Should we give AI a bank account?

23:49Aria Finger:And even if the agent isn't identified with a specific human person? Yes. Okay. I think we will want it to get there because what we'll want to see ultimately is sort of really autonomous operations that many of us can kind of own and participate in and generate value from. And so at that point, the agent's identity really is separate from any one of us. But in the near term, it's more like if you're interacting with our AI bank, then it needs to map back to us as the licensed – and I'm using bank loosely here – licensed financial institution because an agent simply can't be a licensed – it can't go out and get money transmission licenses or apply for a charter and so on.

24:30So there's a progression to get there. We have the technology to very reliably map back to the licensed entity, so the KYB business that's onboarded or the KYC individual. We can use cryptography to do that in a way that means you don't really have to trust any business or company to see the tie. And so we can see back to, like, say, this merchant has these credentials that were issued by Visa to this business, even though we're only interacting with that merchant's agent, as an example.

24:57Aria Finger:You mentioned in the future that we might not want one agent to track directly to one human. It might be an agent that's acting on behalf of many people and they sort of have some ownership. Is there a concrete example that you can give where we might want that sort of shared ownership of an agent? Yeah, so I'll answer a different question first, and then maybe that'll help answer that question. So there's been a lot of talk about, will we see a single person company that can generate a billion dollars or$100 billion of value? And my response to that always, why do we need that one person? You're like, forget the one, let's do zero.

25:31I mean, really. So I think what we want is a different kind of relationship between the humans and the companies, the entities. and I think it looks a little different than classic equity but there is a role for humans that are collectively orchestrating data and behaviors in an autonomous workflow or agent for them to generate value for themselves mapped to the value that they're adding to the agent and in that situation you want multiple people contributing not just one sort of orchestrating mastermind running a company that has a bunch of co-pilot workers so you know so it sounds a little science fiction but that's you know that's the world i think we will ultimately want to get to if we have the proper guardrails and it's sort of aligned with human ethics and so on all these you know important issues and then the identity piece becomes interesting because it's bi-directional between humans and agents it's not only can my agent trust reed's agent um it's more uh can reed's agent trust me as a human being when it begins to interact with these workflows.

26:34And so then we get to this whole other level of, you know, what this could look like. This is more 10 to 15 years, although now 10, 15 years, maybe that's three years.

26:42Aria Finger:But even 10 isn't like that far in the future. And I think also to your point, like everyone's always asking, can we trust agents? Like there's a lot of non-trustworthy humans around. And so if we could have a situation where we trust agents, that might be a better future. Yes. And you know, the time is always the hardest thing for me to predict on this. And We're in this world and we see this constantly. But then if I interact with others who are not in this world, you can see this might take a little bit longer than we think to fully. This is the same thing that we went through with the Internet and certainly with stable coins.

27:18And we're 13 years into Circle's tenure. And we're only just now realizing some of the use cases we thought surely will be satisfied by 2014. And they still haven't been. And so it may take longer than we expect, although right now this world surely seems, to me, seems very different than anything else I've done. In May 2025, you released the Agent Commerce Kit. I do think the acronym is a little odd. ACK. But the month before, Google's AP2 or OpenAI is ACP. And then Open Call happened. All of a sudden, the future that you're working towards with agent identity, payment roles, etc., suddenly is like, you know, kind of an interesting shape, suddenly much closer.

28:04What do you think this with this kickoff of this open source hobby project accelerating everything and what are the ways that we need to navigate? What are the things we need to be doing in society given this acceleration of this? I do think that the solution for agentic identity and verifications and all the things we've been talking about should be something that is an open standard that everyone can build on. I'm a very big believer in open standards and the power of open networks as opposed to, say, proprietary solutions offered by one vendor. And I think that there has been fragmentation on the AI side when it comes to these kinds of topics today for a lot of reasons.

