Affirm's Max Levchin Breaks Down How Buy Now, Pay Later Really Works

24:41So you've nailed the business model there. In some situations, the retailer just doesn't have the margin or isn't interested in paying your interest. And so they'll say, look, you're going to use CarterCard. You'll pay some interest. If you're going to use Affirm, it's okay for us to have this transaction happen if you are willing to pay interest to Affirm. And in that scenario, you will see both the principal and interest. We'll calculate it for you, both the rate and the dollars. And we'll show you the schedule. and before you commit to any of that, you will see and agree to the schedule that we agree on.

25:08In the latter case, the consumer is paying us something. The merchant is probably paying us something, significantly less than what they're paying us if they're absorbing the cost of interest, the cost of time, value, and money. The business model is really, really simple in our case to understand. The value is fixed, so whoever is paying us almost doesn't matter. That has to cover the fixed cost of underwriting, servicing, all the usual bits, leave a little bit for us to actually be a profitable company, which we are, and also absorb the probability of default, which by the way, sort of all the way back to this alignment of incentives, an easy check.

25:40Like this whole idea of like, oh, you know, you're just not going to profit when people stumble. Our delinquency rates are about half the industry of credit cards. That should give you a sense for we don't make nearly as many mistakes, or perhaps we are not willing to let people go late because we don't benefit from it. Back to the business model, that's how it works. The competitiveness of this industry is just like any other competitiveness of any payment industry. Payments are notoriously a competitive world. There's actually never been a monopoly in payments full stop. There's a fun puzzle I used to do.

26:14Cocktail parties, name a monopoly in payments, it turns out there has never been one. That sounds like an odd lots cocktail party. Yeah. I, you know, there's a reason I'm a fan of the show, right? I listen to you opine and all sorts of esoteric things with great gusto. And so I think that's, we'll tell you everything you want to know about the competitiveness of the space. But we have decided from the very beginning that we want transparency and honesty with everyone involved. With our borrowers, that's why we say everything up front. That's why we tell them, here's your disclosure on exactly the rates and the schedules.

26:46Because with our merchants, we tell them, here is the price you will have to pay us if that's where you're paying. If you can't, don't want to, that's fine. We will probably not be the right one for you. We won't make it up elsewhere. We're not going to take it out of the consumer's hide when they least expect it. That's just not the brand. There are definitely cheaper providers out there. There are plenty of brands that'll say, we're just like Affirm, but way less expensive for merchants. What that really means is that's because we charge all sorts of hidden fees. We have all sorts of other ways of taking it out of consumer skin.

27:16What this means practically with 15 years of experience is consumers, as they cast their eye over the list of buttons, they say, well, the one I want to use is the one that's not going to get me if I stumble. And that makes for 24 million active users in the last 12 months. And we feel like we've kept our promise and the consumers keep coming back. Just reiterating Joe's question, though, on the merchant side, again, I imagine they're getting offers from a bunch of different installment lenders, BNPL companies. And I don't think they do they care much about the underwriting. It's not really their problem.

27:51It's your problem. Right. So I assume the thing they care most about is the fee, which seems like. They actually care about three things. Okay. So they absolutely care about the fee. Like that's it, which can range from as low as less than credit cards. So typical credit card rate today is on the order of between two and a half and 3%, depending on the size of the merchant. But that's kind of the average in the industry. we will definitely meet you around those numbers at the absolute lowest and goes up all the way to, let's say, low single-digit percentage points when you are subsidizing consumer interest.

28:33So we are not a cheaper-than-credit-credit-credit provider. I don't want anybody to have that illusion. They care about the rate. More than the rate, they care about incremental sales. So if your next marginal buyer is either a no thanks or it will cost you 5%, if you have the margin of better than 5%, you don't want the items staying on your shelves. You would like to pay this 5 % to get the marginal buyer to say yes. And so because of that incentive, which I think is easy to follow, you do have lots and lots of merchants that say, all right, so what I really care about then is the approval rates, which is the second variable we care about.

29:11So as people come through and say, hey, I'm not going to use a credit card, not interested in buying unless I have an installment loan, let's say from a firm, they need to know that that rate is going to be high enough. Otherwise, why have a button that just sits there and looks pretty? And so our rates are typically higher than the rest of the industry because we are so obsessed with underwriting because we have no crutches, e.g. late fees. And so this underwriting thing, we don't really try to explain it to merchants at all. What we do say is look at our approval rates. If you see the approval rates are meaningfully higher than the industry, you know you're going to get value from this.

