The Retail Read-Through + Practical AI Use Cases with Current CTO Trevor Marshall
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Let's go. Let's go. LFG, is that what the kids say, Guy? I don't know what the kids say. All right. Guy doesn't know what the kids say. Welcome to the Wednesday edition of the Risk Reversal Podcast. I'm Dan Nathan. That's Guy Christopher Adami. Guy, how are you?

I'm well. I'm doing very well. I'm doing well because the Mets are in a bit of a losing streak and the Yankees are just sort of compiling wins. That works for me. We have Nick basketball. Just a lot to be happy about. Nick basketball. This town is just abuzz with the Knicks. Probably a little too much for where they are in the playoff schedule here, but let's see. You and I got a lot to talk about here. It's the open. It's Wednesday.

Wednesday. I just want to tease this really quickly. Stick around after Guy and my conversation. I sat down with Trevor Marshall. He is the CTO and co-founder of Current. We talked a lot about FinTech and the prospects for M&A and the IPO market, you know, kind of heating back up. We talked a lot about Google I.O. and this

the cloud wars in general. And here was a really interesting part about it, Guy. You know, we spent a lot of time talking about use cases for the investment in generative AI, but a lot of companies, and he walked us through a lot about how they're using this technology and how they see it adding to productivity and a whole host of things.

All right, we have a down day this morning, 50 basis points in the S&P 500, the NASDAQ down a little more. We had some retail earnings this morning that I think are very noteworthy. Palo Alto last night, security name also down after its results and then yields moving higher. You know, lots going on there. I think this tax bill guy, and you and I are not gonna get in the weeds because we are not that well versed in this, but the idea that they're getting this SALT cap

increase. And then there's parts of the Republican Party that really want that paid for. And it comes through, you know, Medicaid cuts and nutrition programs and the like, which I think, you know, is one of those things that is going to be continued to debate or debated, you know, right into the midterms. It's going to be a really interesting situation if they do get that bill through. Oh, one other thing. You sat down yesterday with Gary Cohn,

And I would love to know when he was in the White House in 17, he pushed through the tax bill that they're trying to extend right now. Anything you want to tell us about that conversation? Yeah. You know, at a great BNP Paribas conference at Casa Cipriani downtown on South Street. Beautiful place, by the way, about four hundred and fifty five hundred of Paribas residents.

clients invite only not only was Gary Cohn there but um Janet Yellen was there Ray Dalio was there I mean it was really a who's who of speakers it was a great conference but

Gary spoke about, you know, the differences between the first administration and this administration, the importance of keeping those tax cuts. You know, he's a believer in it. Obviously, that was one of his big missions in the first Trump administration. But we also talked about the difference between the first administration and their sort of

purview with in terms of the US stock market and how that was a report card and how things have now pivoted maybe correctly to the bond market, although obviously the stock market is still something that they watch very closely. So it was a great conversation. It was only a half hour, but we discussed a lot of different things. And, you know, Gary tends to be optimistic and he remains so, you know, he thought that little bond blow up a couple of weeks ago was a bit of a wake up call. And he's I think he's right to use that term.

and we'll see how it plays out. But you mentioned the bond market, you mentioned Palo Alto, you mentioned retailers. Let's start with the bond market because as we're sitting here, 10-year yields are back above 4.5% for maybe the reasons you just talked about in terms of some of the consternation around this bill. But I think it's problematic. And again, Carter has a different view, which he's entitled to, and he may wind up being right. But I think this...

rates going higher here in the United States in this sort of stealth manner is going to really catch people off guard because I think the market is not set up for higher rates. And I think there's still a lot of people out there that believe the Fed has some sort of magic wand that can make these rates go lower. They don't. Yeah, well, Fed funds futures, you know, CME funds tracker that we look at quite frequently is not pricing in more cuts than, you know, you might have expected.

over the last couple of months, especially with inflation being tamped down and the like. And again, I don't know if inflation has materially been tamped down. You're seeing like a trend that's slightly lower. You saw in the UK though, that they've seen highest inflation readings in a year

Okay, so these are, you know, economies that have seen rate cuts and Trump has been pushing our Federal Reserve to take a look at what's going on overseas on the rate cutting front. But to your point, yields just kind of keep moving higher four and a half or four five five, you know, for the 10 year and above 5% on the 30 year that kind of leads me to believe the housing markets not going to kind of loosen up at all. You know, we've been talking about job cuts.

And these job cuts are happening white collar jobs too. Microsoft announced that they're cutting, you know, 6,000 jobs and these are like coding jobs. And this is something that Trevor and I talked a lot about productivity gains and some of the early use cases for these generative AI models has been coding, you know, it's

also customer service. So those are jobs that you think about if one's on the higher end of the white collar, one's on the lower end, but these are people that are going to be initially cut. So the 10-year yield, like you said, you're not sure the markets are set up for this. And it goes back to the freak out that we had more than a month ago. And it'll be interesting to see if rates start moving higher. If we see that sell America trade, the dollar, the US dollar index is below 100 now. Do you think with stocks growing

so much higher than where they were on April 9th in the bottom that this could cause some sort of palpitations in the stock market because even on down days, you know, two days ago we come in and, you know, there's some headlines, you know, we're down 1%. This was the Moody's downgrade and it just gets bought guy.

You know, back in early April, I think collectively we thought that, you know, just try to continue to push to the downside, given where a lot of these readings were the oversold conditions that the market was in didn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense. On top of which, you know, we traded down to an uptrend line in the S&P that had been in place or has been in place.

for basically the last five years. So it didn't make a lot of sense now. Well, in a month, that's completely flipped and those oversold conditions have now become overbought conditions and nothing has fundamentally changed in terms of the concerns out there. So I think you're right to point out that, yeah, there can be a downdraft here that nobody is prepared for once again. And, you know, the market, regardless of what people will tell you, I mean, the market is still expensive. And if in fact,

We're moving into a slowdown at 21 multiple for the S&P 500 makes no sense. And since you mentioned higher rates and the potential for unemployment to go higher, this is anecdotal and it will probably come up on market call at some point. But I just want to point it out. Toll Brothers reported yesterday we were sitting on the desk of fast money. The stock was gapping higher.

But we were quick to point out that although it was a bit of a relief rally, if you think rates are going higher and if you think the employment picture is changing, you're not chasing it. And if you look at Toll Brothers today, yeah, it's higher, but not nearly to the extent that it was in the after hours yesterday. So these home builders, to me,

might, I don't want to say they're ground zero, but they're definitely worth keeping an eye on. All right, let's talk retail for a second. So Target right now, guy, they missed, they guide down. It was a shit show. The stock's down 7%. I think it's making new 52-week lows and multi-year lows. So they cut their forecast. They're talking about a sharp pullback in spending. They're talking about tariff costs, boycotts,

consumer confidence weakening. And so obviously they guide down here also. The comp store sales dropped nearly 4% in the quarter. They're spending consumers less per visit. And I just think that is interesting. But they also, and this is maybe purely political, you know, they're saying that they're going to be introducing new products at lower prices so they can gain market share.

