Dr. Alex Karp LIVE from AIPCon | Alex Karp, Dan Ives, Eric Brock, Casey Lane, Ted Mabrey

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (01:21) - Dan Ives is a prominent American technology analyst and Managing Director at Wedbush Securities. He is widely known for his coverage of major tech companies, particularly Apple, Tesla, and Microsoft. Ives frequently appears in financial media, offering commentary on the tech sector, market trends, and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. Over the years, he has built a reputation for being one of Wall Street’s most visible and outspoken tech analysts. (11:03) - Eric Brock is an American business executive and technology entrepreneur best known as the Chairman and CEO of Ondas Holdings. Under his leadership, the company has focused on developing private wireless networks and autonomous drone technologies used in sectors such as defense, rail, and industrial infrastructure. (18:07) - Casey Lane is a business executive who serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Teton Ridge. Teton Ridge focuses on producing and promoting Western lifestyle content, including rodeo and equestrian sports, media production, and live events that celebrate Western culture. (32:07) - Ted Mabrey is a technology executive and entrepreneur who serves as the Global Head of Commercial at Palantir Technologies. In this role, he oversees the company’s commercial business, helping private-sector organizations adopt Palantir’s data analytics and artificial intelligence platforms. (54:18) - Alex Karp is an American businessman and entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Palantir Technologies. He helped found the company in 2003 alongside figures including Peter Thiel to build software that helps governments and organizations analyze large, complex datasets. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console - https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You watch TV.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Today is Thursday, March 12th, 2026. We are in the middle of a blizzard. In the middle of a blizzard. This isn't actually that bad, but it is very cold. What do you mean it's not bad? It's not a blizzard. We're having a great time. A real blizzard head would not give this, you know, a 10 out of 10 blizzard. All right, well, we got. There's barely snow. We got high winds. Just say you've never been to the East Coast before. True. Once or twice. Been a few times. You gotta track it on. We're a long way from the West Coast. We're a long way from the TVP and UltraDome. We will be back there tomorrow. There's a ton of news that's going on, shaking the timeline that we will be covering in detail tomorrow. Dwarash Patel dropped a response to the Department of War's move to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk. There's a whole bunch of interesting nuanced conversation.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  We're going to get into some of that today. Patrick Collison talked about the nature of drama in Silicon Valley, a very interesting thread that I think we can have a long conversation about tomorrow. And Microsoft is fast following OpenAI and Anthropic with Copilot Health. And OpenAI plans to fold Sora into GPT as the sort of productization of consumer LLMs continues. So we'll be covering those stories tomorrow. We want to say thank you to all of our sponsors that make this show possible. It'll be a little bit of a shorter show today, but we have a banger lineup. So we're going to kick it off with Dan Ives. Welcome to the show, Dan Ives. How you doing?

• 1:22Speaker 00

  What's happening?

• 1:23John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time and on this very, very cold day to hop on with us. First, introduce yourself. Tell us what you do, why you're here.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, Dan Ives. I've covered tech stocks going back to late 90s on Wall Street. And look, for me, I mean, being here at Palantir, it's one of our favorite names, you know, the last few years. To me, it's the AI revolution. It's almost been the poster child. And you know, and I've, in my career, going back to early days of Apple, Tesla, it's always trying to find who could be the next one of those. And you know, my, my view the last few years is Palantir has been, what I view as kind of the golden child of AI.

• 2:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you work on separating like the narrative, the company, say, every company who comes out and, you know, slaps AI on something, renames? laps dot AI on their domain versus it showing up in the financials, it's showing up in the metrics.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  There's only one carp and one Palantir and I think if you look at the numbers, numbers speaks for themselves. And I think the commercial business has really been what's been the jaw dropper for Wall Street. Because I think that alone, you know, could really ultimately be combined with the government business, a trillion dollar company.

• 2:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34Speaker 00

  In the next two to three years. And I think Palantir continues to be one where I think investors continue to underestimate just how big they're going to be in this AI revolution.

• 2:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember reading the Airbus case study a while back. Have you talked to anyone today doing anything particularly interesting in the commercial sector with Palantir? Like who sticks out?

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Ninety percent of customers here weren't here two years ago.

