A Stablecoin Future, Netflix is "Boring,” and Flying Cars | July 18, 2025

0:15Welcome everyone to the information's TITV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Friday. The date is July 18th and we have got a great show planned for you today. We are talking crypto with Dragonfly Capital. We are talking about Netflix with our co-executive editor at The Information, the man behind our nightly newsletter, The Briefing. And we've also got some analysis coming out of the fashion at Sun Valley. Always promises to be a fun discussion with our weekend editor, Abe Brown. I want to start with a couple headlines coming out of our own newsroom. Our venture capital reporter, Natasha Moscarenas, had a great column in her Dealmaker newsletter last night about how AI companies, like AnySphere, are also making these big aqua hires to snap up talent from older non-AI companies.

1:03I'm thinking about cybersecurity businesses. She also wrote about how VCs like Andreessen Horowitz are playing the talent broker role in these deals. It's definitely worth a read. The other story I want to point out to you is we published a story this morning about how Roku has relaxed which ads it shows on its platform to try to reignite revenue growth. The most interesting detail here in this story is that Roku used to be very opposed to putting promotions at all on its home screen. But now the company has gone so far as to let Carnival Cruises take over the entire home screen altogether, which is a huge reversal.

1:38I haven't seen the ad, but I'm picturing a ship coming across the TV screen. Make sure you check that story out. A couple other headlines for you before we get started. Uber is partnering with electric vehicle company Lucid and self-driving car company Nuro to point Nuro. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. The idea behind the deal, they are putting 20 ,000 robo taxis onto Uber's platform over the next six years. It's a long time horizon, but the FOMO around robo taxis has officially taken off. Perplexity is raising more money. Again, it raised$100 million at an$18 billion valuation this time. That's according to Bloomberg.

2:17And finally, speaking of any sphere, Kerser has blocked China-based customers from accessing its coding product. This, of course, relates to the discussion that we had yesterday with our Asia Bureau Chief, Jing Yang. Make sure to check it out on our site. Let's get to today's show. I mentioned Crypto Week. We are Friday. It's been a big week in crypto and in Congress. The House advanced three major crypto bills to the desk of President Donald Trump, the most notable of which was a law allowing companies that aren't banks to issue stablecoins. It wasn't exactly a seamless vote. They needed two tries to get it through.

2:54But it's going to the president's desk. It's likely to be signed. I want to bring on Dragonfly Capital's Tom Schmidt to talk about exactly the question. What impact is this going to have? Tom, welcome to TITV. Hey, thanks for having me. It's a great week to be here. So the stablecoin bill, who wins here? Yeah, the Genius Act is something I think people in crypto have been asking for for a long time. Obviously, as with anything political, you're not going to get all the wishes that you want. I think some of the things that were left out were things like yield bearing stablecoins, which are not permitted in the bill.

3:30There's a moratorium on some new types of stablecoins. So it's a two year block for that. and foreign issuers have sort of a window where they can come into compliance with sort of onshore issuers so that's kind of a win for Circle which went public recently but overall I think we are just happy to have a carve out and have some clarity for stablecoins as to where they sort of fall in the U.S. legal landscape and now we know hey you know stablecoin holders have you know seniority in terms of bankruptcy which is a concern that came up with USDC as you remember, maybe remember a couple of years ago, stable coins are not securities, they're not commodities.

4:07We know sort of how they have to apply KYC, AML in order to be compliant. And ultimately, I think this is great for the US. You know, this is a way to dollarize the world and promote, you know, the stability of the US dollar. And so that's really where stable coins have gotten traction and gotten excited in the past few years. And hopefully now that, you know, So we're looking to see the president sign on the G.S. Act of law. This will be sort of the path forward for years to come. So this week on the earnings called Jamie Dimon talked about stable coins. He said, I don't know why you'd want a stable coin as opposed to just a payment.

