You are tuning into the Rich Habits Radar, our Friday episode
of the Rich Habits Podcast, where every Friday morning we're
coming at you with the biggest headlines impacting you and your
money. This episode is brought to you
by VCX, the public ticker for Private Tech.
My name is Austin Hankwitz and I'm joined by my Co host Robert
Croke. And this episode is going to be
a little different. Instead of running through our
normal 3 headlines and three radar points, we're going to be
having a very special conversation with the CEO of
Affirm. Max Levchin, a firm, recently
reported their earnings results. The stock is up 70% throughout
the months of April and May. So what better time to chat with
the CEO of a $25 billion company than after a ton of cool
announcements? So Robert, let's jump into our
conversation with Max Levchin. Max, thanks again so much for
joining us. Great to be here again so you
all. Just wrapped up your 2026
Investor Forum and you're coming off your tenth straight quarter
of 30% or higher GMB growth. Most people listening right now
still file a firm under the Buy now, pay Later acronym.
If that's the wrong box, what's the right one?
What is a firm actually trying to become?
You know, I think I'm done fighting the BNPL moniker.
For a while I was raging against, you know, don't, don't
put me in a box. And I'm over that.
What's important to understand is BNPL, or at least a firm
within that category is fundamentally a mind shift or a
vibe shift, as the kids say these days.
You can borrow money. It's a good, good use of
Personal Capital to stretch your money out into the future.
And there's the right way to do it and the wrong way to do it.
And we represent certainly to our biased opinion, the right
way to do it. We don't charge late fees.
We don't do deferred interest. All the sort of things that are
kind of scary because they really are, we don't do, We are
super transparent. We do everything simple
interest, we pre communicate, pre price everything.
We reward you for paying early all all the things that our firm
stands for. So that's called BNPL.
So be it. We are unique.
We're still the only company in the industry that does all these
things in a very specific or deliberate way that is so
profoundly pro consumer and in that sense we are in a box of
our own and I'm quite happy. Being there, yeah.
Maybe talk more about what makes you all so unique.
I mean, just for example, right? Like walk me through a
transaction a firm did maybe six months ago that makes the next
one cheaper or more accurate. Yeah.
So as you guys know, every transaction that is powered by a
firm is underwritten individually in the moment of
transaction. So we take all the data that's
available about you as a consumer, as a shopper, as a
borrower, and the thing that you're buying, drop it all into
a giant AI model. And it tells us, here's the
price of risk, here is the cost of lending you this money based
on everything we know about you. So if six months ago you came
in, we never met you before, we can infer a little bit of value
based on your credit poor data, which we pull based on kind of
what we think we know about with the kind of thing you're buying.
There's some very interesting fraud related data.
If you're buying something could be easily fenced in a street
corner, there's a little bit of an increase in risk.
If you're buying something that is essentially a capital asset,
that's a lower risk. Buying a mattress, we're easily
convinced that's probably something going to sleep on as
opposed to try to sell it to the highest bidder, etcetera.
So the, the models take all the data in and give you, give us a
price and we show it to you and say, hey, this is the cost of
credit. A lot of times the retailer or
sometimes the manufacturer will pay your cost of credit or pay
your interest for you. So it's a 0% loan.
But in either case, there's some associated cost that the model
tries to predict. And we're very, very good at
that. We've been at it for 15 years.
Models are very precise. The next time you come around,
assuming you have paid your bills from a firm on time or
early, which we love, we'll say, hey, you know what, we know more
about you now. It's not just the publicly
available credit data. It's not just what you're
buying. It's also the fact that we've
seen you in action. The cost of risk will go down
and we'll pass it right on to you, and your next transaction
will be cheaper and it goes on and on.
Models are built to take that into account every single time,
and that that's why it's so powerful to underwrite every one
of these transactions in real time.
And when you say pass that on to the consumer, how does that?
How does that work? Just ends up being lower
interest. Got it.
