Patrick Comer on Building the Infrastructure Behind Modern Market Research

Patrick Comer, CEO of Cint, joins Leonard Murphy to discuss the evolution of market research infrastructure, the future of AI-powered insights, and what it takes to lead through industry transformation. Drawing on his experience building Lucid and now leading Cint, Patrick shares how the industry is addressing data quality, fraud, identity, and measurement at scale.

The conversation explores why human participation is becoming more valuable in the age of AI, how synthetic data complements rather than replaces real respondents, and what CEOs must learn as they grow from founder to public company leader. Plus, Patrick and Lenny close the episode with a spirited debate about the best Star Wars film.

Transcript

Leonard Murphy: Hello everybody. It's Lenny Murphy with another edition of the CEO series. Thank you for taking time out of your day to spend with myself and my guest. And today our very very special guest is Patrick Comr,

Patrick Comer: Is there a...

Leonard Murphy: CEO. So special. Uh Patrick and I have known each other for a long time.

Patrick Comer: Question?

Leonard Murphy: Uh this is going to be fun. Um but Patrick is the CEO of Cint uh and has a storied legendary career in the industry. And we're going to get in all that. So Patrick,

Patrick Comer: It's good to be here, Lenny.

Leonard Murphy: Welcome.

Patrick Comer: It's It's always a pleasure to be talking about uh Star Wars and research with you, my friends. So, these are two hot topics in my

Leonard Murphy: We we are going to get into both. So 100%.

Patrick Comer: Life.

Leonard Murphy: You should have never let me know that you were a Star Wars buff back in the day. I uh if I recall, we were on a call like this and you were even you were showing me like your your room and you know,

Patrick Comer: Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: You had memorabilia and uh I showed off my poster that Steve Phillips gave me with all the signed autographs and we geked out. Anyway, we'll get to that.

Patrick Comer: We'll get to that.

Leonard Murphy: So...

Patrick Comer: That's not the purpose apparently of this podcast. Star Wars.

Leonard Murphy: Uh it's not I would like it to be.

Patrick Comer: A career...

Leonard Murphy: Uh but that doesn't pay the bills.

Patrick Comer: Third career, fourth career. Lenny, there we did that

Leonard Murphy: Something like that. Something like that. All right. All right. So, Patrick, for those who don't know you,

Patrick Comer: One.

Leonard Murphy: Uh, I mention you have a a long and storied career, and that is a true statement. So, why don't you give us kind of the the bio, give us the give us the

Patrick Comer: Well, I you know, honestly, today um I run a public company called Scent.

Leonard Murphy: Highlights.

Patrick Comer: We are listed out of Stockholm. Um and I've been lucky enough to spend the past 20 some odd years um in and around the market research industry. Um and before that, previously I've been a lifelong entrepreneur, tech founder, uh in around the whole concept of how do you go from zero to one and then from one to 100. So that's been my that's been my entire career is figuring out how to build businesses, taking ideas and making them work and then specifically in the market research industry really focused on this concept of the backbone of research as I like to call it which of course is sampling but more recently um since it's become more and more of a measurement business as more and more of our customers are not per se the market research agencies but the streaming platforms uh and the other advertising companies that work around measurement across the board globally. So, we've been expanding our our use case, but my job is uh just jazz hands to tell stories and to help people uh you know figure out their their optimal path forward. So, that's a little bit about

Leonard Murphy: Well, I appreciate that, but also I think you're being too modest, right?

Patrick Comer: Me.

Leonard Murphy: The um uh so I will toot your horn a little bit here. Uh the you know, you were the pioneer of Lucid and you know, building the uh kind of the programmatic network that has driven research for for so long. Um uh turned that into a hell of a deal when you sold a scent.

Patrick Comer: Good timing.

Leonard Murphy: So uh that that was very good timing.

Patrick Comer: Good timing on valuations

Leonard Murphy: There were many people who said oh crap right I was one of them.

Patrick Comer: There.

Leonard Murphy: So uh and for those who don't know the uh uh you've been very involved in helping to build the uh the positioning of the industry uh you coined the term Restec. You and I have talked, you know, off and on over the years through uh kind of building loomscapes and and thinking about a taxonomy for the industry and uh uh did a conference last year, Restecer, which I I wish that I had gone to, but uh so behind the scenes, you have done a lot, not only building good businesses, but also helping the industry, and I just want to make sure you get the credit for that. Um uh because I've appreciated it.