28:39I think one of the reasons is that even large incumbents aren't sure where the value is going to accrue, especially now that tech is not a moat for anybody, one person or, you know, Alibaba. It's sort of no longer where I think maybe past the castles and moats metaphor. And we're in the era of like gunpowder and ballista. So I think it's for that reason and many others, the approaches to things like agentic identity are quite fragmented. They're even more fragmented now than they were a year ago. And so it feels like we haven't made the progress toward a standard that I had hoped for. But there are many ways for standards to emerge.

29:16MCP has kind of become a de facto standard. It didn't emerge through the W3C as a working group. The competitors to Anthropic have embraced it. These projects that achieve a level of virality show real appetite and interest that can shine a spotlight on a use case that causes others to act. Agents suddenly showed up as customers a lot sooner than we expected them to. So that's a positive way to look at it. For ACK and for some of these other protocols, fundamentally look at it as, you know, ideally a set of standards that we can all rely on. So that as you're building agents and others are building agents, they're all leveraging the same open standard that no one can sort of unilaterally change.

29:55and also so that our agents don't have to try to integrate 20 different approaches to the same thing and we can build just much more valuable competitive offerings on top of that base.

30:04Aria Finger:So when people are worried about AI, they talk about runaway agents, and sometimes that's sort of more bioterrorism and geopolitics, but often it's an agent buying 10 ,000 burritos or making a million-dollar polymarket bet when you wanted them to put$10 on red. And so you talked about sort of guardrails. It's like you can tell them, you know, don't spend more than$50 or these are the rules. Talk more about your guardrails and specifically whether they're sort of rules or judgment. Like are we giving these agents values about what to do or are we giving them hard and fast rules to make sure that they still have their autonomy but they're aligned with humans?

30:46Yeah. So it's a really good question. I think of it in two layers, and this is how we've approached what we build out today. The first layer is very much, you could just call it the AI layer. And a simple example of a guardrail there, it would be easy to circumvent, but it's just kind of a prompt suggestion. But the problem with guardrails without policy enforcement is it's just that. It just becomes suggestions. So you can flesh out many things, many layers of guardrails. We're talking about an agent, but usually there are many sort of LLMs involved in workflows, And you can have LLMs check the output of other LLMs and did they have just ones dedicated to guardrails before any activity happens.

31:24And so there is a sophisticated tuning of that, you know, sort of architecture and orchestration. But when it comes to things like moving money, those are deterministic outcomes and not – they should not be completely non-deterministic. If I'm moving a million dollars, it either needs to move or it needs to not move. And it can't be sort of worse than sort of failed. It can't say, oh, yes, it did move and it didn't. It moved to a different place, hallucinations or whatever. And so the second layer is really the underlying deterministic layer, which is a place where stable coins actually excel.

31:58Because we can programmatically enforce rules, both at the wallet, sort of cryptographic key level, and on chain and smart contracts. We can write rules that AI can't possibly circumvent. And so you need both operating in concert. And so that's sort of how we approach, you know, enforcement of these guardrails at a couple of different levels. And I think there will be iterations on both of these things. But it's one of those places where, you know, blockchains are useful for moving value. But the thing that's particularly exciting is you can program money on them. And you can write these so-called smart contracts that have rules in them that then are not controlled inside sort of a bank's ledger, but publicly on these rails using cryptography.

32:42And so that turns out to be really helpful for AI flows and AI actors who are executing these money flows, as opposed to just having an API and then trying to deal with the inputs and outputs.

32:54Aria Finger:So another thing people are really worried about, of course, is external threats. And like, is this, are the AI agents going to become so good at whatever it is, scams, fraud, etc. Like, are there ways that you think you are better positioned to ward off external threats than traditional banks? Or how do you guys look at that? Yeah, it's, I mean, it's a problem now. I think a lot of people are approaching through this sort of proof of personhood, which is very useful. It will become incredibly more useful. But we really think more of the other side, which is sort of proof of agency, which is more along the lines of proof that this agent belongs to the operator that it says it does and that has these policies that we can be very sure cannot be bypassed.