That's really cool. I appreciate you walking through
that, Max. Two weeks ago you announced firm
is going into Google Search AI mode and the Gemini app via
Google Pay. For folks who haven't
internalized what a Gentek commerce means yet, paint the
picture for them because from a year from now someone asked
Gemini to plan a trip to Europe. What does the checkout
experience actually look like? And where's the firm sit in it?
It's a great question and you know, the future is super
interesting and exciting and it's fun to try to participate
in both predicting and building it.
This is already happening. This isn't quite figment of
someone's imagination. So if you go into Gemini today
and you type in, hey, I'm going to Europe, help me figure out
how to get there. Here's my budget.
I want to be able to fly a family of four, the city, this
city, etcetera, etcetera. Gemini'll do a pretty good job
saying, all right, I can see some information about airlines.
I can help you shop for seats, etcetera.
So that's already happening. The next thing that's going to
start happening more and more and it's already beginning and
we are an excited part of this is you can tell Gemini or your
favorite bot or your favorite LLM.
Hey, I actually want to close the transaction now.
I like the price. I like what I'm seeing.
How can I afford this? And it has been our job for 15
years to answer the question, how can I afford this in the
most transparent, sensible, lowest cost possible way?
And So what we've built are these plug insurance that go
into LLMS and pipe up right as you ask this question, Hey, how
do I pay for this thing? And obviously we're not the only
ones that will be plenty of choices.
But the thing we're so excited about it is think in the past.
The thing that I love to Rage Against this idea of, you know,
zero with a tiny asterisk. Don't read the fine print,
you're getting screwed. You don't know how doesn't
matter. Like that's the the business
model of old. The business model of a firm is
you are not going to get screwed.
We take it as our responsibility to you to give you the exact
price and a super transparent language.
One of our core values is no fine print.
It's always been hard to compete against those who have a
somewhat less scrupulous approach because the fine print
is really fine. You can't read it.
And I can Rage Against the fine print all I like, but the
consumer who's got two kids to travel to Europe with is not
actually going to have the time to be like, wait a second, I got
to read the fine print. So they still get trapped.
They still get into these full transactions that later on they
come to regret, but too late. What's amazing about Chad bots,
amazing about AI is each one of these bots has a PhD in consumer
finance. They are looking out for you
every single moment. And so as you say, hey, how can
I afford this thing? A firm will pipe up with pay.
Here is a pay in six plan. Here's the exact cost of
interest. If you prepaid, the interest is
going to come out. Or here's a trip by an airline
that we have a partnership with. They will pay your interest for
you. So it's a true no interest loan.
Doesn't matter if you're a couple says late, doesn't matter
if you forgot a payment. We're not going to flip on you
and charge you a bunch of interest you didn't expect like
some of the other characters that I enjoy raging against.
And so that combination of extreme consumer convenience,
transparency, and AI being the world's best watch of these fine
print gotchas, we think it's just going to not only do great
things for our business, but fundamentally change the bar,
raise the bar on financial products.
Every single person asking their AI to help them buy something,
afford something, plan a financial decision is going to
get a better outcome because these things are never going to
be fooled. They're capable of doing
advanced math right there in front of you and boiling it down
for you in a single light. This one has no fees.
It's a pretty good thing. Cool.
They're not going to make a decision for you, but they're
going to make your decision. Most informed decision possible.
You mentioned competition you're launching alongside Klarna in
the same Google integration. From a retail investor
standpoint, why doesn't this become a race to 0 where the AI
agent just picks the cheapest option every time?
Spell out what a firm's Moat is in this agent mediated world.
Because I just want them to really understand because it
does seem like a challenge for you guys, but I love the fact
you have all this transparency. So walk our listeners.
Through that a challenge we we are embracing wholeheartedly.
So I think there are two fundamental things that make us
different. Maybe 3.
I'll, I'll start with two and then I'll add one more.
