FULL INTERVIEW: Alex Karp on AI, Job Loss, and the Future of Work

This is our full interview with Alex Karp, recorded live on TBPN. We discuss why AI could eliminate large numbers of white-collar jobs and trigger political backlash against the tech industry, unpack how Palantir’s hybrid model of software, deployment teams, and institutional knowledge allows companies to transform operations in months rather than years, and debate what the United States must do to stay competitive in the AI era from rebuilding domestic manufacturing and expanding vocational education to preparing for a world where AI development shapes geopolitics, national security, and the future of work. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to podcast platforms immediately after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com AppLovin - https://axon.ai Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Cognition - https://cognition.ai Console - https://console.com CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io Figma - https://figma.com Fin - https://fin.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Graphite - https://graphite.com Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com Labelbox - https://labelbox.com Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app MongoDB - https://mongodb.com NYSE - https://nyse.com Okta - https://www.okta.com Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com Public - https://public.com Railway - https://railway.com Ramp - https://ramp.com Restream - https://restream.io Sentry - https://sentry.io Shopify - https://shopify.com Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Vibe - https://vibe.co Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Well, we are joined by Alex Karp. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much.

• 0:03Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 0:04John Coogan?

  For taking the time.

• 0:07John Coogan?

  Uh, whatever's comfortable for you. You can do hat.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  Keep your hat on. It's cold.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  This is an average day for you. You're always out skiing.

• 0:14Jordi Hays?

  We should have done that. Yeah, we need to get, we're close to getting skis. Look.

• 0:19Alex Karp?

  Physical.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  It's starting to stick.

• 0:20Alex Karp?

  It's starting to stick. Oh, I like this. Why? Now I feel like a newscaster. I feel important. Yeah. You're like eight feet tall. People don't realize that. He's not standing up because it'd be like, he's like counteract.

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  For all of us.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  Last time we talked to you, I think you were doing four minutes on the dead hang. What's it up to now?

• 0:40Alex Karp?

  Five oh, five oh five.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  Five oh five. What about in the cold though?

• 0:44Alex Karp?

  That's gonna affect it, right? We need to have a special minute for that. Five oh five. For those of you who haven't done a dead hang, first of all, go do it.

• 0:51John Coogan?

  Why is it important?

• 0:52Alex Karp?

  Um, well, there, there are very few things that are proxy indicators that are accurate for health.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:57Alex Karp?

  It's like dead hang, farmer's walk, body weight and VO2 are the three ones that count.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02Alex Karp?

  I don't think anyone really.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  What about one rep match bench press? That's all I focus on.

• 1:06Alex Karp?

  Okay, well, you know, it's like.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  I feel like, I feel like as long as I have a really impressive bench press, I'll, I'll live a short but glorious life.

• 1:13Alex Karp?

  I don't know.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  Didn't they say something about that?

• 1:15Alex Karp?

  Yeah.

• 1:15John Coogan?

  Who wants to live a long, glorious life when you can live a glorious short life?

• 1:19Alex Karp?

  Yeah, I think that's what they tell you before they give you a bad salary.

• 1:25Alex Karp?

  I think it's like, yeah, it's or it's like, yeah, my social life is so great. I only have a bot, but I enjoy it.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:31Alex Karp?

  A kind of logic. No, um, but no, it's, um.

• 1:34John Coogan?

  Dead hang is important.

• 1:34Alex Karp?

  Dead hang is crucial.

• 1:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:36Alex Karp?

  And you really need to go work on it, especially anyone watching your podcast.

• 1:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:41Alex Karp?

  Is likely to outperform.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44Alex Karp?

  You want to have some, you know, you want to be able to do something with that outperformance.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, like dead hang.

• 1:48Alex Karp?

  Like, yeah, well, the dead hang may be a proxy indicator. For other things you could do with your outperformance, you know? But, uh, not everyone is, yeah, not everyone is like six foot nine. You're like, you may not need a dead hang, but the rest of us.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  Well, I can cheat because most of the pull up bars, I just stand on the floor.

• 2:05Alex Karp?

  That's right.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  And I can hold forever.

• 2:07Alex Karp?

  Forever. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  Uh, but, but when you're. You're not dead hanging. What should people be doing with the new coding agents? How important is it to learn to code? How important is it to?