4:44But nonetheless, he did acknowledge it. Are big banks, you know, do they lose here in the stable coin bill passing? How do they get affected? Yeah, I mean, I think this is a topic for debate. Certainly a large number of U.S. banks are now sniffing around the stablecoin space, looking for their angle. Some of them may end up being, you know, working with sort of the backing, sort of like Cantor has been with Tether and sort of being their custodian for Treasuries for the past several years. Some of them may look to issue not quite a bank, but PayPal obviously has been experimenting with PYUSD. Ultimately, I think the lack of yield bearing provision in the Genius Act is like a little bit of a giveaway to banks when they go and play.

5:26Ultimately, I'm sorry to cut you. I was just going to jump here. Yield bearing provision. Let's just make sure we know what we're talking about. Explain that for us really quickly. Sure. So right now, holders of stable coins are not able to receive yield directly from the stable coin issuer. So they can maybe go and lend that stable coin out and get additional yield elsewhere. but it's different than maybe a savings account that you would get at a U.S. bank where, hey, some of the underlying yield from the treasuries is passed back to you as the holder. Stable coins have had none of that. And I think ultimately that's a testament to the power of the product that people are willing to forego interest in order to actually just get access to dollars, which is often more stable than their local currency.

6:09But I think stable coins has been in kind of this weird part of crypto where obviously the numbers sort of speak for themselves. I mean, we're up to over 250 billion in stablecoins issued, really just been on this tremendous growth streak over the past many years, even as the price of cryptocurrencies has fluctuated, which I think is a testament to the offshore demand for dollars. And that's really where stablecoins have found product market fit. So I'm not surprised that someone like Jamie Dimon is maybe not as excited or maybe doesn't get it. Obviously, you have access to the US banking system, you're maybe less concerned, or you don't quite understand the feel.

6:42Well, I mean, it's not just Jamie Dimon, you know, the big banks, the big banks having thought about stable coins. I mean, we've had reports that companies like Walmart, Amazon, Expedia, you know, these types of companies are also looking at stable coins. I mean, whether or not they are looking at it or not, my question is, help me explain how this works. I mean, you know, just brass tacks. If everyone has a stable coin, how does that even work? I'm trying to wrap my head around it. Yeah, it's unclear yet if everyone will have a stable coin. I think ultimately there probably will be a power law effect where you'll have a small number of players that take up the majority of the market and maybe a long tail.

7:20I think you can kind of think of it analogously to like the gift card market or sort of like the Starbucks app where you can have credits inside of an application that are dollarized. And maybe you get some sort of additional benefit with the issuer, with the merchant for having their bill coin. So maybe you get reduced fees or maybe you get some sort of membership or additional yield. I do think the more likely scenario is, hey, we have a small number of issuers, a small number of stable coins that take the vast majority of the market. And maybe there's some differentiation around different geos, around different verticals, again, sort of like the general banking industry.

7:57Right. So you guys have a big portfolio yourself at Dragonfly Capital. You know, I'm wondering as it relates to the startup ecosystem, you know, stable. On one hand, there are companies issuing stable coins that they're clearly a beneficiary here. What other startups, you know, can you see sort of getting more attention around the stable coin ecosystem now that this bill has passed? Yeah, I think now that is going to pass. Sorry, I should be clear. Yeah, I think a lot of people focus on, again, the sort of issuer side of stable coins. And certainly we've invested in a few, including Agora, which recently announced their$50 million round.

8:38We're really also looking at sort of this periphery and sort of other parts of the stablecoin stack. So things like stablecoin orchestration, I would include Bridge, which obviously Stripe acquired semi-recently in that sort of bucket. Orchestration is like being able to accept the stablecoins or what is that? It's being able to move stablecoins around programmatically. So it includes like custody, documentation, execution, things like that. I would also look at something we did a company recently called ZAR, which is basically a fiat on-ramp, off-ramp targeting Pakistan. So it's a little bit like M-Pesa, if you're familiar with that, where you can go to your local corner store.