33:32And how do we enforce these restrictions? And I think that we have a time window here to get that right, but the window won't be open forever before people are burned. And so some of the sort of not doomsday but dire scenarios you mentioned I think are likely to happen without these guardrails in place, frankly. Absolutely. In some of our other comments, you've mentioned that agents are surprisingly bad at marketing content generation, but great at compliance. What other counterintuitive things have you learned about what AI is actually good at and actually still TBD in financial services? You know, some of the things that it used to not be so great at, it's actually, it's not bad at now.

34:10And there's always the thing of, you know, I hear people say, well, I put this in Claude and it told me this or Chachiquiti or whatever. And it's like, well, that's what it told you based on what you put in. It's like sort of saying, well, I put this in Photoshop and this is the image that came up. It's like, well, if I use Photoshop, it's quite different than if a real photographer uses it.

34:30Aria Finger:Maybe you're the problem here. Yeah. And it's like, you know, some of it's garbage in, garbage out. But it's also, we have very sophisticated workflows now in terms of managing memory and context and so on when it comes to making these things good at software engineering. that have made them so good at developing software that the profession is completely different than it was a year ago. And I think that'll happen to maybe not every knowledge worker domain all at once, but it'll happen to many of them. And it'll be a sort of similar progression. So a lot of the things that marketing content, just in terms of generating copy, there's a certain tone.

35:03And it's not just the M dashes or whatever the cliches are. It's the phrasing of the short, short, long. Short-term. So the kind of like, you know, freshman in high school sort of like, this is a good essay kind of a thing. But that's going away with the right context and the right sort of, you know, data provided and the examples provided and models that get sort of teach each other to be better at those things. So, you know, I think the other answer to the question is a lot of the stuff that it's good at, it's the non-sexy stuff. It's just really good at parsing a tremendous amount of information, synthesizing it and turning it around to make you more productive.

35:37Aria Finger:Mm-hmm. Well, it's so clear that you are so excited about this sort of next world and you're, you know, building this whole fleet of financial tools for AI agents. What made you decide that like this was the thing to do? This was the first thing you needed to get out into the world? Yeah, I mean, I think if we don't get this piece out, it's like an unlock. If we don't get this piece out, then we can't unlock these new opportunities. I mean, the sort of pattern through crypto and stable coins and circle that I think is relevant to AI is there's kind of a toy phase where people are speculating with some random stuff and it seems easy to dismiss.

36:13It gets some attention, but then there's this really hard middle ground of infrastructure development and regulators start plugging in. And this middle ground can last a long time. We're doing really hard work to unlock new kinds of opportunities to the later phase, which is these world-changing applications, the likes of which we can't possibly imagine when we're in these early stages. And it was similar to when I was actually young. In the early days of the web, could have possibly predicted all of the things that the internet and the web would be used for, but we just had a sense this is world-changing.

36:52That's the excitement is to build the unlock. We're in the infrastructure phase, and it's often accompanied, if it's truly valuable, it is often accompanied by a speculative element as well. So there's hype and there's speculative cycles, but that doesn't mean it's not real and important. And the last thing I would say is I think that there's a time window here to get this right. And the window is closing. And so there's urgency here to execute.

37:16Aria Finger:Why do you think the window is closing? Because of the advancements now, they're AI augmented, if you will. So they're just exponential in terms of the capabilities. And we're talking about OpenClaw, which, again, I think is exciting. I don't want to poo-poo it. But there are also some real concerns. You know, and so what's next will be augmented by open claw agents building other like the next thing. And so making sure that we're capable of working on all of these things to make AI powerful for people with the kind of guardrails and the alignment that we've talked about. This is the time to do that.

37:48But there will come a time when it, if we don't get it right, where it may be too late. Crypto has taught us immutability has costs, no chargebacks. Traditional banking has fraud protection and appeals. Where should we be thinking about agent commerce in this? Yeah. So I think one of the big hurdles that people have now, even with agent commerce, just the sort of consumer shopping behaviors is if a merchant tricks my agent into buying something, who's liable? The merchant wants to know this. The consumer wants to know this. And these are questions that are answered in, say, the Visa world or the MasterCard world.