Now, you and I know quite well that in an environment like this, you know, you got to get inventories right. You got to get the right products on the shelf. But in a tariff environment where there's likely to be disruptions to shipping, I'll bet you like 85% of the stuff that they sell, at least from an apparel standpoint, maybe higher comes from China. Right. And so we're going to have some issues there, especially when you look at what happened to shipping rates over the last month or so. Peter Bookbar

of the book report and Bleakley Advisors has been writing about this. We went from, you know, people canceling orders left and right, right. And, you know, before liberation day, and then they just went back really hard because they're trying to get stuff worked out with this 90 day pause. Right. And who knows, but there's still a 30% tax on inbound goods from China.

which is still three times probably what the market is priced for. So let's just talk about Target real quick. I think it made a low of 87 and change in early April. As we're sitting here, it's 91 and change. But your point is well taken. By the way, for those that care, this is a stock that made its all-time high, I think, in the summer of 2021, north of $220. And I'm not the brightest bulb in the fixture, but the stock is now down probably 60%.

since then. So at a certain point, you have to say, okay, the retail environment is definitely gotten a little bit more difficult, but when is it a target specific problem? And, you know, people put Brian Cornell on this pedestal talking about being one of the great CEOs out there. Well, not over the last four years or so and target,

has a very target specific problem they're sort of find themselves in the middle and in this environment the middle is the wrong place to be so i think target is a bit of a tell i think it's more of a tell on target but there's clearly something going on and you mentioned the fact that target wasn't going to talk about raising prices well if you're in a classroom and somebody raises their hand and they give a really bad answer and the teacher just eviscerates that student

if 10 minutes later the teacher calls on you you're not going to give the same answer and why do i bring that up because i think target saw what happened with walmart in terms of walmart saying they're going to raise prices they saw what the administration did in sort of in sort of retaliation or in response to and they weren't going to make that same quote-unquote mistake but it doesn't mean they don't find themselves in the exact same situation so i've been

I've been concerned about Target for a long time. Nothing has changed in terms of my view. All right, here's a name in retail that people have not been concerned about. We talked about it yesterday on the market call. We're looking at that chart. We're looking at TJ Maxx. We're looking at the breakout and this kind of just...

stair step move that it's been making over the last few weeks or so. So there's this kind of idea that consumers were, you know, going or trading down to TJX. We've seen some pressure on the higher end. We've been talking about that. I want to say for like the last year or so, but here's a company that, you know, they missed guidance. They lowered guidance or so they missed their prior guidance. They lowered for the current core, not,

Not massive by any means, but, and I would say, you know, if I was the CEO of TJX, I'd be doing the same thing, especially with my stock trading the way it was. And I know that these CEOs, they say they're not always looking at the stock and this and that or whatever, but you got to be a little bit. And it gives, the performance gives the management a little room to kind of reset expectations in a market that, you know, is really uncertain, if that's fair.

down a couple percent as we're sitting here i think the all-time high was about 136 we're trading about 131 and a half 132 so it's not disastrous stock performance yet the quarter was okay the guide to your point was a little bit concerning but why would you guide um higher why would you put yourself out there in this environment so i think your point is well taken i think

TJ Maxx, in my opinion, is going to continue to get the benefit of the doubt. The valuation is clearly a concern, and it's been a concern for a while. If the market were to sell off in a meaningful way, TJX is not going to be spared. But I will tell you, it's not going to go down as much as some of the other competitors and much as the broader market. So despite the fact that there was a concerning guide, I don't think you're running too far from TJX here.

Yeah, another name that had kind of a weak guide. It's trading down 7%. Here's Palo Alto Networks. And this is one where I know you've been a fan for years of. The stock was just trading at all-time highs. You know, the fact that it's down 7%, yeah, it sucks if you're a trader and you were playing it from the long side. I think both you and I said yesterday that...

You know, it's getting a little stretched here. Valuation's always been a thing. I think the secular shift towards security is something that people feel, you know, this is one you want to reload on. This is kind of best of breed in the space, you know. But last night on Fast Money, when we were talking about it, it was like, this is not a hyper growth company anymore.

They're expected to grow earnings and sales, you know, basically 15% for the next few years or so. Trades at about 60 or so times this year, I think 50 something next year. And maybe you don't care about valuation in a name like this because you think about this new world of generative AI. You think about the acquisition that Google

just made a whiz for $32 billion. And you say that everybody who's offering these sorts of services, I mean, in the generative AI, whether you're a hyperscaler, whether you're investing for your own company and this sort of stuff, you're going to need increased security, you know,

apparatus, if you will, whatever you want to call it. Apparatus is probably a dumb word to use, Guy, but who knows? I'm also not the brightest bulb in the fixture, by the way. So thoughts on this one? I mean, you look at down 7.25%. I mean, this thing could easily continue to go more for just profit-taking, you know? And I'm just curious your thoughts here. It's noisy. You know, you just go back over the last year and the moves to the upside and the downside have been exactly that. I mean, they're exaggerated and probably rightly so given the valuation.

But I mean, as you just said, this was a stock that I think in February was making new all time high around 208 or so. And here we are at 180. But it's not like we haven't seen this before. Again, if you go back over the last couple of years, you will see dramatic moves to the downside only to be followed by dramatic moves to the upside. So.

This is just my opinion. You're not looking for a place to sell this stock. You're saying, okay, where do I sort of reload? Now, I think the low in April, if I'm not mistaken, was about 153.5 or so. I don't know if it gets down to there, but somewhere in the mid-160s, 170s, you got to sort of, if you believe in the secular story, which I do, you got to sort of, if you believe in the secular story, which I do, you got to sort of, if you believe in the secular story, which I do,

you got to say, okay, you're closing your eyes and you're taking another run at this thing because what we're seeing today is not that much different than what we've seen over the last couple of years. Yeah. One last thing here, Guy, before we get out of here. So Baidu is up 6% today. And this one's interesting to me. If you just think about it, you know, this is kind of the equivalent of Google in China from a search perspective. You know, some of their search stuff is, it's not growing, you know, but they're investing in AI. And this is one where,

You know, you think about what they're doing relative to Alibaba in the cloud space. Alibaba was meant to be the Apple intelligence partner in China. There's definitely some regulatory scrutiny about that. I think that came out earlier in the week. But, you know, the headline that I find interesting, and this is, you know, wraps into a little bit about Jensen Wang from Nvidia lobbying the administration to kind of pull a lot of those curbs

about selling their high-end GPUs into China. Jensen's been making this case for a while that ceding share to like a Huawei in China is bad for us, which I'm not sure if our technology is better than theirs that we just kind of want to offer it up. Jensen's talking about the missed revenue opportunity for him, okay? The charge that they had to take in the last quarter. The missed, he said $15 billion in sales

And I think we just have to remember what we're trying to do with these sorts of export bans, right? We really do want to shield our best technology from getting there. But I do think it's interesting what Baidu is saying. You know, they're talking about this increased battle. They're talking about some of the innovation in and around DeepSeek and the intensifying competition. But here's a name I think that a lot of folks are not paying much attention to here.

here and I think it could be like a two-horse race there between Alibaba and Baidu. So I just wanted to bring it up because I think it's an interesting one to keep an eye on. It looks a lot like Google and potentially some of the issues they're having in advertising search and the like.