9:16They can basically OTC fiat into stablecoins or vice versa. and Zara sort of acts as this app that does compliance, custody, execution, kind of enabling these different sort of local merchants and it should be able to do that. Let's go a little bit up in terms of size here. Those are sort of the early stage companies. Let's talk about the later stage crypto companies. We've seen quite a bit of M &A lately in crypto. You mentioned Bridge. We've also got Coinbase buying Deribit, which is a derivatives exchange. That's their play into that market. Why are we seeing so much M &A right now in crypto?

9:54Yeah, I think it's a few components. One is certainly, I mean, the public equities markets have been extremely favorable towards crypto for the past few months. I mean, Coinbase just hit a new all-time high today. Circle is, you know, 8X, its IPO price. And that is effectively, you know, more dry powder for these companies to go out and acquire. And a lot of it's how they're financing a lot of these deals. Some of it is also non-crypto companies feeling this kind of FOMO moment specifically around stable coins and payments, feeling like, hey, here's this big trend that we have no current play in.

10:30How do we play catch up? How do we make sure that we're not getting left behind? And so we see a lot of sort of sniffing around from different parts of the channel, either banking or web to industries, looking to sort of get smart and get ahead on stable coins and payments. So I think those are sort of two of the main components going into it. But it's ultimately, I would say, playing towards crypto being sort of this back end for all the different players where it's going to sort of sit behind these applications that people already use and sort of powering it. You don't already know that it's powering it.

11:07I think the Robinhood announcement a couple of weeks ago is sort of emblematic of this. What did you make of the Robinhood announcement? Awesome, because, I mean, you were on Twitter about this, the idea that, you know, Robinhood can issue tokens. You know, it's not technically open equity. You had a good tweet about this. You said, what do you mean it's not technically equity? It is not equity. So what did you make of Robinhood's big, you know, party announcing all of its crypto products? Yeah, I would say it's a bit of a mixed bag. I think, you know, Robinhood using its own chain to do 24-7 trading, to basically offer new types of derivatives, I think makes big sense.

11:47Ultimately, this is a way to sort of leapfrog our existing technology and sort of the debt that sort of comes alongside it. I think the OpenAI SpaceX thing was a little bit goofy. It's effectively just a CFD or a forward that they are putting on chain that, you know, Robinhood is your counterparty for. I would have liked to see something a little bit more creative there, at least a bit more transparency around how they presented it. But, you know, it's a V1. I'm excited to see at least that they're investing into the space. And I think overall the product direction is how I think more Web2 companies are going to start playing in crypto.

12:20I want to let you go, but, you know, we've got a number of companies in the crypto space possibly looking at IPOs in the next couple of years. We've got reports of companies that have filed confidentially. give me two names, two names that you think are going public in the next 12 months in crypto. I would bet good money that Kraken is going public. This year? 12 months. Yes. 2025. I have no inside information, but it just seems like it's so primed. And again, looking at comps, looking at how well Kremis is doing, I think the market is saying, yes, we're ready for Kraken. I guess in that same vein, I would not be surprised if Gemini does as well.

13:00I don't know if I want to hedge my bets a little bit there, but I would say overall exchanges are just such an understood, well underwritten business model. And now, if anything, is the time for them to do it. Great. Well, when that happens, we'll have you back on the show. Thank you so much for being here, Tom. We really appreciate it. That is Tom Schmidt from Dragonfly Capital. Next up, I want to talk about Netflix. The company reported earnings last night. Investors sent shares down this morning, even though the company raised its revenue forecast for the year. I want to bring on the information's co-executive editor, Martin Peers.

13:35He is not only our boss, he has been covering Netflix pretty much since its inception in 1997. And more importantly, he is the man, the face, the author behind the spiciest takes in tech in our very popular nightly newsletter called The Briefing. Martin, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Akash. So, look, I asked you to come on the show yesterday to talk about Netflix earnings. And right after the earnings came out, you said, look, Netflix is a boring company now. There's no point. And I said, what do you mean? And you started telling me about why you thought so. I said, put a pin in it, come on the show and tell me today.

