E127: Ripple Cofounder: How We Built Crypto Solutions Banks Actually Trust

0:00You co-founded Ripple Labs in 2012. We decided we wanted to be an enterprise-focused company. Essentially, my last two companies were all consumer companies. The technology team was the guts of the company. And then as you sort of go forward, 5 % of our company is technology and everybody else is dealing with consumers, which, by the way, is exactly what traditional banks are doing. What I like about enterprise is actually the polar opposite. Chris Larson, co-founder and executive chairman of Ripple. Advancing global payments with crypto. He's a fintech pioneer. And a prominent voice for privacy and transparency in the financial world.

0:30If you had to summarize what it is you do, what would you say? I'm solving problems. Any way I can help the team make sure that we have proper governance at the board level. Keep an eye out for interesting things going on in the world that might apply to us. But most of my work now is how can I bring solutions to the climate crisis? What happened in your life that made you hungry for success? It was anger that motivated me in the early days. Anger at the way my dad was treated. He was a super hardworking guy that never seemed to be able to get ahead. He was always taken advantage of. That was a motivator for me.

0:57It's a great tool. You just have to sort of try to recognize it eventually. One of these things that made you angry is an old saying in finance, in confusion there is profit. Correct. That was something we lived by in the way we were trying to build finance online, is that you could have transparency. Because the old model, you didn't know your credit score back then, in confusion there's profit. I'm confusing you about your credit worthiness so I can jack up your rate and make a ton of money. What's the day you can look back and say, with Ripple, we've made it? Um, you know.

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2:43Is this an official thing here? Yeah, it's a Pudgy Penguin. Are you aware of Pudgy Penguin? It's an NFT project, Lucanets. Okay. So they built an NFT project that has been doing pretty well. And Luca was a bunch of time on the podcast. And it's cute. Cool. It's wholesome. Absolutely. It makes the whole thing a bit less serious. Who could hate a penguin, right? And people talk about it. How are you doing, Chris? Doing well. Thank you. How about yourself? Amazing. As you said before, beautiful day in SF. It is. Yeah. And how's Singapore doing? Singapore is always amazing. I mean, I'm biased, obviously I live there.

3:27Yeah, we have an office there as well. Where is the office? Do you know the address? I mean, how many folks do we have there now? What's the reason why Asia? Asia focus? Well, Singapore really became the center of crypto for quite some time. We'll have to see if that changes now with the US back in action. But, you know, because the US was so... I don't know if we're started already. Yeah, the U.S. was so hostile it moved, I think, a lot of the really good firms to Singapore and London. So we really like being in Singapore. Do you go there often? I've been there a few times. I don't travel as much anymore.

4:08So that's Brad's job. So he's in a plane all the time. So I'm too old for that. Yeah, I mean, I guess you've done it enough in the past. I did way too many of those red eyes to New York and then turn around and come right back. Yeah, that's right. Those are not good for your health. They're not. That's what I'm doing right now. And I can't feel. You're young. You can get away with that. I can't get away with that anymore. How long do you think I can last with that? You can go into your 50s. 50s. That's the moment you said, hey, I'm done with that. I need to send someone else. I think people kind of assume, investors assume this, you're sort of your most productive between 35 and you know kind of your 50s right that 15 year i'm not i'm not even there yet so that's good good i have two years left there you go until starting to be very productive yeah that's good but you got to understand when you reach the end of the line there oh how did you understand that well i for me as you know i stepped down from being ceo where i guess that goes back to 16 that was actually more of i'm good at that early period of a startup when you know there's no roadmap there's no product market fit necessarily yet um a lot of it is you know again there's no there's no trail it's sort of reality suspension it's bringing in a a team of very independent people letting them wander in the desert and hopefully you're going to strike gold somewhere um but then eventually you do figure out what your purpose is and what your product market fit is uh i'm actually not good at that part because that's very much about discipline and measurement and goals and reviews and holding team members account very different part of uh the journey some people can do both maybe a steve jobs maybe a mark zuckerberg um i'm not that person so i'm good at that first part brad was the person who could take us from there handing the baton to him when we had that product market fit and he's phenomenal at that and then that's building building building and that's where we are today so you love the zero to one but not the one to a hundred i like the completely uncertain part almost the reality suspension look any new thing you know a lot of people in the world will say like well if that was a thing it really exists already and i guess that's the the University of Chicago School of Thought, right?

