Hello. I'm Reginald Smith. I cover Fintech stocks here at JP Morgan. I am excited to interview CEO and founder of Affirm, Max Levchin, this afternoon. Thanks for coming out, Max.
Always a pleasure.
I know the name well. most people probably do as well, but I wanted you to talk a little bit about, like, what makes Affirm different than other BNPL companies, credit card companies. You guys have a unique mission, I believe, and it's worth, kinda starting there, I think.
Thank you. I think it's always a, always a great place to start. That is right. The thing that makes us most different is we are fundamentally a mission-oriented company. Comes from a personal disappointment/credit troubles all the way back to college. I was an immigrant to the U.S., and I found myself unaware and unprepared for the American credit card system. Promptly ruined my credit and then took me a long time to fix it. I think the fundamental problem, or at least at the foundation of Affirm, I felt the problem to solve was to fix credit scoring. It turned out that the problem is much deeper. It's actually access to credit.
The way we built the company was to be as transparent as possible to our borrowers, give them as much control as possible, and most importantly, to never surprise them with any costs. Every transaction we approve has full and total transparency into the total cost. The cost cannot go up, it can only go down. There are no prepayment penalties of any kind. There's no fees, not even late fees, which has allowed us over the last 10 years to build a brand of transparency and control for not just our borrowers but also for our merchant partners, which is where we're always introduced. We're a point-of-sale lender. It is very foundational to who we are. One of the things that I'm sure we'll talk about is our long-term guidance of 3%-4% RLTC.
One of the easiest ways for us to juice that number is to just introduce a few fees here and there. I remember one of our early advisors told me, "All you gotta do is harvest some fees. That's how the industry works." We are anti that part of the industry in a very profound way. We will never harvest fees, and that is what makes us different, and that's why our consumers come back to us over and over again.
Sure. I guess to start, like, what are 2 or 3 things that you're spending most of your time on these days?
I'm not sure what this is. It's a pre-cycle, we're in a cycle, we're mid-cycle. I don't know, I don't know what we're in, but I know we're in something. As a non-depository, non-bank lender, job number 1 for us is maintaining credit quality because fundamentally we're working for our capital partners. The folks that fund our loans look at our credit print all the time, and so long as we continue delivering results for them, our next year, next 5 years of growth will get funded. That is where I spend. You know, we have extremely capable people working on that, so it doesn't actually take up an enormous amount of my time. A lot of my brain share is making sure that we are as good as we always have been on credit.
Spend most of my time when not doing that on Affirm Card, which is our card product that we have finally rolled out and are scaling up in a pretty big way now. I am a product guy. One of the sort of corollaries of being in this very cautious credit stance and yet wanting to grow, and I've said it before, even in the 0 interest rate environment and very benign economic world, growing as a function of loosening credit is always a bad idea. You eventually come to regret it, just a question of when. Still you wanna grow, and today we're in a, what I would call a, you know, poised to be even more conservative. Already are quite conservative on credit, which means that the way you grow is you optimize.
You look for places where you left a few points of growth on the table, be it user interface, be it capital efficiency, be it underwriting efficiency, all the various things that you could have done, but because growth was so plentiful, you just kind of postponed for a while. There's a lot of opportunity left just in not touching credit, yet growing through optimization. I introduce new products. Affirm Card is the focus, and I also look for efficiencies in existing systems.
I'm glad you brought that up. I think you mentioned it either on the callback or on the earnings call. Can you give us some details around? It sounds like there, you know, there are multiple screens to sign up. There's different things you guys can do to kinda improve the funnel without giving away your secret sauce. Like, what can you do there, practically? Like, make it real for us.
Because we are in the purchase funnel, there's an enormous amount of user interface that we control, which is both a responsibility because we sell conversion to merchants. When the merchant signs up with Affirm, what they expect is a certain number of people to make it through the application process and buying, be it a couch or bicycle or clothing. Credit is an input. When we set the credit to the financial outcome we desire, everything else is up for negotiation. For example, how you communicate exactly what the consumer will pay is profoundly important. This is not a learning from this year, it's a learning from 12 years ago.