38:19And they're not answered yet in agentic commerce. So it's very difficult to establish liability paths. And this comes back to me, to agentic identity and understanding who it is, what are the rules it has to follow, and then who is ultimately responsible if an audit shows that an agent bypassed its guardrails. And so these are things that have to be defined. There are lots of different opinions. I'd say some are very traditional, which is more along the lines of AI is just a surface on the underlying rails. We believe new rails need to be created and that smart contracts and blockchain technology help us get a step forward in creating this.

38:56Aria Finger:So you said earlier that most economic transactions in the future will be agent to agent. And you said this is something we'll want. We'll want these autonomous agents doing that. Can you make the affirmative case, like, why do we really want that for all the people who are listening being like, that sounds insane? I think it's not even the most. I think it's all. I think every single transaction will be executed by AI in the future. And I think we'll want that to be the case because it will be the safest way to execute transactions. It'll be safer than trying to trust a web form and a purchase through the whole chain than it is today.

39:29And that's not the case today. We have a ways to get there. But I think that ultimately will be the case. It'll also be the fastest way to execute commerce at the lowest cost. I mean, thanks to things like stable coins, we can move a trillion dollars around the world for fractions of a penny. and nearly instantly, you know, connecting those kinds of flows effectively does require a similar level of intelligence because now the bottlenecks in terms of speed are not the machine. It's not the blockchain. It's all the layers on top of it. And then when it comes to earning a return on our assets, I think it will be the only competitive way to earn a return.

40:01I mean, today, you know, things like private banking or certain opportunities are accessible to very few people. And the promise of AI is that you have the same level of access that everyone else, all of these businesses, these sort of high-end businesses or ultra-high net worth individuals have. And the only way that you get there is by trusting these agents. And they will be the only way that you get a competitive return on your underlying assets. And so that's the optimistic vision, certainly the thing that we're marching toward.

40:26Aria Finger:Yep. So one of the things that you know, I know, technologists know, is that these AI systems are inherently these interesting probabilistic systems. But when you get to, for example, you know kind of a statement of like all commerce transactions flowing through agents because it's higher reliability how do you square the probabilistic nature of these things where you know it's like well we've gotten them highly reliable in a certain set of circumstances but they can go strange very quickly yes um with the necessity of reliability within the financial system so what you're thinking about like what is already present or what needs to be created What's the thought on that impedance?

41:10Yeah, so I think I'll start at the user experience level, which is I think a lot of the tasks that we'll be executing will involve some level of orchestrating these agents doing a variety of things for us and steering and tuning. And then past the user experience is the underlying infrastructure to take that steering. I would say that's more at the AI layer, not just at large language models, but with all of the integrations and data that they will touch. And then when it comes to deterministic outcomes, when they're really doing specific things in the world, you know, moving a car or executing a financial transaction, then those things need to be absolutely deterministic and not probabilistic.

41:49And so that's the sort of second layer. But I think that the really interesting thing is that rather than clicking a button in an interface and then checking the readout, the button led to what we expected to happen and ultimately committing, it will be more like we're doing less on those surfaces, but we're doing a lot of steering as needed to orchestrate the agents in the way that we want them to behave. Which is what happens in software engineering today. software engineering is kind of gravitated toward you don't really use IDEs anymore or like look at source code so much because you have a new level of interface, which is which still requires a great deal of attention.

42:26Some would say it's even requires more right now, but you're kind of multitasking across a set of orchestrating surfaces, either on a command line or otherwise to to build to build software. Going up a level, what are the things that we should be doing with our kind of governmental financial infrastructure to kind of bring all of our companies, industries, inventions, society, et cetera, forward? What are some of it like if you just said, hey, guys, if you start paying attention to at least a few things, do these? Yeah. I'll say on the policy side, there's a policy component to it. Obviously, we're leaning into being a regulated financial institution, so we're confronting the existing policy regime.