6:35There's a dollar bill on the ground and somebody walked by and said, no, couldn't be someone would have picked it up by now, right? So it's the same thing. So there's a little bit of you're out in the wilderness, you're ignoring advice from really smart people, and you're just, just go, you know, go forward into the darkness. I like that part. You like the chaos? yeah kind of making order from chaos um hacking a new trail but again and i think with most people that's the polar opposite of the other side of that when you when you figure out the product market fit because that is that's a disciplined play that's that's an athlete that's training 10 hours a day and holding yourself accountable and measuring yourself against your competitors it's very very different which to me i find boring actually and if it's boring then you're going to be good at it so absolutely i actually feel the exact same which is why for me scaling my business is very hard very hard yeah well you could you could be the talent side and then have a coo who does the growing side those are very different things if you had to summarize what it is you do and why you do it what would you say what i do now i kind of feel like i'm solving problems and i've focused on a couple of areas obviously any way i can help brad and the team on what ripple is doing day to day yeah there's only one boss in the room and that's brad um so my job is to help him make sure that we have proper governance at the board level keep an eye out for interesting things going on in the world that might apply to us it might just be headwinds or tailwinds that all companies are going to be facing.

8:21So I love absorbing. I read a lot. I absorb lots of different sources of what's going on in the world. I think that's a good role for me. Sometimes Brad doesn't have the time for that, but I can spend the time on that. But most of my work now is how can I bring solutions to the climate crisis? um you know actually i should have done research like what kind of podcaster are you are you the one that thinks that climate change is bullshit are you one of the ones who believes in it should we try to pick a different word because i know young men today don't even like the word climate change they want to talk about it in other ways so let me know uh and i can i can spin it any way you like but it is a problem and uh we've got to solve it and then things like west coast cities being broken you know as you know somebody from singapore you probably appreciate this um i'm not sure what your experience has been in san francisco it is better but i'm sure if you walked in certain neighborhoods being from singapore you'd be shocked so um you know the west coast cities we are very free cities um but in recent years we've sort of you know uh fallen off the cliff a bit we're picking ourselves back up some of the reasonable more pragmatic people are taking the steering wheel and we're pushing the ultra left, the socialists, putting them to the back row until we can get things right.

9:48And hopefully, hopefully there'll be constructive passengers and not people that think they can drive when they can't. Dear When Shift Happens family, the following message is probably the single most important thing you should take away from today's podcast. If you're serious about your crypto investing journey, please take some time to learn how to self-custody your assets to make sure that nobody can take your coins away, ever. If you don't learn how to be your own bank, it is very likely that one day you will lose all your hard earned crypto. The safest way to hold your crypto is in a cold storage that we also call hardware wallets.

10:22Hardware wallets are not complicated and they give you peace of mind. I personally use a hardware wallet called Treasure. It is open source, very easy to use, and the first hardware wallet created ever. As we like to say it in crypto, not your keys, not your coin. You can order your treasure wallet with a 10 % discount by following the link in the description down below and by using the promo code WSH10. And now back to the episode. I walked in the street in SF. Earlier this month, I was actually staying in Union Square, which is where we should not have stayed. Oh, why is that? I mean, because you get in the street and you're basically walking in the middle of zombies right homeless people basically and it's very did you see a lot of homeless people at union square so many like there's streets literally i mean obviously we don't know where to go where to not go and so we were with the the electric scooters and we were just literally like at some points we had to stop and walk because there was so many of them that we couldn't even go right yeah and i was like what the hell that's that's that's crazy and for me it really raised the question directly.