• 2:16Alex Karp?

  Look, there are two that everybody's worried about, like their future. But there are basically two ways to know you have a future. One, you have some vocational training.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:26Alex Karp?

  So it's like, or two, you're neurodivergent. And when I say neurodivergent, I mean broadly defined. Like, your guys are sitting here, you could have had a corporate tool job.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36Alex Karp?

  You could have been like, I don't want to pick on Goldman, but like, just say, you know, like a job.

• 2:40John Coogan?

  I applied there, they turned me down.

• 2:41Alex Karp?

  Well, yeah.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  I did work at Citi for a little bit.

• 2:43Alex Karp?

  You could have had a job where you're like a cod.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  He tried, he tried and failed.

• 2:48Alex Karp?

  It's like, yeah, no, actually, maybe they didn't know the right way to test.

• 2:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51Alex Karp?

  Like, it's like, yeah, they were like, like, you know, whatever. I'm not picking on one or the other, but I'm just saying, you, you, you know, they're like, you're probably here. You think you're here because da, da, da, but it's actually, you probably wouldn't have been able to do that shit. Cause there's like, it's the same thing as sit down in class and learn some bullshit.

• 3:07John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:07Alex Karp?

  Like, and you just regurgitate it.

• 3:09John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:09Alex Karp?

  Like, that's not a valuable thing.

• 3:12John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:13Alex Karp?

  If you are actually have insights into anything, and you have real technical expertise.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19Alex Karp?

  Like, you know, you can look at a company, but you actually can look at it because you know something about how these things work or something about how clients work. You know, then all the other stuff that used to be precious, like being able to do low-end coding, being able to do low-end learning, being able to do low-end reading and writing. I mean, God, this is like, I feel like Odin came down and was like, I'm gonna make the world just right for a dyslexic. It's like, yeah, Odin has come down from, or Locke has come down and said, you know what, Carp? You suffered so much as a kid.

• 3:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:49Alex Karp?

  I'm just gonna make the whole world so everyone else can suffer. I don't want that. It's like now, but it's really an inversion. Like, everybody with like the normal shape skills are dyslexics. Cause like, the, meaning, the thing they can do that used to be valuable is not so valuable. The thing that they need to learn to do is like, be more of an artist, look at things from a different direction, be able to build something unique. And you see this on the battlefield, like, one of the most underappreciated things about fighting a war, which is the, I mean, there are basic core things civilizations do, like build technology for war, is every society fights differently, every component of the society fights differently. And when like, Americans analyze it, we do not even approach these problems in the same way. What it makes America lethal.

• 4:34Alex Karp?

  More so than any currently country is like a combination of obviously the technology, which we're super interested in and believe are paying a huge part in. But it's like 20 years of like, operators figuring out what worked, what not what worked in a manual, like what worked in reality. Also, even selection, if you look at the selection of people, like you meet like tier one operators, they don't look anything like what people would think. It's not like the movies, they're like these, like, they're like this big and like, you know, it's like because

• 5:05John Coogan?

  It's like vining.

• 5:06Alex Karp?

  Yeah, we have, we have, we have specialized ways of doing that. All of that is crazy valuable. As a proxy indicator, people who are getting their news from you are just likely to massively outperform. People are getting their news from something that's a regurgitation of you gotta vote for one party or the other. And then, the, the real problem we have in society is not your listeners or Palantir's customers or our partners is like, well, what happens to everyone else? Are they gonna lynch us? Cause like, that's the real problem. Like, these products, like what we're building, like our, our, our agents, mean that like the most, I mean, the most powerful people in the Democratic Party are highly educated female voters.

• 5:48Alex Karp?

  And these technologies, like they love, they, I mean, like, I actually get along with all these people in private and there's a public dispute, but like largely have talked to Dari over and over and it's like, yeah, you love one company because they, they're not pro-Trump, that company's taking your job. How are you gonna feel about that company when you find that you have no job? What, what, what do you think the Republican Party's gonna do to products that do not support our military? What do you think the Democratic Party's gonna do to proxy, even if you're voting for them, that are taking away the jobs of every one of your constituents? And saying, oh, people are gonna love you so much and you're gonna be poor. By the way, we love you so much, we're gonna give you a little handout once a month.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, apply that to the, the SaaS apocalypse narrative, the enterprise SaaS, there's an idea that, uh, the first jobs that will be taken might be the enterprise software products that exist, haven't really innovated, have lock-in and they're gonna be replatformed away from.