29:41That's why it's worth paying more than credit cards. And so that is true, and that's what they do. The third piece they do care about, every merchant knows that the second transaction is the one. The first transaction costs them probably more than the margin in it. They're paying Google, they're paying Facebook, they'll soon be paying an LLM provider or a chatbot provider to drive that first transaction in. They want to sell you another thing. So they very much care about if they had sold that first transaction using a buy now, pay later provider, it better not harm their brand. Because if the buy now, pay later provider is harassing the consumer for paying them back or has late fees or has unexpected fees, it's going to accrete negatively to the merchant's brand.

30:22And so they actually do care about late fees in a way that has less to do with financial consequences, but more with, will people come back to us and use Affirm again? Or will they be like, ah, I hated that merchant, I got into some bad transaction. So they care about all these things through their own lens. That makes a lot of sense. So let's say I start accepting your premise. Okay, this is per se better than credit cards. One reason that people can't just quit credit cards generally is not every place takes by now pay later. People want something in their wallet, right? They want something at the restaurant and wherever it is that they know it's going to be accepted.

30:58Now, you are launching a card or you have a card, right? We have a card. It's been around for a couple of years. So you have a card. But I'm curious, you referenced that recent episode that we did with Itamar Drexler. And one of the things that he said about cards is they're very costly to advertise. The marketing expenditure for the card companies is very high. You mentioned that you don't do a lot of advertising. I'm curious, though, on the card component specifically, if you want to be, quote, top of wallet to consumers, the first thing – I think I've read that phrase. That's right. I'm laughing because you're like, I'm trying to acquaint myself with the industry.

31:36You're a true insider, that's T-O-W, that's legit. So if you want to be top of wallet for the consumer in the card, can you do that with an advertising light model or do you really need to spend to get significant wallet share? You can. The card is available to our users. So this is not a thing that you'll see on Times Square displays. This is a thing you find out from Affirm once you are a borrower, once you're actually in good standing. You qualify for the Affirm card as the, hey, you really liked us, didn't you? This was great. You're transacting five times a year. If you want to take us with you to your retail shopping experiences, restaurant, or otherwise, we have a way.

32:19It's called the Affirm card. It's actually pretty magical. The card is a dual mode card. It switches from debit to credit explicitly as you tell it to. So when you're buying a burrito, we expect you to use the debit mode, which just literally takes the money from your account and that's it. There's no interest, obviously. It's just a pay now transaction. If you're buying a TV, you can buy it now with Affirm. In the app, you say, hey, my next transaction, I want that to be a 12 months, maybe it's a 0 % loan because the retailer wants you to have it interest-free. Maybe you're paying some interest, but you're setting up that transaction in the app and then your card is ready.

32:53When you tap it next time, it becomes a loan automatically. It's a pretty magical experience. It's super popular. It's a thing that we haven't needed to advertise because we went from, we have this card idea to about 12 % of our users having one very, very quickly because it's just a really, really good product. Again, our user, their mindset has long been changed from revolving is okay. I don't understand it, but I don't care to, I don't like revolving. I don't want to pay late fees. I don't want to pay excessive interest. This affirm thing is neat. The card is a logical next step. It's how much more than I have of this type of financial life.

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36:19Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. How much insight do you have into how much people are borrowing from other BNPL lenders? So the sort of stacking issue, which has been discussed multiple times now. It's a great question. We have a decent insight in the sense that we understand pretty well the overlap between user basis. So there are two prongs to this answer, and this one is worth delving into pretty deeply because this is where we differ from the rest of the industry pretty significantly. So before I get into the stacking part, I'll address the overlap. So we do a lot of studying just externally through surveys.

37:00Also, because when we log into your bank account or we ask a provider to log into your bank account and pull in some of your transactional data, we get a glimpse into what else you're spending money on. So we have a decent sense for where else you might be using buy now, pay later. And to date, the user base overlap with other providers is quite minimal. So there's not a whole lot of stacking possibilities simply because people who use Affirm tend to stay with Affirm. They sometimes stray and use other providers, but it's quite minimal for a meaningfully lower transactional amount. I think we average a significantly higher average transaction relative to the rest of the industry.