Patrick Comer: I appreciate that. It's been it's been again I've been blessed to work in around very talented people for over 20 years and we've seen a lot of change in our industry and to be a part of that transformation uh and to be in the mix of where the industry is going is exciting. It's fun. It's why I'm here. It's it's I'm always excited about where we're going versus where we've been.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yeah. Well, so let's let's talk about that. All right. So, uh because I right there with you, I believe that access to humans and their willingness to share information um is the backbone of the whole damn global economy. um uh in one form or fashion. So whether we're talking about advertising, marketing or or insights and now of course with AI. Um so I look at companies like like scent and your your competitors of building an infrastructure layer that the the rails to drive that connectivity, right? To connect humans and their information to multiple use cases. Uh and and and I I think it's critically important, right? Um the analogy I always use is oil, right? The humans are the well and companies like scent are the pipelines and you know the users of the refineries and

Patrick Comer: Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: If we use that that analogy works because look how important oil is to the world, right? as we speak, you know, it's kind of a center of geopolitical uh, you know, conflict right this minute because access to information uh is the the the oil that greases the skids uh of everything that's happening

Patrick Comer: That's

Leonard Murphy: Now. So it's interesting it's descent as you mentioned transitioning now into you know more

Patrick Comer: Right.

Leonard Murphy: Measurement business. What are you seeing on those other use cases as well though of that that overall view? Obviously that's one of connection to what people uh say and do and think and experience. What else are you seeing? Are you seeing that

Patrick Comer: I'll go back I'll go back to what you said around um

Leonard Murphy: Shift?

Patrick Comer: Humanness being critical right now. And I was telling the story recently about when the internet came to pass, I would intentionally send handwritten letters out because they became more valuable. They became more interesting, more special because we weren't getting them anymore because email was taking over.

Leonard Murphy: Mhm.

Patrick Comer: Now, the combination of remote and AI, suddenly like direct human engagement is more valuable than it's ever been. Today, someone said to me, and I'll just repeat that scent is the original human in the loop business. that we are the humans in the loop for research for collection of of data and providing

Leonard Murphy: Okay.

Patrick Comer: Those capabilities to so many different of our partners and it's the critical function as much as people think about disruption around or change with AI every one of these automations or reimagining of the research process from A to B still requires humans to engage and that is what we all care about is what are the the human beings beings,

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: Thinking, doing, caring about, understanding, and it's that root of need, that root of envisioning that uh is critical these days. So I think that access and communication and engaging with human beings is becoming more valuable, not less valuable over

Leonard Murphy: Agree 100%.

Patrick Comer: Time.

Leonard Murphy: And to do that via technology is scale. Now, all right, we're going to we're going to verge into some sensitive territory here, I think, but I I think you'll appreciate the conversation. When I step back and think the you and everybody who built, you know, large scale companies to enable that connectivity, um use technology to make that an efficient process. And we hear people say, "Oh, but we lost quality through that." Um, we we'll set that aside for a second. The my position has been just like programmatic advertising or anything else. If there's if bad people bad guys can find a way to make money off something off a system, they're going to exploit the system to do that. And I don't think that is the fault of the system itself. That is the fault of humans being sometimes s***** creatures. So, let's set that aside. It's become a big topic obviously in the industry. Now I know you have championed quite a bit of looking at at this and saying yes we built some systems they've been exploited and now we're plugging the holes. We're finding ways to make better systems so that we don't sacrifice the efficiency of scale uh and the efficiency of speed with quality.

Patrick Comer: Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Um and you've been in the you've been in the thick of that conversation for quite some time.

Patrick Comer: I remember the first time that a system I was working with in research was I'll use the word hacked for fraud. This is 2003 three early versions of say routing at OTX and if in Los Angeles, California and suddenly overnight we had all these survey completions and at that time we had access to the email addresses directly and we just saw that someone was taking a Yahoo email address and just incrementing the number and we sourced the the IP addresses back to

Leonard Murphy: Mhm.

Patrick Comer: Russia. We're like, "Oh, this is going to happen." And that was the first time we realized that fraud management was as important as any other part of the process. Now, of course,

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: The systems to deliver research have gotten more sophisticated and the systems to fraud the research have gotten sophisticated. And so, my point of view as our job is that we can't remove fraud. It's the whack-a-mole game of forever. Our job is to make sure that scent systems are annoying enough to a

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: Frauding element that they go somewhere else. That there are greener, more expansive fields somewhere else to spend their time and energy against. And of course, we have a whole new attack vector now in terms of AI.