For a long time, I thought as a computer science and math guy, that telling someone their exact rate to the 5th-You know, number after decimal point, which has given them that much more precise data, and they'd appreciate that. I realized that actually most people could not care less what the APR is. In fact, they're confused and terrified by APRs. What they really wanna know is if it's a $1,000 thing, there's some stuff about interest, but what's that mean in dollars? Ideally, dollars per month. This year's learning or this last quarter's learning, you can optimize this very, very deep.
1 thing you can do is you can ask the question, "Are you the kind of person who cares about the total number of dollars or the kind of person that cares about the monthly load?" Depending on what we think you are, We'll show you both for sure, and we'll show you the APR, and we'll show you the monthly schedule, but we'll emphasize the piece we think your mind naturally goes to. Are you planning a family budget, and you're thinking, "Hey, a monthly thing is what I care about. I'd rather take 12 months to pay it back, but I know it's no more than $100." Do you actually say, "It's a Peloton bike, and what I really wanna know is I'm not gonna pay any interest at all.
If I am, maybe it's this many dollars, but no more.
Is that dictated by the merchant or the purchase amount, or what do you think?
It's fundamentally dictated by the item and the price of the item, but also the type of the item. Whether you think of this as a capital purchase of the consumer or a consumption purchase really matters. More than anything, it dictated by your personal net worth and your earning capacity and your personal cash flow. If you think that $100 a month is very manageable, no problem, you have that excess. That's you think in months. If you look at it and say, "I have plenty of savings, but I don't like paying interest at all," or I think in terms of bulk dollar outlays, then monthly schedule doesn't matter to you, but you don't wanna prepay if you don't have to. It's, it's fundamentally a function of the consumer, but also how they think about the item.
Cool. You talked about, I guess, tightening your credit standards, given your ABS markets. There's a slide in your quarterly presentation that shows I think it's FICO score. It shows that basically, you know, for a given FICO score, your performance is better than credit card issuer other lenders, right? The question is, I guess, so how much... Is there a way to kinda quantify or think about how much you've tightened? You know, you obviously don't wanna expand your credit box, but just like what would going back to a normal credit posture like. How much have you restricted your GMV growth by?
I think last quarter, not this one, I mentioned that the demand, the inflow of applications relative to actual approvals is on the order of 2 to 1. We could grow twice, or we could be twice the scale of issuance if we approved everybody. We would also first lose our shirts and then lose our partners. We will not be doing that. The demand for credit is up for all the obvious reasons. I'll actually delve into detail of our approvals and tightening just to sort of give a little more context. Fun anecdote. Most of our tightening, as you put it, happened about this time last year, maybe a little bit, like another month or 2 after this time last year.
That has everything to do that we started seeing disturbance in the force of consumer repayment around April of 2022. If you look at actual volume impact, it did what we expected it to. It went down a little bit on a relative basis. If you look at the approval rate as a function of applications in yes answers out, it stayed the same. Reason being is we are in the purchase flow, and so we have a chance to interact with you. We're not telling you, "Swipe. Oh, sorry, you're declined." We're telling you, "Hey," first of all, we always give you or almost always give you 3 choices or on the order of 3 choices where we say, "Look, you need to borrow $1,000.
You can pay it back in 6 weeks, 3 months or 6 months, or 3 months, 6 months and 12 months." We adapt that. We have a fancy term for it internally. What we market it under is Adaptive Checkout. We adapt the checkout terms that we offer to the transaction and to the creditworthiness of the consumer. Other things we can do is say things like, "Hey, we need to know more about you. We need you to disclose your earning potential or earning capacity. We need you to log into your bank account, so we can see your cash flow data." There's all sorts of step-ups we have for information purposes. Another really useful tool we have is we can say, "Hey, you're approved for $600, and we know you're asking for $1,000.
