Financial Advisors Are Cooked – Public Co-CEO on the Great Wealth Transfer

0:00Before we live in this oasis where no one has to work anymore, I think it's going to get really dark. Elon is going to own all the robots and the power disparity that's going to happen there is going to be so massive. The wealth disparity that's already extreme in the US is going to become even more extreme. You said millions of users, billions of assets, billions of trading volume and revenue doubling every year. So is that... That is accurate. So you're trying to take on Charles Schwab. Yeah, if you look at where people consolidate brokerage accounts from, it's Schwab, Fidelity, E-Trade, Vanguard, Merrill and Rodinette.

0:3085 % of that money will be inherited by the top quarter, the top 25%. And so that's literally where the money is at in our space. The best performing generated asset on the platform right now is defense and weapons manufacturers, one that is like up 350 % in the last month. So we just lost agents for investing. If we look at what a financial advisor does for you, one is grunt work, second is advice, the third is emotional support. what we've launched that does number one now being it's ridiculous how quickly this is moving financial advisors will have a really really really hard time

1:10life welcome to sorcery thank you well we're here at the new york stock exchange in the library and we have your beautiful logo love yes in the wrong blue still but okay it's the wrong blue it's not serious enough it's not serious enough exactly we need a serious blue and it's to be dark and you know it's to feel feel serious and classic and ah so yeah so why is that your tagline but serious and classic now public serious and classic that's a good tagline um do you mean investing for those who take it seriously if you look at especially our space and like call it like new brokers and so on you've seen that i think that first generation of those companies has been very heavily focused on speculation and that was like very deep into options trading you know about very deep prediction markets or you know um they're all like for example things that started only in crypto you know and so on and i think it's created a generation where essentially all the new modern platforms all were you know not that serious in the end it's not nothing like these are not the places where you would build your wealth for your long term where you put your life savings into or the money you inherit from your parents or whatever it might be um and the incumbents were still that and i think even if you see as like when the first mobile broker just came up and you look at like schwab you know schwab hasn't actually been disrupted yet really because that company actually you know still doubled in the last five years and so um so when we kind of look at the market we were like hey let's build something that is actually for people to put the life savings in where they can you know that they can trust with that money and therefore make sure that we're also being positioned as seen as a serious financial service because also if you look at things like the greater wealth transfer it's like 85 percent of that money will be inherited by the top quarter or the top 25 percent and so that's literally where the money is at in our space and so i think also to be successful here, you have to build something that people can look at and think of it as like, this is a serious financial service that I can trust with my life savings.

3:14And so therefore, from a pure positioning perspective, that's what we put out. So you're trying to take on Charles Schwab. Yeah. Actually, if you look at where people ACAD accounts from, you know, where they like consolidate brokerage accounts from for us, it's Schwab, Fidelity, E-Trade, Vanguard, and then Merrill and Robinhood. Oh, wow. So we are much more competing with the incumbents than we are competing with the other new brokers. That's crazy. You kind of compete everywhere, of course, in some regard. So most recently, you have been going viral on and off with these new product launches.

3:52Can you talk about the recent product launch? So we just launched agents for investing. and what that helps you do is to essentially automate any type of workflow in your brokerage account there could be a trading strategy there can be money movements that can be alerts you want to set up to some regard and it really moves the way you even just like interact with the platform away from just like clicking buttons to just expressing intent and how we think about it is that it kind of helps people to really kind of move up in the sophistication you know like Like one example we always make is there's a lot of people who have a decent understanding of that you could generate some income using covered calls on your portfolio.

4:37And that's like high level what they understand. But now to actually go find the right contracts, see what the income potential would be, et cetera, that's where it starts to break down. And so people just like start freezing because now they have to educate themselves and it's going to be really hard. with agents, it can literally just be like, okay, look at my portfolio, show me if I could do five grand a month, income potential on it, let me see what's there. And then it scans the portfolio, shows you opportunities for cover calls and income potential behind it, and then you can just activate it, and then it runs as a workflow.

