. Uh, Jeff Dean's keyboard, it only has two keys, a one and a zero because he programs in binary. Uh, that it's that type of thing. Uh, unsatisfied with constant time, Jeff Dean created the world's first O(1) algorithm so he can bend time. There's all these programmer jokes. I don't know. Uh, they're a lot of fun. He knows the last digit of pi, that type of thing. Uh, but he's been a legend. These were on Quora maybe 15 years ago, maybe more. People were so, uh, excited about him and for good reason. Uh, he invented tons of things.

Doesn't call APIs. APIs call him.

Exactly. That type of thing. Uh, very fun. Uh, so the lore around Jeff Dean has been substantial throughout his entire career. Uh, he has been, you know, very key to so many different, uh, Google projects, integral in MapReduce and, uh, actually being able to scale Google systems.

Does this make any sense? Chuck Norris counted to infinity twice. Jeff Dean did it in parallel.

Ah, okay. Yeah, that's kind of funny. It's a programmer joke, but, uh, I don't know.

But yeah, it's just funny that he was able to like have this level of aura at Google, uh, as like a non-founder, just a great scientist, and it was so long ago before there were, before there was so much attention on like talent below the founding team and below the investing team or whatever, you know. Uh,

Truly a living legend.

Yeah. Jeff Dean will be going. Jeff Dean will be going in the rafters.

Yes. But he's not done.

He's not done and he's starting a new company which is very exciting because there's a lot of opportunity in machine learning, science, and engineering obviously. Um, so, uh, Google DeepMind CTO and Google's chief AI architect, Koray Kavukcuoglu, I can't pronounce that, I'm sorry. Um, is being promoted to SVP and will lead DeepMind. So Koray is now running DeepMind. Interestingly, there's no new CEO, uh, of DeepMind, which always seemed to be an odd, uh, decision because DeepMind was not its own reporting unit like when the, uh, when quarterly earnings happen. You get YouTube numbers, you get Google Cloud numbers. And so having a CEO of those divisions made a lot of sense for those organizations. But DeepMind was always a, was always a unit that sort of cut across everything because the work that DeepMind does on Gemini and the models made a lot of sense to vend into YouTube and now there's a little Gemini button when you're on YouTube and you can just go to a one-hour long podcast and say when did they talk about this and it'll just answer you. And so that was like a feature that was vended into that obviously goes into core Google search. Gemini models help with ads. They help with the actual Gemini products. Like they get vended everywhere. There's a Gemini button in Chrome. There's also a Gemini button in Google Docs. There's also a Gemini button in Gmail. And so, uh, it was, it was never like its own, even though it was its own unit, like the value that it created at Google was very, uh, was very cross-organizational as opposed to, you know, the YouTube team has a CEO and they have revenues and they have ads and they have a product and yes, it's integrated into the other things, but it very much is a standalone organization, reports its own financials and has a CEO. So, no CEO for DeepMind, at least in the short term. We'll see where it goes. Uh, on X, Demis says the move will, will quote, allow him to focus on long-term strategy and accelerating scientific breakthroughs. He's done a lot of that already. Uh, including leaning into his work at Isomorphic, um, and to help cure disease. He fleshed this out more on Google's blog. Uh, he said, "I've decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, uh, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come, uh, uh, to the best of my ability. In my new role, I will continue to work closely with Sundar on strategic and global AGI matters and to advise Koray, Josh, and the GDM leads, uh, from our awesome new London Platform 37 offices. As part of this transition, I will also be leaning into my role at Isomorphic, where we are making, uh, extremely rapid and promising progress to accelerate our mission there even faster. As you have heard me say many times, I've always believed the number one application of AI should be to improve human health." That is a great message. Very different from the SpaceX S1. The number one application of AI is the power of the entire galaxy. I mean there's that but also just in the actual like application it's like, it's like enterprise workflows which is

Yeah, so now at least.

And so.

Some type of shakeup has been expected for a long time.

Uh, Google, the DeepMind organization has, you know, made some real contributions to the space but has been, uh, lagging. It's been a point of embarrassment for, I would say, for Google for, I would say, a year.

Uh, plus.

Uh, they've always felt behind, uh, even though they created so much of the fundamental research that is, uh, you know, gone into this entire chapter of the, uh, you know.

Certainly not behind on video. The video stuff's really good.

Yeah, sure.

3.

But then you get kind of tied up because the Chinese models are like, actually we will do Mickey Mouse.

Yeah, but here's the thing. At no point has Google been breaking out their true AI revenue in a way that gets shareholders excited.

Yeah.

And that's a good point.

What would.

Yeah. And there's just been so many, so many question marks. There was a moment, I mean,

Over a year ago, felt like Google had some real momentum.

And, uh, but, but that momentum was very much lost and so there's this question of.

Uh, you know, when Noam left, which was about a month ago.

Uh, that felt shock, that was like more shocking in some ways than even this. This feels like expected and then to leave what, what feels like a hole in the organization is, uh, pretty, pretty wild. Stock's down. It was down 5% around the open. Uh, it's, it's recovered a little bit, just down three and a half percent. Um, but I mean the big thing is like they just started, like Google as a company I don't think was able to be at least sufficiently AI'd, right? They started selling compute. A lot of researchers, I, I'm sure were frustrated with that and that could have, could have led to some of the historical.

Tyler over there thinks Nvidia shouldn't sell the chips if they're really AGI pilled. The much more extreme version of, of Google should keep the TPUs for themselves is, is Nvidia should keep the GPUs for themselves. Um, and yeah, I mean that was something that was, that was, you know, discussed as, okay, if, if, if you believe you're in the foothills of the singularity, you, you, you will want to scale your compute. If you're seeing traction in the, in the products that you're making, you, you want to be GPU rich. You don't want to be selling TPUs to other companies and so that's got to be, there's got to be some tension but Google's a big organization, there's multiple organizations within Google and they all have different, uh, different KPIs. So one team might say, "Yeah, my, my mandate is to sell as many of these as possible externally." Other people might say, "My job is to keep as many of these internally." And there's a lot of debates there. So,

We'll see.

