#34 - Sean Neville

0:00All right, Sean, welcome to the New York State Podcast. Glad to have you here. Great to be here. Thanks. So we worked together several years ago on what became USDC. And I was the lead on the Coinbase side. And we set up the center consortium. And you and Jeremy were the co-founders of Circle. And I think the Circle Coinbase Center partnership has been pretty impressive for the world over the last seven, eight years. Do you want to talk about that? Just introduce people because you're a co-founder of Circle. You've done a bunch of other things. Give the quick spiel. Sean on Sean. Yeah, yeah. So Jeremy and I started Circle in 2013.

0:37So it's been, you know, 12 years, which is like 120 years in crypto or something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so, you know, we were just obsessed with this idea about democratizing and sort of decentralizing global finance and, you know, sort of had this vision for what that might look like. And the vision really hasn't wavered. The way that we've tried to execute on the vision, obviously, has had a lot of different sort of crisscrossing paths. And probably should have been obvious in 2013 that we needed something like a stablecoin. But it was actually 2017 when we figured out that that's what we needed to that's what we needed in order to build everything else we were interested in.

1:17And obviously, I was going to say, obviously, you know, that part of the story is as you came into the picture and help make it happen as well. Yeah. And I think basically what's funny about that was that was I think that was true teamwork. and um what was interesting about stable coins at the time as you may remember is a lot of people poo-pooed them and said wow your great innovation is putting a dollar on chain that's a great innovation right and it was kind of like people not understanding how big a deal it was to put like for example news on online right or uh you know they they just didn't understand that for example once it's on chain you've got um programmability and you've got uh you know anybody can send anybody and you can use it in smart contracts and you can slice and dice it down to smaller amounts and uh you can have devices use it machine payments as we'll get to with your new startup with the katina and people didn't understand that stuff at the time but i think we we saw that and uh you know what were you thinking about you said the vision had changed for stables over time but what were you what was the number one thing that you guys were thinking about at the time you started work on USDC?

2:27Yeah, I mean, it was pretty simple, honestly. In order to enable global payments that didn't pause at borders and that were almost free, we needed some representation that was stable and capable of moving over internet rails. So the idea was multiple chains, not to be religious about any one particular chain or piece of infrastructure, but to rely on blockchains to deliver value. And that in itself was really a building block so that we can enable these other use cases. You know, I'd say today stable coins, you know, largely the use case has been in crypto capital markets. We haven't yet seen that unlock of payments, treasury management effects, you know, these other things, but we're right on the cusp of it now.

3:07And, you know, we certainly needed that building block technically, but also it couldn't just be a circle coin or a coin based coin, you know, that's right. That's why I said USDC, if you recall, I think we named it so that the C was circle and Coinbase and Center because the Center Consortium, and the Consortium meant it was decentralized because we were partners on it. And it also meant that others could, in theory, join. That's right. And that was the idea. We expected there to be multiple, you know, potentially multiple issuers, all of whom participated in a consortium, even though they may be competing at other layers of the stack.

3:43You know, the idea is just interoperable standards, right? So like back in the day, Microsoft had a slightly different version of HTTP, than, than Eatscape. And ultimately, that's interesting. Well, you know, there was this, there used to be, it was, it was sort of like, you know, build your service that ran an IE. You mean, you mean, do you mean like blink tags versus marquee, like HTML? That kind of thing. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But ultimately everybody agreed. Let's just, let's just agree on a standard and let's not argue over different implementations of say SSL, because we can compete at the e-commerce layer.

4:15So long as we have this foundation of interoperable standards that no one vendor really owns. And when it comes to delivering dollars or other currencies, but stable coins today, largely people largely want dollars today is what they mean when they say stables. It can't be circle dollars or Stripe dollars. Or coinbase dollars. Yeah, exactly. Coinbase dollars, whatever it is. It's just dollars to people who are using it. And so we sort of saw a need for if dollars were going to move over internet rails and over blockchains, then it needed to move as an interoperable standard. And so that was the idea.

4:50So it's put together a consortium, not sort of Libra style of 30 people who can't agree on anything, but, you know, a small number of very like-minded, motivated participants who could agree on these fundamentals and get it going. Yeah, you know, I like the Libra guys, and I remember saying to them at the time, and And I think David Marcus and Morgan Beller and so on would agree with me now, I guess. It was totally fine. You know, they did their thing and I give them props for seeing it through, even though, you know, it didn't work. Another thing works. But I think the issue with Libra at the time was, A, they were using a basket of currencies to back their thing.