• 6:41Alex Karp?

  If you, the, the, the thing that these technologies do is they also make it harder to lie about, is what part of the political problem. If something's not creating value, or something's not working, or there's corruption, you can't lie about it. And Nobody believes that all software companies actually create value. I mean, the famous thing that we all learned was that we rejected that you were learned and people taught you is like, your software company is supposed to give the client a feeling they're getting laid while they're getting fucked.

• 7:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:13Alex Karp?

  Now, if that's how your products actually are, you are, now you are going to get fucked. Like, and this is going to happen so quickly. And the simple test for people who are looking at this is, does this product, or in our case, we were never pure software. We're actually like a hybrid of like,

• 7:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:30Alex Karp?

  humans, FDEs, augmented humans, so AI FDEs.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:35Alex Karp?

  And then orchestration and then, essentially what we would call primitives, like, taking the tribal knowledge of institution, coding it into logic, and then using that to be extended in LMS. Okay, but we don't have to explain that to our clients.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, so, so there's, there was always this, oh, is Palantir a consulting firm? Is it all just people? Is there any real software? I feel like that narrative went away.

• 7:57Alex Karp?

  Oh, no, no, they, they couldn't invest in us because we were a service company.

• 8:01John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 8:01Alex Karp?

  And now, now it's like, and now,

• 8:03John Coogan?

  But, but is, is, is actually having that service capability better in the future?

• 8:07Alex Karp?

  No, no, it's not better, it's crucial.

• 8:10John Coogan?

  Underrated, it's crucial.

• 8:11Alex Karp?

  It's crucial. Like, all these places that made fun of us.

• 8:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 8:14Alex Karp?

  They're running around and trying to get FDEs.

• 8:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 8:16Alex Karp?

  Getting an FDE is like, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's not as easy as it sounds. Because you have to know how to manage it, where to put the person, how to extract value.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:24Alex Karp?

  And then you need all these products that augment the FDE.

• 8:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:28Alex Karp?

  What are those products? Ontology, foundry, FDE, AI, things that we've built.

• 8:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:34Alex Karp?

  What we, being able to,

• 8:35John Coogan?

  So, the value of the business is not a monolithic code base that never changes. It is the people, it is the deployment, it is the relationships. Is that how you're thinking about the business these days?

• 8:44Alex Karp?

  Well, actually, the way I, I'm telling you, like, when you walk around here,

• 8:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Alex Karp?

  They only care, they don't care about any of that.

• 8:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:50Alex Karp?

  What they care about is you transform my business in three months. It would have taken three years and I would never have happened.

• 8:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:56Alex Karp?

  That's what they care about.

• 8:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:57Alex Karp?

  Now, then there's a question of how do you do that? And that is a, that is a concatenation, it's artistry. It's like, select client. Select where you would start, select ways in which it innovate in ways they would not accept innovate in places they do not understand you should innovate. Uh, learn to manage these very complex. By the way, it's not just culturally complex. It's tribal knowledge. And much of that tribal knowledge is in rules that they have to apply because there are all sorts of rules about manufacturing hospitals. Or um, rules that are applied that they're not saying they apply laws. Like all sorts of regula regulatory things on top of all that.

• 9:37Alex Karp?

  All that has to happen very rapidly. So you would need and like without going into details, like I'm in the middle of like every single one of these discussions. In almost every breakdown, it's like people do not understand how institutions work. They don't understand how the software would work. They don't have the LLM would work. They don't have the product that would actually work in that environment. And they still, at the end of the day are not saying we're going to charge on value.

• 10:00John Coogan?

  Okay. How do institutions work? Why is it that we get these genius models that are 160 IQ? They can solve incredible math and they're not just like everywhere all of the time. What is slowing down adoption?

• 10:12Alex Karp?

  The simple version is they're 160 against a test.

• 10:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:15Alex Karp?