Yeah. And, and obviously Google has made a, you know, massive bet on Anthropic and is, you know, becoming their largest financial backer, especially through some new reporting on, on, uh, some of the lease guarantees that they're doing.

Yeah.

Um, but, uh, but anyway, still so surprising. Google obviously one of the greatest companies of all time, has every possible advantage, uh, in this race and yet has just consistently struggled. Susan Jong, uh, who is currently on leave from DeepMind, um, posted a little, somewhat of a, a fable. Said, uh, "Backdrop kings all asleep slash on vacation while minions slave away. August 2024, first big fail. Fast forward January 2025, only competent VP bails after one terrorist lead demanding an even bigger slice of pie breaks the camel's back. Summer 2025, a year ago, second big fail and king of terrorists climbs the ranks above the slumbering execs."

This is a crazy.

Summer tweet.

"Summer 2026, slumbering execs and terrorists who only show up for successful announcements move on, leaving just the king of terrorists behind. Lessons: If you're high enough up there, you can pretty much be a terrorist and hold orgs hostage while continuing to ask for more and more and more until there's absolutely no more aura or gold left to plunder and then just move on to greener pastures to do it all over again."

Uh, and we'll leave it up to you.

Crazy, crazy post.

To try to figure out who's who in this story. I don't, doesn't strike me that, that Susan will be headed back to the company after, after this post.

Crazy, crazy.

Uh, she says, "I've been on leave since January. Got pretty burned out by certain people who just say yes to everything to avoid ever making a hard call." Yeah.

"And leave it all to the hungry minions to backstab each other until success finds a cursed hole to crawl out."

I mean, to be fair, I, I, I was looking at, uh, at Tyler's alt account and he, he talks about us like this all the time. He's always, he refers to you as the slumbering exec and me as the terrorist.

It's a, I mean I believe in free speech. I defend your right to say these things, Tyler. I am offended but, you know, you get.

No, it's a wild, wild thing.

One of the crazier.

Sub tweets from a big tech.

Yeah, but I, I don't know. I was, I was never sure that she worked there. It felt like it was maybe like an alt account and it was just like an anon. But it does seem like, I mean she's saying right here, I've been on leave from this organization. So I don't know. Uh, and somebody calls her the Homer of our times. Uh, well, it's certainly well written, certainly entertaining. Uh, another interesting like wrinkle here is, um, if you look at what Demis was talking about, writing about just a few weeks ago, um, it wasn't as much focused on the Isomorphic, uh, scientific advancements. I know he's super deep in that and that's what he's, he's said he's been focusing on and I love that message. Uh, he says it's time for AI to prove its unequivocal value in the world. Uh, and what better way to demonstrate that than, than to help finally cure diseases like cancer. 100% agree, 100% agree that if, if you get a new cure for cancer, you save someone's life and they can go and say, yes, I, I, I took the new cancer cure and I was cured, AI is doing its job. A lot of people will be very happy about that, perfect. But that's not what Demis was writing about a couple weeks ago. Uh, the last substantial piece that Demis put out was called "The Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age," in which he argues for a frontier AI standards body that evaluates frontier models before they're released for risks associated with superintelligence. Uh, it's at the very least not crazy to assume that Demis' new role at Alphabet is maybe related to what he's advocating for in this essay. Uh, there's been a lot of back and forth in Washington about the interpretation of that essay and a lot of AI researchers have stepped up and said like, "Yeah, we basically agree with this. This framework seems pretty good. It includes open source models in there."

Yeah. Demis could be an amazing candidate as, as somebody to lead a new regulatory body.

Lead America as the president, you think he's running?

Not quite, but.

I think we got to get a researcher in there at this point.

Be great.

Yeah, I mean the big, the big question now is, is.

Are you voting? Are you voting?

I'd vote for Jeff Dean.

You know what I'm talking about.

Um, no, so big question now. So Jeff Dean is out, Noam Shazeer is out, Demis is out. Who is going to fill that void from a leadership standpoint? How are they going to be, how are they going to be able to recruit the best researchers in the world?

Uh, that's a big question mark, right? And so it does feel like.

Uh, sounds like Google's investing in Discovery Loop, Jeff Dean's new company. Very excited to see what they do. Um, but, uh, I wouldn't be surprised to see Google just shift into more of an Nvidia style role as like a capital partner to a number of other labs as they, you know, continue to fall. It's, it's, it's maybe more of like an Amazon and Microsoft role where you have a great business, you're also great at building infrastructure, you also have a semiconductor team and a chip team and you can play up and down the stack, but maybe you're not as, as focused on this like full stack straight shot thing and you're partnering with other labs on, on different pieces of the puzzle. Um, it'll be interesting to see where everything goes. Um, Discovery Loop, the mission over at Jeff Dean's new company: "Our mission is straightforward. We are building AI solutions that can automatically solve important problems in machine learning, science, and engineering."

Yeah, there we go. "By advancing the pace at which we conduct engineering and scientific discovery, we can bring the benefits of science and technology to the world much faster. Ultimately, our goal is to build AI systems that act as a deeply positive, empowering force for humanity, delivering technology solutions that improve people's lives on a global scale." Uh, good, good mission, fully support it. Excited to see what they launch. Also, fun handle, Discovery Loop. You can follow them on Disco Loop AI. Disco.

I like it. I like dis, I, you know, you don't think about disco and discovery having the same root. When I think disco, I think, you know, 70s disco dancing.

I think panicking.

Panicking.

Panic! At The Disco.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. For sure.

Panic.

Anyway,

Panic! At The Disco. Uh, disco is short and formed of discotheque, a French term that originally meant a library of phonograph records.

So that's just, uh, etymologically not that related to.

Not that related.

I mean yeah, maybe if you go far back now, but.

Interesting. Okay, well let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Tano Bruss says, "Demis is ousted as DeepMind CEO and Jeff Dean and Sanjay are leaving Google to start a new lab. They're all being very careful to frame these as positive shifts, but there's no way in heck Demis would have accepted this willingly, and there's no way Sundar happily accepted Jeff doing this as a totally independent new public benefit corporation rather than a bet under Alphabet. Tough to see an interpretation other than Jeff losing confidence and working on AGI under Google. Very bad."