5:28And the problem with that is you had volatility without upside, right? You didn't know if it was like one Libra is what? It's 87 cents a day and it's$1.15 tomorrow, right? and so it wasn't mapped to anything that people had psychologically right no fixed price he had the other hand they had volatility without upside because it's never going to be 10x right so it's like worse to both roles in that sense and then there are other kinds of things that were like that as well where it was blockchain so traditional banks thought it was risky but it didn't have any upside so crypto people didn't want to back it and actually this was something which i think we did right with usdc so i'll explain on the coinbase end how we were thinking about somewhat similar to how you were thinking about it.

6:08So my view was because at that time, if you recall, we were in the ZERP era, right? And so we didn't know, I mean, only with a crystal ball would you know that they would jack rates to the moon in 2022, right? That was like four years out at that point. And we had been in ZERP for like almost 10 years, right? Since the 2008 financial crisis, right? And so USDC, it was not obvious that it was going to make any money anytime soon. and the way i conceptualize on the coinbase side is we thought about it similar to how you thought about it but we thought about as google login like google did not make money directly from google login but it sort of projected you know like uh projected power projected login over the whole internet and then people would come back to google except a decentralized version of google login where stable coins would be used everywhere and then people would come back and they'd trade on our venues they do things they basically be part of the crypto economy so just like google login sort of grows the internet we thought usdc will grow the crypto economy that was one kind of process the second thesis is we we put in capital behind it because we didn't think that um so had it been an ico for example there would have been pressure for a short-term return so we capitalized it you know together and uh i think that proved correct because had people gotten or wanted interest back from it.

7:32Now today, it throws off whatever billion dollars a year, it's like 5 % rates, 4 % rates to 70 billion, it's like two,$3 billion a year, not bad for seven years, right. But at the time, it literally returned like nothing for like the first four years or something like that, because interest rates were zero. So something like that is, you know, something where you can't necessarily make money on it, because rates are not, we're not within our control, or we didn't know. So we had to essentially assume that it was just a utility thing for the entire ecosystem until the returns came there. Does that comport with how you guys thought about it?

8:05Let me know your thoughts on that. Yeah, you know, the first version of it in 2017, actually predating Coinbase, we did have a, you know, it's probably still floating around out there. The first version of the white paper contemplated a token being released on the network that was called the SENT. And so there was sort of this alternative path that we quickly realized this is not the right way to deliver this but there was a little bit of a different revenue model tied to it um by virtue of you know having a token and this was yeah this was in the ICO you know sort of boom and bust um and uh you know we explored a lot of things uh to try to deliver it in that fashion before we did v2 yes and that was our collaboration and then we that's right we we had patient capital on the balance sheet.

8:53So we didn't need to, we didn't have ICO, like nothing against coins, but those investors are not patient, as you know, ICO investors are not patient. So, you know, so by having patient capital on the balance sheet, we could go for years and years without, you know, worrying about any return in the short term. And I think that that helped a lot. Okay. So now I'll tell you before, before, so, you know, we had sort of decided what Coinbase is the right partner. We were also talking to others, I mean, as you know, and assisted by people like Jim McDoll at Coinbase, trying to bring people into the central consortium.

9:31And there were very serious conversations we had before Coinbase that it didn't work out with very large players when ultimately you leaned in and others at Coinbase. I always wondered internally, did Brian have to be convinced to go this path? It's a good question. So now the story can be told, right? So it actually, so again, of course, you know everything that happened on the Circle side. I can describe what happened on the Coinbase side. So there was essentially a big conversation internally, which was build versus buy versus partner, right? And I wanted to, so buy would have been like buy an expensive stable coin or something like that.

10:14And I also felt that wasn't really in tune with crypto because crypto is about decentralization and so on and so forth. And so I wanted to, first of all, partnering would have been, you guys had, my view on what you guys had, you had an audited smart contract at a time when that was actually a relatively very scarce thing, right? Because a trail of bits and what have you had, you know, they were, they're still, I think they're still good, but they were backlogged. And, you know, there weren't that many people who knew how to do audited smart contracts at that time. So I knew that that would take us months to get to the level that I felt that we could put hundreds of millions or billions of dollars into it, right?