  But the test isn't, it's a concatenation. The simple math would be it's 160 on one test. But you've got to pass differentiated tests over a long period of time. So it's a thousand tests.

• 10:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:26Alex Karp?

  So de facto, by the 50th step, it's zero IQ. But then there's also, there's also, yeah, I mean, it's like, it's, it's, it's insane. Like no, I love when I hear about all this is going to replace and then I get to our clients and they're like, could we have more? We don't even have the capacity. It's like, it's like, it's a surreal thing. Like, would you guys like to be F Ds? Cause we need some help. If you're in the audience, completely seriously, and you're aligned broadly speaking with America is a great country. You don't have to agree about anything else. And you're out there and you're technical or just smart. Apply. We need you.

• 10:59John Coogan?

  Okay. America is a great country. Put aside Democrat, put aside Republican. Is democracy the correct formulation to decide the future of AI? Should the American people be voting to decide or should that be handled by private companies?

• 11:15Alex Karp?

  No, American, well, it depends. Like, it, it, like, yeah, great. So in the warfighting context.

• 11:23Alex Karp?

  The Department of War Yes. Has to be the arbiter of what gets deployed. But, as a citizen, I vote for the Department of War, correct? Exactly, yeah. Okay. Okay, but I'm just saying, so I want to split domestic and foreign. Okay. Because, like, we in this country have God-given rights, literally given to us by a higher being. There's a right of free expression, which we're exercising all the time. Yeah. And is very important to us. There's a Second Amendment, which I exercise. I shoot very well. Yeah. I would encourage you guys and other people to listening to avail yourself of the Second Amendment. Yes. It was not, it is there to protect ourselves in case the First Amendment fails. Mm-hmm. That's the reason it's there. There's a Fourth Amendment, which is essentially, we have a right to privacy. Privacy. Okay. We have those rights. Mm-hmm.

• 12:09Alex Karp?

  Adversaries trying to kill us in Iran do not have those rights. Sure. And I don't believe, I've never believed in extending our rights to foreign countries that are adversarial to us. Mm-hmm. I don't even really believe, I don't like, you know, in Germany, where I lived half my life, they don't have a First Amendment. Mm-hmm. They don't believe it. And by the way, they've never believed in a First Amendment. They have other rights, so that's great. I'm not going to dispute that, but I want our rights here. Mm-hmm. In this country, if you're going to tell the American people you're building what is clearly a dangerous technology, it's dangerous because it will likely take your job, especially if you're a white collar. So, if you're voting, you know, you're a highly educated person...

• 12:50Jordi Hays?

  Have you flipped on that in the last, like, six months or so? Because I think, I think the last time we talked, your general mindset was like, high-agency, highly productive people will be able to continue to leverage the tools to deliver value within organizations.

• 13:07Alex Karp?

  Yeah, I think if you're neurodivergent and high-agency and you're highly educated, that's great. But if you're not neurodivergent and you're like Lawyer 14506, that's a problem. Mm-hmm. Okay, but let me get to this, and they're linked, but it's okay. On domestic stuff, I...

• 13:26Alex Karp?

  We have rights that are not subject to majority rule. Like, the majority can vote against us having Fourth Amendment rights. I want that litigated at the Supreme Court. Because we are not, our Constitution is not about majority. It's actually about the rights of the minority. And it's our right, I bet you the three of us have opinions that are very much in the minority. That we want to be able to say, at least in the privacy of our own home. Right? And so, so that, there are real issues. I'm super sympathetic with restrictions around the use of these products in a domestic context. Even though it's funny, people out there, every conspiracy theorist thinks, yeah, it's insane. I'm the only one.

• 14:06Alex Karp?

  Conspiracy theorists, you may hate this, but there's one person protecting your right to be a conspiracy theorist that actually has a seat at the table, and that person is me. You may not, you may not want to hear that truth, but it's, it is fucking true. And maybe do a little more reading before you pontificate on your absurd and obviously ill-formed and many times stupid opinions. Okay, so, because like, you're attacking the person who's protecting you, idiot. It's like, fucking so stupid. Do, do, use one of the bots to correct your opinion. It's like, I'm being attacked online now. It's like, Dr. Karp is anti-progressive first, because of my whole life. I'm just telling you the truth, these things are going to take your job.