If you have the means of paying us now $400, we'll take on the rest as a loan. We control the risk we take through all of these levers, not just yes or no, which is very, very powerful because A 2nd-order thing that we really care about is consumer experience. Actually, maybe it's the most important first-order thing that we care about. We'd never want to tell someone, "You've been a great customer, but sorry, no." Telling them, "Hey, actually, we can still approve you, but it's less, or you need to make a down payment, or we need more information," is really, really valuable to us. We'll continue optimizing towards least number of no's while credit outcomes that we want. That's the way we do this.
Thinking about that, just really quickly, are you more lenient with your repeat purchasers? Do you score them the same? Like, how do you treat them versus a new first time?
The scoring is certainly the same exact math. The access to information that we have is better because we've seen you before. The inputs, the way our models work is we take every piece of information that's available to us, and we weigh first-party data as an information that we've collected ourselves higher because there's no filtering, there's no delay, there's no potential for error. If you have recently paid off an Affirm loan, we know that you're capable of paying off that Affirm loan and understand something about your cash flow. Inevitably, our approvals for repeats are higher than new, but it's less through a function of blanket, we don't like new, we want repeat. More a, if we have the capacity if you're comfortable approving it, we will.
Is there any insights broader to glean from maybe late payments? Trying to figure out like what health the consumer's in in general. Is there anything within your portfolio or view that you're seeing, for the broader economy, maybe?
Sure. The very short hand is U.S. consumer is still quite resilient, which is a surprise even to me. To be honest, I expected by now, things to tip, and the next breath I'm holding is for the loan apocalypse, the educational loans to restart it. Writ large U.S. consumer have generally remained in reasonable financial shape as far as their ability to make their payments. They are seeing stress, and they're certainly seeing real stress in the lower income and lower credit quality. It is less or in fact not at all because of their ability to find a job that pays them a reasonable wage. It's all about inflation. That translates to their consumption decisions. Basically, the order of priority is feed my family, pay my rent, get to work, get out of town.
If you look at our results from last quarter, you'll see that everything is growing, but not quite. We're taking share versus riding a secular growth in connected fitness or sports equipment.
Right.
Outdoor. Like, all of that is flat to down in the real world. We're still growing it to at least some of these categories we're growing because we're able to sign new merchants or pick up new consumers. The part that's growing secularly and we're growing within it extra fast is travel. People are still refilling their experience battery because pandemic was such a restraint.
Sure . similar vein, you know, we talked about a little bit the ABS markets. you know, you've talked about really making sure that your numbers are strong for your partners. At the margin, is it-- Are things getting better in the ABS markets or, what's your expectation for when that will improve and how quickly can that improve and what impact will that have when you, eventually?
It's a little bit intertwined or co-complicated is 1 way to put it. 1 vector is ABS markets are still looking at us and a bunch of people who are not like us at all. I would argue we're actually quite unique in this industry. It's easy if you are a debt buyer to say, "Well, okay, you may be a special unicorn, but I got these guys and these guys and these guys, and they're all selling loans and so are you. Their performance sucks right now. You did something. I don't have the time to figure out what you did, but your delinquencies are flat to down, but theirs are doing this. I'm gonna hang on or get compensated for the risk I'm gonna take if I'm gonna do it with you.
While the rates or at least the perception of rates are stabilizing, the spreads are still all over the place because people are basically saying, "If you wanna transact, you gotta give me a lot of insurance." It's improving in our conversations. The somewhat ironic/counterintuitive thing that actually helped us a little bit lately is the bank failures. In the short term, I think that's a huge boost for us. In the long term, it's not gonna be good for anybody. In the short term, every bank CEO of a mid-sized regional bank and higher looks around and says, "All right, so the thing that was not supposed to get me fired, U.S. Treasuries and long-term mortgages absolutely got Greg Becker in some serious hot water in front of Congress. That's not what I want. What I want is, oh, yeah, lend short and borrow short.