We need a Sebastian Mallaby sequel. We need a sequel.

Overall.

I would love for him to write a, uh, a sequel to just, and even zoom out and look at the, the, the AGI wars generally like he did in The Power Law about the early venture capital firms and how they all formed and battled each other. Uh, that would be great. Anyway,

Rohan Anil over at Core Automation says, "Pour one out for the big G. It's so over."

Um, we did have a funny, uh.

Brutal.

Funny moment with, uh, Google AI Overviews, uh, yes, uh, a couple days ago where, uh, it said that one of our friends, yeah,

Was married to another of our friends' wife.

Yes.

And it was quite confident in that.

It was.

And I have no idea how, how it even thought of that.

Yeah. I think it was because they did a podcast together or something like that. Like they were linked in a blog post together, something like.

Doing a podcast together.

She wrote about him or something or wrote a profile and it just like put the names together. Uh, very odd. Um, yeah, I don't know. Uh, yeah, you have to wonder what it takes to get AI Overviews into like a reasoning mode that can actually do the fact-checking so the hallucinations die down because.

Well, yeah. And they have to figure out a way to make that process so inexpensive because they're serving it.

Billions. Yeah.

Billions and billions of.

Times. You know, that, that feels like more of an engineering problem that feels like very solvable. It feels like they're on the right track there. So, um, anyway, the excerpt from the Wall Street Journal article published this morning on Jeff Dean's departure: "We wanted to build something differently than how things are built at Google right now. Google's infrastructure has very different requirements than the type of infrastructure we want to build for research." Sounds like they want a more flexible kind of infrastructure, kind of like the infrastructure Nvidia provides, Nick Dorsey says over at Midnight Capital. Um, interesting. Um, I wonder, I wonder what they will do. Of course, I mean, they have to have access to whatever chips they want. Um, they can't be completely locked in. Anyway,

Nathan Lambert says, "Major restructuring at Gemini will be studied forever as the incumbent with all the advantages not being able to get going."

They got going. This is, this is not correct. They completely got going. They got going, but they certainly didn't build, uh, real momentum.

Yeah.

Uh, and then he says, "PS, OpenAI accomplished their original goal."

PS of the century.

But yeah, the backstory is that a lot of the initial energy around OpenAI was a concern that, uh, Google would control AGI and a fear from, from the various, uh, early participants.

Around that scenario.

Yeah. Uh, interesting. Oh, well, yeah. Um, New York Times has some nice photos. Mike Isaac, New York Times has really been on a run with the, with the, with the photo, the photo archive. They did a whole photo shoot with Leopold Aschenbrenner sat on it and then the hedge fund blew up and then they were able to trickle these out. Uh, it's, uh, it's, it's true, uh, true excellence over there in that.

Well, let's switch over to some more exciting and positive news.

Figma agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Uh,

And almost even more positive news, the moment you've all been waiting for. CarPlay is coming to pontoon boats.

Let's go. Finally,

Finally, finally, finally.

Have you ever been on a pontoon boat?

Yes.

Explain what, what context were you on a pontoon boat. What does a pontoon boat even look like? This is a terrible thing.

It's for cruising. It's for cruising. Team, pull up a pontoon boat.

It's not, it's not like a monohull, but it's not a catamaran.

It's something between like a.

Cigarette boat and a houseboat.

Okay. That's a really wide gap.

Well, it's right in the middle.

Okay.

Um, no, you just kind of putts around.

MasterCraft Boat Holdings today said it's adding CarPlay to its upcoming Crest and Biscayne pontoons. Uh, the company is working with Savvy Navvy to bring CarPlay and on-water navigation to boaters.

And, uh, MasterCraft Boat Holdings Inc., of course, a public company experiencing a god candle, up 72%.

Up 18, 18 cents.

Wait, this is cool. This is very cool.

See?

Yeah. This is a double-decker.

Double-decker. See, out in California, we don't, we don't know anything about these pontoon boats cuz these don't work at the beach, right?

Correct. Uh, but I, I was sort of correct. Somewhere in between a houseboat and.

Aren't you from the land of a thousand lakes? Right. Michigan. Isn't that the land of a thousand lakes?

No. Me? Minnesota.

Oh. Oh, you're from, okay. Are, are you a pontoon boat guy?

Pontoon boats are huge in Minnesota. Okay.

Yeah.

How many.

They're for lakes.

They're for lakes, basically. How many hours have you spent on pontoon boats in your life?

10,000.

10,000 hours. I'm an expert.

The man put in life's work on the pontoon boat, apparently.

Just.

You're in the wrong job, buddy.

I think, I think you got to become a pontoon boat.

It is crazy to think in another life, Ben could have been the top pontoon boat salesman in the entire world. Hey, this one comes with Apple CarPlay. Uh, they don't, they need to call it BoatPlay at this point. They got to come with something else. CarPlay. Um, but they're doing navigation, on-water navigation like this.

Um, okay,

Moving over to.

Okay, we got.

What is the story of the day in technology?

Yes,

This is the story of the day.

Okay,

Hit us, John. You know what I'm talking about.

Startup billionaire sued over super yacht broker fee. Everyone's talking about this. This is potentially bigger than what's going on at Google today. Uh, in London, the billionaire founder of one of the world's most valuable startups recently bought a super yacht valued at an estimated $400 million.

Yeah.

Continue. Uh, replete with a glass-bottomed swimming pool and a helipad. Do they make, wait, do they make super pontoon boats? Can you get a $400 million pontoon boat? What does that do for you if you.

Almost certainly.

Can you imagine just a, a 300-foot?

The world will create infinite ways to, to make you part with your, your hard-earned money.

Yeah. Uh, and, and I'm sure we could arrange a, a almost half a billion dollar pontoon boat.

Team AI images. I want to see what $400 million gets me if I'm going all in on a pontoon boat. Want to really dominate Lake Michigan? Is Lake Michigan too big for a pontoon boat?

No.

Because you said lakes. So any lake it works?

Yeah. I, I think the pontoon boat is not for like big waves. You can't, it can't be like.

But there's not big waves on, on, uh, on Lake Michigan. You can't surf or anything.