10:51Like an audits of our contract is no small thing, right? There's that and also, you know, the fact that you guys were reputable. You've been around for a long time. Jeremy had had an exit before with his video company. Gosh, I'm forgetting the name of it, but it was... Brightcove. Brightcove, exactly. That's right. Like streaming video company. And actually, we had met you, I don't know if you remember this, when I was a partner at Andresen, all the way at the very beginning in 2013 when you guys were starting circle uh you know so so we we had game film on you right and and obviously i think there was mutual respect um and then the so my view was a partner b um user balance sheet and essentially the question was partner versus build right and i felt that partner was the right approach because crypto is like i'm a i think i I'd like to be or we'd like to be win-win people and there's more that can be done together.

11:44And I felt that that would be an organic partnership since you guys were also crypto first and you've been in the space for a long time. And everybody who's in the class of 2013, we all have our grays. Right. But that was like the first time that a bunch of venture, you know, Eric Voorhees of Shapeshift really got his start back then. Right. I think blockchain.info really got going then. You know, Blockstream got funded around that time. And so I think quite a few companies, as you may recall, like CoinDesk and so on really got going. So I think some of the really foundational companies in the space got going at that time.

12:16And you'd been in the space for the right reasons. You weren't like a Johnny come lately. And I mean, it's all obvious stuff, but these are just explaining what our thinking was. So I felt you'd be a good long term partner for this. And so that's that was part of the reasoning on our side. And then what I did, which you guys don't care about, but we had just really three or four people on our stage. Jim McDull, who you met, Jacob Horn, who's the product manager, and then Maxim and Miha, who are the two lead engineers. And then there are several other people, you know, on design and so on. Those are, I think, the four principal people.

12:51Maybe there's somebody I'm forgetting, but I think those are the four principals. And the biggest, one of the hardest things was just clearing everything off of Maxim and Miha's schedule so they could just code 24-7. and block all the HR people and so on and so forth. So no, I just fell out of their forms. And we shipped it really fast. October 3rd, 2018. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. And Jacob, by the way, also, I always felt he was a great champion for us internally. Yes, yes. And, you know, really, really enjoyed working with him. We had Joao Reganato, who was PM on our side, but our CD is really small too.

13:20It was a handful of people. I mean, the tech, obviously, it needed to be secure. It needed to be a strong, And obviously, we launched it on Ethereum. It's now on like 20 - On everything, yeah. It's on everything. But it has to be secure. And so the code mattered a lot, but there's not a whole lot of tech there. I think the partnerships and the distribution, obviously trying to clear the liquidity mode, which is still, there are only two dollar stables that have any meaningful liquidity right now because that liquidity mode is really difficult to clear. Like all of these things were at least as important as the pure engineering.

13:59That's right. And I think the reason on the engineering side, it wasn't so much it was hard because it wasn't a lot of code, but it had to be extremely correct because reentrancy bugs, there's all kinds of these things that can get you. There are two other things that I remember at the time that were really important. First was that a lot of other people had been doing stable coins back by what I call plutonium, right? A very unstable thing over here. And you didn't know what the value was because it jumped up and down all the time. And nothing against Tether. They've proven themselves. They've executed over the last X number of years.

14:36But at the time, it wasn't known that they had enough paper to back what their outstanding assets were and so on and so forth. And then there were other people, not even Tether, who were doing algorithmic stable coins, some of which, as you know, blew up later. And so one big thing for us was using the banking relationships to get$1 on chain backed by$1 off chain and do it in a dumb. But simple is hard and good, right? So the simple thing of just one currency off chain, one currency on chain, that was one big piece. The second big piece, if you may recall, is, and this is a big debate with those banks, right?

15:20was would people have to kyc to send to somebody or would it be a blacklist rather than whitelist right meaning would we maintain so we had to have some compliance type stuff and so on so for somebody misused it so we eventually agreed that freeze and um you know in in extreme circumstances freeze or reverse transactions in in the contract was better than having every single address have to pre-verify in KYC beforehand, which would defeat the whole point of it, right? So once we, I think that was another key thing is we got enough banking partners to agree, A, okay, with a warrant, you can freeze or seize or reverse transactions, just like you can with wires.

16:06And B, you can also guard the egress and ingress at the exchanges when USDC is being swapped for USD, right? And so given that, then you otherwise have fun on chain and do what you need to do, right? Yeah. And I think that actually now opened up the door for, among other things, something you and I have both thought a lot about, kind of your new company, which is Katina, right? Because by doing that, since, you know, if you had to KYC every address, you couldn't have a program generate 100 new addresses because it all have to be KYC by like the human and some photograph or something like that.