14:14So I want to ask you the question now. Why is Netflix now a boring company? Okay. Well, to be clear, I mean, as a reporter, it's boring. I mean, for the investors in the company, it's not. But I mean, honestly, this company, every quarter is the same 15 % increase in revenue. They're making a huge amount of money. Every quarter they talk about we've made continued progress in this and that. It's just not very interesting. There's no drama. So it's not the company. I mean, you know, reporters always want when companies are sort of declining or surging. Netflix is just going along very, very sort of stably.

15:00And they're doing really well, but it's not that interesting. So, yes. But for investors, it's interesting. It's fantastic. I mean, this company, it has really achieved the economy of scale that you really hope to get. They've got 300 million global subscribers. They're making a huge amount of cash. They really are. They have achieved everything that all the other streaming companies, you know, are looking for. So, I mean, what do you complain about, really? Compare it to cable. I mean, is it as boring as cable? Cable is not as boring because cable is declining. And the thing you're always looking for is something that is going up or down, not sort of sideways.

15:57Right, right, right. You know, as it relates to Netflix becoming interesting and in the eyes of a reporter, I mean, they've got a number of bets going in advertising, in sports. I mean, what would make it a more exciting story for you? What sort of plays are you really paying attention to here? Well, look, this is the issue. Advertising is where they're hoping to grow because their ability to continue expanding is not that great because they've already signed up pretty much everyone who wants it. So really the way that they will expand is to get some advertising dollars. So how they do with that is, that's what we'll be watching for.

16:44But that will take a long time. So it's not something you can really get any kind of interesting story out of. What about sports? Sports is the thing. I mean, look, if they go in and they spend a huge amount of money buying up sports rights, then their entire business could be really hurt because sports are very expensive. So if they do that, that's a good story. It's not so good for the investors, but for us, it's great. One of the things you wrote last night is you were talking about the company's valuation and the multiple. You pointed out that the company is trading at 12 times its sales. You also compared it to Spotify, which is growing sort of around the same rate, but it's trading at a much lower multiple.

17:30What were you getting at there? I mean, actually, your column ended saying, is there a correction coming? I'm asking you if there is. Netflix I think the stock reflects the fact that it is the one company in streaming which is doing really well it's it's you know it's it's making all of the money so I think investors are buying it as the only stock that they need for exposure to that industry but I think it's overpriced and you know today the stock is down I think five percent so I think investors are realizing the days of the rocket ship like expansion are over and i think the stop will over time come down and and did executives last night on the call give any kind of indication that they are interested in re-accelerating growth and becoming that rocket ship company or are they well of course they always talk about that but i don't think anyone is expecting them to to post the growth that they used to i think it's going to be they will be okay if they can continue the rate that they're expanding now you know 15 percent or so right because you know the really the issue is that could fall even further so i mean look you you've been covering the company um for more than 20 years now uh you've seen many management teams uh over the years if that's just true no no um that isn't true akash they haven't had that many that's true management teams i mean one of the reason that they're boring is they're in the entertainment industry and other companies in the entertainment industry tend to have dramas firing ceos they're firing all sorts of other people right doesn't have any of that it's just such a stable boring company right and actually i mean all i was getting at was you know if in another reality a virtual reality you were on the management team of netflix you were the ceo i mean what would you horrifying thought really no no ideas what would i do no i mean you can't i would say this is one of the best run companies that there is so i can't really suggest that i would have any particularly good ideas i mean i would prefer that the programs they air weren't so bad i mean they have a lot of shows on which are just incredibly derivative and predictable but i mean such as such as untamed i was watching it last night and uh honestly it's not so great okay but no i you can't fault them they this is a very well-run company right well thank you so much for coming on we appreciate it again martin is the author behind our nightly newsletter the briefing it comes out at 5 p.m pacific 8 p.m eastern time every night be sure to check it out i want to move to another editor at The Information.