5:10And so it really kind of helps people move out that sophistication and just basically automate anything in that portfolio. And you can buy the dip. and you can buy the dip automatically automatically systematically so are those videos real or are they ai they're real they are yeah where do you record them because it's like this like nice blue world totally they look like apple launch videos or like oh thank you and it's fantastic it's on the line of being ai or not you don't know how much uh our brand team will love that you said that really yes yes yes um but but it's true because it goes back to if you want to be a serious financial service there's also a thing of like we look at ourselves as we're building a premium product yeah and as part of that like product quality and design and all these things are just very very important and i think specifically in our space there's a lot of also just like dodgy players and you know like platforms will design it's not really a thing and so on like especially if you go the deeper you go into active trading like you know the wackiest and things style to look um and so it's very important to us i like the design stuff is like it's at a very high quality level and so we very much appreciate that comment um no it's like a big cold studio in bushwick it's just out in bushwick it's just out in bushwick so the company is based here in new york correct you're not from here you're from germany i'm from germany just became american and three weeks ago.

6:41Congratulations. Thank you very much. Wow. Can you recite the Pledge of Allegiance? Of course. No, I'm just kidding. No, that's so exciting. And so your co-CEO, Jannik, he's Danish. And we have an office in Copenhagen because of that too. Okay. Where are your offices globally? New York headquarters and then Copenhagen. A lot of our backend engineering sits there. We have co-CTOs and so one of them is there as well. He's Danish obviously, so we build a team around him over there um and then we have a few remotes like we have a little bit of like a cx hub in raleigh where we used to have an office but then um people just want to work from home and whatnot so we gave that up at some point but we still have like a lot of people in that the raleigh durham area um that do cx because you have to be licensed and so on there's all license talent down there and why did you both go after the co-ceo route it organically happened from the beginning first off in Europe it's not an unusual thing.

7:43It's very normal. If I look at a company in Germany for example it's very normal to have multiple managing directors, CEOs and whatnot. It's a really unusual thing. I feel like in the US it's more this thing of people want to have this one throat to choke and the way the corporate structures are set up. It's just like you have a bot and the bot appoints a CEO essentially and that's kind of how it flows down and then you know if the CEO doesn't uh you know perform then bought replace the CEO and it's like the kind of like how how it's run here um so I think people just fall back to like well that's just how it's done right so why is this weird why is this not but I don't think it's actually that that unusual I think the biggest thing is um I think first it helps really for more balanced decision making um there's a great little podcast actually on about Excel with the Excel founders um where they make that same argument because they also were like a duo that started Excel the VC firm and they made this argument of like balanced decision making where I'm like I'm gonna steal that um but uh because there's a very truth of like you're always like we're all human to some regard we'll all have a time where we go to the office and we'll feel anxiety or we in a bad mood or whatever and so on and it helps to have someone else who experiences everything the same way you do same incentive structure same goals same experience of how they experience things in the company and around the business and so on and so I feel like that is actually a very valuable thing How do you divide responsibilities?

9:11What are your core traits versus Yeah so the company is that way we have our own reports and so Janik has the CTO's reporting to him and therefore engineering and then he's like the deepest in product design I would say and then I essentially have everything else and I would say I'm the deepest in growth, that's I want to go through the evolution of public over time. We're very clearly, and you very much embrace this in an AI world. So what was it like early on? And did you think you were going to expand this much out, outside of the existing categories you were going after? Like, where do you feel like there was extra opportunity to like grab?

9:56Yeah. I mean, so when we started public was like the first, like you know investing app with like a social feed and i think a lot of people still know us it's like oh you're the social investing app and stuff but now but now social is dead because it was basically cannibalized from ai um seriously but um but like that's kind of where it started and we had this like thing of like okay we like we knew in order to build something serious we had to first of expand into more asset classes and so we kind of spent the first four years just building all the different asset classes, fractionalizing all those, building this internal system, which we call the holding system.