16:42It'd be too much friction on the thing. It'd be impossible. It'd be impossible, right? So that brings us to the unlock of machine-to-machine payments. So why don't you talk about your new thing, Katina? Yeah, so I'll also say something on the way that the sort of funds freeze happens. I was still never, honestly, I always felt like we could have innovated there a bit more past just address management. I mean, you and I talked at the time about things that were more sophisticated, probably would not have been executable then, but this - Like governance contracts that - Governance contracts, yeah.

17:15like risk and reputation on chain to, you know, sort of handle these, these sorts of things. And it turned out that you were right. So the simple approach was, was the one that was going to work, you know, but I still always felt like, you know, there's something there. And it's the, you know, one of the things that always nagged me about the internet is there's no real like, like really, you know, distributed identity layer where people can sort of manage their own credentials effectively and not have to lean on a Google or whatever. um and i i was sort of like the remnants of that i wanted to somehow figure out maybe how we could incorporate it but at the end of the day it was all about not even getting the regulators comfortable but our de facto regulators which are our bank partners um and uh this the simple approach was the one that was going to win there for both settlement and reserve bank partners yeah yes and and i think that basically um you know like you so i think today it's possible to innovate on that right but you know uh my my view on a lot of things like this is sort of like minimum necessary innovation right so no coin we just did off the balance sheet no plutonium we just did one-to-one backing you know usd for uscc uh no um coin governance we just had root access to the contract we had the minimum size of the consortium of the game which is two and and we just minimized all complexity and it was still not a completely trivial thing to scale and build this thing over last few years uh but but it was awesome and you know really you know it's funny you do 20 things and it's interesting as to what things actually turn out to be really big you know um it's kind of like for you know there are like 50 investments i do did in a year and then one of them is like ethereum or one of them is salon or something like that and then it's like oh okay well that went you know that goes really big right and it's interesting because a year later or two years later usdc was useful but it is it is after i think zerp ended that it really went boom like this and became as material as it is now right and it's funny so i'll tell you another discussion that not public but i think you know there was a discussion internally as to how much to out you know like resources to allocate towards usdc and unusually see most of the time you know good advice to the company is like ignore macro but in this case you couldn't ignore macro because 100 of the decision was what is the fed going to do right because it's like is it going to increase rates or is it going to keep them down or is it going to go wiggle like this or what is it going to do and like it felt actually it was much more wall street than i'm used to in tech because completely 100 % decision was your mental model of the Fed.

20:01I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Then we can go to Katina over there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's true. I mean, I think that my recollection is that even after we had decided on most of the structural pieces in terms of governance and tech, and we had, you know, lined up the banking partners. And this was also, speaking of banking partners, this was also just barely after the era when there was only really one bank in the world that would bank coinbase or circle yeah so the banking partner piece which you mentioned was it was a huge negotiation and discussion because uh things are different now um you know we have you know bony mel and blackrock and you know you know but it was not like that then um uh a short time ago so so yeah but my recollection is that the the most um uh i would say difficult but time-consuming hardest pieces to put together were the economics It was the macro situation, a sort of analysis, but also micro.

21:01What should the economics be if we have a consortium, not of 100 people, but of a small number starting with two? What does that look like? And there's a lot of discussion that's been revised since our time focused on that. But yeah, absolutely. I think that was the big puzzle. And even then, I remember we had people talking about, you know, maybe can you do JPY stablecoin or like negative interest rates? All that is now happening. All that is now. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So that's right. So you asked about Kupaina, and I keep going back to USDC because it's fun to chat with you about it. But, you know, one of the nice things about machine native money is that it's very reliable for machines to use it.

21:46so uh so when we have these orchestrated workflows call them no one can agree on what an agent is but sort of uh workflows with llm intelligence involved in making decisions um then as those workflows become economic actors they need to be able to transact they need to be able to hold money they need to be able to send money they need to be able to make you know treasury effects decisions potentially with you know all within guardrails um and uh humans in the loop where necessary. But simply tacking AI intelligence onto the edges of, say, a credit card flow is just, aside from the economics, it is not reliable.

22:22It's really difficult to make those, even just the simple tool calls very reliable. And so when you take a five to seven to nine party system and you add a couple more parties on the edges of it, then it's different than taking a stablecoin, you know, point to point transaction. And, you know, Agentech workflows are very good at signing cryptographic messages. And so, and then all of a sudden, you know, you sort of unlock the capability of transacting in fractional amounts, in like streaming payments in real time, all these things we've been talking about for 20 years, but have really never been economically possible or technically possible until we have the combination of machines becoming economic actors and stable coins.