37:39So far, that's not been a problem. In the long term, you, of course, can make the argument like, sure, right now you guys are all still tiny. You're growing really quickly. Everybody's taking a bite out of the credit card industry. What happens five years from now when everyone has signed up for their favorite BNPL and they're now signing up for a second one? The right way to address this problem, and this is the right way, and it's traditionalist of me, but I really do believe it's the right way, is for everyone to report to the credit bureaus. Today, when we tap into one of the three major credit bureaus, we see what you're borrowing and relatively current state of your borrowing from other traditional sources of credit, and it is a variable that we use inside of our own underwriting.

38:19A firm today is the only one that furnishes, that's another fancy industry term, delivers the data of both positive and negative, as in you're on time, you're not on time, to the credit bureaus. The rest of our competitive set, generally speaking, does not, although everyone has experimented a little bit. From the very beginning, we saw the idea of building credit history and improving credit scores for people who are on time as a key value proposition for our borrower. Like, we are not going to be the only lender for our consumers. They need to borrow for a car. They need to borrow for a house one day.

38:54That means whatever they're doing with us, especially if they're doing well, which 97 % of our consumers are doing really, really well, they're on time all the time, it has to reflect in their permanent record somehow. So we've been furnishing basically from the very beginning. It took a long time to persuade not just the credit bureaus, but also the companies that provide traditional credit scores to understand the data we furnish and treat it in the right way so that when you are on time, the scores go up. When you're not on time, the scores go down, et cetera. And so we did all that work basically on a volunteer basis over the last decade.

39:27And today, right now, the state of the industry is if you are a BNPL provider and you're not furnishing data, you kind of have no excuse. We pioneered this. We did all the work. We worked with the score builders and the credit bureaus. And we're now sending all of our data. And so we want everyone to join us because most people do pay on time. their credit histories should reflect their good repayment, but also people who should not be borrowing should be reflected. And I think that that's just really, really important. If I can do one bit of advertising on your show, it's one before I firm. It will be all of you out there.

40:02If you are in a buy now, pay later industry, furnish your damn data. It will help consumers and it'll eventually accrete to your brand too. But for now, we are the only major one. Wait, what's the resistance then? Because it seems kind of obvious if everyone cares about the underwriting, you would want more data out there. So why not provide it? So I don't want to pretend that I understand all the motivations, but I think a basic inferential thought might occur that if you're making a lot of money from late fees, it's a cool thing to tell your consumers, don't worry, you can just pay me off and it won't go on your permanent record.

40:40And if you don't make any money from late fees, you have no incentive to tell your consumers, oh, it's okay, just pay me something and we won't tell on you. The connection between late fees and lack of reporting is unfortunately the underlying fact. And because we don't make any money from late fees because we don't charge any, we're very pro reporting. Just out of curiosity, since you're talking about late fees and credit and all that stuff, here we are recording this on December 2nd, 2025. You take the temperature of the consumer for us? How are things doing? Seeing any signs of growing missed payments or anything like that?

41:17Not as of December 2nd, 2025. The important thing to understand, I'm asked this question fairly often. I am a great, I am, Affirm is a great lens into the financial hearts and minds of North American consumer. We operate in the US, Canada, and now UK. It is a specific set of people. These people are more financially responsible. They made a conscious choice. They picked us not just because it's installment pay and yay, it's convenient. It's also because we told them we don't charge late fees. It's also because we told them, do you hate the asterisk next to the 0 %? We don't have any asterisks.

41:53One of our core values is no fine print and we mean it and on and on and on. And so it stands to reason that firm consumers will be probably much later into any kind of a macroeconomic earthquake territory if there was one to come. But as of right now, we feel quite good about our book and also about the US consumer. I'm going to ask you a question and I'm going to mention a competitor. I won't make you name the competitor, but I'll just say it in my question and then ask you about. So one of your competitors, Klarna, recently announced a new dollar peg stable coin. And I'm very cynical. And so when I see like random companies announcing some crypto thing, like sometimes it makes sense.

42:30but often it's like, well, maybe is this just a good press release or something like that? And I haven't really looked at the Klorna one, et cetera. But for you, a firm right now, when you look at as someone who has been in the internet payment trenches for literally decades right now, do stable coins or anything crypto unlock anything for you right now when you think about the future and you think about opportunities that you can't do with traditional rails? The short answer is I don't think so. Now, I'm also very cynical. So I think you're unfortunately tapping into the exact same mind flow that you have.