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: What happens when you put an LLM LLM besides a headless browser and you start, you know, growing into surveys? And we experimented with this before it was even fraud maybe three, four years ago around how is this actually going to play out because we know it's coming. And of course you see a lot of good partners. I mean we partnered with Rep Data. I know you had Pat Stokes on your show previously. It we try to do is not own the entire thing ourselves.

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: We recognize that there are things that scent does incredibly well to combat fraud and to increase the quality like our trust score capabilities but we also want to partner with other companies that are best in breed like rep data for example because we believe it's a holistic view versus we do everything alone in ourselves but what I critically believe is that um and we see this in our own quality uh scoring is that quarter

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: Over quarter um especially with the launch of our new exchange quality every single week on the the the the reporting obviously, but more importantly, what's next on the release schedule for product and process in order to improve quality of scent, something I do every single

Leonard Murphy: Okay. So, you said something that I thought was interesting and this is kind of a view of uh excuse me. So I think about the evolution of how the world but particularly you know our industry and the role of companies like Sid right that are uh that you are infrastructure you are critical infrastructure right you are the equivalent of an AWS within the research industry from that standpoint um and increasingly I see the role of companies like uh like you of being orchestrators you know of combining the appropriate pieces uh within and within a system within an ecosystem to uh be able to deliver on you know the result. You don't need to own the whole damn thing. Um the instead you want to put the right pieces together the best and breed solutions uh to ensure that we get the right output. the is that an evolution in thinking for you as a CEO and for the company to uh kind of play that orchestration uh role or is that just something you've always done?

Patrick Comer: I think this the we what we would always call it is we enjoy being the pipes. Other companies excel at the what I'll call the front end of research which is working with the whoever

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: Has the question the research process um or also in our case whoever is trying to measure an ad campaign all the all the creative testing the build how we actually going to do the

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: Research um all that we have great partners for who are excellent companies that achieve that and we do none of none of that whatsoever um like we program no surveys as an example literally we're very focused on a very particular part of the of the value chain in the same way that we don't see any data that's collected.

Leonard Murphy: That's

Patrick Comer: We don't analyze any data. We don't you know these are not the things that we solve for. Um and so we see ourselves as the critical infrastructure to make sure that the very simply the demand side or the research side of the equation is getting the best possible respondents globally so they have the best outcomes possible in terms of the data collected. Um, and what people often don't see is that one of the biggest values in the overall merger between Lucid and Cent was on the data side, meaning we had the largest two pools of respondent profiles globally. And we combined that into what we call our global IDs,

Leonard Murphy: Mhm.

Patrick Comer: Which kind of makes sense. And we have a 100 million distinct global IDs across the board. Now you could say that panels are one size or the other or how much traffic do you get but we have a very what we call clear identity spine within set that are connected to all different types of behaviors and identifiers and supplier ids etc across the board and it's that critical identity spine that one allows us to start

Leonard Murphy: Mhm.

Patrick Comer: Pinging against quality everything from duplication but everything else but more importantly it allows us connect thirdparty data and this is where our most recent uh partnership with affinity data solution solutions where we connect credit card information to 100 million uh profiling IDs which allows us particularly on the measurement side to connect someone's uh purchase history with how they're responding to a survey or how they're responding to an advertising campaign. And so not only do we see ourselves as connecting a respondent to a research moment, but also all the ancillary data around that respondent, which includes everything from sales information, but also quality and fraud information together to in order to expand the value of that research moment for all of our customers.

Leonard Murphy: So what about connectivity to other so I don't know about if you had heard um the last few months there was a a very large project from a social media platform that was floating out there where they wanted uh 360 behavioral data uh

Patrick Comer: Sure.

Leonard Murphy: Globally um Do you you know the one I'm talking about? Um so yeah.

Patrick Comer: I'm aware several types of projects like that. But

Leonard Murphy: Yeah.

Patrick Comer: Yes.