20:23Abe Brown is our weekend magazine, which is what covers what Silicon Valley does when they log off for the week. I'll let him tell you a little bit more about it. But he's got some very exciting stories coming for us in the pipe, not the least of which is one on flying cars. Abe, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here. Look, we'll get to flying cars, but tell us about another story you're working on about fashions at Sun Valley. This was exciting to me. Well, thanks, Akash. Great to be here. This is, we do have a piece in Weekend from a new writer. One of the best things about Weekend is that we have a bunch of contributors to it, including a new writer who's written for Vogue and Elle in the Wall Street Journal.

21:12That's Freya Doohan. And she's gone through what everybody was wearing at Sun Valley last week and pulled out the most important trends that everybody needs to know about this year for the summer. This includes the big chunky sunglasses that you saw Sam Altman wearing. It's actually from an Australian brand called Varnet, which has been around since the 50s. They've sponsored Olympians. I may have ordered a pair. And why do you think he was wearing these sunglasses? They are a particularly high-end technical brand of sunglasses and they are technically exquisite for blocking the sun and activities outdoors and they're expensive and they look weird and you can you definitely get noticed wearing them.

22:09Part of a bigger trend of chunky sunglasses and then Then another trend that Freyra pulled out is navy is the new power color of the summer, which, you know, I appreciate as a man with a lot of navy shirts. Well, you know, that's not the, you know, the only thing that we don't just have stories that come out of the weekend. You also write a Saturday newsletter, which is it's it's a quite colorful newsletter. There's a lot of variety in it. I always quickly actually start with the bottom half, which is the recommendations, because you've got some great recommendations. You also put out a story recently about your top picks for summer reading.

22:51Tell us about a couple of picks on that list. Yes. So every summer and winter, we do a whole guide to the books that the books to go out and buy and, you know, take up, take on your trips with you. the latest guide has 25 i'm gonna give you a condensed version of just my top three one of them is my documents by an author named kevin yuen and that is a alternative history which imagines a contemporary america in which we in which a crisis unfolds and we treat Vietnamese Americans like we did the Japanese Americans during World War II. We sent them to internment camps. It sounds like a dark, unpleasant subject.

23:39Kevin is a very funny guy. He's the features editor at The Verge. And he tells a very fast-paced, very of-the-moment story. And he has a lot of fun doing it and really pulls in a lot of themes that will resonate today, both in terms of politics, media, and tech. One of his main characters is a fresh Google hire. I want to jump in here before you get to there, too. What prompted you to pick up that book in the start?

24:19What prompted me to pick it up? I had read Kevin's earlier novel, and I knew that I had read a preview of it earlier and I knew there was a connection to the Techverse, which obviously is a center interest here, the information. So I wanted to check the book out. Obviously, Kevin writing, editing at The Verge means that he's also in our world. Just very quickly, the other two, one is a book called Where the Axe is Buried and that is a some speculative science fiction by a very fun up-and-coming science fiction author named gray nailer uh he's written another couple books i recommend them all uh they are scyfe they're you know very straight down the middle sci-fi you will need to sit there and enjoy the world building the my um the book i enjoyed the most is one that has a title that may not be the most appetizing for everybody it's the spinach king and when i i'm going to give you two cultural touch points to understand why i love the spinach king so much it is succession meets boardwalk empire it is the story about the seabrook family who uh were frozen food magnates in the previous century and when i tell you that the book uh it's a true story about the seabrooks it the book and touches on everything from Joseph Stalin to the Ku Klux Klan to the SEC to a mansion with a fake vault or a fake door and a hidden vault.