• 14:47Alex Karp?

  Okay, so then, but in the warfighting context, and it's the primary justification for these products has to be, it's, they're two relevant powers now, us and China. This is a half, half-not world. It's going to be either us or them basically deciding the world order. Because, like, these other countries, and maybe India will get involved, maybe the Arab, non-Arab, Middle East, but currently on the trajectory we're on now, there are two places where these things are being developed and deployed. It's us or them. And I'm not particularly, you know, I'm not, I'm not out to hurt China. I'm just out to, I think we should win. I'm not trying to hurt them. And in that context, you can't say, we're not going to do X, Y, and Z.

• 15:27Alex Karp?

  I mean, I give you examples, but like, there are data sets that are publicly available in the US market that should, I don't think should be used against you and me in a law enforcement context more than, with the help of, say, AI agents and ontology. But if you don't use it on the battlefield, you obviously Iran's gonna use them. You don't think they can go online and buy those products? Yeah. And, and by the way, without going into somewhat classified data, those things are in combination with other things lethal. Like, a lot of people who wanna hurt America on the battlefield end up dead. Because of our ability to aggregate and then figure out what's going on in the battlefield before they can figure out what we're doing.

• 16:06Alex Karp?

  And so like, I'm very much in favor of it for moral reasons, but I'm also in favor of it's like, I don't know how else you explain this to the American people. We're, we're gonna take your job, we're gonna take away, you're gonna eviscerate your ability to, to, to have money and power. But that we're not gonna defend you on the battlefield, it just seems like, yeah, well, they're gonna, you know what's actually gonna happen? That nobody believes me in tech, but there's gonna be a movement in this country that gets very strong, very quickly to nationalize these things. First, it's gonna be, take away all our money, the billionaires are evil, you may not have heard that. Super evil. And if you take away their money, it'll help poor people. Yes. That's really important to understand. Making rich people miserable is the only way to help poor people. Yeah. That's obviously true. So, once you've learned that, the next thing you're gonna learn is, we have to nationalize the tech.

• 16:50Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna, they're gonna quote you on that.

• 16:52Alex Karp?

  Well, you know, it's like.

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  They've quoted you on, on.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  So, I mean, it sounds like you're, you're, you're closer to Dario on, you know, potentially 50% of early-stage white-collar job loss. Like, you're, you're, you're aware that there's a risk, at least some probability. You're aware of it. Well, what do you see as the solution?

• 17:10Alex Karp?

  Um, well, first, we just have to, I mean, well, I mean, the obvious thing is, okay, we can't have any migration here. Like, how are we gonna create more jobs? Like, it's like, you have to, what, the problem, in fairness, not that people wanna be in the business of being fair to policy leaders. But that, we are dealing with technologies that will determine the policy decisions. So you can't just pretend they're not happening. Like, step one is, like, we, it's going to be hard, but possible, to make this society work, given that.

• 17:41Alex Karp?

  Transforming it requires these technologies like all like I really like the people here. They're not here because they like me. Like maybe they're here for my jokes. High quality in some cases, but it's like a long trip and we're here and I'm the only one who likes this weather is great weather. I brought it for you. It's uh, but um, they're here because they've seen their business being transformed. And this is happening in America more than it. So we have to win those battles, but the costs are going to be very high. And so you have to work back from, okay, the costs are going to be very high. We, we can't put oil on the fire. It's like, you know, it's like, well, getting jobs for all Americans is going to be hard. And people maybe who become Americans, but it's like, you have to have different policies around migration.

• 18:23Alex Karp?

  You have to different policies around how we train people like currently, if you're a young kid in high school and you're neurodivergent. They're literally tracked chaining into your chair and feeding you medication. So you can have skills that are not valuable. Yeah. Like it's so it's like, and then we'll probably over time have to have like a discussion of like, yeah, if you go into this career. You're not going to have a job, like a really honest discussion about that. These are the places where you will likely have a job. And yeah.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  What uh, you know, it, it seems like we as a country will probably head down a more European path. Where it is, becomes very, very difficult or near impossible to let people go. Do you think that's correct?

• 19:08Alex Karp?