11:30I mean, I'm from Switzerland. I live in Singapore. I'm not kind of used to that. But at the same time, I come to the US and I realize the energy here is different and that's where shit happens. It's insane, the quality of the people. And now crypto, as you said, like probably everything's going to happen here. I can feel it and I'm going to spend much more time here. But there is such a massive disconnect between, we're here, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, if I take my phone and I look at the phone itself or the five apps I use the most, it's all coming from here. While at the same time, there's all these people in the street.

12:07How is that possible? That's a great question. I mean, it is a little bit a byproduct of trying to have an anything goes society. So the way California had worked in the past, why we were such a magnet was this is the place I could be anything I wanted to be. And it has incredible opportunity, not to mention the beauty and the weather and everything else about it. And, you know, people from everywhere. But in the last, I don't know when, I was born in San Francisco. I've been here for my whole life. Something went off the rails. I don't know if it's 10 years ago. It's not just COVID. And it was all political.

12:47The, you know, blame it on the democratic socialist. The fact that we even have a democratic socialist party in america it's kind of shocking but they have sort of taken outsized influence in a couple of west coast cities la is even worse actually if you go down there and they sort of drove us off cliff um by you know born of compassion saying to the homeless people look we'll support you but we're not going to sort of force you into treatment now if you look at homelessness is a very complex issue right it's there's kind of three different things going on it's it's economics because we haven't built enough housing and i would blame the left on that too because they've built a structure in california that just it wants to say no to everything so they all know we need lower cost housing yet they're blocking every single reasonable project you can imagine that's what's going on for the last 10 20 years so there's something fundamentally wrong with that there's a movement afoot to change that there are laws being passed now to make it much easier to build in san francisco and california we got a lot more work to do there there's this whole abundance movement you probably heard ezra klein has written a book about it that's catching a lot of fire now to move dems and and the left to this more pragmatic like we were in the 60s let's let's get shit done let's get you know let's let's just get to work and build housing so but that's been a real problem so it's been an economic version of homelessness that's actually pretty straightforward and what we got to do the trickier ones are the drug crisis because this this is a culture that actually embraces freedom to take drugs and i in my mind i would break this into two versions of you know kind of healthy medicines and i would say psychedelics fit that And you'd be surprised how much psychedelics have infiltrated this culture up and down the spectrum.

14:45I mean, you know, Elon Musk, for example, I think he's found in many ways enlightenment through that, right? Now you could argue, you can make all kinds of argument about Elon, let's not get too lost there. But in my opinion, those are good medicines that actually help our creativity. and it's part of why this is a creativity machine out here and that's powerful whereas i think in a lot of places in asia as we all know uh you're gonna end up in jail so yeah or or expelled yeah or expelled and i get it i get it because you don't want chaos and i guess it looks like chaos but again that's why i break it down i think psychedelics are generally in the category especially with a really good guide, guided therapist with psychedelics.

15:37I think one of the best medicines that we have in this world today and are incredibly healthy and lead to more compassion, more empathy, more creativity, get you out of sort of broken tracks that may have made sense when you were 4 or 12 or 20, but don't make sense when you're running a podcast or you have more money than you've ever imagined you would have and you're in a position to do different things. So those are good medicines, and I'll say drugs. Flip side, we have some of the most horrible drugs we've ever faced in society. Fentanyl is just a horrible drug. It just kills people. And we have lost, I mean, we're losing 100 ,000 Americans every year.

16:15That is shocking. Now, it's a little better this year, but this is where the left let us down because it kind of used the hippie version of freedom to do what you want to do. And it applied it to these horrible drugs that are killing people. And it just kind of almost said, yeah, that person over there in Union Square or where I read San Francisco, who is clearly dying, right? You can clearly look at this person and go, that person is going to die. And you're sort of saying, well, you know, freedom, they have the right to die. So let's just step over them and not force them in to help. Now that's bullshit.