Leonard Murphy: Point being what I'm seeing more and more is that evolution towards uh you know moving away from asking the question to the observation right to the the passive measurement of multiple data points. I mean back in the day remember we're talking about you know big data and we would have this world where the big data it was all there. we would only have to ask a few questions. What we did know is AI was the unlock to that. But I believe that we are there now. The um so in the demand to access lots of different data points from a consumer um seems to be growing. Um but also the pipes for that seem to be subscale. The uh you know we see other companies Go ahead.

Patrick Comer: If you think about how um we went programmatic from a online quantitative research standpoint, it's because the transaction was consistent. There was a CPI. There was even though we didn't have standards on demographics or the rest there was a very simple process of

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: Being able to transact between parties on quantitative with

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: Behavioral um one of the biggest issues is that it's not like you can buy another behavioral panel because their entire data flow taxonomy is structured differently than what you already set up. So the biggest issue within behavioral has been for a decade is that it hasn't been able to scale. you can build out a a 50 to 300,000

Leonard Murphy: Yeah.

Patrick Comer: Panel size behavioral uh asset, but scaling above that you've got diminishing returns and then trying to merge two together is its own data challenge that has been problematic over time. And so when a major, as you said, let's say a social media partner or streaming partner comes in and wants to do a very very large project, it's almost typically a build from scratch because there's no good way to share between parties.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yes.

Patrick Comer: So a market's always been challenging until there's a standard for what is all this data that

Leonard Murphy: Agreed.

Patrick Comer: They're that they're tracking and managing.

Leonard Murphy: But now that's interesting though, Patrick, because you and I had a conversation years ago. Well, back the Veraricliff days, right? And that was kind of the vision of you know trying to solve some of these problems. But but also you had a very specific idea that you were pushing and I think you talked about it publicly if I recall correctly the so forgive me if you didn't for what I'm about to say a standard schema um you were

Patrick Comer: Of course I push that standards all the time.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah and yeah okay so now my belief that's my belief I I know this to be true um the barrier of that uh that synchronization um is now much lower because of AI. We even built some elements of that within uh within Veraraglyph. I think we talked about that, right? We could identify a question, we put it into a standard schema. Anyway, so it was years ago. So, so the challenges of taking all these different companies that have built these smaller uh panels with these data assets and integrating that into something that is uh more that is larger and and more significant via AI to standardize those data flows seems like a relatively easy thing to do today. Um, have you guys thought about that or or is that uh because you would seem to be the ideal company to do that? So, you know, as as the pipes to be able to help facilitate the uh the streamlining of these multiple audiences and multiple data sets into one marketplace.

Patrick Comer: We've talked a lot at scent about what we call premium supply, which I think behavioral could fit into that that framework.

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: You know, publicly we've spoken a lot about um our most near-term objective is around

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: B2B versus anything else where there are a lot of smaller uh robust highquality B2B panels who are for a lot of great reasons not interested in being programmatic or integrated into these platforms.

Leonard Murphy: Sure.

Patrick Comer: It's because the demand isn't high enough quality,

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: The CPIs are not appropriate, etc.

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: Um so we we believe that there are these levels of unlock into different types of supply into the data stream um of which behavioral could be one but it's lower in priority list than some more obvious lowhanging fruit. So, as we launched the SID exchange last summer and we're going through uh migration with multiple customers now, we're now able to move away from building the core product to now expanding the features and capabilities to other types of research um audiences that our customers are interested

Leonard Murphy: Okay.

Patrick Comer: In.

Leonard Murphy: All right. So, last question on into the weeds and we'll get into some more uh kind of your journey as a a CEO. As you think about what what is your vision for what scent looks like as a business with fundamentally you're the pipes, right? to connect supply and demand from a data standpoint. What do you think that looks like in the next year or so?

Patrick Comer: Well, um, as a public company CEO,

Leonard Murphy: Oh, that's true. That that's true.

Patrick Comer: I have to be careful about what I can say vision for where we see

Leonard Murphy: Sorry.

Patrick Comer: Things are going is that a lot of uh analysts and

Leonard Murphy: Okay.