  Uh, you mean fire people.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  In Germany, it's much harder to, to lay someone off. And that does impact, I mean, that does impact the, the growth of, of companies. But I think many Germans would argue that's probably.

• 19:22Alex Karp?

  Yeah. You know, Germany's, I mean, I won't, I'll answer your question. Germany's interesting place. I did this thing in German. Where I basically told the truth, which you're not allowed to do in Germany. It's like. You know, it's kind of a really bad situation and the economy sucks, the migration thing's a complete disaster and the energy situation is like, compounds everything and I got thousands of people literally saying, "Thank God, someone told the truth." And there are a lot of people like you guys, young people, building things that feel hammered and are correct to feel hammered. I think the American version, if we're not careful, is not going to be the German version. I think it's going to be hang the rich. It's like, I think it's going to be not protect everybody else, it's going to be like, "Look,

• 20:06Alex Karp?

  this is too dangerous and we're going to hang the rich but not really help the poor." In fairness to the German version, like, you know, German, like, health insurance, insurance, all that stuff, it works. Like, I was, I was poor in Germany for like, a decade. And like, I had, I had the best life on the planet. Like, it's like, being poor in Germany is like being better than being rich here, in some, in some days.

• 20:27John Coogan?

  So, basically, policies that lift the floor, re-education, training.

• 20:31Alex Karp?

  Well, you're, so if you want to do what we could do here. We, the things we could adopt from Germany are, Germany has three high schools. Two are vocational.

• 20:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 20:41Alex Karp?

  One is academic.

• 20:42John Coogan?

  Better education.

• 20:43Alex Karp?

  Better programmatic vocational, vocational, it also has a bad, like, a weird vibe here. Like, vocational training in Germany is very technical. Like, the people building the cars at BMW, or even in the French version Airbus, like, very complicated jobs, they didn't go to college. They went to a very, very high-end high school. And they come out without any debt. And that stuff is really valuable. So, if you want to, you, you have to completely transform our educational system and, and go very young into like, training people to do things. You also need to change our testing system. Like, different forms of intelligence, all of our tests are built around things that were valuable in the industrial revolution. It's like, you want to pull out all the dyslexics, all the neurodivergents, everybody who can't

• 21:25Alex Karp?

  sit or needs to build or wants to build, have to go into a separate slot of like, "Yeah, we should have gotten you before you got turned down at Coleman." And like, said, this is like, that's a waste of your time. You could be building something important. And, uh...

• 21:37Jordi Hays?

  What else goes, uh, would be a part of the good outcome?

• 21:41Alex Karp?

  Well, the the most important part of a good outcome is we show our adversaries, you can't fuck with us and we're the best, we have the best military in the world. Hope, I believe we're doing that right now. On the good outcome side, we, yeah, we go around. And then on the commercial side, we go to all these high infrastructure, you know, hospitals, manufacturing, all these things, complicated infrastructure, and we AI enhanced all of them. So the products are legitimately the best in the world. And we rebuild manufacturing in this country, like a big problem for us, including on the battlefield, is our manufacturing just is not up to where we have to be. And that, by the way, requires rescaling, scaling humans, and we're doing this all over the place. I mean, the guy writing a lot of the scripts for the target, these people, they're like high school, college grads, the people

• 22:26Alex Karp?

  building batteries and all these things using our products. These are high school, college grads. There's a lot of opportunity there. But, you know, one of the things I told the Germans, and I would say to us is, we, I was like, you know, Germany, you have to call it a crisis. We do need like, this is a crisis moment. America isn't, tomorrow is not going to look like it looked at all, or we're going to have radicalism on right or left. The problem, the danger is if we don't do these reforms, you are going to get the pitchforks. Because then the only solution people are going to have is, well, you know, let's go after the unlikable rich people in tech, especially AI tech. And then, but, but then what can work is, yeah, close the borders, keep them closed, start doing huge vocational

• 23:07Alex Karp?

  efforts, change how we test aptitude, like so we have an accurate diagnostic of where you could be slotted, be ruthless and like, you know, it's, it's like in, in certain, find out new ways to test and do ruthless testing and slotting. And then also go around to universities and just, I mean, you know how when you like, you want to smoke a cigarette, it's like this, this cigarette may be harmful to you. Maybe we should be putting that in universities. This university, this, this university is harmful for your investor. You know, I'm libertarian. You want to go to university?