43:06But when it came to building U.S. dollar coin and stable coins, our belief was then that this is something, in order for the dollar to work on the internet, the United States government has to say that this is how dollars can work on the internet. And there needs to be a public-private sector cooperation and sort of joint innovation. And the way that we usually do that in the West is that there's public policy and there's private sector innovation. We thought it might take 10 years. It ended up taking about seven years to get the Genius Act passed for stable coins, where the government says, you have a dollar on blockchain rails.

43:35It needs to be backed by these T-bills and cash and sort of overnight repos and so on. It's like very specific thing. Here are the consumer protections. Here's how, you know, can't return yield because it's not a mutual fund, you know, those sorts of things. And when it comes to regulation of AI and finance, I do think that ultimately we'll have policy requirements around any AI actors that are permitted to touch things like dollars. and that's where public private sector again needs to needs to cooperate because the u.s dollar is backed by the united states government it's not a it's not a private sector technology and so how these things move through agents similarly to how they move through blockchains will have to be encoded ultimately in in public policy the way that that is happening today is there are several different sort of work streams in dc and otherwise to explore this some come out of the ai safety world, AI safety guardrails in general, and sort of clearing evals and the like.

44:28Others are very much out of finance. And so there are many different, I would categorize my experience so far is that they're fairly nascent. It's an important investment toward a long-term result that we'll need to have in place.

44:40Aria Finger:So if we go back to March 2023 and Silicon Valley Bank, the whole point of a stable coin is that it's stable and that it is pegged, in this case, to the US dollar. USDC briefly de-pegged. Can you take us through what broke, what held? What did this teach us about stable coins in that moment? So in terms of the stability of a stable coin, we did not have Genius Act in place then. So there are many different approaches to how you provide stability. There was no clear sort of reserve. So you have this token on chains, but it's backed by reserves. There's no clear guidelines from the government as to how those reserves should be structured.

45:17And when we were building USDC over the years, we've had different approaches to how we manage our underlying reserves, as has everyone else. Since then, even before Genius Act, we've moved into this mode as very conservative underlying. As long as you have trust in the U.S. dollar, in the U.S. government, it's a very conservative reserve backing, which is how we're able to ensure stability. But it is the case that stablecoins – this is sort of the next problem with stablecoins. It is the case that they trade against one another in the marketplace. So we first lacked regulatory clarity to say this is how we achieve stability and this is how the government will enforce protections for everyone.

45:54Now the problem is if you launch a stablecoin, you launch a stablecoin, and I launch a stablecoin, we can do that because we have regulatory guidelines. But none of our stablecoins will trade as a dollar. We have this sort of a singleness of money problem. If Amazon issues a coin and Walmart issues a coin, well, they're going to have a market against one another until we solve this interoperability and this sort of clearinghouse issue. And that hasn't been clarified by the Genius Act or anything else yet.

46:20Aria Finger:That's what I was going to say. So in order to clarify that, do you think we need additional government regulation? There's some technical approaches to it. So I think we'll see some solutions that people can rely on. And by people, I really mean those businesses who just want to look at this as a dollar. They don't want USDC. What they want is a dollar that moves more efficiently and is more accessible in their markets. And if they have 20 of those, they want to view all of those collectively as just dollars. And so there are some technical approaches to how to achieve that. But we may also see it addressed in subsequent legislation that comes out in this space.

46:52So many crypto maximalists kind of worry that Circle, other similarly centralized stablecoins can lead to a government having full control over individual citizens' ability to transact, monitor all transactions. Do you see this as a risk of heading to a CBDC surveillance world? Is there anything we should be doing to navigate in or out of that? So on CBDC, just to clarify, central bank digital currency, there's this idea that maybe the federal government should issue its own stablecoin and issue it directly to individuals. And that's been an approach that has been looked at, say, in China. Here, generally, the way we do things is that we have private sector innovation, but with public policy.