25:58It's an amazing nonfiction, and it's written by one of the heirs to the fortune who happens to be a New Yorker writer. So it's an amazing read, and I recommend it and the other 24 books on the package. Very quickly, we've got a story this weekend. It's our big read, which is our big feature that we put out. It is about flying cars. It is not a company that I have ever heard of, but it's a company that you, Steve Levine was the writer, you were the editor. Tell us a little bit about why you guys wanted to cover this company and what the most interesting thing was. So the story is about Joby Aviation, which has been trying to create flying taxis for many, many years.

26:48A company was founded in 2009. They're coming, Akash. They're coming. You and I are going to be commuting to the office soon. These are like helicopters? Are they helicopters, effectively? Yeah, they have four blades. They look very minority report-ish, very Jetsonian. And they're really, honest to God, getting off the ground in Dubai and looks like they're coming, really are actually coming to New York and Los Angeles. And what's really interesting about the last couple of years of Joby's lifespan has been how it has needed the rigorous engineering help from Toyota, which is not kind of a strange bedfellows just because Toyota kind of passed on the first EV wave, but they have been eager partners because they really see these flying taxis as a future that we're all going to be living in.

27:50Well, I really look forward to reading it. Again, it's a company I never heard about, but that is what you get in the weekend. You get fascinating characters, fascinating technology, and best of all, fascinating stories. Thank you very much, Abe, for being here. That is our weekend editor, Abe Brown. I want to go to our editor-in-chief and CEO, Jessica Lesson, to help us wrap this Friday show, our first Friday show of our first week. We did it, Akash. Congratulations. First week under our belt. It's just so exciting. I'm really excited to talk to you, not just about news of the week, But, you know, we put out these stories at the surveys, I should say, at the information.

28:34We pull our subscribers about about the topics that are really just, you know, top of mind for Silicon Valley. This week we did vibe coding and I'll let you go through the results. They were actually pretty interesting. And why don't you tell us what what you know, what we found? Absolutely. So I think for years now at the information on a monthly basis, we've been surveying our subscribers and readers to take a pulse on important topical questions like vibe coding but also their sentiment about a basket of public and private companies so i think the information's text sentiment survey which also had some interesting moves this month um is is just a very cool franchise and i i know um we have a lot of features to it in terms of downloading the whole data set and a lot of our investors are really parsing it on a monthly basis.

29:27Right. I think in this month, when we asked about VibeCoding, look, the information's audience skews techie. You know, we have over three quarters of subscribers and respondents to the survey. So maybe the survey respondents skew even techier than the overall page, but who have tried VibeCoding. And, you know, I think that is just a huge number. I know there's a debate in the lesson household about how much vibe coding time one should do because my husband is so into it right now. Often I just want to watch Netflix, to be honest, to to reference Martin's comments about them crushing it. I have a different take on some shows.

30:07I'll have to give him a few referrals. But I think it is just a stunning percentage. And then if you look, I think mostly people are trying apps, of course. There's also websites and other things. The other thing that was pretty surprising to me was that ChatGPT is still the leader of the pack in Vibe coding. Now, obviously, ChatGPT is the leader in chatbots. but cursor and thropic are really you know the the names that i'm certainly hearing most among the developers most interested in in using ai to build these services um clearly they're still the gap is narrow between the two i would say but it's still there um and so to have about 53 percent using chat gpt 43 using claude 43 using cursor um was interesting to me so um well well there's a lot more reporting to kind of spool out on that um in terms of the overall survey results for the month we had google sentiment up and apple sentiment down um you know tends to vary a lot we look at a number of different companies but um that kind of jives with what you know you're hearing about Google, right?

31:26It seems like the reviews for Gemini's continued improvements are more positive. Yes, huge, huge questions hang over the company, strategy, the future of search and so forth. But I wonder if it's just some of those new releases that are giving people a little more optimism around the company. Yeah, yeah. You know, one of the things that jumped out to me about the surveys, we also asked about satisfaction and how well people like the tools that they are using. and the number here was 88 % of people are at least somewhat satisfied and I think it was something like mid-30 % of people, they are extremely satisfied.