43:07This is our way of ordering them to want to come on the podcast and have you against it, but keep going, keep going. I am confident that there is some thought that went to the press release. So I don't think it's a pure press release. I will make it. We're not going to make you speculate on what you're competitive, but just tell us from the firm perspective. Sure. I will straw man the reasons why yes. So why not is obvious. I think you probably can do a much better job than I can. The why yes. So there are a couple of reasons. One, in general, if you have a lot of cross-border commerce, foreign exchange, the complexity of just diligence around everything from sanctions to reserve accounts, et cetera, you can squint a little and say, you know what, if we just lived in dollar-pegged stable coins everywhere all at once, it would be a little bit easier.

44:03And I think that's true. E-commerce is not a very significantly cross-border discipline. And so before you sort say, oh, wouldn't it be amazing if I bought lots of things from Zanzibar and just paid them with Affirm, but they got stable coin as a settlement currency. They'll be very happy because they want dollars and this thing is essentially dollar equivalent. It's a good story. Just most people in the US don't buy a lot of things from Zanzibar. They buy some things in other countries, but most of the time, because we all want things shipped to us very, very quickly, we're probably buying it from a US subsidiary that's warehouses somewhere pretty close to the US.

44:37And so it's not that big of a market just yet. But in like five years, if you see me putting out a press release, it's not because I finally realized that I'm missing out. It's because there's enough cross-border commerce in our scale where it starts to make a difference. That's the best I got in terms of why would you want to do this. The obvious of why not, it's like, well, maybe you want to move money around person to person, but that's not our business. Maybe you want to believe that one day Joe will have a wallet full of stable coins. I really have a hard time imagining you sporting a whole bunch of different kinds of branded dollar pegged effectively equivalent stable coins like a coupon book of I got my affirm stable coin and my brand XYZ stable coin and I'm going to choose between the two like none of that maybe solve the rule like what about for like rewards that's one thing that credit cards currently have that like oh I get miles like could there be something with if I use this stable coin I get remitted but I don't know I'm just I'm just throwing stuff out there I so for what it's worth I spent a lot of my time contemplating the reward ecosystem and mostly raging against it because it is one of the less documented wealth transfers.

45:46And by the way, the credit card industry in general is a regressive wealth transfer where people who never evolve, transactors like probably both of you and me when I do use credit cards, which is really rare these days, we're paying our bills at the end of the month. We're not paying a penny of interest. I think Joe is on the record saying you've never paid any interest. And so I think that's a nice place to be if you can afford it. Telling people that they should just not bar and pay it off at the end of the month is an incredibly let them eat cake equivalent for the 21st century payments. Lots of people in America revolve.

46:15Half the country revolves at$10 ,000. And so the idea of those people caring about rewards is sort of preposterous. They do not. They care about making their minimum payment. People who are figuring out which reward scheme they want to be a part of, I'm just not so convinced that they're going to be expanding their horizons to have more stable coins. Because ultimately, they're just getting dollars. In the world of a firm, people that we serve every single day, 24 million of them in the last 12 months, they really, really care about the interest rates they pay. Because a lot of them understand that the alternative is revolving.

46:49And so for them being told, hey, your reward is a 0 % loan is incredibly powerful. And so before we get into using our hard earned revenue into stable coins, we will just give it back to the consumers in a form of no interest. So we talked about how you make money, but we should talk a little bit about your cost side as well. And you mentioned funding earlier. So you have to get money from somewhere and you're paying for that money. What levers do you have to pull if the cost of money goes up? And again, I'm aware that we're recording this in early December and everyone expects an imminent rate cut.

47:27But in theory, if interest rates were to go up, what could you do to offset that additional cost? So the most important thing to understand about our business from the capital sourcing part of the game, everyone understands that rates are not super volatile, but if you look back a couple of years, they were very volatile for a brief, not so shining moment. And so we all knew it was possible. So all of our contracts with various lenders of money to us, but also people who will buy our loans, they all adjust fairly gently over a course of a fairly long period of time. So it's not about can we deal with rising costs of credit for us, it's how quickly do they change for us.

48:16And of course, we understand that they might change quickly. Therefore, a lot of our contracts stipulate that, hey, if they do move up, the adjustments to our cost will go fairly slowly over a period of time. So the more likely outcome in December is probably a downward motion of the credit rates or perhaps they stay steady. But just the same as I described, we're not going to wake up to, ooh, 25 free basis points of incremental revenue. It will eventually come to us in a form of incremental margin, but it'll take its time because these contracts adjust both up and down quite slowly and we're in no way unique in the industry.