You know, you talk about a stock that's underperformed, throw Baidu in the mix. This again, it's stock like Target made its all time high somewhere in 2021 ish. And it was probably north of $340. You're talking about a $94 stock and a stock that is flatlined for the last couple of years. So yeah, you're seeing a bounce here today, but at some point you're going to be talking about potentially a bearish to bullish reversal. I just don't see it yet. So

As much as people getting excited about it today, in the context of where it was and

and what it's done, not all that much to get excited about, in my opinion. Yeah, and something else that people are not getting excited about is crude oil here. 65 seems to be big resistance guy. The headlines this morning is that the Israelis are preparing strikes on Iran nuclear facilities. This comes at a time where the Trump administration is trying really hard to do a nuclear deal with Iran, which is really interesting that the Israelis... Makes you wonder a little bit. It does make you wonder. And the other thing is, it's like, you know, President Trump was

all over the middle east and he did not stop in israel so those were the headlines over the last week or so it still looks like the israelis are really trying to do things to undermine some of our negotiation you know in that region but again crude doesn't get going so that's one i don't know if you think it's more geopolitical guy or maybe the lack of uh you know just really a global growth issue so many forces at work here you know the geopolitical headlines

have not helped crude oil hold on to gains. It's been more the drag of, again, global growth concerns without question. And the fact that OPEC seemingly said, okay, you want to play the lower oil game? You know, we can flood the market just as easily as we can take

barrels away. And I think you're seeing that as well. There is a price, by the way, and we've talked about this, that if crude gets much lower, it's not necessarily a good thing. I know there'll be people that say it's a great thing. Well, not necessarily, because unfortunately, gas prices are not commensurate with crude oil prices, number one. And number two, if you think about some of the states that rely on some of the companies that rely on crude oil and the price, I mean, it becomes a pretty big drag at a

sort of chatter about that around the edges. So 65 to 70 is probably a safe spot for crude. Below 60, it's problematic. We'll see how it plays out. But to your earlier point, I mean, the geopolitical spikes do not hold. Yeah, no doubt. All right. A lot going on here. You know, really feels like we have a VIX that was below 20 over the last week or so. The fact that it didn't melt into the mid-teens is something that you and I have been talking about a little bit. So

Even at 18 and a half right here, it feels a bit complacent, especially with the dollar below 100 yields above 450. So maybe we are in for a little bout of risk asset volatility.

We had a great conversation with Trevor Marshall. That's coming up. You and I are sitting down with Mike Wilson of Morgan Stanley tomorrow. That's going to drop Friday morning. Check us out on the market call, 11 a.m. We're doing lots of charts there and a whole host of things that are very different than what's going on here.

here, go to riskreversal.com, get our daily newsletter that drops shortly after the close. C.C. Lagader is doing a great job with that. And I guess last thing, guy, last thing, remember the market matrix? That comes out after the close.

Our main man, Brunson, is reading the top 10 stories that we curate. Amanda, you know, she puts them all together and then it goes into a voice bot after it's gone through perplexity. And you can get up to speed that everything went on in the market in less than 10 minutes. So that drops after the close. Go find it in your favorite podcast store. Follow it, rate it, review it, guys. That's how people find it.

No doubt. And before we get out of here, since this conversation is coming up, it is incumbent upon us to wish the great Stuart Sopp a happy birthday. His birthday today. Happy birthday, Stu. All right. Stick around. Trevor Marshall, his partner in crime. Right after this.

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All right, welcome back to the Risk Reversal Podcast. I'm Dan Nathan. This is Trevor Marshall. He is the co-founder and CTO of Current and also our landlord, Trevor. Welcome back to the pod. Thank you for having me back. The last pod that you and I did, I cannot believe it's been this long. It was December 24th. It can't be December 24th. Could it be that was Christmas Eve? We were

We were podcasting on Christmas Eve. What a way to celebrate. Right? It was OK Computer. I don't know if you noticed this, but we no longer call the pod OK Computer. I did notice that on the calendar invite. I took a pause. Well, let me ask you this. We're streamlining the brand.

We came into the year and we just really wanted everything to be okay. Computer is more recognizable. We're still focused a lot on tech because that is what's going on in the public and the private markets, as you know. So we're going to hit what's going on in FinTech. We'll talk a little bit if we're going to see some IPOs. I know that there's been some filings within FinTech. I want to get a

beat on what you think generative AI and GCP has been a great partner of yours. And I'm starting to see what we could talk about the whiz acquisition by Google, because that to me is really interesting when you think across different clouds, security applications and the like. And maybe a couple other things. We've got to talk a little bit about Jensen. He's been all over the place. This is Jensen Wang. Over the last week, I read something. It was like, I would hate to be his EA because he's

in the Middle East, then he's in Singapore, then he's doing video things over here at Microsoft, and he's probably gonna be at I/O. All right, give me the 411. What's the vibe? You guys, we've talked to Stu a little bit about this when you think about the customer that Current serves.

I have to imagine that persistent inflation, a jobs market that's cooling out a little bit, maybe an economy that's slowing. What are you thinking right here? Because again, we talk about this stuff on the pods. We talk about it on CNBC. Sometimes we can be separated from the human aspect of it. I know you guys have a lot of data on this sort of consumer, which is, I would say, a mid-range. You guys call it the average American.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we didn't see the basket size prices increase. I mean, I think that was reflected in the print recently where it looks like a lot of the retailers are in the short term trying to minimize confusion with customers and just absorbing that in their margins. That's not sustainable. But of course, now that we have the 90 day pause and potentially a bigger deal, it's amazing. But like that is driving everything from what you see on the shelves down into like the fintech vibe and more specifically what's happening in the market. So yeah,

Yeah, we didn't see that strain yet. We are looking closely at it, but we're not seeing things that we would expect. So, you know, average Walmart purchases, average, you know, gas prices, which, you know, we'll see how everything ends up shaking out. I think the decision from the retailer side was smart. There's so much volatility. You don't want to

you know, lose customer loyalty at target because all of a sudden your napkins are, you know, $20 and or whatever, you know, but so yeah, we're, we're keeping an eye on it. A lot, a lot of weird, like I'm looking at the information. There was a headline from today, Amazon caps, warehouse inventory, mid tariff turmoil, right? You had home Depot that reported today, uh,

This is Tuesday, May 20th, and they're saying we're not going to raise prices. Walmart said they were going to raise prices, but then the president came at them really hard. It just seems like a really tough environment despite a 90-day pause for the retaliatory tariffs.

because you still have 30% tariffs on Chinese goods. You know what I mean? So just really quickly before we move on to some of the other stuff, I mean, what are some of the biggest buckets that you see from your customers where they're spending? Is it retail? Is it gas? Yeah, I mean, we have a very...

a very sort of primary use case. So it is all of your sort of non-discretionary buckets. So gas, food, some retail for sure. But it is not sort of like, you know, we don't capture the customer that is

is spending, you know, buying a new laptop every month or something that, you know, will have probably pretty significant price impacts when you look at the sort of the supply chains for some of these more complicated, you know, pieces of hardware or things like that.