16:53And that bullshit is going to end and i think san franciscans californians have realized that that has just gone too far that's performative bullshit freedom and you're not taking care of your neighbors and your fellow citizens and that's where tough love comes in and i've had friends uh who have gone through this you intervene and you send you get them help whether they fucking like it or not and that's what we got to do on that and and we're coming out of that bullshit period of letting our fellow citizens die from these horrible drugs which are by the way a really cheap inexpensive flooding that's the worst that's the worst of the worst and this is where singapore oh sorry it's where singapore and switzerland get it right actually zurich had a problem here right you guys dealt with it um so you gotta have some tough love here and uh we lost our way on that and the third area of homelessness is uh is mental health mental illness and you know this is where California and again and you could debate this any you know both ways California uh remember the Francis laws right you may have seen the movie right where this actress was uh institutionalized against her will horrible things happened to her so California long ago passed some rules that said uh to to lock somebody up because of mental illness force them to get mental uh health services uh that's going to be very hard we're going to defer to the person's civil rights to make sure there's not abuse there i get it that was compassionate that was you know in some ways pro-freedom but it also went too far where you know that this person is suffering and needs uh mental health services therapy drugs whatever psycho uh not psychedelic drugs but uh antidepressive depression drugs schizophrenia drugs um and we're not intervening there enough either so it's a very complicated issue and made hopelessly complicated by the far left that just kind of um they look for simple answers that sounded good you know on a podcast or when you know to the media that they could feel proud about being pro-freedom and it's had disastrous consequences so look society's complicated and somewhere between what Singapore does to be a successful city but I would argue something Americans would say isn't free enough and then something San Francisco had where we went too far there's some happy medium in a way sorry if it went on too long there anyway probably yeah probably for sure like I live in Singapore I love singapore but it's definitely not a free place that's for sure but it works right hey i like the idea you don't spit your gum on the sidewalk i love that i was interviewing uh another person the other day and he was basically saying something like he went from believing that everyone is a good person but if they have the reason to not act well they will to thinking everyone is actually a bad person, but they will act well if the incentives are set correctly.

20:09That's interesting. And I mean, he's extremely successful and it's basically because he invested a bunch of money into different projects. He lent some money, but without contracts ever. Because he was just like, oh man, I'm just going to help you out, etc. Oh, yeah. And then he said, 100 % strike rate, people either take the money or if the startup is successful say oh no it's all theirs and so on and so forth I mean it's not directly linked but actually like it's do you set clear rules or not basically and then absolutely there's a common pattern across the very successful people who interview on this podcast they have something that happened in their life that gave them a chip on the shoulder what happened in your life that made you hungry for success?

21:00Yeah, you're talking about success fueled by anger, I believe, right? It could be. And it's often related to childhood. Something you leave at home or so your parents. Yeah. No, that's for sure. I know that about myself. It was anger that motivated me in the early days. Anger at the way my dad was treated. He was a super hardworking guy, union guy. I worked United Airlines, Pan Am, as an airline mechanic most of his life. again worked super hard but never seemed to be able to get ahead he was also always taken advantage of um by you know having to get loans um you know because they didn't have a lot of money and he just felt like he was always being ripped off so yeah that was a motivator for me i had a big chip on my shoulder with ivy league folks for example which wasn't fair i i you know i went to a state school and then i went to you know stanford so i was you know became one of those people i guess in a way so i i recognize that wasn't fair but i also recognizing that at the time it helped me so if i was somebody starting out and you and you have some kind of anger you can kind of channel it into kind of a mental toughness to get through the really hard things you need to as a entrepreneur it's it's a great tool you just have to sort of try to recognize it eventually otherwise it can get in the way later.

22:25Like when you already have success and you're still hanging on to, like, why are you angry? What's going on there? Right. So I think, um, you know, you need to change as your situation changes. It took me a long time to get to that point, but it was, again, a great motivator. How did you get to that point? What's the day you realized, oh, this anger is not serving me anymore. I noticed it when, well, my first or second company, I guess my first one and you know, you're ready, you're successful. People are looking up to you. People who work for you are looking at you as a role model and you can't behave that way anymore, right?