48:50Everybody does that. The levers we have to deal with such cost changes are exactly what you would expect. So we will either pass it through to the consumers and moving up in the increments or down of 25 basis points is not that significant, and most people, I think, generally don't care that much. In some cases, we actually choose to tell, hey, merchant X, you are providing these rates for nothing. You should continue doing so, but the cost to you will go up a tiny bit because the rates have changed. Now, because of time value of money, the merchants pay us in real time, essentially, as a transaction is consummated.

49:25The true cost to them is truly the minimus. And so in either of these two cases, so long as the movements are not very violent, it's not that major a component of our business. I just have one last question, AI. So setting aside the technology for the underwriting, which I'm sure is a very high tech data intensive application and setting aside that probably many of your engineers on staff are using code generating for that. Just putting your tech hat on as someone who oversees a large organization, people looking for how large language models in particular are being deployed in productive capacity.

50:03At a firm today, is any of this technology in use in production and saving human hours in some respect or another? Yes, emphatically so. So we just wrapped up the Cyber Weekend, Turkey 5, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, whatever you want to call, yesterday, which was wonderful. And I don't actually have the stat yet because I will get the report immediately after this podcast is recorded. But I'm confident. Well, I probably can't pronounce the results. We report early next year. But we will have handled tens of thousands of consumer contacts. people saying everything from, hey, I just borrowed money from you and I don't understand when my first payment is due.

50:49And, you know, maybe it's because they hadn't read the email as clearly or everything all the way down to I just borrowed money and I realized that I need a refund because I actually have no intention of buying this thing and all that stuff. And a lot of it, we try to serve them in real time as they're transacting, but plenty of people contact us right after or maybe sometime after the purchase. A huge percentage of that is handled entirely by AI now. Now, that has not caused us to lay off our wonderful customer service staff at all. What it has allowed us to do is to go really deep into specialization.

51:21AI is very, very good today at handling basic questions. It can do cool things like look up your account and say, no, you're not late. You're mistaken. Don't worry about it. Or yes, you're late, but we don't charge late fees. So just please make yourself current and we'll move on. All of that can be handled by AI wonderfully. If it's something like I changed my name or I changed where I live right as I was consummating this transaction, there are all sorts of crazy things that come up. That is something that a human can handle. AI models are not smart enough yet to handle some of these things.

51:52And also, frequently enough, we wouldn't want the possibility of hallucination to derail what is a good customer relationship. So we've been able to move our human helpers into a much more sophisticated, much more specific role. So the theme in our customer service for last year has been specialization, specialization, specialization, where we train people now to serve very, very specific subset of problems because they can be effective and move faster. And so these tools are actually making them more efficient by letting them focus on just a very specific thing that they're good at. So that's one example.

52:23We track all sorts of interesting metrics about AI tool usage internally. The interesting or sort of random factoid, our engineering group is not the single largest consumer of AI tools. I will not reveal exactly who it is. And by the way, like the vast majority of our engineering. You cannot reveal who it is. Give us a hint or something. It's actually finance. Our finance group uses these tools obsessively. I'm cheating a little bit here. So for a very long time, it's not the case anymore, but for a very long time, because we are so AI and ML heavy company, one of the core requirements for any employee, but certainly in finance, was you have to know how to read code and probably write code.

53:02And so a huge percentage of what we do in our finance group actually looks a lot like coding and a lot of software engineering. But they're somehow, maybe because it's a smaller group on average, but they're great adopters of these tools. Our legal team uses it all the time. We have literally hundreds of thousands of very custom contracts. Every time a merchant pays your interest for you, they signed up for it contractually. That's a custom contract. Imagine managing half a million of these things. They're all carefully written and bespoken so AI can read and find errors and corrections, et cetera, et cetera.

53:32So one of the things that we're responsible for as a regulated business is we cannot allow merchants to advertise our service incorrectly. We're actually on the hook. When a merchant says something like, hooray, affirm, interest-free for everyone, it's not true. Some people will actually pay some interest sometimes. We are responsible for finding that and telling the merchant, please stop saying things that aren't strictly speaking true. AI tools are amazing at reading both loads of advertising copy and saying, hey, wait a second, that is inaccurate. We've got to fire off an email and tell this merchant to fix it.