I guess there's no.

I don't think so.

Surf. Yeah. Anyway, so, uh, it was a $400 million super yacht. It had a glass-bottomed swimming pool and a helipad. There was just one problem. According to this reporting in the Wall Street Journal, he didn't pay the broker's fee. That is according to a top luxury yacht broker who is now suing Nikolay Storonsky, a co-founder and chief executive of digital banking giant Revolut, alleging the entrepreneur went behind their back to avoid paying commission on a purchase they had worked on. Cecil Wright and Partners, a luxury yacht broker, uh, filed the legal action in London's High Court over Storonsky's acquisition of Nixie, a 335-foot vessel with four terraces. The broker alleged in a court filing that it was negotiating the purchase for Storonsky when his team secretly contacted the yacht seller directly and agreed to buy the boat, avoiding roughly $20 million in standard commission, the amount the dealer now claims it is owed. In January, Storonsky's team allegedly told Cecil Wright to hold off. Let's see. I'm not going to flip through this. Um, that's to hold off. Uh, hold off on contacting the vessel seller, Canadian billionaire and former hockey player Patrick Desmarais, uh, and said they would talk again the following week, according to the filing. The filing claims that by next week, Storonsky's team had already arranged to buy the boat directly from Desmarais, uh, bypassing the broker entirely. It was Cecil Wright that brought the yacht to Storonsky's attention and introduced the Revolut co-founder and the owner.

Matt Young says, "Unbelievable taking food off the table of that luxury yacht broker's family."

Uh, a spokesman for the Storonsky family office said, "We are aware of the claim. It is without merit and it will be defended." He says he's not guilty. Nixie features a private wellness spa, indoor and outdoor cinemas, two movie theaters. Now we were talking. As well as a Japanese teppanyaki grill, according to Boat International, a.

Pull up this picture that Tyler just shared. I think this is what Nixie looks like.

Yeah, let's see it. Uh, when chartered, is equipped with a variety of water toys, including a luxury Seabob water sled and inflatable blob launchers. Is this the pontoon boat? The luxury pontoon boat?

Oh, sorry. That's, that's the, the $400 million pontoon boat that Tyler just generated.

That's pretty good. I like it. I like it. That just looks like a normal yacht. That doesn't, that doesn't actually look that crazy to me. I don't know. Uh, Storonsky is one of Europe's highest-profile startup founders. Founded in 2015, Revolut is now the world region's most valuable startup with a recent share value, uh, share sale valuing the digital bank at $115 billion. Wow, Revolut, what a tear. Uh, originally built around low-fee foreign currency transactions, Revolut is widely used by international travelers and migrants sending remittances home. The company gained a full UK banking license in March after a lengthy battle. Wow. It took them over a decade to get a banking license. That is crazy. But they did it after a lengthy battle. Now they're looking to expand into the United States, having recently applied for a national banking charter. It's crazy. It's crazy that they can't go faster. Like Arvest got a charter so fast and then there's been other, there's been other companies that have explored like buying a regional bank and then using that charter. Why?

It's almost certainly part of why Revolut is now such a massive company because they don't have infinite competition in the way that.

True.

Many, many banks and neobanks have here in the US.

Earlier this year, Revolut reported record annual profits and a jump in its customer numbers. At the same time, uh, Revolut said it remained focused on its goal of increasing its customer base to 100 million users by mid-2027 from more than 70 million currently. Well, good luck in the luxury yacht battle. Hopefully, everyone gets what they're owed and everyone is compensated fairly. Hate to see people fighting over that. Uh, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Uh, AI's great reverse bank run. In today's newsletter, Joe Weisenthal wrote about Leopold's Basilisk and what makes this particular mania feel distinct. People are betting on left-tail outcomes without sacrificing the right tail of financial opportunities. Doomers are getting fabulously wealthy. Let's see what he's saying. Here's the deal. Historically, if you want to cut off your left tail, you also have to cut off your right tail. Or to put it more specifically, uh, if you are up big on a stock position, you want to hedge your gains by buying puts, you can do that. But if you want to maintain your puts over time, you spend a lot of money and erase any upside gains that you might otherwise be making. Or you can, or to put it even more generally, suppose you're afraid of the outbreak of war. Well, you can move to a rural farm and grow your own food, but then you miss out on the economic opportunities afforded by living in the city. People make these kinds of trade-offs all the time depending on what's worrying them. Pin that thought for just a second. One of the big questions with AI is whether it's just another technology or whether it somehow will be different this time. Is it purchasable intelligence kind of like purchasable electricity or is it something more like a sci-fi novel where humans get replaced or eliminated in some way? As businesses, the big American companies selling AI mostly operate as if AI is just another technology to be developed and solved. But we know that there's deep anxiety within the companies themselves that AI could play out in the way sci-fi novels have expected for decades. And this sometimes is reflected in their governance structures. Here's one stylized fact though that might argue for the "it's different" camp. If you are one of those people who's been reading AI philosophers and message boards for the last decade, familiar with paperclip maximizers since long before ChatGPT came out, you might have deep existential fears about something bad happening right around the corner. You might also have ended up very, very rich. With AI, there has been no trade-off. The doomers who were early on accumulating GPUs or better yet shares in GPU companies have done extremely well. The put option on humanity has become the call option on the technology. You could bet on the left-tail outcome, not sacrifice anything financially. We've maybe had some shades of this before. For a while, Bitcoin was or had been characterized as an end-of-the-world hedge, a form of money for when the nation state collapsed, and people made a lot of money on that bet. But a trader wasn't driven by the fear that Bitcoin was a world destroyer. Or take gold. Betting on gold at certain times protected you against hyperinflation. But the fear that came with the bet did not entail gold being the catalyst for doom. Something else would be the catalyst, but you would be protected. AI is different. The long-feared catalyst for doom itself has presented an unbelievably profitable trade, at least so far. What's interesting about this is that, uh, he's sort of, he's saying like the doomers got rich. Uh, there are plenty of AI doomers who, uh, did not join AI labs, did not participate financially, worked in nonprofits, just wrote books, worked on research, did not ever join anything that had economic upside. But I take his point that in general, if you were early to this, oh wow, like things are going to get weird, you probably were earlier on the train. And a lot of those people that were talking about AI and doom scenarios did wind up working at labs that did very well. So, uh, it's a good point, but there are some people that, that don't fall in this category. Um, long before we had the transformer architecture of GPT, people have been characterizing, theorizing about the risks of AI doom. One popular thought experiment is Roko's Basilisk, a 2010 thought experiment. Wow. When was the last time we got a new thought experiment? I didn't know they were dropping new ones in 2010. That seems kind of recent. Maybe there's like, I don't know. Someone should come up with a new thought experiment. What's the most recent thought experiment that's really taken hold and been thought-provoking?