47:33So we have the government saying how to do it, And then we have companies such as Circle and others that are able to actually do that thing. So that's the kind of difference between stablecoin issuers in the U.S. versus the sort of CBDC approach. But the crux of the question really, I think, is related to privacy. And it is important to have an open mechanism for value exchange that also has privacy protections. And a simple example of that is if you're paid on chain, I shouldn't be able to see your paycheck. And so there needs to be some privacy protections. Another example is for very large transfers internationally, there's counterparty info exchange or there's this thing called the travel rule, even at relatively low volumes.

48:13And so that should be private. You don't need to know my address or social security number if I'm part of these transactions. And so there is an imperative to maintain privacy and balance transparency in these open rails with privacy. And so this leads to things like Circle has created a new blockchain called ARK, which is really designed specifically just for stablecoin payments. as opposed to all the other things you can do on other blockchains. And there have been others that have looked at the same space. Stripe and Bridge have formed Tempo, and we also leveraged that on Testnet. So as Katana, we just want a solution in place.

48:48We're not necessarily wedded to one. But part of the issue that these payment chains are addressing really is this privacy issue to avoid the surveillance state on chain.

48:57Aria Finger:So you talked about how you thought it would take 10 years to get the legislation that you needed, and it took seven or eight to get the Genius Act. And it's so critical, actually, to understand the rules of the road and to have this public policy so that we can have innovation, which I think is sometimes that people don't think about that. They think about innovation and regulation actually being at odds. But in some places, in order to have innovation, we need regulation, especially when we're talking about people's finances. And I think a lot of people sort of take the financial regulation for granted because it's just what we have.

49:27And if there's fraud on our Visa card, they'll refund us, sort of all those things.

49:32Aria Finger:Where do you see this landscape for Katana? Like, how long is it going to take? Like, what do we need to have happen so that we can have the regulation that causes the innovation? Yeah, I'll say how we're going about it, because I do think it's similar to Circle, but it's different from other tech companies. Typically, the way you build things at tech companies is there's some version of sales and marketing, BD partnerships, that sort of function. There's some product manager, product design. And then there's the engineers, and the three of them are the big stakeholders, and everybody else is kind of supporting.

50:04And when you're building something in finance, you have a fourth stakeholder at the table, which is related to risk and compliance and these elements. And things go wrong when any one of those stakeholders is kind of out ahead of the other. Sales is selling things that can't be built in a reasonable amount of time, or product managers create documents, and they have a cabal of decision strategy, but it's not. Or engineers build amazing tech nobody wants, you know, that kind of stuff. And then the same can happen with risk and compliance. So it needs a seat at the table and it needs to be moving in lockstep with the other three.

50:41And so that's kind of a compliance first is how people refer to it. But, you know, compliance first sort of approach to building out this technology is the same one that we're taking at Katana. Taking it at Circle certainly causes to be slower on certain things relative to others who are in the crypto space. But we absolutely had conviction that it was the only way ultimately to have the winning solution.

51:01Aria Finger:You've built two generational companies at two massive inflection points. You could have stayed at Circle and worked there a long time. You're still on the board, which is fantastic. But what drives you towards the chaos of a startup and starting something new? So I'll give the healthy and unhealthy answer. Great. I'll give the unhealthy answer first, which is just it's almost like an obsessive disorder. I can't not do this. is I tried not to do this, but I have to do this. You know, I build things. I'm not, I haven't been that successful investing in other people build things, which is a great skill I admire in people, but I build things.

51:37And so I have to build this. And then the healthier answer is I do think, again, that we have a window to get this right. And I feel like I can play at least a small part in getting it right. And that's a combination of understanding the policy, the underlying tech, how to bring the right people in, and sort of having pattern recognition for what to apply to this stage. And I'm excited to get out of bed every day and work on this problem in this space.

52:03Aria Finger:Absolutely. Awesome. So on Rapid Fire, is there a book, movie, or idea that gives you optimism about the future? Usually I answer with books, but I'll give a movie answer because that's what popped in my head. So there's a movie called Arrival. It was a Denis... Ted Chiang short story. Yeah, exactly. So it was kind of like an alien first contact movie. But the thing that I think it gives me optimism is built on this, there's a language that they need to understand. And the language as they begin to understand it doesn't just allow them to communicate. It changes the way they think and opens up new patterns.