Well, let me ask you this last question here. So last year, I remember we spent some time talking about this. You guys launched a paycheck advance. And I think that was something that I think a lot of your customers were kind of like, that was just a massive value add, right? You have the data, you see how the money that's coming in, you see how they spend, you can make those sorts of decisions. I know it's not a lending product, but

But have you seen or do you see those things tap more by folks who maybe haven't done it before in a time like this? So what's really interesting is, and this is not a dynamic that a lot of folks potentially listening to this podcast are dialed into, but the tax season is actually the bonus season for our customers. So you'll see this in, you know, like Chimes, most recent S1, you can start to see some of this data, but our customers are getting money in cash.

in March and in April. And so they actually don't need to get access to their earned wages as much. So there is for sure some seasonality and it's not the seasonality you think. And for us, we're not seeing the stress

yet in the customer base. We're not seeing it demonstrated in people pulling forward access to their earned wages. We're not seeing it in basket sizes. So we're monitoring it very closely. We are seeing still good engagement, like sort of the engagement that we expect, which is as people have an upcoming bill or have sort of a lumpy payment that's due and they don't want to have to bear the cost of a late fee, they're pulling the paycheck advances

So, yeah, we haven't seen that stress yet, but it is something that we're watching closely given the backdrop. All right. You just mentioned an S-1 versus Chime. Let's take one step back because under, you know, prior to the Trump administration, there was this hope that

you know, there would be increased or at least during the transition, right? There would be increased M&A due to less regulatory that you might see an easier path for IPOs and the like. You and I talked last year about this Discover Capital One that closed, correct? It closed this week. All right. Give me give me give me a sense of what that means for the industry, right? Because this is something that it took about a year to close, which is kind of on average, I think, for M&A of this size.

I think when it was first announced, I came on here and we talked. I basically, I think I said something like this is the starting gun for really opening up the fintech spring. We're definitely seeing that now. I think for sure the administration change was the biggest catalyst in the vibe shift because...

There's a lot of pent up demand for IPOs and for sort of like activity. And that had been dulled for two or three years. And with that backdrop and everything, people started putting the S1s out, making the signals that they were going to go out, go public. And also some of these bigger deals like the Cap1 Discover merger was able to get to the finish line. That one in particular is just extremely interesting to me just because it is sort of...

I think the holy grail sort of for someone like CapOne is to own the network. I think that was the words that the Capital One co-founder used to describe it. And it's really, it's like a very interesting change in the payments landscape

within the US, adding in effectively a somewhat closed loop system with such a huge issuer. I'm going to be watching that very closely and seeing what types of changes happen from a consumer perspective, if they're able to pass some of that value back and what the level gets set at for everyday consumers. But yeah, the beginning of this year, before the, what was it?

Independence Day? Liberation Day. Liberation Day. April 2nd. Yeah, yeah. Before that, I think it was like very, very bullish and now we're actually with this pause seeing a pretty quick ramp back to early year levels of excitement about what's coming, especially in fintech. Yeah, and

that's not a small company now. It's a $125 billion market cap company. Just to put that in some context, Schwab is $166 billion and they're like the largest online brokerage and they have obviously this huge, you know, FA network or RA, whatever you call them, that sort of thing. One of the hottest groups off of the lows is,

in April was fintech as you think about it in the public markets. So do you think that there will be some M&A like the COF and the discover like those companies looked a lot alike, right? And so it really was taking out a lot of market share combining it. Is that fair to say? I think there is a slightly different thing. Like I think Cap one

had the consumer in the way that Discover did, and Discover, of course, had the network and actually already had the distribution. Creating those networks is extremely difficult. There's almost no options if you're them and you want to do that verticalization. I think it's just like an absolutely genius deal. But yeah, I mean, I think the overall vibe

has been look at for example dave consumer finance ripped you know absolutely ripped as as they've been able to show the margins the profitability basically everything coming in even better than that where they were guiding um and it's giving a lot of credence just to this sort of consumer sector and

then you combine sort of the pent up backdrop of a more clear regulatory environment. I hesitate to say favorable because it's really just about clarity. I think that's really the thing that we've been looking for for a long time is like, is there a clear

like place we can go to get consistent, you know, sort of guidance. And I think they're doing a good job sort of sharpening those types of things. - I'm glad you brought up Dave. A friend of mine is an investor in the company and he's been talking about it for a while, for a couple of years. And I think this came public via SPAC. I think that it was like such a low single digit. They did a reverse split. Now normally, as long as I've been in the business, when you do a reverse split,

it's not a great sign. You know what I mean? Like that sort of thing. So this stock,

is a $2.6 billion market cap company. It was languishing between 30 and 40 for like a year and a half, two. It's now trading $195. It's gone absolutely parabolic to your point. They reached a level of profitability. I mean, there's a whole host of other metrics that people were certainly geeked up about. What do you think has changed? Because I'm sure there's aspects or a lot of aspects of your business that look a lot like theirs. What's changed in the last year? I think there is a huge element of

the winners have survived in terms of like there is...

This is the promise. This was what people were going in in 2020, 2021 when you saw that initial, oh, wow, there could be something really interesting in consumer fintech. This is proof that that type of model is possible, which is you can create something that has a significantly lower cost to acquire than traditional finance, but has similar LTVs, similar ARPUs, the ability to have

product attached and all these other-- that is the vision. That is the goal. That's something that we've been focused on for a long time at Current. And so I think you're just starting to see the credit paid towards that now. Yeah. All right, so another thing-- so let's go to the private markets for a second. That's where you guys live.

you know, the acknowledgement of some of the things that you just said, I think is giving the VCs some confidence. We also talked about there's a huge backlog for IPOs. There might be a new appetite for M&A. We call that a dual track, right? If a company like yours hires a banker because you're looking for an exit or your VCs are bugging the shit out of you to exit, they need to recycle that sort of money. It seems like both of those are good paths.

in a more stable market environment and also a more stable economic environment because again, we haven't seen a lot over the last couple years, really since '21. Some VCs are looking to combine some of their portfolio companies in the private markets to make them that much stronger, maybe give them broader breadth of product offerings. I'm just curious, 'cause you are tapped into the FinTech New York City vibe here, a lot of the FinTech exists here.