23:02You can't be blowing up and be angry. It actually is really counterproductive. And then you're not being a good role model. And I kind of guess I saw that in maybe the, some of the recipients of my anger's eyes or something, you know? So again, it's not like you want to get rid of it I guess the way I've had it explained is you just don't want to drive in the car right there should be in the back seat be very grateful to all the great work they helped you accomplish and maybe you need to let them out a little bit to yell out the window but they ain't driving anymore right so I guess that's a mental vision I have about that one of these things that made you angry is an old saying in finance in confusion there is profit correct yeah that was something we lived by in the way we were trying to build uh fintech on you know finance online is that you could have transparency because the old model when you look at those mortgage brokers or the f and i f and a guy over at uh f and i guy sorry finance and insurance uh person in a car dealer.

24:12Now, all you folks are too young to remember what it was like buying a car when you were with the dealer. You're negotiating the car. You feel like you got a good deal. And then they usher you into that little room with the finance and insurance guy with all the forms. That's where the profit was. That's where the kill happened. And it was to trick you into, you know, you didn't know your credit score back then. You know, that guy's sitting back there on his computer screen seeing it and like going oh wow this looks really bad we're gonna have to bump your rate up let me see what i can do and you didn't have the right to look at that so that was just you know in confusion there's profit i'm confusing you about your credit worthiness so i can jack up your rate and make a ton of money and this is something you saw with your dad earlier that was definitely that that was definitely happening there then for sure but it got much worse though sort of that period between transparency of the internet because now anybody can see the credit score and know where they are awesome um but between then and then when these models were made by fair isaacs company just north of here uh that got really sophisticated about credit modeling for the for lenders there was a there was a a very bad gap there where the lenders had a lot of power and a lot of intelligence on data, but you didn't get to see it.

25:35That was kind of the worst period. That's probably, you know, after my dad saw it most. Back in, you know, when he was getting loans, it was more banks, traditional banks, or, you know, sort of these, what did they call them back in the day? Essentially payday lenders, but different form back then. But, you know, when the data tools got really sophisticated, boy, consumers really needed to have that information so that they knew where they stood. And that's kind of the world you have today, which is good. And that's something that you changed with Elon. We fought the credit score transparency fight.

26:11We thought, well, I guess this goes back in the late nineties or, or so. We thought, Hey, why shouldn't the consumer be able to see their credit score? We were getting access to the credit data as a lender and we just put it on our website. So when you're searching for rates, you could see it. Now, Fair Isaacs got wind of that. And like that was a violation of their terms. They actually cut us off for a time, threatened to cut us off. And then we had to actually go to Congress and testify because some of the consumer groups and congressional folks got wind of that and said, yeah, that's patently unfair.

26:46Now, what was really interesting was Fair Isaacs eventually saw that that was a huge business line showing consumers or credit scores, they started a product. I think they were pretty happy with the money they were making on it. And then eventually now it's pretty common that you can get access to that. It was a good fight. We liked it. It was also good for the organization because it was us living our values of being radically pro-consumer at Elon. And our employees were proud of that. We were proud of that. I think it was good for our branding. So there's a lot of things as a business you can do that, you know, really strengthen your eternal, uh, core values, your mission.

27:26And I've talked about this before, but, you know, three types of employees, missionaries, mercenaries, and misfits. You always want the missionaries and they love when you can do demonstrations of your core values like that. The mercenaries, those that make money, the misfits, they can go either way. So, uh, you know, again, those things I think are really healthy for a company to be taking on those fights we took on another one around privacy later and that was also really good for our our core values our culture so you started elon in 1997 and then 1999 you you know we actually started elon going back to oh boy 93 and then we were sort of in palo alto around the time the internet started going this is when a google search on yahoo which was housed at Stanford down the street.