Golden retriever mode.

That's not a thought experiment. That's an axiom. That's a, that's a lifestyle. A thought experiment is almost like a paradox. Something you can wrestle with. We got to come up with some new.

I've been wrestling with golden retriever mode.

You think it's a thought experiment?

I think you can make it one. I don't, I don't think it falls in the bucket of thought experiment. What do you think, Ty? No. What are you guys laughing at? Are you doing more, more pontoon boats?

Crazy text. I'm trying to find the most recently created thought.

Okay, Jackson, you are correct. Yes, that is the most recent thought experiment. Uh, good stuff. Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Uh, that's, that's very funny. Okay, wait. Quick, we got to switch gears because the price of lab monkeys in China is soaring as demand for preclinical testing outpaces supply. The price of lab monkeys in China is soaring as demand for preclinical testing outpaces supply. Do you think it's time to ape in?

Do you think it's time to ape strong together?

Yeah. Yeah. Go long the monkey trade. Uh, so this is the actual news. We got monkeys up here. There we go. Uh, in.

The first picture was crazy. It really sat.

Yep. Uh, but it is happening and it is interesting because, uh, it tells you a lot about what's going on in drug testing, animal rights obviously, uh, and also just, uh, the, the broader economic market. So in June, a Chinese state laboratory paid roughly $26,000 per monkey for a purchase of 40 animals, nearly double what similar animals cost a year earlier. The price has doubled in the last year of monkeys. Um, biotech executives say the same trend is showing up across the industry driven by a wave of new biologic medicines and next-generation therapies that require far more primate testing than existing breeding capacity can currently support. Uh, the shortage could become a bottleneck for China's rapid drug development ecosystem because many experimental medicines must still undergo studies in nonhuman primates before regulators will allow them to advance. While regulated monkey farms have maintained relatively steady production, demand has accelerated much faster than supply. A similar imbalance emerged during the COVID pandemic when vaccine development sent prices sharply higher. But this time the pressure reflects Chinese, uh, China's emergence as one of the leading centers for innovative drug discovery. The country now generates a third of the global pipeline of novel medicines and has become a major destination for clinical trials and licensing deals with US and European pharmaceutical companies. So monkeys remain essential for making many preclinical studies because their biology closely resembles that of humans. We know it, the monkey, uh, is, has remarkable resemblance to our particular makeup.

Yeah.

But broadly.

Many people have said we have the mind.

Yes. Yes. So if they're working on a brain, well typically they would test on a golden retriever, but yes, um, so this makes them one of the best available models for evaluating a drug's safety, how it moves through the body, its effects on different organs, and the potential for serious toxic side effects.

before human trials begin. While a shortage may slow some research programs, it's also a sign of an unprecedented surge in investment in innovation aimed at developing new potentially life-saving treatments.

Tom in the X chat, how long would it take infinite monkeys to make a one monkey billion dollar company?

Yeah, wait. Yeah, that is an important question.

That's a good thought experiment. How long would it take infinite monkeys to make a one monkey billion dollar company? There is a... that's a new paradox there.

So, there is a thought experiment related to this. It's the infinite monkey theorem. This is a real thing. It states that a monkey pressing keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite time will almost surely type any given text, deeply relevant to LLMs.

Are there any... Okay, get the tinfoil hat.

What do you think's going on? Is it possible that our modern AI systems are monkeys just clacking a bunch of keys and that's... this is just an AI bottleneck.

Yeah. You think that when you go to ChatGPT it's secretly a monkey on the other side.

Yeah. That it's not a computer.

Yeah. No one really goes in the data centers. Could just be a bunch of monkeys and computers. You don't know.

Bunch of monkeys and bananas.

You don't know. Okay. Well, there's also news somewhat related. Are there monkeys in the Amazon rainforest? Almost certainly, right? Almost certainly.

Jack in the YouTube chat says, 'How long until monkey see?'

What about monkey do?

There's over 50 to 100 species of monkey in the Amazon rainforest.

Okay. Well, a new lidar survey of the Amazon rainforest has uncovered evidence of a previously unknown civilization that may have supported as many as three million people, challenging decades of assumptions about the region's ancient history. So, we talked to a friend of the show who was doing this, scanning the rainforest with lidar, putting new sensor stacks on helicopters, flying them around on planes. But there's new evidence here. So, using laser scanning technology capable of penetrating the dense forest canopy, researchers mapped more than 4,500 square kilometers of Brazil's Acre state after flying over 4,400 km of rainforest. The survey, which was published in Nature, identified 396 previously unknown geoglyphs, massive geometric earthworks made from deep ditches and raised embankments. The discoveries have provided the clearest picture yet of the Aury civilization, which is believed to have emerged around 500 BCE and flourished until roughly 850 CE. Rather than serving as permanent settlements, the earthworks appear to have functioned as ceremonial and civic centers where people gathered for rituals, political meetings, and other communal events while living in nearby multifamily longhouses and cultivating crops such as corn and squash. Based on the number of earthworks and the labor required to build and maintain them, the researchers estimate that the civilization's population peaked somewhere between 1.25 million and 3 million people. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that the ancient Amazon was home to large interconnected societies with engineered landscapes, not just small isolated villages, as many archaeologists once believed. Even more remarkably, the surveyed area alone contains roughly as many earthworks as earlier estimates suggested existed across the entire Amazon basin. If future lidar surveys uncover similar densities elsewhere, scientists may have to dramatically revise estimates of how many people once lived in the rainforest. Archaeologists still do not know why the civilization disappeared, though the abandonment of these ceremonial centers between 850 and 950 CE coincides with the decline of several other major societies in the Americas, including the Maya. Very interesting.