Patrick Comer: Investors and partners ask me about what I see as the change that AI brings to the entire value chain and also to sample itself. And what we're noticing is that right now we're seeing more demand than disruption in that story. Meaning more interests are coming in. We see a huge amount of growth particularly in the AI moderated interviews that are coming in to scale quant I mean qual is the first time ever it's really been able to scale like this and I keep reminding people

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: This is not about the AI it's about the quant the qualitative scale but the the so we're seeing more demand

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: And we're seeing disruption but I think the disruption is also coming because everyone's vcoded their survey before and you know done the entire thing and also v coded synthetic uh as well so in a scenario where the number of research automation opportunities through

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: LLM is going to scale out dramatically. You're going to hit a wall on how do I get people to answer surveys and we expect to be the partner of

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: Choice as all these new experiments occur as LLMs are driving the research process from end to end. Additionally, I think we've seen time and time again that human scale is too small

Leonard Murphy: Awesome.

Patrick Comer: For um AI research at the end of the day. This happened with Tesla where they ran out of hours of video and they had to create synthetic hours in order to continue training. Also happened with every single foundational LM.

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: They're all training on synthetic. Not because it's quote better data, because they've already trained on the existing human data. And what I remind people is that at some point the amount of research demand is going to be larger than

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: All respondents answering all surveys at any given time. It's a scaling issue. So there's a human there's a AI scale above human scale.

Leonard Murphy: Okay.

Patrick Comer: So synthetic's role is not to displace the humans answering questions. is to scale beyond the potential of all humans answering all questions which is what's going to happen at some point because the demand for research from an AI perspective is going to be bigger than it ever was from a pure

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: Humans perspective in terms of size speed and scale. So synthetic is about helping the AI future of research answer research scale that's beyond what's possible today. Not about displacing human completes with something else because these are two very different

Leonard Murphy: Right. I agree.

Patrick Comer: Things.

Leonard Murphy: And in order for that the demand for the constant influx of new data to feed that will only increase as well that I often you know we very much have been clear that I do not believe that the AI wars are done by any stretch of your imagination

Patrick Comer: War. Which you talking about?

Leonard Murphy: And yes yes the foundational wars and

Patrick Comer: Foundational wars or something

Leonard Murphy: And people keep discounting Grock it's like you're an idiot for discounting rock the uh in

Patrick Comer: Else?

Leonard Murphy: XAI to begin with because the only reason Elon Musk bought Twitter not only reason but the primary reason was that's a data feed that is a constant real time data feed that's why they've been able to succeed you know uh and compete effectively from that standpoint and that's not the praise of Elon that's thinking to your point it's that it's there's a

Patrick Comer: Okay.

Leonard Murphy: Constant supply they're solving the supply issues for scaling So overall and by just owning the

Patrick Comer: Well, regardless of the relative uh battle as it were between foundational

Leonard Murphy: Ecosystem,

Patrick Comer: LLMs, this has already been proven by Claude 4.6 over the last quarter, right? Because I think a lot of written off Claude as a second player to others and then with a new release

Leonard Murphy: Sure.

Patrick Comer: Cla and with open claw suddenly uh they're worth a lot more than they have you know an incredible run rate of revenue over the past 90 days or so.

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: So I think we're at early days in all of this and this is you just to go back to the beginning. Why am I having so much fun as CEO is because this is the most transformational time that we've seen in this industry much less all industries. It is the most challenging because the the crystal ball is so vague but we know the opportunity is so big.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah.

Patrick Comer: And so the the the best part about the game right now is being able to play it. And that's why again I feel honored and blessed to be CEO of Senta this

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Okay. We'll be constantly your time because I know we've and might as well, but there was one other question,

Patrick Comer: Time.

Leonard Murphy: Two other questions. I'll make sure we get to. One, if I think about your path as uh as a a CEO, you have filled every role, right? You've been the founder, uh you've raised capital, you sold a private equity, uh and then you had a wonderful exit, and then they dragged you back in.

Patrick Comer: Back in.

Leonard Murphy: Uh yeah,

Patrick Comer: That's

Leonard Murphy: As the CEO of a public company, which uh we were chatting beforehand,

Patrick Comer: Right.

Leonard Murphy: I as the uh board member and now chairman of a public company, God, what a pain in the butt, right? I mean, being public has its own unique challenges um uh overall. But that's my position that being public I think is pain in the butt. Uh you don't have to confirm or deny that as your your role. But I am interested in your your your take on that journey right because you've just it's the classic journey. You have been on this path from you know bootstrap founder to CEO of a large public company. What's that been like? What have you learned through that?