What are you feeling? What are you hearing a little bit? We haven't seen, there's been sort of a long prophesized consolidation in fintech. We haven't really seen it yet in terms of like the,

the true, like, okay, let's come together. One plus one equals three. I think like there's been lots of conversations, lots of exploration. But I think that dual track opportunity does kind of push that out a little bit in terms of there isn't, there was definitely a feeling of, hey, we need strength in numbers at a certain point, maybe a year or two ago. And

At this point, there are still like those types of things will be purely now looked at in a more positive lens, which may actually enable them to happen, which is this is not a let's shelter and safety in numbers kind of energy. It is much more a hey, let's go let's go together and make something really big. And those types of strategic combinations

I think we'll be from the front foot on both ends or whoever is doing that sort of roll up. - Yeah, and again, just now let's talk about the IPO for a second. You mentioned Chime, I know Clara had already filed. Did they pull it because of market conditions a couple of weeks ago? - That's what it seems like for sure, yeah. - So one of the things, and you and I talked about this

a year ago that they were one of the first fintech companies that came out and said, OK, our use of generative AI specifically in the customer service standpoint has allowed us. And I remember saying to cut 700 customer service jobs. Now they've just done a little bit of a rollback on that.

Explain that to me because one of the use cases aside from coding, and I want to hit that with your group a little bit, it seems like that is the one where people are getting immediate benefits and there's going to be pressure on jobs. I'm not going to ask you to comment as it relates to current. There's enough examples out there. But what does it mean that Klarna now has gone the opposite way, right? If the other major use case is customer service for consumer facing sort of businesses, what

have you gotten your like a sense for what's going on in the last year with Klarna? I've never used Klarna as customer service. I don't think I've used their product yet. But one of the things that we saw for sure is that while you can pretty easily take out from a handling perspective, call it between 30 and 50%, I would say that's really the low hanging fruit. And that's like,

you know, really getting the FAQs in there, being able to, to what we call a service, the L1 of like, this is informational. It doesn't connect to the account. And then L2 being like information about the customer's account and L3 being actual modifications, like doing things on the customers we have. The complexity is not linear. So like, it's not twice as hard to do L2 as L1 or twice as hard of, you know, L3 than L2. It goes significantly more complex.

because of the guardrails that you need in place. And in particular for FinTech, there's a lot of regulatory guardrails as well. Just as an example, something that we've been looking through is if you get enough information, if a customer is saying, I don't recognize this transaction and you get enough pieces of information to be able to identify that transaction, you are on the hook as the issuer to go out and make sure that that dispute gets properly filed, that it follows sort of like the credit life cycle, all the requirements there.

that is a highly guarded space and so the innovations that we've been seeing on the because we we also use sort of a an llm type of chat bot in front of our agents is how do you make sure that the processes that need to be guarded are not probabilistic but they follow very precise and that handoff between

the probabilistic nature of an LLM and then the deterministic requirements of regulation, that has been the reason it hasn't gone to 100%. And that's probably, I imagine, what some of the things that Karnam might have come up against. Because when you go through that first level of automation, you go, oh, great, 50% of my inbound, I've got that handled. Well, that's not 50% of your cost because those were actually not too hard to handle. Yes, they were taking up

queue time and sort of, you know, bumping up of your concurrency constraints of your humans. But a lot of the stuff that lives in that other half or that other third or whatever you can get that down to is much more complex. And so you need

better specialization in the, in the, the agents that like the human agents that are handling that combined with better technology around how you guard those processes to allow the automation to go further and further. Because for sure, when you get that automation, right, it is a much better experience as a customer. Yeah. So, um, the whole idea of intelligent assistance with people right now, that's something that you're seeing people get a lot of benefit from. Right. And, and, you know, you use the term agent, you know, um,

agentic AI is that thing that's kind of sits in the background. It does a lot of that on its own, right? That's a fairly sophisticated thing. It takes a lot of trust from a business like yours, especially when you talk about all the regulatory that goes into fixing some of those things. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I haven't like the closest thing, the furthest thing that's along in terms of that, like, Hey, you know, give it the keys to the car and tell it to come back with groceries. Kind of like agentic AI is more actually on the development side, which is,

You've got both OpenAI and GitHub's Copilot and a few others that are doing these like assign it effectively instructions

have it work in its own sandbox and come back with a pull request or a change to your code base. What's the reason why it can work there is generally like there's a couple of things that as a development team you need to have in place, you need to make sure that you have really good test coverage to make sure that if there is an issue, it's it's sort of it's caught within testing. And you also just need

the type of environment that can be like the surface on which it's working, AKA the repository or the code in which it's working is like sufficiently contained to be able to make changes in one place. One of the, not to get too technical, but not one of the challenges right now is really in when you have multiple repositories and multiple different domains and the way that an engineer might think is like, I've got to make changes in these 10 systems.

It's hard because of the context window size for AI agents to be able to facilitate those types of changes. But it seems to be a matter of time. Like the Gemini 2.5 is pretty impressive with a context window. Actually, just last night, I was experimenting in our...

in our development environment, just taking one of our backlog bug tickets that was pretty well scoped, getting GitHub Copilot's agent and assigning it to it. And it did everything outside of like some very small things I had to fix. It pretty much produced

the PR pretty well. And so we're starting to really explore like how to make that possible. But on the customer service side, it's not totally there yet. And that would be the next reasonable thing. Because if you think about the reason why it works really well on code is because it's highly prescriptive. So you know when you're wrong. And customer service agents, it's one level there with a little bit more fuzziness and the fuzzier you get, I anticipate,

I could be wrong, but the fuzzier you get, I think the harder the agent experience is going to be because you don't have the same type of reinforcement or guardrails for success.

But let's see, because like when we were first talking about automation, we thought it would be all the blue collar jobs that got taken out first. And it's actually the white collar one. Which I think pre-pandemic, it was blue collar. If you think about automation within factories and the like, and people were talking about universal basic income, you know, what are we going to do with all these folks that don't have jobs? I also think I heard a quote, I think it was Paul Tudor Jones on CNBC a couple of weeks ago. He said like 4%

of a factory's sort of productivity is actual humans here in the US or something like that. So automation is already there. So when you talk about the reason for this trade war, you say to yourself, bring back manufacturing. What do you mean? Are we going to put robots in? You know what I mean? I just heard Jensen Wang. He was on Ben Thompson's Stratechery. You should listen to this. There was a couple. I have a few.