Number one, much to my chagrin, by the way, look, this, this
advantage I'll give away, anyone who wants it is welcome to it.
So stop charging late fees, stop doing compounding interest, stop
having transaction fees, all the fees that the industry loves to
throw in. We don't do any of that and for
years, I feel like we just never quite got our fair share of love
and recognition for those who use us know exactly what we
stand for. In fact, our best customers are
the ones that have been late by a day or two.
I used to love listening in on phone calls, but like, hey, I'm
late by a day or two. Can I just just be current and
you'll be OK? Like what's the late fee?
There is no late fee. Like, Oh my God, that is so
cool. Like I've heard that that is so
cool so many times. It's just, it's, it's the, it's
the happiest. We are still largely the only
player that does this at any kind of scale.
And so right now, as these AIS compare all these providers to
each other, we tend to stand out in a good way of like, hey, this
is the one with no fees. So I will gladly share that
podium with anyone who wants to be on it.
But for now, we are unique, maybe the more permanent or at
least harder to dismantle advantage.
We've been at this idea for 15 years, which also means we've
gone to literally hundreds of thousands of retailers and
struck special partial pricing contracts with them where they
will pay your interest either fully or partially, sometimes
during a promotional period, sometimes during every day of
the year. But the same level of
transparency, the same level of no fees, no gotchas, 0 means 0.
All the stuff that we just bring from ourselves, we pass on or
invite retailers and brands and manufacturers to participate in.
So when you go into a chatbot and you're buying a Samsung TV
on a 0% transaction, you know it's zero because it's a firm
making the promise, but it's also unique.
You can try to buy it with any other payment provider, BNPL or
otherwise. You're going to find yourself
paying interest. You're going to find yourself
also wondering if there's going to be any fees.
But even without it, you're going to find it a little bit
more expensive. So quite happy to compete on
that facet of price because we do have these contracts and take
a long time to negotiate. They take a long time to execute
very carefully because retailers, they don't have
infinite margins. So each time they subsidized
this sort of a 0% loan, they have to believe it's a consumer
who's only going to buy when they are seeing this particular
promotion powered by us. And we have incredible amount of
experience doing it. But also huge systems of
software that we've built over the years to provide visibility
and transparency to the retailers to make sure that they
can run these ad campaigns responsibly, thoughtfully and
get the most for their money here.
So that's a a huge, very, very sophisticated advantage that we
bring to bear that we've used very successfully over the years
outside of AI. We think it's going to be
multiplicative within AI. And then just one last bit,
since sort of the 2 1/2, the other thing we've done for the
last 15 years. So we've gotten better and
better at underwriting. And so at any given moment when
we are side by side with any one of our competitors, especially
for things like 6 month transactions or 12 month
transactions or something that's actually quite long term and has
real risk to it. If you know as, as people in
credit say 12 opportunities to default, 18 opportunities to
default, it's kind of a, it's a bad joke, but it's not
completely wrong. We're very good at sizing that
risk and pricing it correctly. And so typically we approve more
people while having lower losses.
And so that again creates A Moat or an opportunity for us to
outperform form our competitors. So we love competing.
We're I'm generally sort of a competitive person, but who very
good competing in a space where the judge has a PhD in consumer
finance. Austin Before we ask Max our
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Back to our conversation with Max Lebchen.
I want to linger on that half of the 2 1/2 that you had, you
know, mention there around the consumer side of things because
we're seeing credit card delinquencies climbing, you
know, household savings are getting drawn down.
But you also said on your call that you're not seeing
deterioration as it relates to your business.
Help me understand that. Is a firm's consumer different
or kind of like what you're alluding to or you're just
better at saying no when truly underwriting every single one of
these transactions? It's it's.
Fascinating. The answer is actually kind of
both. Or maybe yes, is the we are
better at saying no in a sense that we have the right or the
opportunity to be the consultant or the, you know, sometimes
people ask me like, what is a firm?