10:36It's like a ledger that enables real-time money movements, internal asset classes. If you sell Bitcoin, you can buy a T-bill with the second after and consolidate the performance reporting where you have one chart despite all the asset classes, which is actually quite hard. That's why if you open your JP Morgan account, you will not see the chart because of that. All this kind of stuff. and that was like the kind of first the second was like why do you open the app and I think brokerage had become a little bit just a tool to execute trades and that's I think through back in the day you would call your broker then it went to like you log into your computer and you execute trades yourself and then it went to mobile and it became like simplified, simplified, simplified and then cost down, cost down, cost down, cost down and with that it basically became just this tool where you go to execute trades and so we were again back in the sense of like okay now if you're the premium product you're not just a tool to execute trades you know do you obviously provide more value there and i think what is now happening specifically is that because of ai you can actually move much more back to this like more full service layer there where like back in the day when you called your broker your broker would maybe even give you a ring himself and be like proactive and be yo you know maybe you should you know check out this company or i've seen this and this you know and all these things um and that all went away when people start clicking the button themselves um and i think we're kind of going back to that now where an investing app can actually invest in platform can be much more full service and ai can kind of enable that and so i think we kind of went through that arc a little bit and for us specifically while we kind of went through that and obviously like as you built the company things always change but i think the biggest turning point for us was like in 2022 um essentially right after everyone realized money isn't free anymore and came back from the high you know from like the total world and you know and like uh you know everyone was just able to to to raise whatever and we see we're just asking about how many accounts have you acquired no matter the quality of how much money you make on them you know and so and kind of when everyone came kind of down from that high and everyone was kind of looking back in their business i was like okay like let's like rejigger this because we clearly just came from a ridiculous phase um so in 2022 we essentially looked at everything and we had this internal um uh like this internal that kind of called like mantra like a better one which we called level up and level up was essentially like okay let's make sure that we truly focus on the top quartile the top 25 percent because, you know, in the US, sadly, if you're in the sub-75%, you live paycheck to paycheck, you crack out a credit card, you do not have money to compound the markets.

13:21You just don't. That's also why you see the people who acquire those and build products for those and consumer fintech, you have to monetize those through loan speculation or interchange or something. And we were like, okay, but we as a financial service company, we're going to monetize assets. And that you can only do if you actually monetize, we have people and service people who have assets. And so in the US, that means if you have more than a hundred grand, that means you have money left over at the end of the month to actually put into the market. So you have the ability to compound in the first place.

13:51And so it's like, okay, let's focus on that and then make sure that the roadmap really, you know, is focused on the things that these people need, the way our customer service, you know, talks and so on, you know, it's more in that world. There will be design, the way the app looks, right? We kind of went from something that looked more cash appy of like big bold numbers and very, very simple, you know, to a little bit denser UI, you know. It's okay to have a table that you can scroll sometimes, you know, like maybe some more numbers are good sometimes because it gives you more context and people actually need that information, you know, caring deeply about things like your tax lots and tax management in the first place and so on.

14:29And so that kind of took us through, you know, the next few years and then we kind of looked at the team and was like, It's likely going to take two years for all this stuff to really show results. And then I would say within the next 12 to 18 months, we saw how cohorts just kept stepping up and stepping up and stepping up. And I think since then, every single cohort we acquire is better than last. And it's because I think we're still on this thing where we're still adding products to it that drive sophistication up and therefore kind of serve that audience better. And that's where AI is in a position to do, full service model, yada, yada.

15:05I think I asked you and I was wondering what your numbers were. And you said millions of users, billions of assets, billions of trading volume and revenue doubling every year. So is that? That is accurate. That is accurate. That is accurate. As much numbers as you're going to get out of me. And so, but I'm curious because, okay. So when you started the company, it was like right before COVID. COVID hits, like there's Wall Street bets, like trading volume explodes for retail traders. and then we have a slump and the IPO window kind of shut. And then how did those macro cycles affect the business and how do you create defensibility against that?