• 23:36Jordi Hays?

  This student debt may be harmful to your future.

• 23:39Alex Karp?

  And your personal life. Explain to someone you got a million dollars in debt. Yeah, a million dollars in debt. I mean, maybe if you're six, nine, and you can get away with that, but the rest of us have to provide.

• 23:50John Coogan?

  That's funny. Help me square this idea. You, you were, you were talking earlier today about people misunderstanding your business.

• 23:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What's it like to read about your business?

• 24:02Alex Karp?

  Oh, I mean, first of all, it's, I mean, the part, I, I hate it, but then the part I love is. And it's like you're valuable, your value is pretty directly convergent with people's inability to understand what you're doing.

• 24:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:19Alex Karp?

  So it's like, it's like all these technologies are potentially commodifying everything.

• 24:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:24Alex Karp?

  Okay, so if you are a business that is, you know, not services, not product, but both, but also works on tribal knowledge, on data, and every single business you make is individual, and so, yeah, that's a crazy valuable business.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  That's true in a lot of industries where if the broader business community doesn't understand your business, you might have a short report, but you'll have way less competition, because people aren't copying you, because they don't understand the playbook.

• 24:49Alex Karp?

  Well, it's impossible to copy certain, like, and we neglect this, like, you know, almost, like, you even see it culturally, like, luxury products dominated by the French, watches dominated by the Swiss, currently, certain kinds of warfighting dominated by America.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:04Alex Karp?

  And it's like, it's very hard for people to eviscerate these cultural advantages, and our products augment that, which makes it, you know, augments the differentiated specific over the generalizable, and that's where literally all the value's gonna go. And this is gonna be like a waterfall, and that's the problem with a lot of software companies, that's like, it's like product A, B, C, T. But, but then, when you read it, it's like, like, one of the more depressing things that you guys probably confront, but it's like a market, huge market opportunity for you, it's like, where are the experts? Like, it's like, you know, it's like, it's like, you know, you hope and pray, like, I'll tell you the funniest thing about my life now, and people internally know, almost every day, I'm like, wait a minute, I'm the adult in the room here?

• 25:49Alex Karp?

  It's like, everywhere I go, it's like, it's like, wait a minute, like, and it's like, there, it's like, and it's, so, it's surreal when you read about these things, but, and it's, it used to really frustrate me, but now, I kinda just think, well, like, I can't believe we're still viewed as crazy, it's like, everything we're doing is the only thing that's working, I mean, like, I don't wanna, like, spend a lot of time on our baller, essentially baller numbers from last year, but it's like...

• 26:18Alex Karp?

  You know, clearly our shit works. Clearly, nothing is working at that level. And you would think they would take like, I don't know, 10 minutes to think, okay, well, the thing I believed and I thought would work didn't work at all. This thing I thought was insane is has like a rule of 127 when like no one like 40 is considered like. And like, but they don't and and and then and I, yeah, but it's sometimes frustrating, honestly. And the hard part actually is I kind of view it as a feature. Uh, internally, we get these bright eyed kids. So it's so funny. I mean, the one get the best people in the world. But you know, just like I was probably a 21, they're very romantic. It's like, but why does the adult not understand this?

• 27:01Alex Karp?

  It's like, but, but, but the adult expert tells me it's like, I don't know when you guys had to drop the shoe moment when you realized that like the adults are like, you know, on crack or something. Like it's.

• 27:12John Coogan?

  Okay, uh, last question. Would you rather have $10 million or access to chat GPT in 2012? It's a viral question. It's going viral right now.

• 27:25Alex Karp?

  I have to choose one or the other. Like, I mean, okay, I'm just. I don't think he needs.

• 27:32Alex Karp?

  Can I, can I have my social life in grad school?

• 27:34John Coogan?

  There we go. Okay.

• 27:37Alex Karp?

  New pick.

• 27:38John Coogan?

  We just have to ask.

• 27:39Alex Karp?

  You know, it's like, great. I'm gonna take something I valued.

• 27:42John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, the most valuable thing, your social life in grad school. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. It's fantastic. We'll talk to you soon.