Bones to pick. I like, yeah. I like big ones. I generally like that, his views. But I'm going to ask you about this. He's like, Jensen went through all this stuff. I mean, you know, for him, you know, the next extension of some of the stuff that they're doing is robotics. And he was talking about if you could buy a hundred thousand dollar robot who could do all this sort of stuff rather than pay, you know,

I get all that. It seems like I'll take the over on most of that, which leads me to, I'm looking at my inbox right here. This is from the information. This is a couple of days ago. It said behind Microsoft layoffs, automation efforts, boom. I think they laid off like 6,000 workers, which is like a rounding error when you think about how big that company is.

but they are white collar jobs. They are coders, right? So we just talked about the two main use cases right now. It is coding and then it is customer service, all right? And then here's an article from Bloomberg. AI hiring pause is here.

which actually is speaking to a lot of the Bloomberg sort of stuff. When you talk about what we just mentioned with Klarna, how much pressure do you expect to see in the near term in some of these like kind of coding jobs? Because if one person with the assistance of, you know, one of these, I guess, models, if you will, or co-pilots or agents or whatever can do the job of how many, I don't know if it's two, three, four, five, you know what I mean? That sort of thing. When do you think we're going to start seeing this across the board with a

predominantly tech companies at first. - I think one thing that I've found to be very true in the 10 years of now, like hiring engineers at Current, the more people you have, the more things you end up doing. Like you never, it's always the case that if there's 10 things, you can only do two out of those 10 things. And you're like, okay, well, if I doubled my people, maybe I can do three out of those 10, 'cause it's not exactly linear.

But then you just end up having 11 things to do and 12 things to do. I think most likely, this is my own view. Yes, a lot of the basic functions that we had been looking towards for junior developers in terms of, I mean, like what's traditionally there. I think with current, it's a little bit more unique just in the way that we onboard folks and how we think about engineering just generally as a practice within our company.

you're just going to get more things done. The goal is more productivity, it's not lower costs. And so I think what will happen is, yes, the hiring pause now is mostly figuring out, well, how does this all work and how does this shake out? But eventually, you're going to just get more effective people that can then do more and more things. And then, again, it will be then racing. Okay, now you've got 100 people who are AI-assisted,

Well, 200 people who are AI assisted might even be more powerful than that in terms of still being able to, if you think about the role of the engineer, it is moving away from writing perfect code because a lot of that stuff can be somewhat auto-completed. And it is really about communicating and understanding requirements, working with business stakeholders. It's pushing engineering more and more towards a systems thinking approach

which, yes, has traditionally those roles have been held by more senior folks, but it's going to require that knowledge and that understanding of how to actually build more complicated systems earlier on in the career, which is a good thing. Yeah. Do you get as a CTO and you've been you co-founded the company, do you get

buy in from a lot of, let's say, the decision makers alongside of you in this firm? And I know that, you know, obviously it's probably a handful of people and you guys debate a whole bunch of stuff the way you allocate resources and the like. Is it like do our folks skeptical outside of like your group, you know, as a CTO? Skeptical and just like trust.

in some of these systems? Maybe the outlay as far as cost? I would honestly say it's the opposite. Really? I would honestly say most folks internally and externally, people who are not necessarily in engineering orgs, are seeing the value of or are reading the stories and seeing all these things going, we should be doing more of this. I think actually one of the challenges internally has been figuring out

What are the systems that actually do provide the productivity? Because there's a lot of things that don't fit. There's a lot of products out there. We've been trying out a couple of them. They just don't fit within the development lifecycle. And so there's a lot of promise in some of these tools, but if they're not well integrated into your, your development lifecycle, they don't add the value that you'd expect. And I would say, if anything, it's sort of the opposite. There's an expectation of let's get, let's get this productivity. Let's, let's move these things forward, which.

I'm super excited to find. And I think we're starting to now be able to capture more and more of that. Some companies have figured it out with their workflows faster. I think like every company needs to figure out the right way to give your developers leverage. So we're going to continue to push and explore. All right. So from a consumer standpoint, I mean, most of us, you know, we,

we really only engage with these chat bots when we're asking questions or trying to like create stuff and that sort of thing. And I think a lot of people have been totally wowed by this. And if you look at just kind of open AI, I mean, it's hundreds of millions of people that are using ChatGPT. They are actually making real revenue from that. Companies like Perplexity, I think they did $35 million in revenue last year.

Now, I pay $20 a month. I actually just was speaking to Dmitry Shevelenko, who's the chief business officer at Perplexity last week, and I asked him a question. I'm going to ask you, why would anybody pay $20 for ChatGPT or $20 for Claude or $20? This is a month, you know what I mean? When you could use a wrapper

like perplexity have access to all of those models, even the reasoning models and deep seek. Why would you pay $20 a month for any of those, you know what I mean, those, and there's multiple models there and everything like that, versus like a perplexity. And I'm just curious because all these companies are spending tens of billions of dollars and hundreds of billions of dollars in the last two and a half years

to create these models that are all being commoditized, right? They're all kind of the same. So help me and the listener understand that a little bit because I think that more and more people are using these models, but they're not paying for it. And I wonder if you were using it in the workplace, of course you would spend that because it's just that valuable.

So there's a lot in that question because it gets to the fundamental, what is the business model of these model generating companies? You've definitely started to see, and I've observed differentiation in the model towards different domains in particular, Claude and Gemini. There's a like Claude in particular has been one of the strongest when it comes to coding assistance, for example.

Um, Gemini has gone really deep, um, towards both coding and more scientific research or technical writing. Um, you know, chat GPT and, and sort of like they've been pushing like the multimodal, um, in a very interesting way. A lot of these are converging in a certain sense, but I do believe that ultimately we get towards more commoditized models, even if they have certain flavors that are giving them edges now, ultimately.

most of the fundamental technology and pathways are consistent and it's going to be hard to preserve that over time, like moats around that. Yes, you'll get, it's almost like material science, right? Like, yes, you'll get certain combinations of things that work really, really well, but at the rate at which it's changing,

even if no one steals your IP, there's going to be someone with a different technique that gets to kind of a close thing and potentially moves beyond that. Like the reinforcement learning that the DeepSeek, like their methodology is like pretty fundamentally different than the way that a lot of these other models are constructed. So there's a lot that's happening in that space. And so as a result, some of these companies like

OpenAI and ChatGBT need to focus on what is the distribution and trying to own that. I think I've been on this podcast saying that ultimately the people who are going to win the most are whoever owns distribution of these things. - Which is why you like the idea of Apple intelligence, one and a half billion install base. - Exactly, exactly. It's like ultimately delivering these things is more of the value. And that could be not just like to consumers, but also to businesses. Like, you know, Microsoft is super well positioned

And so OpenAI's partnership with them makes a ton of sense. You have a massive distribution partner.