I wonder where else people can scan with lidar, find interesting things. Gotta go to Antarctica or something. I don't know. Well, in other news, Gwern is retiring from writing to start a company. Gwern is the anonymous online writer. Is it gwern.net? Fantastic blog. He's done, I believe, only one podcast in history with Darknet Diaries where he was anonymous. They used like a 3D rendered version of him, a voice changer to keep him anonymous. This is the website of Gwern Branwen. He writes about AI, psychology, statistics. He also is... I mean, he's written about self-experimentation, Bitcoin, all sorts of different stuff. He wrote an amazing piece about nicotine and all the deep dive there. It was very fascinating, very formative when I was starting my nicotine company. It's very interesting. But he's starting a new company. So let's dig into what he wrote. Let's see. Can I pull this up? Where is it? I lost it. Gwern. Gwern. He has a locked account. So, you got to go request to follow and then... Damn it. Timeline app. Open it back up. Where is it? Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Gwern. Okay. He's retiring from writing to start a company. The company's first product is for writing. His design goal is a 100x increase in productivity. What would it take for an AI to make me 100x more productive as a writer or thinker? Why 100x specifically? He says, 'Because two exaflops is enough to hope to keep up for a while. And this goal will shatter ineffective band-aid style short-term design proposals. But it doesn't require solving the AI alignment problem or value extrapolation. We do not need to be able to oversee millions of superintelligent AIs working autonomously for subjective millennia, which is good because an AI can probably not do that.' What would that look like for me? Roughly, I think it would look like an AI enabling me to produce one to three worthwhile writings a day which are 100% written by it without loss of quality.

Very interesting. I've heard enough. 100 million. Give them a million dollars.

Yeah. No, I agree. It is interesting that, you know, we've been going back and forth on, you know, is writing verifiable? I think it's a little less verifiable. But, you know, with feedback and different algorithms you can get there, but it just feels like the progress in mathematics is accelerating faster than the progress in writing.

Yes. And also, I mean, in this scenario it's like maybe it's easier to train a model to write like one specific person. To write good generally, that's like much more amorphous. What does it mean to write well versus, oh, this is in the style of a particular person, this is how they would think.

It also feels like there needs to be a sort of like a whole agent harness or workflow because writing is not just the last step of instantiating the words. It's all the research that goes into it, all the different references, all the different links and things, and the way he will put together arguments, the way he structures these things. All of that is part of the writing process. Even just narrowing down, you know, is this an essay or is this a shorter post, longer post, all these different decisions, they can probably be built into a system, but it will take time. So, that's what he's working on. Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And we have the perfect guest to talk about Shopify because we have Harley Finkelstein, the president of Shopify, here with us in the TVN Ultra. Welcome back to the show, Harley. Congratulations. What a quarter. Insane stock chart. Take us through it. What's going on at Shopify?

Okay. So, yesterday we had the most feared lawyer in the world on our show, John Quinn. He was talking about a sort of current lawsuit between Amazon and Perplexity. Amazon sued Perplexity because Perplexity's bot was going onto Amazon.com finding listings for users, which I think is something that a lot of people want. But Amazon is not excited about that because they have a big ads business and if bots are crawling all over, they can't really serve or they don't have a way to serve ads to bots in an effective way.

It feels yesterday I think there was some type of action by the judge. I forget the technical term for it, but the judge is... I don't think the case is fully decided yet, but the judge is effectively saying like an agent acting on the user's behalf to do something on a website is wildly different than just general... like basically the way that we would historically view bots where like a company could say like we don't want your bots on our website, but we're entering into this new paradigm. It does feel like Shopify is in a really great position here because you guys aren't trying to monetize eyeballs in the same way and you're not trying to monetize that demand. You're just trying to get merchants in the position to sell a lot more products. And so how do you see this sort of struggle evolving on a more global level between consumers which want to use agents to buy products all over the internet and these sort of big platforms and legacy shopping platforms that want to, you know, control attention on their websites?

I have like five of them. They're amazing.

Because AI is still a little slow. There's a little bit of a cost to going down the agentic search path. I would expect, I have been expecting that we will see disproportionate agentic purchases for higher-ticket items, more considered purchases. So, you're doing research on a car. Yeah, go let 5.6 Pro cook on all your features and figure out everything, but you're ordering just another, you know, soda. You're not going to go down the agentic system for that at least in the short term. Are you seeing any of that? Do you expect that to be a factor?

Yeah. The other thing I've been doing, I think you maybe discount consumers' willingness to wait or do things in order to save money, right? This is not... you don't strike me as the kind of guy that ever was doing like credit card point maximization or like chasing coupon codes around the internet, but a lot of people are. And a lot of people want to buy something and then they're thinking, okay, how can I get the best price on this? I saw a pair of sneakers a couple days ago that I really liked.

I found them for sale and I just took a screenshot of the product page and I said, 'Find me this sneaker in my size at the best price.'

And what was interesting is it actually took me to StockX and it was like, 'Hey, by the way, this is selling for below retail on StockX, so you should just get it here.' And I ended up buying it there. And so that even though that was like... probably took, you know, 30 seconds... like 30 seconds to save 50 bucks, a pretty good trade.

Yeah. I mean especially if you have some sort of like reminder like, hey, these are the sneakers I want. They're a little too expensive for me right now. I would love you to let me know if something else comes up. And now it basically runs a query, you know, every couple of days to see whether or not it's being discounted as well. So even though that's not a deep research product, you actually are doing deep research on the pricing of it as well.

Yeah. So, like break that down more for someone who's actually running a Shopify store today. How close are we to the world where you show up, you have a budget, and Shopify can sort of agentically for me take a budget and spread it across Facebook and AppLovin and Google ads and load balance everything? The stuff that, you know, you wind up hiring an agency for sometimes and then maybe they get a little checked out, then you hire a person and it becomes a job. And a lot of small merchants might not have that capacity, but there's money... you're picking up pennies off the floor if you're doing it properly.