Like, what are you to me as a person?
And I'm not really a brand marketer.
So I always struggle with these like, what is it?
But someone I know who is a brilliant brand marketer said,
you're like the smart older sister.
Like you're like, hey, that's a bad idea.
Put down that wallet. Like don't buy that thing.
You should not indulge like this.
This is or hey, that's cool, you deserve it, Go, go, go get it.
And so the ability to say no or yes in the right moment, the
right way as a sort of a friend or a coach or somebody who's
actually out to look for your best financial outcome is
something that we're very, very good at.
And so because that is a fairly unique value proposition, we
appeal to a particular type of a consumer.
Like the person who wants that participatory engagement from
their credit provider is someone who's actually quite motivated
not to be behind. Our consumer knows we're going
to say no, you know, when we feel you really shouldn't be
buying this. We're also very frequently we'll
say things like, hey, $600.00 bicycle is a little bit more
than you can afford right now. However, we're quite happy to
lend you 2/3 of this, but you do have to put 1/3 down as a down
payment because that's what we think is the right sort of
contours of a loan for you for this purpose right now.
And so that consumer is doing fine, but it's also because they
want to do fine. They're motivated to improve
their financial reality. Like maybe the most shocking
thing about a firm is that we are a living proof that in the
last 12 months, 27 ish million such people exist.
You would think that, you know, we hear in in the front pages of
various newspapers is people don't care about their financial
reality. They're sort of shopping was
their eyes closed. They're not reading their
financial statements. And I'm here to tell you that's
not true. Like we have 10s of millions of
people who are coming back to us now almost 7 * a year saying,
hey, make sure the thing I'm buying isn't going to bite me.
I'm not going to regret it. I'm not going to be figuring out
how the hell did I get myself into this kind of debt.
And so that customer exists, they shop with us, they're doing
fine. I think some of the less
scrupulous providers are happy to lend money because they'll
make it back in things like late fees and delinquency charges.
And we don't do that. And turns out that a lot of
people in America who actually quite prefer that sort of way.
Of living and we don't blame them at all I.
I think I'm preaching to acquire a little bit here, but I just
want your, your viewers, your listeners to know they're not
alone. There's a lot of people who
really want to have a lifestyle that they can afford but also
profoundly enjoyable. Yeah, I want to go into some
more numbers. You've been throwing around all
these great growth numbers, but I saw that the Affirm card more
than doubled to 4.4 million card holders.
And you also announced a firm edge to embed pay overtime
inside banking apps that now reaches 130 million Americans.
Both of these moves are about going from a button at checkout
to a default payment system inside of someone's life.
How do you think about this from a cannibalization versus an
expansion here for people that are trying trying to buy things
the right way and use your service?
We're not so large as to worry about cannibalization of
anything just yet for a very long time.
Like the the total addressable market of US commerce is calling
on the order of a trillion dollars plus that we can play in
right now just given the products that we have 20% last I
read happens online. You know, all those metrics are
giant. If you, if you look at the, the
number we put out as our this fiscal year expected GMV volume,
it's still in, you know, touching 50 billion.
That seems like an enormous number.
And it is an enormous number just in the absolute scale.
But in the grand scheme of credit card payments or commerce
payments or any denominator you choose, we are so tiny.
Calibration doesn't doesn't enter my imagination.
So that that's sort of Part 1, Part 2.
You know, I'm completely serious when I shake my fist at the
compounding interest and revolving debt and fees that
shouldn't exist. And it's the best kind of
problem to have if suddenly more debit cards in America end up
growing quote UN quote. This borrowing capability that
we built into our debit card because it is that same mode of
responsible borrowing with no fees, no compounding, etcetera.
So bring that functionality to other issuers, banks, credit
unions, fintechs, you know, whoever wants to partner with
us. And we, we know we're privileged
to have a couple of, you know, our, our earliest partners on
stage with us at Investor Forum to just sort of Telegraph the
excitement the industry has about this product.