I think that the-- - Which is interesting, sorry to cut you off, is like you just mentioned, that's enterprise and that's distribution for OpenAI through Microsoft, right? And you think of like, I don't even know how many businesses are out there, like hundreds of billions, you know what I mean? Or what, you know, it could be small business too, where they're using Microsoft Office and the like. And then when you think about on the consumer, you know, like the distribution through an Apple,

which is not there yet. I mean, like they were meant to do Apple intelligence with open AI, but they, you know, indefinitely pushed out, um, you know, open AI, uh,

They definitely pushed out Apple intelligence and we do have WWDC coming on June 9th. It'll be interesting. There was some Bloomberg broke a story today that they're going to open up, they're going to create an SDK for developers and they're going to use their small models on device. Like, give me a sense of like, is that going to hit like a lead balloon when they announced that? For Apple in particular, this SDK, I think,

It all comes down to how people instrument it. In theory, they should be able to win because they have the app store, they have where consumers are. In theory, if they can create a system that's highly useful to developers, they should win. So it really will come down to how they think through that product, how they think through that value for developers, because they already have the distribution.

All right. On the distribution front, Google, let's talk about it because, you know, IO is going around right now. I think expectations are not particularly high. You talk about, you know, they have seven platforms with over a billion users. Now, obviously there's a lot of overlap there. You know, a few of them have two to 3 billion, right? You'd think that Gemini should be able to grow like a weed across, you know, Gmail and some of their productivity tools and even, um,

You know, YouTube, I'm probably missing a couple that you would think are interesting. Where are they, you know, again, I think they're being placed in the penalty box, probably for some good reasons. And then you think about what's going on from a regulatory standpoint. What are the remedies going to be, you know, as far as the browser? Thoughts here, because again, I know GCP, good partner of yours,

thoughts on Gemini? Like if you're a public markets investor, let's say, you know, you love the valuation. You think they're going to get it together. If all these things are going to be commoditized and it's about distribution, why not take a shot? Let's say the regulatory stuff is not going to be a huge problem for them. Like the remedies aren't going to be huge thoughts there. Yeah. I mean, when it comes to Google, it's mostly for the success of this is how does it integrate with search and how can they serve ads through this experience? That's

That's basically it. And if you've seen Google search in the last, you know, six months, it's gone completely towards a more LLM style of results. But it's kind of a mess on that front page. A little bit, but it's less of a mess than it was, you know, a year. I mean, remember when autocomplete first came out on, on Google search, right. And that was like,

hugely transformative for how, and then, you know, Google for a long time was still hand crafting, I think the top hundred thousand search results to make sure that, you know, like everything looked good. And it gets a lot harder to do that when you can't actually control the output from these systems. Yes, it is chaotic. And I think the second question around everything else that Google does, they've always been a little like

and stoppy when it comes to consumer products, like how many Google branded consumer products, whether it's like how many iterations of voice, how many iterations of like their social media, different, you know, things, the things that have stuck the best for them besides search or, you know, YouTube, which still like kind of

exists under its own flag in workspace. Like those are like two consumer facing things that have had tremendous amounts of stability from a consumer standpoint. And I'm most interested to see where AI comes in across maybe like those three things. Of course, I'm a pixel owner. I like their hardware. I was going to go there with Android. Is that like a huge distribution engine right now? Absolutely. It should be. But I think the Android ecosystem is different than the Apple ecosystem because everyone can run their own flavor.

And so, for example, on my Pixel, I have great, like the Gemini integration and everything is, it's pretty solid and I'm opting into features trying them out. - Is that the best version of Gemini on Google device? - On a mobile, most likely. I mean, I think like Pixels carry the most pure version of Android in the sense of they're not getting, for example, Samsung overlays a ton of technology on top of their Android base.

And Pixel has always been very focused on keeping that as small as possible, which is what I like. So you're going to see the best. But it's not like even now, like I don't use Gemini on my phone the way that I would expect to be at this point in terms of,

because it doesn't have access into apps or, you know, like when Apple approaches it, they're going to mandate certain things be required in apps, like what they expose. Apple forces uniformity in a way that Google really doesn't. And so I think it's going to be the iPhone, like embedded AI experience

should be way better but let's see i i'm a pixel owner i'm like i'm a big fan but i don't think they're going to be able to pull it off in the same way all right um xai uh they announced that they're merging with twitter xai was largely um you know trained on a lot of twitter data my my view is is like garbage in garbage out i think the product is very different than it was a few years ago before elon bought it but i hear people really like um you know grok in general um

Thoughts there. OK, like how is this, you know, for whatever reason, XAI for the moment is not thrown into, you know, the conversation the way OpenAI and maybe some of these other models have been done.

Have you messed around with Grok? Um, and what are your thoughts there? I have messed around with it. Um, and it is exposed in certain places. I think at this point, because their main interface, just like most people's interaction with chat GPT is like chat GPT dot whatever.com. Um, and, uh,

the OpenAI models are included in pretty much every tool. It's just distribution. I don't think Grok has been as focused on distributing outside of X than OpenAI or Google. - And there are some problems, man. Like the other day I read this story, I'm not on Twitter,

But I guess like white genocide kept on coming up like to a lot of different searches. You know what I mean? And it's really funny because, you know, you say, oh, you know, free speed absolutist, you know, that sort of thing. But the model is doing that. You know what I mean? Like that's a problem. It's one thing if white genocide is trending on Twitter because there's a whole host of things that result in the inaction.

You know what I mean? And the algo, you know, again, I would be very careful about trusting, you know, one of his because he's shown himself to be not afraid to put his thumb on the scale. And you just think about that. That went on after he bought Twitter for a while. Yeah, I don't I don't have a strong opinion about I would say the bigger opinion I have on.

on the way that models are used is that I think that any of the sort of social reinforcement algorithms, like what is your target variable effectively? And I think this is an issue that is not really contained to specifically LLMs or more general purpose models.

I think when your target variable is engagement or your target variable is making Dan Nathan upset or, you know, because that engages. It's pretty easy to do. I mean, that's my natural state. Because, you know, because then he talks about it to tons of people, you know, like, you know, in the, I think those, any like social media, the way, the fundamental business model, and I think what's problematic about it is that the

The target variable is engagement and engagement does not mean good. Yeah, engagement means scrolling. By the way, I have the only social I have is a locked Instagram account. And you know what? Since I've done that, it's just it's nice. I don't have to see all the bullshit that everyone gets aggravated about. You know what I mean? One way or another. I can look at the stock market, my fax machine every day that there's enough aggravation there. All right. Very, very, very last question.

Jensen Wong. You know, he's somebody, I heard him on this Ben Thompson interview on Stratechery this morning. I read it and I also listened to it because after I listened to it, I really went back and there was a couple things that kind of infuriated me a little bit. I mean, he's like kind of,

this profit now about AI, you know what I mean? And, you know, he said things like, you know, well, this is what I was talking about. This is what I saw five years ago. You know, five years ago, they would do crypto mining and gaming and, you know, a little data center. You know what I'm saying? And so, when you think about this, it's gone from, you know, a $300 billion market cap. You know, today, it's

just below Microsoft, which is back near its highs. It's like a $3.25 trillion market cap. I think Microsoft's got like $100 billion over it, but that's up and the other one's down, that sort of thing.