15:46So two sides. First off, in our business, we always talk about how we cannot predict the markets. If we could, we should start a head fund. And so therefore, we just got to build a product that can kind of, you know, be successful through our market cycles. and in our space if rates are low people are more risk on you see more active trading your trading revenues will go up your options trading will go up these kinds of things your crypto will go up you know um when rates are high people are more risk off and you will see more money being made in interest and in you know bonds products and so on and so you kind of want have these two sides of the business so that whatever the market cycle is um you know you monetize your assets and then yes your monetization rate on assets you know might fluctuate a little bit with the cycles but shouldn't be much and that is what the model should be now if you look at companies in our space who are just very heavily on the trading side you know it's obviously harder for them because if you're if you know call it 90 of your revenues come from uh trading fees or something you will obviously have a very volatile business and so we look at it as like okay by also being multi-asset you take volatility out of the business because whatever market cycle you're in you will always monetize the assets and so for us mission zero is just have people bring assets on the platform and then once the assets on the platform we'll monetize them in some way and because we're also building for portfolio builders of people that actually just compound wealth over time we essentially have no churn like our lifetimes are like 25 years plus they literally like that that line is just straight at some point and just completely flattens out and um and so for us you know again that means as assets are so sticky um it's just like just bring assets on monetize them in some way um and let's make sure that you know users are happy and they have all the ways to bring more money in and so on that's also why like whenever you launch a new class and your account type or whatever, all numbers go up.

17:49Just because you can, you know, you can consolidate more of your funds. You can, there's more things to invest into, you know, maybe trust it more with more money sooner, et cetera. Could you share all of the offerings that you have? Okay. So we look at it by, by the way, we have literally this little chart in our pitch deck, like these four kind of pieces, which is asset classes, account types, products, and platforms. And so asset class is pretty straight. stocks etfs crypto options um treasuries corporate bonds um and then other things coming then you have account types so right now that's your regular brokerage account margin accounts you can take as part of that um iras we're doing trust accounts soon with the most requested features actually um it's also how the great wealth transfer happens before people pass away, right?

18:42Exactly. And then what was I? Trust accounts, entity accounts. So like you might be someone who has, you know, entity wants to put some money away, small business, you might have an Airbnb business on the side or whatever it might be. Or again, like you might inherit business from your parents even before they pass and stuff like that. So entity accounts are very important. So things like that. And then we have platforms. Essentially, the app means for us like mobile, web, API, and now agentic which we see as a platform platform shift um and then you essentially have uh products and products is like when we build unique product around asset classes and so um generated assets is an asset class that we've essentially sort of say invented where it's like it's an AR product where you can just prompt be like give me companies that are founder led more grow more than 30 percent um have no debt and are us-based um and then the ai goes out finds you those asset classes uh finds you those those those companies that like fit that criteria gives you a back test as you s p against s p 500 returns drawdowns etc and then you can invest into that and it sits in your portfolio just like your etf of you know spy would and stuff but again that is a product that we have created that kind of feels like an asset class yeah but it's actually more of a product that sits on top of all the engine all the assets that we've built right It's similar.

20:03We have a treasury letter product where you can go in and really easily just deposit money, create a little treasury letter, and then you invest it in US treasuries to put some cash away, for example. But again, that is a product that we've built that sits on top of all the asset classes. You could also just go and figure out yourself and find this one bond you want to buy and stuff. You could do that too. And so that's how we think about it. And then for us, any of these things is essentially growth. like we can launch a new asset class but it's also if you combine these things right so you have a new account type and now you want to have generated assets in that account type and so it's something you start to like when you connect all these pieces as well it's also an opportunity for growth and so i have a couple questions about this but like has that and i guess has the reflection on that and the understanding of the business strategy within all these different connected pieces has that just kind of naturally evolved or were you thinking about different levers to pull as you grow like how did you think about constructing all of this so we have a few high level principles in terms of just building stuff like one we always talk about is um um it's uh simplicity not simplistic and so like the sense of that you want to have a simple experience that has a lot of product depth to it so it can't feel complicated and so i can't feel like a tax form and you log into your shop account or something but it still needs to be simple enough that you can understand it and use it and whatnot but it can't be simplified because if it's simplified that means you're taking product depth away in order to simplify it and that's what you've seen a lot of consumer fintech do but that takes sophistication away and also just like control and so on so that's like one of the pieces just from like a high level principle perspective and then generally speaking I would say like yeah i mean as you build the company you learn things i would say most cases i would argue like if you find founders it will tell you that they had the perfect vision from day one i think that's bullshit in most cases and that you learn over time and things change i think our the story of level up for us is a good one where you know when we launched the company we were much more in this mindset of like democratization public for everyone you know no no no um then we were as we then built through it and kind of made our learnings and we're like you know what we're going to focus on the top quartile.