It's great. I, I, I would love for every
bank that issues debit cards to have a firm edge, the
functionality of a firm card built into their debit card.
One of the cool things that sort of, you know, bears repeating,
the unique thing that we bring to bear isn't just the
underwriting, isn't just the sort of clever technical
functionality. We do have these arrangements
with many, many retailers, many brands that will subsidized
these transactions for you. So embedded in that partnership
that Affirm Edge is is a giant to home of promotional finance
available to anyone who participates.
So we, we, we, we think there's a huge opportunity.
We're very excited. We are but a tiny speck of
consumer finance in this country.
We would love to bring our flavour to everyone.
That's fascinating. And I remember when the Affirm
card first came out, it was such this, you know, revolutionary
product in the sense that everything that you bought on
the Affirm card was sort of pay in for, right?
It's not just like does this specific retailer offer some
sort of, you know, pay in for for a product?
It's like, no, you can go buy your Blistex.
That's a bad example, but you go by I'm looking at my Blistex
here. You can go buy something at
Walgreens or CVS or something, whatever you need there, use
your Affirm card for it. And you know, you sort of have
all the same abilities to to pay in for like you would if it was
a specific retailer being able to unlock that to not just the
4.4 million people that use the Affirm card.
But to your point, with this Affirm Edge, I mean that is
fascinating stuff. Just for the record, it's more
than Pain 4. So pain 4 is a great tool.
You know, Blistex is probably, I mean, I don't know what kind of
Blistex you buy, but mine is quite affordable even in today's
strange world. But a nice lunch.
You might consider splitting into four if that's what your
heart desires. But Affirm card incidentally
supports a pay now mode. So a Blistex is probably very
appropriate to just pay for it right now and move on.
But if you're looking at ATV or a fridge or you know, something
quite pricey, you can go into the Affirm app and with edge
into your bank app and say, hey, the next transaction at, you
know, Best Buy, not a current integrated Affirm partner.
When I tap my card there, I want it to be alone anyway.
And so the magic of the Affirm card and included in Affirm edge
stack is ability to say hey at the store whether a firm is
tightly integrated or not integrated at all or some
combination of the two. The next transaction I want it
to be a loan and I want it to be pre approved.
And I want to know my rate, if any.
And I want it to be a six month loan or 12 months loan.
I want a budget and I want the budget to be up to this number.
And if I spend less, I want it to adjust down.
And all this happened seamlessly.
Basically automatically while telling you all the time here's
exactly how it's going to work, here's exactly how much you
going to pay not a penny more. All the same functionality you
come to expect from a firm and it does support paying for
certainly is a very popular product, but goes out to four
years sometimes. So this is it's a very, very
versatile tool. The reason it's been growing by
far the fastest in all of our product ecosystems because it is
just such a powerful tool and it it it really is a full-featured
replacement for a credit card with absolutely no revolving,
absolutely no fees, absolutely no annual fees or anything.
I mean, that's. That's the story right there,
and I hope everyone listening right now completely understands
that at the end of the day, we need credit, we need liquidity.
People need to have the opportunity to say, I need to
borrow X amount of dollars for this refrigerator or for this,
whatever it might be. And unfortunately, the system
that has existed for the last several decades is ambiguity and
an asterisk next to the 0%, right?
That is that that's been the system.
But you all are flipping that on its head with authenticity,
transparency. And of course, now with this 130
million Americans that can do this in their banking apps.
I mean, it's it is incredible. Now Robert, before we ask Max
our final question, we absolutely are in the summer
months and after what's been going on in the Middle East, now
the new Fed Chairman and inflation like uncertainty has
never felt so high. The major indices have been all
over the place. Let's be real. the Fed has
completely flip-flopped on their rate cut assumptions.
And again, inflation remains just incredibly sticky here.