52:40And so the thing about developing stable coins is it unlocks new kinds of business opportunities that can be built with programmable money. AI is like, we're just learning the grammar today to how to understand this language. And it will unlock new ways of thinking for all of us. So I'm optimistic about that.

52:57Aria Finger:Awesome. What is a question about crypto or AI that you wish people would ask you more often? I guess both. And it's kind of a personal answer. But I have a background in my undergrad degrees in English. And I'm a musician. And so when usually people hear that, they're like, oh, that's interesting. but I can see what they think of, like, maybe he didn't know what he wanted to do, or there was career drift, or these sorts of things. And so the question I wish people would ask is, how is that connected to all the products and companies that you've built? Because I think it's very directly relevant, especially in the age of AI, when sort of, you know, skills across multiple domains are incredibly valuable, as opposed to just sort of like climbing a career ladder, which is, you know, those two, I think, will find their tasks most in jeopardy.

53:42Right.

53:42Aria Finger:Instead of leaving your field to start in this field, you used that knowledge, which was incredibly important to what you're doing today. Absolutely. The music thing is fascinating because I've been thinking about music a bunch. Where do you think the current state of AI music is? What are some of the things that are kind of perhaps off the beaten path of, oh, is it an issue with the industry and the creatives? Issues to navigate. Is there issue with copyrights or training or inspiration in order to be generative? Anything that has kind of struck your musical background? I think a lot of the things that are circulating are really good replicas of other things.

54:17that's not entirely bad but it's also kind of empty so you know it's like lyrics that are a little sloppy but it kind of bops you know and you know it's we're kind of there's a lot of that going around which is a little more like an echo of originality and that may come from a number of different originators who have obviously are not being compensated and there's no mapping back to that there's also experiments more along the lines of sort of electronic music and experimentation where it is a skill to compose with sounds that you yourself are not capable of making as an instrumentalist. And there's still a creative element to it.

54:52And so I would hope that the future of AM music moves more in that direction as opposed to just the millionth copy of Let It Be sung by Cardi B or whatever it is. Exactly. So where do you see real progress happening outside of your industry? Outside of my sort of financial and even AI foundational domain, an industry that I'm really hopeful about is related to health care. And sort of the cost of producing drugs coming down, accessibility to health services, you know, sort of increasing. It's not a domain I'm deeply familiar with. I have friends who are deeply in that space. But it's one that I have personal connection to.

55:31I lost my sister from cancer. I lost my mother from cancer. and sort of just that personal experience of seeing how the databases are just not connected and nobody has all the information that they can even use to guide people. There are trials that are available that people don't even know exist and they can't sort of connect. So I'm very optimistic about some of these technologies being able to clear those gaps. And it ultimately comes down to accessibility, which is the same thing that sort of drives a lot of my interest in finance.

55:59Aria Finger:So as always, our last question, if everything breaks humanity's way in the next 15 years, what do you think is possible to achieve and what's the first step to get there? Wow, 15 years. So I think I'll steer it back to what we're working on. So if we get this right, and I do think there will be kind of a hyper-personalized private banking experience that will be accessible to businesses everywhere. Whether you're an entrepreneur in Nairobi, you're a two-person company in Detroit, or whatever it may be, you have the same access to the global financial system with new opportunities to start new businesses, tap into new mechanisms to go to market that you just haven't had available before thanks to the combination of AI agents and underlying financial infrastructure that can make them safe to transact.

56:46Aria Finger:Amazing. Awesome. Great talking to you. Great talking to you. Thank you. Yeah, I enjoyed it. That's fun. Possible is produced by Pallet Media. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Tanasi Delos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmoor, Imozu, Trent Barbosa, and Tafadzwa Niemorundwe. Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Sayida Sapieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Rallis. And a big thanks to Victoria Lampson and The Lighthouse in Venice.