That's what I want. I don't wanna lend long anymore. Where can I get some of these loans that have great yield, well-managed credit and are very short term? There's not a lot of others like us. We are suddenly seeing lots of people saying, "Wait a second, you make the thing that is much more fashionable to own right now than mortgages and Treasuries." That translates all the way down to people that want to buy loans from us as opposed to. I mean, obviously we don't sell loans to small banks. That's a net positive or at least narratively a net positive. The market says, "Wait a second, you're onto something.
You made these really short-term lending decisions. In the long term, the regulatory load, the overall concerns, are certainly not gonna help anybody's cost of capital. That said, I think things are on balance feeling a little bit better. That said, ABS market has been nothing but a rollercoaster for the last year. I'm sure even as I say now, something else is preparing to have an impact on it. Maybe debt ceiling, maybe alien invasion.
Is there an opportunity to fund these receivables outside the ABS markets? I don't know, like private transactions or anything like that. Is that something you've ever explored? I cover a few other like AI lenders and they've done some deals with money managers. Is that an option for you or is that even less attractive than the ABS markets?
The goal number 1 is to fund the business. We will fund it by all the rational means possible. We have a very diverse set of-Partnerships already. We securitize, we do private securitizations, we do public securitizations. We sell our loans whole to a variety of buyers from insurance folks that need stable yield and not too much of it, and hedge funds that chase yield. We're very picky relative to who we partner with. Generally speaking, from my memory, I think we've probably never lost a partner in the last 11, 12 years of doing this. We've been good to our partners, and they've been good to us.
We also have significant amount of on-balance sheet warehouse capacity that we utilize whenever we feel like we're not getting the right level of execution. We'll look at everything from where we are today to whatever. The 1 thing that's a little bit different between us and again, I feel like I'm beating up on an unnamed party here, we're not interested in selling our loans below par or at a some financial penalty that we do not feel we deserve. We print excellent yield. We are in control of our credit outcomes. We'll continue to remain in that control. There's no reason for us to take a bath on our economics. If there is a buyer out there that will give us a good execution, competitive execution, we'll absolutely talk to them.
Whatever the structure, we're very creative, and we have a significant advantage in the sense that we've built majority of our own software that does all this stuff, so we can account for whatever it is we need to build. If it ends up being just take it off my balance sheet already, which I think some folks are dealing with right now, that's not interesting.
if I'm hearing this right, it's not that you are necessarily capital constrained. Maybe the economics aren't as great as they were a year ago, but You're not feeling pressure from the.
-the capital markets.
No. We are not capital constrained. The business is well-funded through this fiscal year, next fiscal year. The constraint we put on ourselves is we never want to show up to the market with a story of, "Oh, we're so sorry. We gave you..." I mean, we're lucky or maybe better than lucky, we have not had to deal with, "We're so sorry we lost you some money.
What we want to make sure, though, is we show up with a, "Hey, we are delivering the yield we promised and then some." The constraint we put on our growth is that marginal dollar where we cannot be absolutely sure that we will deliver the yield that we promised. That we'll always stick to. We're not hurting for actual capital, though.
Got it. wanted to talk about competition. It was funny, I was talking to Michael a few weeks ago when Apple finally launched their pay later product. I think your stock was down a ridiculous amount that day.
For our volatility, ridiculous amount is not much.
Right. No, as I was doing the math and looking at your volume mix, like yes, you guys are a BNPL player. You're not, that's not your biggest channel by any means.
No.
If I'm understanding this correctly, your relationship with Shopify and the Shop app is near exclusive. So it's not even like you would. Okay, cool. I didn't.
It's exclusive in a sense that we are the only ones integrated-.
Right.
to Shop Pay. You can still use one of our competitors-
Right.
in a general ecosystem.