We just got a four handle on inflation, 4.2%.
Unreal. And that is why it's never been
more important to have a plan and stick to it.
And if you're a long term investor like us, the plan has
never been easier to come up with and implement.
Dollar cost, average and ride the wave. 100%, Robert, we've
been talking about how important it is to dollar cost average for
years now. And when the market feels shaky,
it's hard to see your progress. This is why we recommend being
part of a social platform like Blossom Social, because on
Blossom you're able to see your entire portfolio in a very clean
and simple way, which includes your holdings, your performance,
your dividends, everything you can think of.
You're also able to follow other long term investors on the
platform, helping you stay motivated during these uncertain
times. Not to mention the portfolios on
Blossom are all verified, so if you're seeing someone buy or
sell a name, it's because they actually did it in their own
brokerage accounts. We're both on there, our
portfolios are on there, all the fun stuff.
So if you want to join us, search Blossom Social in the App
Store, head over to blossomsocial.com.
And don't forget they just came out with their AI assistant,
Bevis, where you can ask it any question about your portfolio,
which I think is a really cool feature.
So again, awesomesocial.com link in the show notes below.
All right, Robert, let's now ask Max our final question.
I know we've only got you for a couple more minutes, Max, So
last question here for you. You've spent your entire career
here building products around how people handle money.
What is the one money habit you think most people are missing?
And what would you tell someone who feels like the financial
system today has just not really worked for them?
I think people just, and I am in that list and you know, you're
totally right. I've been doing this since my
early 20s, so I really should get it by now.
But somebody tells you, $1000 loan, six months, 20% APR, what
are you going to pay at the end of the year?
People just stare blankly at the wall and make estimates and
they're all over the map and they're always wrong.
It's a great party trick I used to do back in the old days.
I'd fly to New York to try to raise money for a firm when we
were a tiny fledgling. And I would go into like venture
capital offices or hedge fund offices.
And I'm like, hey, I have a, have a basic math question for
you guys. You're, you're smart people.
You trade stocks, You're, you're serious $1000 loan, blah, blah,
blah. What's the total cost?
People were like, Oh yeah, I got this.
And they'd be like 80% wrong or 100% wrong.
And so people are not very good at computing revolving credit
costs. And it's designed to be hard to
compute. So I don't feel bad.
But if you choose to use that product or if you at least
understand one, to understand how it works, make sure you have
a sense for it. And it, it's a thing that often
enough people just sort of say, you know what, I give up, I
can't get it. I don't understand why I'm in
debt. I'll probably never get out.
And a lot of people we know are struggling through life
financially because they just sort of given up trying to
understand. And obviously, our mission since
the very beginning, my personal mission for a long time has been
how do you shine a light, how to make it easier to understand,
how to build products where we can compete with the tools that
exist today, that are not designed for transparency.
But some degree of basic understanding of financial
mathematics is a really, really useful skill that an awful lot
of people don't seem to fully understand.
It's not you. The system is built to be
confusing. There is an alternative.
We are it. Please try us, but don't feel
bad that you can't do the exponential math.
It's designed to be difficult. It's designed to be difficult.
I like that. Max, thank you so much for
joining us again here on the Rich Habits Podcast.
We're so grateful to have hosted you and for taking some time out
of your busy schedule. So excited that you know, the
investor Forum went so well and all these great stats.
Can't wait to have you back to talk more about in the future.
Thank you guys for having me and always great to see you.
Thanks Max. Robert, another incredible
conversation with Max Levchin, so grateful that he takes time
out of his busy schedule, especially after these
incredible earnings calls. I just saw his stock is up
literally 60 something percent in just the last two months now
from the lows of March, I think it was when the markets kind of
hit that bottom at the end of March there.
I mean, it's, it's incredible to see these partnerships.