28:19Took like an hour. It was crazy. But we then kind of switched everything online in 96. We were able to get our first VC money in 97. And then we went public in 99. Very fascinating period of time. You rode, I mean, surfed the dotcom wave and probably the crash too. We did. What's the kind of, what's the craziest memory you have from this, from riding up and down the dot-com wave? Well, going public was quite an experience. Absolutely exhausting. You're just traveling all over the country, sometimes multiple cities. You're going actually flying to take advantage of the time change so you get more meetings in there.

29:01You're just completely exhausted. Sounds glamorous going public. I would caution people to, you know, it's a fundraising, you know, thing. Could be a branding thing was back then. But you should think about that very hard. And I think in this environment, you know, I'm pretty skeptical about why that's a good thing for a company. Frankly, being a private company with a really good board, man, that's good. That's the reason why we have these startups that are worth so much more. These private companies are worth so much more than before because they don't want to go public, right? Yeah, I think so.

29:41Something changed with going public. It's got, and maybe it will change under this administration, but it got very bureaucratic. And after the, I think the financial crisis got loaded with so much bureaucracy and nonsense and costs. And then you got the short sellers who are always looking to kill you. And in this misinformation environment, make shit up so that the stock goes down. So you're going to be fighting that all the time. why do you want that so boy i think i think i'm long and hard about going public these days sad to say because it's kind of a wonderful thing when any citizen can get involved with you know kind of a new technology that's pretty cool i would argue that with crypto you go public directly you launch your token and you have all these people who are longing or shorting right so it's this but on steroids and much earlier well it's it's interesting although i think you got to be really careful that you are not creating an ico right an initial coin offering which is a security and as you know this industry has been in so much muck over this whole argument about what it is we went through a brutal five-year period on that we think very unfairly and that's come to an end.

30:57We won. But entrepreneurs need to be really careful about that, right? So if you're raising money, look to the VC route early on, right? I think that's kind of the way our system is designed to go. And then you stay clear of all of that, right? So you got to really try to separate, particularly in crypto, the creation of technology and then how you do your fundraising. Those are very distinct things and when they start getting mixed up, I think you start seeing trouble ahead. So you got to be really, really careful about that. How did you get so fascinated by the world of cryptocurrencies and the blockchain?

31:44So, you know, weirdly we talked about this, I remember with one of our big Japanese investors, Katao Sun, who runs SBI in Japan, which is a phenomenal kind of fintech conglomerate. And boy, was this back in 95, I know 2005, 2006, we were talking, he was, you know, Japanese uh people are have always been great currency traders and always fascinated by this intersection between currencies and coupons and fascinating really really absolutely amazing economy and society just love it there um but we had that discussion way back then and i think we both kind of recognize this is going to happen and again you know that's not a novel thought if you go back to 2000, you know, during the dot-com boom, the first one, there was these models called beans and floors.

32:42They were sort of coupons with sort of an element of currency. And then even before that, you had some very localized currencies like Vermont dollars. I think Germany had a whole bunch of small ones for various communities. So this concept of a non-governmental currency has been around for a long time. And even government currencies really haven't been around that long. People don't realize like, you know, kind of even the US system, or is it like 120 years old or something like that? So, you know, like we look at Bitcoin, it's a real, what, 15 years? It's a pretty big chunk of kind of how long fiat's been around.

33:21So we should just keep in mind, like humans are just starting off on this journey. So the idea that this is somehow violating some key rule of, you know, governments have control of this. i don't buy it at all and i think it's played out that way but uh that was we kind of all i think a lot of people knew this is going to happen and then when bitcoin came along it was like okay that's that's it and then you know after a couple years after that there was a group of really really smart people way smarter than i that i got together with and uh basically they're trying to create a better bitcoin if you will so a non-government online currency but that didn't you know burn a lot of electricity and was sort of faster and had more flow through and you know many entrepreneurs came you know after that period but the bitcoin revolution was it was incredible you co-founded ripple labs in 2012 with jed mcaleb that's right what is ripple if you you have to explain it to my mom.