It's great. What a great time to start a company. In two minutes, I want you to talk about the year 2035. And let's assume that you have a widespread use of robotics that can make anything that you could possibly imagine spread out all over the world that can make custom products or one-off products or small batches of products. I have so many different products like in my camera roll that I just made with ChatGPT images and I would love to be able to make like just five of them or 10 of them or make one for myself and throw up a product listing, right? It could be something like sculptural or a piece of furniture or even something in consumer packaged goods. And I personally have a theory that as robotics bring down the cost of making anything, that there's so many people on the planet that have ideas that would create a Shopify store and if they could make, you know, 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 of products really easily, they would become, you know, basically entrepreneurs overnight. You just about reducing that friction all the way. So like 30 years ago it was quite a bit harder to sell products online. It was possible, but again, it was like clunky. Now, it's easy to sell products online. It's still incredibly hard to make high-quality products, especially as somebody that's a new entrepreneur that doesn't have a lot of capital. So, how are you thinking about the year 2035 assuming, you know, a takeoff in robotics? Can you guys pull up Gamerstown? Gamer... like the gamer... like someone who's a gamer... TN?

This is very cool. Is this on Shopify?

I'm getting a full Counter-Strike costume for sure. And this site is amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Always a fantastic chat, Harley, and congratulations. What a quarter. Great stuff.

Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Our next guest is John Giamatteo from BlackBerry. He is the CEO and we're very excited to talk to him because BlackBerry has evolved many times. And the company's been on a fantastic run. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself? And I want to sort of set the table on the shape of the business now for anyone who's been living under a data center and doesn't understand the current shape of the business.

Terrific. Hey, thanks for having me on the program, guys. It's an honor to come out and talk a little bit about BlackBerry, a 42-year-old iconic Canadian company. That's right. A lot of deep roots in technology and a lot of different transformations over those 42 years. You know, so many people know us from the old smartphone days and the devices, but our transformation and pivot into embedded software, and we could talk a lot more about that and the things that we're powering around the world, and secure communications where we provide mission-critical communication capabilities. That's really what the new BlackBerry is all about, those two categories in terms of serving the market.

Yeah. On automotive software obviously it's a very high stakes, in some cases life and death scenario based on the security of that software. At the same time the theme of 2026 has been cybersecurity with advanced AI models showing really powerful capabilities there. What have automotive leaders been coming to you to solve? How are they thinking about solving the problem of keeping automotive software secure in the modern era?

Yeah, great question. Especially now as there's so much more technology going into the vehicles than ever before, the need for a rock-solid mission-critical secure operating system. And when you think about BlackBerry and our QNX platform, think of it really as the operating system of the car, the Windows of the car. The way Windows is to the PCs around the world, the QNX operating system is really the operating system that powers all things that go on in the car, particularly on safety-critical types of functionalities from digital cockpit to ADAS to body control. All of these different domains of technology that goes into the car and the CPUs that power them run on top of a BlackBerry operating system. So, we're proud to be powering over 275 million cars around the world today and growing millions over the years. And we got a tremendous amount of progress all around the world in Germany, Japan, Korea, obviously here in North America. China is one of our fastest growing segments. So, a lot of exciting things as more technology gets introduced to the vehicle.

How has you as a CEO been grappling with this sort of story of token maxing? You get these new models. They're incredibly powerful. You have the opportunity to deploy them across the entire workforce, rewrite every line of code if you want. At the same time, this comes with a cost. You have a serious business to run with a bottom line to manage. How have you been deploying AI internally in a way that maintains safety and security but also doesn't balloon cost but does drive efficiency?

Yeah, great question. And that's something we think about every single day. The way I would describe it, we're pretty pragmatic about AI and how we use it because, like you said, the applications in the car... failure is not an option in a vehicle. So we've got to be really careful about how widely we deploy AI as we build and enhance our existing operating systems and new products. So, you know, one of the things that's in our industry, you have to meet the highest levels of certifications and in the car industry there's a particular certification of ISO 26262, a very high standard. You can't even think about being deployed into a vehicle unless you meet that. And for an AI agent to try to meet that type of standard, it's a non-trivial type of exercise. So, we are thoughtful about it. We deploy AI to help us maybe test our products. We deploy it to help service our customers. We deploy it in our go-to-market activities. But in the actual core development, the code that goes in it, we're very thoughtful and limited about because of those certifications and the importance of it.

BlackBerry's been on such a fascinating historical journey. What is the area or cultural value or discipline or source center of excellence that you think has remained the most true throughout all of that? What is the narrative arc that actually brings coherence to a company that's operated in multiple markets over multiple decades?

Yeah. That's, you know, for a 42-year-old company that has evolved in so many different ways, you know what I always tell people, BlackBerry has always been about security, trust, and innovation. And even though the products and services that we sell to our customers today can't be held in the palm of your hands the way they might have been with a device, that security, trust, and innovation of everything that we do, from the products that we deploy to the services that we provide to the support that we provide governments around the world, you know, eight out of the top 10 G10 countries around the world are still deploying BlackBerry's secure communications capabilities for mission-critical types of applications. So if it needs to be safe, secure, and certified, that's really our value proposition. Our 2,000-plus employees and contractors around the world, our big hubs in Ottawa and Waterloo, Canada, is where a lot of this technology gets developed. That's the pride of what we stand for and those are the values of what we stand for in terms of security, trust, and innovation.

So I imagine that although different technological solutions, different products have evolved, there's always been a really solid operating bar for building trust with customers, go-to-market sales, actually partnering really deeply with the companies that you work with. How has that informed your M&A strategy going forward? Do you have a particular philosophy of how you can bring a new product or company into the fold successfully?

