“I still think it's underrated that internet banking is probably a thing that we're going to live to see the end of. I could really imagine a world where you have to go to the bank to get dollars out again, just because it's too easy to clone your voice.”

TBPN · Startups & Venture · October 2026

Context

A host asked how well investors are pricing cybersecurity risk, on a day when the show had covered a $6 billion crypto exchange hack. Manidis gives his own prediction about the future of online banking.

Listen to the episode → More from Will Manidis → More Startups & Venture quotes →

Transcript

TBPN Around 1:08:54 into the episode

Speaker 4

Yeah, largest possible defense against the biggest possible threat. And right now it's too fractured to have a meaningful chance.

Jordi Hays

How do you think the investment community is doing, underwriting cybersecurity risk? Because right now, people are like, oh, I should own cybersecurity stocks. But it feels like there's some risk of broad internet shutdown, whether that be, you know, Know a day. I still think

Speaker 4

it's underrated that like internet banking is probably a thing that was like we're gonna live to see the end of right. Like, I could really imagine a world where you have to like go to the bank to get dollars out again just because it's it's too easy to clone your voice, it's too easy to break to a fairy. Like, it's just it's all too easy. Um, you know, Corgi sells cyber insurance now, so maybe we should all feel good that Corgi is underwriting this risk at civilizational scale.

John Coogan

Yes, yes, it's a fellowstone of insurance guys, cornerstone of the market. Yeah, where does it go next? Uh, are you selling the rights? Is there going to be a movie? The commanding heights, you know, the books

Speaker 4

coming out. We will try to distribute the thing as much as possible. We're going to try to produce it on stage as a 14-hour production. New York City. Apparently, Aaron Sorkin's bidding on the movie rights. Yeah, but the book, the book, I know John Fiorino has been even making bootleg copies of it.…

John Coogan

Yes, yes, that's great selling them in Canal Street. I think I saw a couple of copies laid out on the pavement there. They've been

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from TBPN

“If you take the Epoch AI scaling curve seriously, which I think we should, these models are going to get so expensive that it gets to a point where there's only kind of one or two states that can continue to maintain a sovereign frontier. … What I think is a really obvious idea is that you will not soon be able to buy the best models, that labs will become something much closer to the defense industrial complex, that they will have models that are available to nation states for national security purposes. You will not be using them.” — Will Manidis, TBPN

“It seems like a bozo model can probably hack your infrastructure. It doesn't really take much. I think the bar is surprisingly low. … It's kind of like a drone, you know, like it costs, you know, a hundred bucks to fly the drone into the tanker. And it costs like, you know, like $2 million to shoot the drone out of the sky or something. That dynamic, I think, is very replicated in AI as well. Meaning, defense costs probably an order of magnitude more than an attack.” — Doug O'Laughlin, TBPN