53:59So you can sort of imagine a flood of ideas that we had when the ChadGPT moment happened and put it to work for the last few years. I'm going to end with a sort of theoretical question, big picture theoretical question. But if you could design the ideal payment system from scratch, complete scratch, you know, using today's technology, there's no legacy card networks, maybe not even legacy banks. What would it look like and how much of a firm's current business model would survive in that environment? Well, I think it would look an awful lot like a firm. A firm is my personal attempt to build a system that I can be proud about.

54:44one of the core things we tell people who join us, one of the reasons we had this such a black and white, no late fees, no compounding, no deferred interest, none of the yuck, is because I wanted the smartest people that would have otherwise gone to Wall Street and traded in quant funds to join us and build the system that they could be proud about. It's very hard to be proud about a thing that makes half its money on late fees. And that's why we don't do it. And so what we've built is, biased as I am, pretty darn great. It really is something that I'm very proud about. And I think the totality of the team here takes an enormous amount of pride in how we went about building this.

55:24It is dependent and intertwined with the legacy systems. But even as we go through card rails, to use another industry jargon, or many other systems that have existed when we tap into capital markets, which has certainly been here long before we came about. and everything else in between, we maintain the moral integrity of the product and its DNA all the way through. We might pay late fees if we borrow money to lend. We haven't because obviously we're on a pretty tight ship here. It will not be passed through. We take an incredible amount of pride in the diligence we exercise within the system all the way down to leaving a penny on the table for our partners to keep because we refuse to make more money than we said we would.

56:10I would love to have a blank sheet design exercise in payments, but I think what would emerge is a system that looks a lot like Affirm, just doesn't have some of the 1980s cruft in it. Max Levchin, founder and CEO of Affirm. So great chatting with you. Very illuminating, helpful conversation, and I appreciate you coming on AdLots. Thank you so much. And again, I am a fan of the show, And I love being able to see myself inside of a thing that I actually listen to all the time. Very kind of you to say. Thank you so much. That was great.

56:53Tracy, I thought that was great. I thought that was really interesting and just sort of understanding the real nuts and bolts about how the money is made and what's different about BNPL companies from the credit card companies. To my mind, very helpful conversation. Yeah, absolutely. I thought it was really interesting, the discussion about why other BNPL companies don't want to report to the credit bureaus and things like that. I wonder if that'll change anytime soon. Maybe politicians will start getting interested in it, regulators, as the space expands. A thought that I had listening to Max was he mentioned the sort of the regressiveness of the point system, right?

57:30So there's people like us who rarely roll their credit card debt, but get frequent flyer miles or other rewards, et cetera. But that's paid for by the people that roll. Now, if a firm is targeting, they're clearly targeting people who are not thinking about points, right? They're thinking about people who really do need to extend their payments or implicitly roll and say, we have a better option. So it's sort of cleaving off. If, you know, if this grows, the firm is still just a$22 billion company by market cap. But as this grows, you've got to wonder, like, in the maximal version where you've cleaved off a significant number of people who roll, what happens to the points ecosystem for the people like us?

58:11Now, granted, I don't think like, oh, what about the poor freaking flyer and all the great rewards you're getting? Will someone think about the points? Will someone please think about the points accumulators who never go into debt or who never like roll their debt? But it is interesting to think about if you could like cleave off that, then a big part of the business model of credit card, the legacy card companies, could potentially be unstable. And part of the appeal of going to any credit card that offers a lot of rewards could decline if revolvers move to this alternate payments model. Yeah, it's a really good point on points.

58:44Thank you. That one was a little obvious. I'm sorry. No, it's good. I like that one. It was straightforward. I actually got this one. Okay. Actually, you know what? I really also appreciated that Max had substantive answers for things that they're doing with AI that aren't just code generation. Even if it sounds like the finance department is probably still using it for code generation, like that makes a lot of sense, like being able to proactively scan websites to say who is claiming something that's not true about a firm, et cetera. So maybe there are productive uses of all this technology. Or sending out millions and millions of contracts automatically.

59:14Totally. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can find me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Jill Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our guest, Max Levchin. He's at M Levchin. Follow our producers, Kerman Rodriguez at Kermanerman, Dashiell Bennett at Dashpot, and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. And for more Odd Thoughts content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odd Thoughts. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash Odd Thoughts.

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