Patrick Comer: Well, I think always the job of the CEO is challenging because the focus and priorities of the job change every three to six months and it's very hard to go to someone and say what's my job today? What are the what are the priorities? You actually have to invoke them yourself, right? It's it's not a um it's not a scenario where you you have the boss to tell you what to do, right? But to be very clear, I do have a chair now as as you understand quite clearly who is especially in the in the Swedish tradition has much

Leonard Murphy: Right?

Patrick Comer: More operational uh authority than than maybe in the US. Um but I think the the challenges are different at every stage of CEO. We we started earlier in this conversation about the zero to one. How do you take an idea and turn it into revenue? Turn it into an MVP. turn into a product. That's a very challenging uh vector of growth and you've you've attempted and been a part of many growth stories in zero to ones and it's in my opinion the hardest part of any of it. But then you have the scaling part.

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: I was lucky enough to go to scale where you go from one to 100 and that's a that is a very different animal. That's where you learn to be CEO. Zero to one is really about being a founder. One to 100 is about being CEO and letting the founder part be the story but not what you do anymore. Now we have what I call the hundred to a thousand or to 10,000 100 thousand. This public company scale and growth vector. And to be clear, it's been a little bit of a turnaround story since the the acquisition of Lucid in in 2022. And so what I'm learning now are the operational disciplines to turn around the

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Patrick Comer: Structure such that we lock in the foundation in order to scale from there. Um the the number of lessons are myriad,

Leonard Murphy: Yeah.

Patrick Comer: But I think the most important as always, it's always about the people you have around you from day one to day whatever we're on now. You're only ever as good as the team that believe in you. Whether that's the people that are in the business, but also all around you. And if you can create that belief system about where we're all going, the future is very possible.

Leonard Murphy: And that's you've had folks like Brett and others that have been, you know, part of that from almost day one with you. So that's uh I think that's very complimentary uh to

Patrick Comer: Right. We bet. And in this journey at uh coming back into the leadership role at Sent,

Leonard Murphy: You.

Patrick Comer: Been lucky to have a couple of people that I've worked with many times come back in and say, "Yes, Ben Hog coming back in to to run the exchange business has been been vital." But also,

Leonard Murphy: Yeah.

Patrick Comer: We've had people that have stuck through this entire transition and are really in strong leadership uh positions at the company like Michelle Darcy Clark um and then also Kevin Evers who runs the entire measurement business. He's basically the founder of that,

Leonard Murphy: I

Patrick Comer: Started it more than a decade ago at zero and has watched it grow and continue to to grow in this

Leonard Murphy: Don't

Patrick Comer: Environment. So it's again it's all about the team at the end of the day that you work with uh for more than anything

Leonard Murphy: It's very cool, Patrick.

Patrick Comer: Else.

Leonard Murphy: The uh I know you take some some flak sometimes because of just your visibility uh in the industry and and you were you were transformative in uh this entire process of of of sample and I want to make sure that folks recognize that you uh you've done a hell of a lot of good out there as well.

Patrick Comer: I appreciate it. So have you you've taken flack over the years as well by trying to move things forward especially on the innovation side of the equation and technology focus. So you understand what that

Leonard Murphy: I I I do,

Patrick Comer: Means.

Leonard Murphy: But I but not uh not having as the target I had on my back was nowhere near as big as yours. Um I didn't have shareholders and and uh well, I did, but not like you. So anyway, all right. So we're both cool. On that note, final. We'll see how cool you are now because there is only one correct answer to this final question, Patrick. So, favorite Star Wars

Patrick Comer: Well..

Leonard Murphy: Movie.

Patrick Comer: As you may know, I have lots of opinions about Star Wars movies, and So, I'm going to start with my most contrarian opinion,

Leonard Murphy: All right,

Patrick Comer: Right?

Leonard Murphy: Bring it on.

Patrick Comer: My favorite Star Wars movie is The Last Jedi.

Leonard Murphy: That is contrarian. That is contrarian. All right,

Patrick Comer: And let me tell you,

Leonard Murphy: You're going to have to explain

Patrick Comer: Give you my reason for it because it doesn't stand alone.

Leonard Murphy: This.

Patrick Comer: It's only in context of when it was released. It was essentially trolling all of Star Wars fandom based upon the release of the new trilogy and came in and basic almost the entire movie is a troll of every expectation everyone had and said, "You're all wrong. I'm doing whatever I want." And so my enjoyment of the movie was the troll, not the standalone of the movie itself.