23:05I don't know if we keep calling them stable coins, but it's a, you know, screaming money. Fiat coins. Yeah, that's right. Well, so because this is funny because, you know, 10 years ago, I also took a crack at the machine payable web and machine micropayments and 402. And the issue was that Bitcoin at the time, see Gavin Anderson, if you recall, had published a roadmap for scaling to huge numbers of transactions of big blocks and so on. And then the Bitcoin civil war happened and became small blocks and fine. But that just basically meant that you couldn't scale on Bitcoin in the way that, you know, lots of transactions.

23:41So everything had to move to other chains. And so and frankly, you know, it's funny now today in retrospect, now that we have Solana and base and we have USDC and we had to have Ethereum and we had to have Bitcoin. And we also had to like win this gigantic political battle. Right. After all of that, Now, finally, lots of the pent up innovation. And also we had to be able to get on phones, right? Because you have to win this political battle because this is something it's a really interesting thing, which, you know, and I know so many people for some years like where are the crypto apps? Why aren't they on phones?

24:19and the reason is that apple especially and to a lesser extent but real extent android would nerf all kinds of apps that use crypto on phones because there was some like apple payment you know the iap thing in-app purchases thing all this kind of stuff where they've now actually lost some cases on that you know and they're sort of being forced to do that and to be clear look apple does a lot of stuff well but they're sort of genetically anti-crypto and so there's a chicken and egg thing where you just couldn't get. And that's why crypto has actually developed as much more of a web phenomenon than a mobile phenomenon.

24:52We have to be choke pointed in a certain way where we're only web rather than mobile. And we have to be choke pointed through the banks in a certain way. And like you couldn't do equity issuance. You can only do meme coins. So I think Bankless also had a very similar observation. Like there's all this pent up spring of innovation go boing like this over the next 10 years that machine payments are a part of. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, my thesis is that in the future, the only actors that we will trust with our money and our assets and the only actors that will be capable of generating competitive returns will be agentic.

25:30Interesting. And and I mean, or do you mean delegates of yourself? So this is that's a good question. So right now there's a little bit of a battle, I would say, between those who believe that agents should be mapped to tasks that always get mapped to some user, could be a business or consumer or whatever. And those that believe that may be true, but we'll also see semi-autonomous or autonomous agents that actually do have their own identity and act on their own behalf, not just a planning loop, but can truly act on their own behalf. And so there's debates on both sides of those things. But I think, you know, either way, you know, in terms of being able to make good decisions rapidly enough with money, we will just not want to trust anything other than, I mean, it's hard to imagine now because people's anecdotal experiences are that, you know, Claude or Chad GPT can't give them a recipe for a brownie correctly because of the sort of hallucinations.

26:31but it but it is i still have strong conviction that it is the truth that we will see ai actors that will be the most effective economic participants the world has ever seen and then we will want to use those but we will have no need to ever execute a transaction ourselves we will always be doing it through some form of um uh you know personal or other ai interesting you don't think you'll ever need to execute a transaction yourself that's interesting that's strong form version um so where do you when that happens when that happens is a question i always find that when the hardest question for me to answer in this so i have conviction around the what does it take uh three years to touch certain domains before others or does it take two months does it take 20 years it's really difficult to say so 12 years ago actually me and actually the winklevosses and novel we are there's some panel and i remember thinking about machine payments then and my kind of example of something bitcoin could do that you know other currencies like fiat couldn't do is if you had two self-driving cars on the highway one of them could pay the other to pass for example right and now that's just kind of a made-up example but the general concept is machines could negotiate prioritization amongst themselves or what have you right in practice by the way self-driving cars might just drive fast enough that they could just you know boom snap snap onto each other and and and go right but there's probably something to that of machines being able to negotiate back and forth you know uh for example you could have um a fully you know right now waymo and and tesla robotaxis just to drop off and pick up finally we have truly fully self-driving end-to-end cars but you could have something load food into it and then unload the food on their side like sidewalk robots exist right and drive-thrus exist and you could have something where like the car pulls up it pays the robot it gets the food you know i mean right so that's an example of machine to machine i don't know if now the thing about that is that's actually in the physical real world which is always hard because there's other kinds of issues there's wi-fi drop out the bluetooth drop so i wanted to know where you thought the first two or three applications of machine payments would be for katina yeah so i'll say what we're seeing today what we're not seeing is true agent-to-agent or machine-to-machine payments.