Now the, what it seemed to me was that, you know, assuming Apple Pay Later blows up, like it's not as direct a threat to you guys as the stock would have implied that day. Probably a bigger threat to PayPal, Block, or somebody like that, that's, you know, competing straight up. Am I thinking about that right? Maybe just talk about competition in general and what impact that has or can have on your MDRs within the split pay space.
I think the paying for split pay, BNPL, whatever the moniker of the day is, good news is that we're all, or at least we are well-trained. We've had competitors like Klarna and Afterpay not just pricing it below 0, but literally paying merchants to use it. We've remained disciplined in that space. I think another entrant competitively on the pricing side of things does not change the game very much for us. I agree with your analysis. Apple is a meaningful threat to the likes of PayPal because it's an integrated wallet, hardware integrated wallet of all things, versus an unintegrated wallet, so there's obvious pressure. Our platform integrations are with Shopify, Walmart, Target, Amazon, you know, places where these are very thoughtful, deliberate integrations that have both parties' financial and consumer interests squarely in mind.
I don't think it's quite as impactful as the stock price that day may have implied. That said, it's actually a strong positive, at least a couple of senses. 1, the sort of standard adage, well, is BNPL like a flash in the pan and then it's just gonna go and nobody's gonna care. If Apple took up, I don't know how many thousands of engineers had to work on this, but it's unlikely it would disappear. Apple does not do things as a flash in the pan modality. 2, I'm very happy they chose to do no late fees. When we started the fee harvesting, it's not a joke.
Like literally a person with 30 years industry experience told me, "You're a total fool," direct quote, "if you think you can run a lending business without late fees. 1, no one's gonna pay you back on time, and 2, you'll never make a penny of profit. Like, this just does not work without fees." At the time in my head, I went, "You're probably right. I don't know what I'm doing." Too late now, I made a commitment. I assure you, we've been able to-- Even in the, you know, the world has changed, our funding costs went up and all that, and yet our last quarter's print was north of 3.5 in revenue as transaction costs as a percentage of GMV.
It does suggest that we know something without late fees and all the sort of yuck that the industry loves to feed on. The fact that Apple showed up to the party and said, "Us too, we're also gonna do no late fees," is very powerful. Like, the rest of the competitors-
Yeah.
Platform integrations or not, should be saying, " If my margin depends on late fees, the alternative is not just that weird company, Affirm who think they're too good for it's also the guy with the integrated hardware wallet." I think the pricing pressure is going to be put on primarily our competitors.
Got it. We only got 10 minutes. There's a lot to cover. I wanted to talk about.
Short answers.
No pressure. Wanted to talk about Affirm Card. I know you've talked about the economics. You've tightened them up on all the different transaction types. Quickly, can you run through how the product works? Because most of us here probably have a charge card with rewards, like-
Yeah.
It's a different world. Break that down for us really quickly, then how the economics work, and I've got a few follow-ups.
Sorry. It's a debit card. It connects to your existing bank account, so you don't have to open a new one. If you got your Chase checking account, we can connect to it. If you swipe and do nothing, it will settle against that account after 48 hours, so it's a pay now mode. You can also say, "Actually, I wanna pay that over time." Retroactively, you can go back into your transaction history in our app and say, "Take that thing and make it into a pay in 6 or pay in 12, a pay in whatever.
48 hours. To do that 24?
You have, I think right now it's 24 hours. Obviously, depending on your standing with us, we can adjust that. There's no regulatory reason not to make it shorter or longer.
Both are doing that. They're doing the
Yeah. Absolutely. Both post, the third mode is if you are thinking of buying something large, you open up your app and say, "Hey, I'm gonna go to Best Buy and buy a TV, and I'm gonna need $200 for that." We pre-approve that, and then when you head to Best Buy, your next swipe just magically becomes a loan. It's a far better product for that consumer than a credit card. You only pay interest on what you plan to finance. If you're swiping to buy a cup of coffee, that consumer, by the way, predominantly uses debit for everything. They sometimes reach for their credit card because they need to buy something, and then they end up revolving, and they pay a lot of fees, and they hate it. This card charges them no fees.