Leonard Murphy: I I I can get behind that. I I can get behind that. The um uh

Patrick Comer: That's a big ass. That's a big ass,

Leonard Murphy: Uh All right. Right.

Patrick Comer: Lenny.

Leonard Murphy: But I I am I am a purist and a child of the 80s as you are as well. Right. So the uh uh since I asked you I will answer. I I it will always and forever be Empire Strikes Back for me. Um I think every But it's the right one.

Patrick Comer: That's That's That's the easy That's the easy selection, Lenny. It's always Rogue One

Leonard Murphy: But it's the right Although that said Rogue One Rogue One was a kick-ass uh Star Wars movie too.

Patrick Comer: Was fantastic.

Leonard Murphy: Rogue One was Yes.

Patrick Comer: Rogue One, but I remember when we were starting Lucid and we had a movie theater

Leonard Murphy: Uh,

Patrick Comer: Downstairs from the office. We went back just before they did the new trilogy.

Leonard Murphy: Okay.

Patrick Comer: We watched the original trilogy and the prequels and the big discussion was what format in what order and we

Leonard Murphy: Yes.

Patrick Comer: Ended up doing I forget what they call it but uh we started with a new hope and then went back from there immediately to view the other ones. I think it was New Hope Empire then you go back and see two three skip one because no one cares and then do Return of the Jedi. But that was all downstairs. We had the entire company and we also ddigitized them. We went back to original format.

Leonard Murphy: Okay.

Patrick Comer: We got the original how you watch the new stuff that they added.

Leonard Murphy: The the original trilogy. All right.

Patrick Comer: And that was by far the best experience of Star Wars ever had was with with the entire team and

Leonard Murphy: Yeah.

Patrick Comer: Also introducing a lot of people to the story that never seen it before. That was that was fun.

Leonard Murphy: That is cool. That Yeah. by my by kids. Uh I I did go traditionally I you you have to watch the original trilogy, then we'll do the prequels. The sequels were, you know, all right, whatever. They were the sequels.

Patrick Comer: My my son and I have long conversations of if we were going to redo the

Leonard Murphy: Um

Patrick Comer: Third of the new trilogy, Rise of Skywalker, how would we make it actually cool? And it's a long and ongoing conversation. I think we may have solved it at least once or twice.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. uh bringing Luke in out of the gate and not whatever. Anyway, we that's a whole other conversation we could go on and on. Finally though, we did and we did mention this that as we record this, we're a month away from the uh uh the Mandalorian and Grou uh movie. And I I'm quite looking forward to that because it's just good Star Wars

Patrick Comer: Maybe.

Leonard Murphy: Um from my perspective.

Patrick Comer: So, I believe that we're in good hands with the new leadership of the the Star Wars franchise and

Leonard Murphy: All

Patrick Comer: Uh we'll see where things go from here. But my I have one trivia question.

Leonard Murphy: Right.

Patrick Comer: If you look above my shoulder, you'll see the X-wing and there is

Leonard Murphy: Oh, okay. I see it. Yep. All right.

Patrick Comer: A pilot and you win all the prizes if you can guess who I might have put as an action figure into my pilot of the

Leonard Murphy: Well, if it is the classic Hener,

Patrick Comer: X-wing.

Leonard Murphy: Then it has to be Luke. Um,

Patrick Comer: But who would I put in there in my contrarian point of view? Which which star which pilot would I put in?

Leonard Murphy: Oh, did you put in Po?

Patrick Comer: No, I put in portions.

Leonard Murphy: So,

Patrick Comer: All right, my

Leonard Murphy: Look,

Patrick Comer: Friend.

Leonard Murphy: I unplugged my uh my headphones because I laugh so hard at that. You put in Porkins. Poor Porkins. Um, but man, he went out like a boss,

Patrick Comer: They went out like a flaming ball of

Leonard Murphy: Didn't he?

Patrick Comer: Fire.

Leonard Murphy: All right, Patrick, this has been great. Thank you so much for the time. Um, uh,

Patrick Comer: No worries.

Leonard Murphy: Continued success and, uh, we'll look forward to, uh, chatting with you again soon.

Patrick Comer: Stay on target, Lenny.

Leonard Murphy: Stay on targeted.

Patrick Comer: Stay on target.

Leonard Murphy: Absolutely. All right, my friend. Take care. All right.

Patrick Comer: I know.

Leonard Murphy: Bye.