It's so cool to see, you know, his Affirm card doubling to 4.4
million card holders, tenth straight quarter of 30% plus GMV
regrowth. I mean, they are building this
company to not only solve problems, but scale
indefinitely. It's really, really exciting to
see. And I guess the last like thing
I just want people to reflect upon with these conversations
because let's be real, Robert, we've talked about buy now, pay
later. It kind of gets this like
negative connotation for good reason.
It's people that normally can't afford things.
They just say, oh, I'm just going to put on the buy now, pay
later. And this happened to me after
our first conversation with Max, but I've completely switched on
what I think about a firm specifically because of Max's
deep conviction and authenticity, transparency,
clarity. Like I said it during the
episode, we need credit. We need to have liquidity.
We need to have that revolving ability to say, oh, I need to
have access to $1200 if I need to go buy this refrigerator or
pay this person or whatever I have to do here.
And being able to lean on a firm to automatically do that
underwriting transaction by transaction, and then saying,
hey, we've realized you're good at this.
We're actually going to pass or savings on to you by offering
you a lower interest rate or whatever it might be.
I just, I really appreciate a firm's business model and their
mission toward transparency and transparent.
Credit, I agree with you 100%. Max has changed my mind
completely because we always talk about people, you know,
staying out of high interest credit card debt and all of
that. But a firm has literally built
the best mousetrap to allow people access to capital they
need for short term, but in a way that is fair and reasonable.
So they're not getting into this high interest debt.
I love what a firm is doing. I think it's really great for
people. And I think about like the
average home that maybe is doing a deck remodel in the spring and
needed $1000 worth of lumber to do this remodel.
And they can put it out over four or six months without all
of the fees and all of the other different things that run the
bill up on them. So I think it's a really
effective way to borrow money for people in their day-to-day
lives. And I love that Max comes on the
show and shares it with our audience.
And to just linger on that for a moment, if there are fees
associated with whatever is going on, you know what they
are, their fees are upfront. It's like, yes, we're going to
charge you this much interest, you prepaid whatever.
Like this is exactly how much this total cost is going to be.
To Max's point on that last question, it's not, you know,
what's $1000 of credit card debt for six months compounding at
20%? No, no.
And nobody knows. And that's why Visa and
MasterCard are several $100 billion companies because
they've been able to fool us all to figure out what our interest
actually is. Now, along alongside the late
fees and the hidden fees and all this other stuff, I just, I love
the authenticity, the transparency, and, you know, it
kind of goes back to Robert. What you know, Max was talking
about when it comes to these AI agents, all of these agents,
I've already done this. I remember doing this.
I, I literally was, was with Google and I was trying to
figure out flights and I, I actually asked Google Gemini.
I said, hey, I need a flight from here to here.
Help me find the best one and, and how do I buy it?
And it found me the flights. It did all this stuff for me,
but I didn't actually do the checkout thing with them.
I don't think the tech was there just yet, but I could absolutely
sing it getting there. But to Max's point, he's right.
Those AI agents are going to be, you know, genius pH DS in
personal finance and these numbers.
And So what begins to happen is if you run a good honest
business and you're not trying to deceive an AI agent, you
know, you can deceive humans because we're not, you know, we
don't know better sometimes when it comes to these hidden fees.
But if it's written somewhere, that AI agent is going to find
it, they're going to let you know about it, right?
So if you just run an honest business like that's the Moat
and it's a pretty simple Moat. Yeah, I love it.
You know, and one of the best quotes from their call that Max
said, and I'm going to read this so I get it right.
The world is divided into companies run by engineers and
companies trying to figure out how engineer run companies are
leapfrogging them. And that's what it's all about.
This AI and all the technology that they built into a firm has
just made them a better mousetrap.
I don't know any other way to say it.
Making it more affordable for people to borrow money, and
that's what it's all about. That and the transparency.
It's a win for me and I love having Max on the show.
Thanks again to Max and the team for joining us and orchestrating
this conversation. Cannot wait to have Max back on
the show very soon.