22:24That's who we should be building for. That's where the opportunity is. But you learn these things as you go. And I think you will stay true to certain goals you have as a business. And I think that is important. I never have like a North Star of what you're building. Like for us, like the investing in those are taken seriously and things like that. But of course, things change as you build. Hopefully with all these IPOs coming up, you can get those trust accounts out soon. Why the trust accounts and IPOs? What's your thinking there? All these employees are going to need to start putting their money in many places.

22:56Yeah, that's true. Usually you put in a trust. Yeah. So on the generated assets part, were there any surprises of adoption and how people really took that? Like, what is the craziest thing or maybe the most popular generated asset that's been created? I think what's interesting is like, obviously, you could create pretty much anything with it. And so I think when people think about it, they first always go thematic. And you've seen that some of the biggest, most performant ones are thematic ones. Right before we started this economy, we were talking about the best performing generated asset on the platform right now is defense and weapons manufacturers.

23:42One that is up 350 % in the last month or something. I wonder why. Yeah, who knew? that's so weird yeah strange um um and so on but i think the um what is what we find interesting what we see a lot of people doing is also a little bit this like remixing of existing indices and so give me you know the nasdaq 100 but truly take out anything that's not tech yeah you know like stuff like that like if you look at like the top 10 holdings i think like for example costco's in there you know and so on so like take that out like things like that and so it's like remixing of existing things i think is something that that's that we see a lot of people do and then obviously like there's some like people who just do funny stuff you know like we have commercial outlets like you know i went found out of the marathon runners you know and so i know like everyone everyone always brings up i've got alpha it's just exactly the marathon running ceos they're gonna outperform this is this is this is famous it's like kind of tweet that went viral some time ago uh not in giant assets but like on this concept of like you know uh founders who lift you know like oh yeah like the debt uh the debt lift index so like there are these like fun examples as well of course but i think what we see people do where they put real money behind is a little bit more than like remixing or the uh thematic stuff sorcery is brought to you by brex the financial stack trusted by more than 30 000 companies including one in three venture-backed startups in the U.S.

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25:56Start today at brex.com slash sorcery. That's B-R-E-X dot com slash sorcery. Turing is training the next generation of AI with tasks that require real expertise and real world judgment. That's why companies like NVIDIA, Anthropic, Salesforce and Gemini partner with Turing. Turing builds realistic reinforcement learning environments and data systems based on real operational traces. The kind of infrastructure frontier labs need to train superintelligence. Visit Turing.com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. I know you focus on the higher end of people, customers. So within the higher wealth class, what are the age demographics of your users?

26:45Are you finding that newer generations are coming up and being more active? How is this dispersed across? I mean, average age in public is 38. So call it like mid-millennial kind of thing, I would call it.

27:04yeah i'd say that um i wouldn't say there's made there's too many surprises i think the main thing that's really out there so we see that people are this generation is self-directed first um and i think it's because they grew up with financial literacy way earlier in their lives through social media niche communities and whatnot always make this example of like there's like dividend investing communities out there they have millions of users and stuff and i'm like how much can you talk about dividend investing it's like i guess a lot but you know it's like what um but i think like you know so i think because of things like social media because of just like how you know information like just like is so much more accessible it gave people financial literacy way earlier in their lives and i think because of financial accounts being much more accessible nowadays lower minimums things like faster kyc right like you can create an account immediately because it's automatic you don't have to fax and a form to some banker that like takes a week to you know process it and like all these things and crypto of course right as an asset class that was born retail and born fractional as well like all these things throughout the last you know decade plus i think have created a generation that is way more financial literate and therefore they have way more you know trust in their capabilities as investors because they recognize like it's just investing it's not rocket science and and I think that's why they're much more self-directed first and so this is one it's like a Wall Street Journal article or something where like the headline is like something of like thank you for the golf invite but I will manage my money myself you know it's like you know about like you know wealthy millennials and financial advisors and such.