Yeah. Well, one of the things we do now that I don't know if we did it to a degree in the past, but I think we've really doubled down on it over the last few years, is we really work very closely with the ecosystem to bring a lot of this capability to the market. So for instance, our biggest partners in the automotive sector, Nvidia, Qualcomm, ARM, Texas Instruments, Intel, big tier-one operators like Bosch take our technology, integrate it into their solution and deliver it to their customer. So whether it's the chip makers, the operating system maker like us, tier-one providers or the end customer like the auto manufacturer, having a comprehensive ecosystem approach has really been the way that we've gone about it. So when we think about M&A, we look at what piece of the puzzle might we be missing and we kind of put it through that filter. But I got to be honest with you, right now with the organic growth that we're seeing, the opportunities in physical AI with robots and medical instruments, there's a lot of organic runway for us to enjoy. So from an M&A perspective, if it fills a gap, if it helps us accelerate a certain category, I think we'll absolutely think about it. But right now, you know, the runway that we have, we have a $950 million backlog in our QNX operating system that's going to be deployed over the next five to seven years. So these are the types of things we think about when we think about M&A.

Jordi, I want you to make a guess for us considering how embedded BlackBerry is with automotive manufacturers and other suppliers. At what point do you think that every auto manufacturer in the United States that sells, let's say, more than 5,000 cars will have a functioning autopilot out of the box in every single one of their vehicles? What year?

Interesting. You know, there's 90 million cars made a year. 75% of those cars have basic fundamental technology like the media type of software that operates. 25% have more advanced technology along the lines of what I talked about. So, taking it to the next level around an autopilot and autonomous applications, I think that's well into the next decade of the 2030s. Early innings. There's a lot more technology going on and we'll see more and more of it get deployed, but I do think it's a little bit more of a journey than an instant thing that we're going to see in the next, you know, 18 to 24 months.

Yeah. No, that's what I was... my estimate would be 2035.

Yeah. What are you seeing on the industrial automation side, the industrial either robotics or just industrial equipment side? I mean, we've seen Caterpillar is doing really well. And it just feels like America is starting to reindustrialize. There's reshoring. There's also the data center buildout, the AI buildout. There's just more construction happening. It feels like... is that showing up in your business? Are you seeing that with your partners? What is the nature of the changing landscape of industrial autonomy?

Yeah, absolutely. It's the general embedded space for us which includes things like industrial automation, robotics, medical instrumentation, surgical robotic arms that go on in the operating rooms today. These are all... while we've got a great footprint and presence and growth trajectory on the automotive side, these other use cases around robotics. So for instance, AMR, rather, automated mobile robots, things that are... these are robots that are doing pick, pack, and ship in big scale manufacturing. Those are applications that would need a QNX operating system based on the precision and the safety levels of things required. So it's the fastest growing segment. It's our fastest growing pipeline. And we think it's going to help us fuel that next generation of growth here at BlackBerry.

Last question and we'll let you get back to your busy day. I'm interested to know how you've processed the story of Palantir's forward-deployed engineering strategy. This in some ways has always existed. There's always been deep partnerships with enterprise companies where employees of one company might be embedded in another.

organization as they're deploying a piece of software. Palantir took it sort of to the extreme. How have you thought about deeply integrating your actual workforce and solutions engineering into the companies that you're working with?

I love this made in Canada. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on all the recent success. Really impressive and really appreciate the time chatting with you. Have a great day.

We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Goodbye.

Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless realtime experiences and new value with Cisco.

Missed an opportunity to pitch John on rebranding back to Research in Motion.

Oh yeah.

Because that is one of the best names in history. It is. And it feels even more fitting for the current business.

Maybe. Maybe. But yeah, everyone knows BlackBerry.

David in the chat wanted to ask, 'Has BlackBerry thought of renaming their company? It's now B2B, a totally different offering than what people...'

I do think the current name probably holds them back.

Really? I think it accelerates them a ton because even though BlackBerry was popular in consumer, in enterprise it was known as a much deeper solution that you would buy and deploy across like your entire organization. But I would say that like the next generation of enterprise buyers associate the BlackBerry name with just losing smart market.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Oh well.

Well, our next guest is in the waiting room already. We have Jeremy Allaire from Circle. He's been on the show before and he's back in the TV van Ultra. How you doing, Jeremy?

Great. Great to see you. Absolutely.

Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Give us the update on Circle. Give us the update on stablecoins broadly. I want to go into sort of the knock-on effects, how the AI era is helping. But let's start with the state of the business.

Yeah, absolutely. We reported our Q2 earnings today. I won't go through like all the numbers, but I think you know one of the things I talked about at the beginning of that is like we're going through a pretty interesting moment right now and that's really being driven by the fact that stablecoins are now becoming part of the actual dollar financial system. So the Genius Act passed, this new law going into effect, and really the big trend that we're seeing is that you know all of the traditional players in the financial system from the big technology companies to the payment companies to financial infrastructure companies, they're all starting to build on this. And so we're really poised obviously for that moment. USDC is today like overwhelmingly the most widely used regulated digital dollar in the world. Visa reported at the end of June 70% of real world stablecoin transactions happening with USDC. We saw record numbers in terms of minting and redemption of USDC. And so it's you know sort of the backdrop is like stablecoins are working their way into kind of everything and at the beginning of next year it's sort of officially part of the financial system. So, you know, that's been going on. And I think the other big shift that's been happening, and we talked about this earlier as well, is that we're kind of exiting the, you know, what I like to think of as like the speculative phase of crypto, and we're moving into like a more mainstream phase. And actually, there's a tipping point data point that happened last week, which is that close to 75% of the volume traded on Hyperliquid was actually real world assets, tokenized stocks, tokenized commodities, other things. And it's no longer people who are like, you know, kind of going leveraged betting on Bitcoin. It's actually this infrastructure being used for traditional assets. And that's obviously, I think, a pretty interesting moment in time. As well,

Interesting. How have you been processing the moves in the traditional finance rails world? There's this talk of a new payments network that might compete with Visa. A bunch of the banks are working on this. Are they fighting the last war? Is this not a threat to you? Is this irrelevant? Is this maybe beneficial to you?

Yeah, I mean like I think our philosophy, you know, basically for the last 13 years is like all of the financial systems going to be moving to being run by software on the internet. It's going to run on open networks. It's going to be open source infrastructure. It's going to be machines that are running that. And as obviously we see this convergence with AI, it's actually machines building machines that are running the financial system on the internet. So I think that's looking backward. I think looking forward this is about programmable money all on open infrastructure, these new, you know, software created money like stablecoins itself is actually software generated money. So I think that's where the world is going and where the velocity is going to happen as we go forward.