There's absolutely no associated costs with pay now. If you wanna finance something, you explicitly finance that one thing at a time. Still the same sense of control and certainty that you get with Affirm. Still very, very small. We haven't broken out the financial impact just yet, we will start disclosing more. It's super sticky. People love it. They really enjoy the product. When it doesn't work, I do a lot of customer service personally and I spend a lot of time now dealing with people who are very upset that their card doesn't work. Like, the card works beautifully 99.57% of the time. The few things when it breaks, the level of like, "What the hell? This thing is so amazing.
How, why did the magic go even for a second?" is palpable. I'm very proud of what we built. Still has a long way to go. That's where I spend a lot of my product making time.
Real quick. The interchange that you guys earn, is it the same for all transactions or is it determined retroactively after they know what is?
On the swipe it's the same interchange, so it's debit. We do have hundreds of thousands at last reporting merchants where we have a custom interchange deal.
Yep.
You can imagine that some of those may or may not be willing to pay for a little extra.
Sure. Wanted to talk about your transaction margin. Get a ton of questions about that. I know you guys, at your analyst day a few years ago, you gave kind of a long-term target there, and I asked Michael about this a few weeks ago. People can get obsessive about ratios, and the way I think about it is profit dollars as opposed to the ratio. Question for you is, do you think about it that way? Is it fair or how can you get people off of that metric? Are you comfortable that 3%-4% is the right ratio? Yeah.
I'm with you. I think, you know, think about ratios. If you wanna improve them, you just either increase the numerator or decrease the denominator. There's lots of ways to cheat. We're not cheating, but what we care about is achieving adjusted operating income profitability. That basically means dollars. You can't ratio your way to that. This is particularly important as we start scaling Affirm Card. Affirm Card has 3 modes of transactions.
Yeah.
1 is a priori, 1 is pay now, 1 is a posteriori. The economics are quite different on each. I assure you, no one's gonna pay me 4% for pay now transactions.
Right.
Like, there's some money to be made there from the merchant, but not a whole lot. They know the money's settling against the bank account. They're not stupid. Yet, if we end up scaling pay now to be a huge component of the business, that is a risk-free transaction, and we get paid 100% through ACH. The repayment from consumer always settles against the bank account, so that cost is de minimis.
Right.
You know, once it becomes a big enough deal, we'll break it out. If you next time you see me and you say, "My God, your ratio went down to less than 3%," you did print $1 trillion of ACH funded transactions. I think we're both gonna consider that to be an amazing success.
Okay.
Not a forward-looking statement. I don't expect $1 trillion of anything just yet. The punchline here is as the transaction mix changes-
Sure.
It's reasonable to start focusing more and more on the absolute dollars and less and less on the ratios. We'll do a good job breaking that out.
Yeah.
as it becomes differentiated.
My guess is that once you guys reach that sustainable profitability, maybe folks will stop focusing on that. You kinda prove that out. We've got a few minutes left. I want to open it up to the audience for any questions. Just give me a second for the microphone. Anybody? The one up front.
You can probably just say it, and I'll repeat it.
Can you just give us the key variables associated with your path to profitability over the next couple of years?
Well, our adjusted operating profitability is at least has been announced as a thing we will get to at the end of this fiscal year and/or entering the next fiscal year, which for us is in 5 weeks, something like that. It's imminent, or at least that's what we said we'll do, and we've been decent at keeping promises. Internally, this is known as the Affirm equation, so our employees are all very aware of it. It's at the highest level, it's transaction volume times transactional margin minus operating cost of the business. We calculate transaction margin honestly, as in we put everything in, like costs of data, cost of servicing, cost of funds. It's not a made-up margin. This 3%-4% thing is a well, well-thought-out thing.
take all our volume, multiply it by the marginal economics, take out whatever OpEx we have to pay for, and if that number ends up being minus whatever is capitalized, which there's not a lot of, but some, and that's adjusted operating income. The other adjustment out is stock-based comp, of course, which is at some point will become less of a thing. because of some of our agreements, in particular with folks like Amazon and Shopify, those warrants have to get fully vested before they stop making an impact on the SBC side of things. that's it. a less mathematical way of answering it is just driving operating leverage on from the efforts of the team, which we are doing.