28:50And I think you're going to see a lot of that. And so when you talk about the great wealth transfer, most of those assets are civil financial advisors likely. And so when those assets being transferred, it's not just a transfer of wealth, it's also a potential transfer of relationships in that moment. And then at that point, you have, you know, XYZ person who's now inheriting all this money, and they sit there with a stereotypical name, it's called a Charles, you know i don't know why who the heck came up yeah who could be charles and then you know charles will sit there at the dinner table you know and they'll sit there well like you know thank you very much for everything you've done you know for my parents but uh what is your thinking about uh you know a glp1 strategy and the guy will be like glp what and he'll be like yeah maybe i'll take some of this money and manage it myself you know and i think you're going to see a lot of that especially as like you know financial like there's less people becoming financial advisors now new generations the average age of financial advisor goes up by you know a year every year i think the average age is actually roughly 60 or so already you know and so um you gotta have the situation suddenly where the the the age gap between advisors and the people that they should advise is suddenly massive plus a generation that grew up with more financial literacy access to ai etc etc and so i feel like that is going to be um the industry is going to be heavily disrupted do you think more people should be suspect of financial advisors like i just i think i i just spoke with michelle del buono who is uh the cio of a16 perennial a16z perennial i always drop the z for some reason i don't know why but you just gotta shorten the acronym step by step more too it's still too long it's not at some point it's just it's just it's just gonna be a i know yeah but i was talking to him about this because we were talking about rias we were talking about um uh wealth managers and uh just this class in general um working with these more institutional funds they are they're not professional investors they're investment professionals they don't actually know how to invest.

31:10They just know how to make you feel you're comfortable with them putting your money places. I don't know if, you know, we could say they're really investors and investing, but it's more of a customer service game that we've all, not we've all, but I would say that the mass majority of people think you just should automatically buy into versus maybe question, is this actually performing or not? I know for a fact that one of my accounts that is like a family account, it's not moving. But, you know, it's, and I'm just calling her out right now, it's, you know, a financial advisor and we should trust a financial advisor.

31:45And I'm like, well, you know what? I've seen this account. It's been around for years. It's not moving. And the market is, so why is that? Do you have any hot takes on this and how people just automatically assume because someone's a financial advisor that they're a professional and they will grow your wealth? And what questions should you be asking them? I always wanted to make a little website that is essentially is your advisor screwing you.com where you punch in your portfolio which firm they're with or whatever and then it tells you number one all the lower fee alternatives of all the stuff you're invested in plus if they sold you their own products that they make some kickback on or the fees way larger and whatnot.

32:25I think you should do it. We should totally do that. That should be your next that would go viral. There you go. I'm spilling the viral ideas on this podcast. That would be great. What a miss. You know? You know? Totally. Totally screwed up already. But, yeah, I mean, it's like, so when we look at financial advisors, and we have obviously, you know, we are more of a self-directed platform. We have more, like, managed-ish products step by step. Like, even generated assets is sort of managed. It's like textiles, harvesting, built-in, stuff like that. But it's managed from technology. It's not managed by a human, right?

32:57And so if we look at what a financial advisor does for you, we break down these three things. But it's like, no more than it's grunt work. So like doing the actual textiles harvesting, setting up some strategy for you, etc. Second is advice, which is basically opinions on the back of news and data and reports and such. And the third is emotional support. Who do I call when everything is red and I'm freaking out? And AI, if you look at like agents what we've launched, that does number one now. and so two and three is going to be replaced as well it's just a matter of time and i actually think that three is even easier to replace than two likely because three is just the emotional support which in most cases i think is just a sense of giving people good uh context around what is happening and um you know and therefore you know kind of calling them off a ledge or whatever i'm in um and i think that emotional support piece is likely actually easier to to it's actually easier to replace i think and we're talking about this concept of like should you be able to like test drive different personalities of an you know of like some ai some ai advisor of like how do they talk to you like you know like what is the style that's that you react to or not you know and so on i think there's a lot of interesting stuff there but i would argue that we humans are actually simpler than we maybe sometimes you know at want to admit and that's you know considering you have people having full relationships with the eyes already now yeah that i think that part is actually easy to replicate and then i think the middle part is actually the hardest because um advice which is just you know again opinions on the back of data is just so subjective if we would put five financial advisor in this room right now and we would one by one ask them about what's a great, you know, investing strategy or stock tip or whatever.