34:25Well, what it was then is a little different than what it is now. And this goes back to that company, what we said about when you get product market fit, you know, and again, for Ripple, you know, as a company, we wanted, we decided we wanted to be an enterprise focused company. That's a really important distinction. And essentially, my last two companies were all consumer companies. and i kind of learned this like a lot of people start off especially young folks starting consumer companies because that's kind of what they know like what do i see every day i see this penguin here on the desk i see this water bottle you're surrounded by consumer products but kind of by definition but we don't realize it's almost a consumer thing is almost like the surface of the ocean and then you have this enterprise thing you sort of discover and it's like everything below though and it's it's just massive and not enough people focus on it especially i think young people that was a big lesson for me so this is my third company in and kind of discovered enterprise and was like i like that and and and i would use the example of what happened with elon right we started off with a new technology right how to be how to show you know all the things going on with finance transparently your credit score for example rates and all the all the early stuff was coding and the website and it you know the technology team was the the guts of the company and then as you sort of go forward you become more like a marketer to consumers and then you got to have this army of customer support folks for all these consumers and then you turn around one day with elon it was like oh like five percent of our company is technology and everybody else is dealing with consumers, which by the way, is exactly what traditional banks are doing.

36:11So you start replicating all the stuff that already is out there and you're doing less and less about what's new. What I like about enterprise is like, it's actually the polar opposite. You're serving these banks, financial institutions, anybody trying to move money, payments, that they've already built all that other stuff. And now they're interested in this new thing, this new kryptonite thing that they want to put into their engine so we can focus on that kryptonite thing and give that to them without replicating all the stuff that they already have i like that i kind of see it as like you can actually have more impact reach more people with the new thing with that model and i think you also get more defensible walls up because it takes a long time of building trust to get in those organizations because they don't want to risk their own brand versus just going right off the bat and building your new brand.

37:01Anyway. What's your biggest achievement with Repo so far? Well, I think that we've earned the trust, you know, of this world of enterprise, you know, financial players and payment players and even treasury, you know, treasury operations. And that takes a lot of work. Like, I mean, you kind of look at it, I think we're in a pretty remarkable place in a very, very big industry that, you know, it takes a lot of work and, and consistency to, to, to get that position. So, so I love that we've, we've succeeded in the position that we're, we're in. And I love, uh, the culture that we have, which is, and, you know, hats off to Brad for, for continuing that, you know, really staying pure to the, to the culture um we have just some amazing dedicated people that are working every single day with the right you know core values in their heart to make a positive impact on the world that is not easy to do it's very very hard to do and um yeah i love where we are right now on brad that you said before he's the one taking all these planes right uh yes i borrowed the question from our common friend alexis sirka who made this happen today shout out to Alexi you're sending your CEO Brad Garlinghouse to have dinners with President Trump if you send your CEO to have dinner with the president who do you have dinner with?

38:35Who do I have dinner with? Well hopefully I'm having dinner with my family so part of me stepping down is like I'm at the age where you know again I'm less productive I would say again there's that period of time if they're maybe 35 through the end of your 50s, you're most productive. So you gotta recognize that. But also I have younger kids and I wanna hang on to every single moment with them. So, I mean, I'm not just saying that. I rarely travel now unless it's sort of family travel. And that is awesome. That is awesome place to be. I feel it. Hope I can get there as quickly as possible, but not today.

39:18What's the biggest problem with Ripple today? Biggest problem? Well, I think like all, when businesses get bigger, and look, especially in finance, where this is a very complicated business, right? It's technology, it's compliance, and it's capital markets, right? These are very complicated things going on, very much more complicated than kind of a pure search company that's really mostly technology, right? So how do you have those domain experts, because they all work on different timelines, and still get, you know, I'm going to have to use it, get shit done, right? How do you move quickly? But you can't break things in finance.