[inaudible]
We are in control of the number of turns in capital. Last I looked, I look all the time, our weighted average life of a loan is about 5 months. If you look back, don't quote me on this one because Michael's in the audience, he'll tell you the exact number if you really wanna know. That number has been steadily diminishing because it's easier to manage risk. The thing that actually people most misunderstand about Affirm is you don't actually have to believe that we are a bunch of geniuses underwriters. Like, we are quite good. We really have some of the best underwriting minds in the industry employed at Affirm for the last 10 years. Majority of the ML team joined us almost at founding time.
We have some very, very smart, very experienced, really good underwriting machine learning people, and yet that is made much easier by having an asset that turns over super quickly. Like, if you make a mistake, it's half gone before the quarter's out. You say, "Oh, well, I screwed up, but now I'm gonna tighten and deal with it." The drive to lower weighted average life of loan is not an accident. We've wanted to prepare ourselves for a credit cycle by having as short an asset as possible, and at the moment, we're quite happy where it is. That said, the very long-term goal for this company is to be your primary transactional device for all transactions. Like, we are not going up to elective medical and autos and mortgages, we're going down towards donuts and coffee and daily spend.
That naturally tightens the number of turns of capital because you're not gonna finance a coffee cup. In the longer term, yes, it will become more and more capital efficient.
Yeah.
25 seconds.
Hey, Max. I guess I was here just a minute late, so I apologize if I'm going over old ground. 2 things. 1 is a short, easy one, which is that you and Michael, when we saw you guys last out here talking, you spoke to a, you know, "Hey, guys, this issue of student loan deferment, which is now gonna be coming in from the horizon, could be a very serious issue." Love to just hear your updated thinking, whether you still feel like that there's some nervousness there and how you're thinking about that for your own book.
Second, and I'm almost embarrassed to ask you this, but I feel like with Affirm Card and I feel like with where you're going, there is actually a fascinating AI, almost like a financial like health co-pilot thing, or I don't even know what, but almost like something there there. As lame as that totally sounds, and I never ask these stupid questions.
Look at Michael. Look at Michael while he's doing...
I did not ask you a question.
I was about to say, like, are you a plant?
Yeah.
Did Michael plant you here? Both are short and easy to answer. I am terrified of the student loan apocalypse. I think it's the scariest thing in the world. I think we don't have time to get political, but I think given our government's collective government ability to negotiate something as basic as let's not default as a country, our collective government's, you know, reserve currency of the world, who cares if we don't make our payments? Given that's really hard, I know there's lots of very, very smart people, including people I know well personally, who are working on a variety of basically re-entry into the cycle of paying your student loan. Like, every one of these people who have not paid their bills for 3 years have heard the story.
They know they're gonna be on the hook. They know these are not bankruptcy remote loans. It's a thing they're gonna have to deal with. Yet no one knows exactly what's gonna happen. There's 2 ways to go about it. You can like, in your face, pay up or collections and nasty things, or you make it easy. The government has to approve a lot of the programs to make it easy. For example, can't make this month's loan, fine, we'll just stack it in the back of your repayment schedule, which is done all the time. It's not a new idea. I'm just terrified that given how hard it is to do that with that ceiling, it's gonna be that much harder to do any of these programs 'cause they're all gonna have to get approved at the Congress level.
On the AI front, yes. That's all I'm gonna say.
[inaudible]
We're given the get out of here look, so.