34:51They would like to tell you all something different. And we would make our decision based off who's most likable or something, you know? And so I think that is the, maybe the, the hardest, you know, to replace. But then again, maybe it's just about giving people more data, therefore making these things actually more like less subjective because it's more driven by, you know, actual historical results. and like the data around that and so on, which then builds trust, you know, versus just someone's opinion at that moment, you know. But I think that is actually, I would say, like the genuinely the hardest piece, right?

35:27Because again, if anyone can truly predict what the markets are going to do, you know, please introduce them to me. But because I want to give them all my money.

35:38So yeah, who knows? But I think, yeah, so I think financial advisors will have a really, really, really hard time moving forward. It's going to be tough. As the platform becomes more agentic, are you worried at all about any risks and vulnerabilities there? Are you thinking about insurance? How are you thinking about the backstop? Yeah, the way we look at agents right now is we essentially separate the reasoning from the execution, which means you spar with the AI to figure out what the workflow should be. What's the strategy? What's a trading strategy you want to come up with? It helps you build that trading strategy.

36:21It literally writes the code to do that in the public account. But once you prove it, it is a deterministic model where that can't deviate. And so therefore, it has no hallucinations. You know exactly it's going to do what it told it to do and so on. And we think that is very important. isn't number one, obviously, just for the safety of the user, but also for people who just build trust with these systems. I don't think people are ready to give their money to OpenClaw and say, make me money now, please. I think we're far away from that. And there's a reason why everyone wants to have a little Mac Mini because they want to have these things operate in an isolated environment that is away from their own data, away from their own money, et cetera.

37:08So I think we're actually far away from that. And so the separation is how we've approached it. And that takes it from this like, oh, agents, futuristic concept you can't trust to something that can work today for serious potential strategies with real money behind it and so on because it ends up running deterministically. We talked about this a little bit beforehand and hinted at it. So you definitely are going hardcore on AI and agentic systems. The rest of the market is going hardcore on prediction markets and everything else under the sun. So the theme of becoming the financial super app is somehow now the goalpost for fintech.

37:53I'm curious why that's now the gold star or the north star. I mean, I think we were definitely in a fintech cold spell for a while. so I don't know if this new thing is like let's go after the growth but it's causing a lot of confusion for new customers and I know you want to be a pop like these companies want to be a platform for everything so with you being so focused how do you think about every company every fintech becoming a financial super app and then at that point how do you differentiate I think when you build fintech in the US and I think it's unique to the US in that regard because the wealth disparity in the US is so big, you have to pick who you're designing for.

38:38And if you're designing for the sub-75%, who are people that live paycheck to paycheck, credit card to credit card, you're building for mass America, for middle America, for most people out there, you will make different design choices and you have to monetize differently. If you're looking at the top 25 % where people actually have the means to compound their wealth and put money away every month, you make very different design choices. And so in the top, your financial life is centered around your assets, your investment account. And every month, you will think about putting money away. That is a sentence that people will say, you know.

39:16And so your checking account lives separately from the actual kind of center of your financial life, really. These are a little bit like two separate pieces. In the bottom 75%, your checking account is likely the center of your financial life. And so if you build for that, you want to connect as much as possible to that checking account. Because when money comes in, chances are that money has to leave a few days later because they have to pay rent and put food on the table and whatever because they pay the paycheck. And so you have to, and this sounds very horrible now, but like, you know, if you're building for mass America, you kind of, you know, and you want to monetize them.