28:54We're seeing AI workflows pay for access to resources, content, data, paying for access to APIs. There may be another agent on the other side of an API, but the interface is not truly agent-to-agent yet. And I think there are a lot of reasons for that that have nothing to do with the payment side. There's no DNS for agents that we haven't really figured out the right way to handle discovery. um uh you know if you're if you're if you're if your agent interface you could just do it all with text fields i guess but yeah not really because agents don't have persistent domains either they can't yeah i mean they kind of do but not really there are proposals for like registry concepts so google has you know proposed something for a registry concept attached to their a-to-a framework maybe maybe there isn't really like a standard for it maybe you could use ens or sns the salon to name system for doing that because that's a little more flexible than dns yeah you can buy i think we may see a little bit of fragmented approach where there'll be you know multiple things that will need to be supported but in the meantime it's sort of like you know if you and i go build a website we get a domain and we just deploy it or you know there are lots of ways for it to be discovered in the world and there aren't really there's not really that equivalent for agents working outside of their ecosystems and even when people build agents it's usually in a particular framework or in a particular ecosystem it's uh and it talks to other agents in that same ecosystem but it doesn't really span uh the ecosystem so if you build an agent that you deploy say um uh you build it and say you know a framework like lane graph um how does it make it self-discoverable outside of like a chat interface to an agent deployed in like salesforce or something so so you know there are smart contracts that are something something.eth right and so that i mean basically the smart contract and the agent are the same thing potentially and you just have an ens name or an sns name and that is that is the registry but but i like your framing of it which is smart contract registries and agent registries should be the same thing and that there should be like i think that itself is a business in its own right to just register and discover agents you know yeah i think that there's probably a um there's some form of you know verisign for agents company that wants to be built.

31:06And there's variation on them too, yeah. Because they could just take your funds and something, yeah. Exactly. And this is part of the work that we have done at Catana so far is just this foundational layer of trying to address trust and policy. The issue that people have with agentic workflows is not yet things related to price sensitivity or even largely data privacy issues. It's just reliability. How can you trust these things? Who's vouching for them? Or when they exceed their guardrails, who's liable? um you know all these sorts of guardrail policy reliability really trust issues um and so this is why yeah exactly that's the thing the ai like you know i i recognize that it's in like in some sense a trough of the gartner hype cycle now it's weird because both there's tons of money going into it but also there's less energy than there was a year or two ago in the sense of oh my god it's going to kill everybody and so on and so forth right but um my view is at least right now as a 2025 ai requires a lot of supervision to get anything non-trivial done and the smarter you are the smarter the ai is and it doesn't do it end to end doesn't middle to metal right because the prompting and the verifying have to be done by humans and so it's great generating reams and reams of text but often a lot of that is filler and i can always tell when someone's used ai to do something and even when you're using it like i think the biggest thing for me whenever we use ai internally is there's actually only relatively few kinds of tasks which can truly tolerate non-deterministic error prone output images and video can but back-end code can't like front-end code is more tolerant of those issues because we have our gpus in our eyes and we can instantly see it and verify that the widget is off but back-end code is much more subtle and it's like much harder to determine that it's off without like really going line by line you know right and uh and it's possible there's some like visualization mechanism, you know, like a Fourier transform, or like an audio spectrogram can turn something that's not visual into something visual.

33:22So it's possible we might be able to turn some of these other data structures like back end code into things that we can just visually debug by eye, you know, like a state machine or something like that, right? So it might be something along the lines, or it's in a domain with smart contracts, for example, as you know, formal verification finally became useful, because these were such compact programs and of such high value that all the compute for formal verification actually became valuable right so maybe maybe that's the answer is uh you know we we have an only generate code that we can do formal verification on or something along those lines but the reason i ask is where you know shopping seems to me to be like the simple kind of thing of get me a good plane ticket that satisfies my requirements, like from point A to point B, that doesn't cost more than X, seems to me like a good place to start because that actually does take a surprising amount of time to go and book tickets.

34:18It's like actually kind of a pain still, right? Oh, you have to put in your name, blah, blah, blah, fill in all this stuff on every new airline site. So that's like one thing, right? And I think the max budget stops it from totally screwing up too much, right? And Maybe you just assign it to get food or a book you like or something like that. I don't know. Maybe you have some thoughts on what it would buy for you first or what you would do with it first. Yeah. So my belief is that right now, I mean, things can change by the time this conversation is done. This space is going so quickly. Right.