Thoughts here on we're two and a half years on the excitement, you know, after TPT launch and NVIDIA was one of really the only games in town to play it from a picks and shovel standpoint. The report next week, we've already seen, you know, the catbacks from Microsoft, from Amazon, from Google, from Meta. We don't know OpenAI and we don't know XAI. But, you know, those six companies I think I just named are probably 65% of their revenues.

At what point do we see things slow? Because, you know, we had Microsoft into the CoreWeave IPO. We saw, you know, some leases being canceled and, you know, that sort of thing. And there's a whole host of other things going on. I'm just curious, like, is it still in the driver's seat? And I'm not really asking from the stock performance standpoint, but... Yeah, more from the technology side. Yeah, I'm just curious. I mean, look,

Hold on. From a technology standpoint, there's no one who touches them. From CUDA to their advancements between Hopper and Blackwell and then Rubin. I mean, that's the only game in town. Is that fair? Yeah, I think that's pretty fair. It's just like you get such concentrated knowledge that can then attract talent and that keeps things going. And I think like...

the biggest advancements that get around hardware advancements are software advancements because if you can do something smarter you don't need you know you can you can do it with different substrate i mean we saw that for example in bitcoin you know once you know there was so many advancements on the the algorithm side until they just put the algorithm into the chips effectively and they just got smaller and smaller chips um

I think what their game is now is really geopolitical. It's basically like, okay, you're at this scale where some people sell to consumers, some people sell to companies, and some people sell to governments. And I think Nvidia is now sort of in this zone where they are sitting on top of a strategic resource that governments care about. And so...

Mostly what it comes down to because I think he's been in the Middle East like trying to you know, build out that infrastructure He's he's in Taipei, you know building out, you know that infrastructure and it's to me like what this looks more like is he's sort of like the tip of a geopolitical spear my view on what Nvidia means is that you know, this is still IP development the IP development is still living here and it's not like

like China or anyone else isn't going to get a bunch of Nvidia chips. Just look at deep seek. But that was the whole point about AI infusion that the Biden administration put in place. So they had restrictions, okay, about selling them to Saudi. You think the Saudis are our allies? You know what I mean? Like, you know, you think that some of these other nations that they were kind of trying to kind of keep some of our advanced technology because there is a black market for these things. Yeah, you just, you can't contain this stuff.

That's my fundamental views. There is. So we just shouldn't try. Like, for example, it's extremely improbable to contain IP around software and generally around hardware because any piece of hardware that you can get your hands on and chips or something that you can very easily get your hands on can be backwards engineered.

why not set up economic relationships that do benefit ultimately an American company that can go and expand and sell outside? - By the way, we have those relationships, okay, from a trade perspective, and the president tried to slap on 145% retaliatory tariff on top of the 10% that already existed, the 20% for "fentanyl" with air quotes, okay, and now we're at 30%.

totally inconsistent for all the reasons that he just basically launched this massive trade war. That's kind of my point is the hypocrisy of it. It's also the hypocrisy of all of these tech CEOs. You know what I mean? Who are getting in bed with a man that they know is deeply illiberal.

You know what I mean? He is like, and listen, don't listen to me. Listen to Bruce Springsteen. Listen to Eddie Vedder, okay? Because those are the guys that- You can definitely listen to those guys. That sounds great. I mean, I'm not listening to them. You don't like their music? No, they're fine. I like a Born to Run. That's like, I listen to that with like my uncle as a Model T, you know, like a 50s.

I know that you're like a hard metal guy. What do they call it? What do you guys? Death metal. Oh, yeah. Big fan of that stuff. I know. All right. So I got y'all tuned up. I mean, I think you got yourself tuned up. I think you done played yourself. No, I mean, it's your views. You're entitled. This is America. You can talk about whatever you want.

I don't believe the same things. Well, the president says that Bruce Springsteen can't say whatever the hell he wants. Oh, that's his opinion. That is his opinion. All right, listen, we covered a lot of ground. I really appreciate you coming over here. I learned a lot. One of the reasons why I wanted to kind of dig into some of this stuff is that a lot of folks that are invested in these companies or invested in the major indices, these are huge companies.

components of the earnings. They're huge components of their performance and kind of digging in and focusing on what the use case of these models are, thinking about the CapEx, thinking about, you know, kind of the interplay, not just here for the, you know, the models that they're creating that we might use from the enterprise to the consumer, but also how it plays in this geopolitical landscape. And that's why I kind of had that little rant. Yeah, no, I mean, things are definitely moving. Yeah. And I think in particular, the way the speed at which

technology now can go global is it's way faster than ever. When you look at just the initial adoption of ChatGPT, the speed at which they got their first million users, it's just a signal of how quickly things can move now. And so you do have to think about what are the global implications of these changes? - Yeah, like swarming drones. You know what I mean? So to me, I would be focused on the military applications of this and

And that should be first and foremost. And so it's one thing if you want to use as leverage tariffs to kind of weigh on their economy and then have this edge, in my opinion, as it relates to technology and not just hand over our best technology. And I get it. It can move all over the place. There's a gray, black market for all this stuff. But

Well, if you want to talk about drones, like we've messed ourselves up with the regulation that's in that space so that China has been able to go way faster than us because we have tried to control it. But that's the point though, man, because we have to recognize it right now. They're building like 50 ships for every one that we can build. Like,

I get it. Like we're losing in this thing, but if we're just going to lay down, you know what I mean? Well, I think it's like, it's just the tactic, right? Like I don't think, for example, if you're going to put sort of the, the controls that you were referencing on AI, for example, like, okay, this has to be guarding all those things. That's just going to get in the way because this is not,

This is not things that can't be independently discovered. It feels like one of the moments where you get around the world, there's often times where around the world at the same time, the same technology gets invented. And there's something-- - Deep seek is an example. - Yeah, but there's just something human where there's a level of shared consciousness that exists. It's like this, for example, they look at, I think it's crosswords or Sudoku puzzles,

You do a Sudoku puzzle on day one with a set of people, and then the next day after 20,000 people have done it or 100,000 people have done it, it's easier for the next people to do it. There is something greater in terms of a global consciousness that exists that we don't fully understand.

The attempts to try to control the progress of those things by saying, hey, well, if we don't advance it, no one else is going to advance it, I think are going to fail. Yeah, well, I'm going to see Mission Impossible, Final Reckoning, or whatever it is. Yeah, that thing was pretty scary. I think this is the plot of the last movie and what's coming out this weekend. All right, Trevor Marshall, I really, really appreciate you being here. I know that our listener gets smarter listening to you. I certainly do, so thanks so much. Thank you for having me.