• 2:59John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  So I think it just shows now, obviously they've dominated the government, you know, dominated what we've seen across the board the last few years. But when it comes to commercial, they've really changed the whole game. And I think what you're seeing is with the AI revolution, when it comes to use cases, Palantir is the first call. And I think that's something that's still not factored into the stock in terms of how big the commercial business could be for Palantir. Because when you look at the AI revolution, of course, Nvidia, Microsoft, you know, you have the semi plays, you have software, but I think Palantir is gonna when we look out in the next few years, they are going to be one of the clear standouts in terms of this fourth industrial revolution.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  What advice do you have for investors who are seeing geopolitical tensions rise, war? There's chaos in the markets, things are jumping up and down. Like, how do you keep a cool head right now?

• 3:53Speaker 00

  I mean, look, in 25 years doing this, it's like if you sold because of geopolitical in terms of those issues, that was the wrong move the last few decades. And I think it's one where you take a step back, we are in a fourth industrial revolution. I think tech stocks ultimately make new all time highs this year. But you have to navigate the volatility and the white knuckles. The haters come out, the bears maybe win the day.

• 4:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  But I think this will be short lived. And that's why, you know, if you look at what we see from Nvidia to Microsoft to Salesforce ServiceNow and, you know, to names like Palantir and some of the cybersecurity, you have to own the winners in these white knuckle moments.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  Have you been following the latest with Nvidia? They're going to be training their own open source models. Do you have a thesis of what that means for the company?

• 4:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think they'll talk about more GTC next week, but but it's our view Nvidia. Look, there's only one godfather of AI. It's Jensen Nvidia. They're they're now going to own more and more of that end to end platform. And I think, look, that's the smartest move. The reality is is that they're years ahead when it comes to chips. But when it comes to physical AI, the two best plays in physical AI are going to be Nvidia and Tesla in terms of the two physical best physical AI plays.

• 5:06John Coogan?

  I mean, cars, humanoid robots, both. What do you think?

• 5:09Speaker 00

  Look, I think when it comes to autonomous, I mean, and you know, Jensen talked about this, you know, when we were there at CES. They are looking to go afterwards can be a trillion dollar market opportunity. Now I continue to think Tesla is going to be the ultimate winner when it comes to autonomous. But for Nvidia. The chips are ultimately going to be fueled by Nvidia. Everyone's trying to play.

• 5:31John Coogan?

  Every OEM is going to need a autonomy stack. They're going to need the self-driving capability in some degree, even if, you know, if people are just driving the weekend, the car on the weekend for fun, they're still going to want to be able to throw it into autonomous mode to get home at the end of the day.

• 5:47Speaker 00

  An eight year old today doesn't need a driver's license when they're 16. And I think I think going back to your point, it's easy to get in these moods where geopolitical white knuckle moment. But if you look, I think ultimately Tesla autonomous is worth a trillion dollars going to a Tesla story. And I think Nvidia a year from now, we're looking at five, you know, five trillion we talked about, but I think six trillion market by 2027 still continues to be our call.

• 6:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, you were at CES? What else did you see that was cool? What was under the radar? What were like the small trends, the little gadgets? I feel like CES is sort of like a world's fair for cool tech.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:26John Coogan?

  Like what stuck out to you? Not even as an investor, just personally, you were like, that was fun.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  Look, I think robotics, like when you look like serve robotics would be a good example, like autonomous in terms of what we see. The robotics coming out, I think is really going to be. Really, it's also a physical AI. I think that is really gonna be the game changer. And who are the chip players that are gonna fuel that? Of course, it's Nvidia, but then you look down the sort of semi-food chain. I think robotics, we talk about Optimus with Tesla. Humanoid robotics, we are still in the early days of where this is all going. And I think, look, CES for so many years-

• 7:02John Coogan?

  It's like day zero. Like, they don't, they barely exist right now. It's demos, right?

• 7:06Speaker 00

  But, but that's why we're year three-

• 7:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  Into an eight to 10-year build-out of the AI revolution. And I think those that are, that are getting embarrassed, they're gonna miss what I believe is the next leg of this market.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Do you think humanoid robots will find more traction in consumer? Like, every person has one, it's doing their dishes, it's doing their laundry? Or are we gonna not really see these things because they're gonna be in factories first?

• 7:30Speaker 00

  Well, I think at first, it's factories. And that's where we're seeing with Tesla. I think that's gonna be the first key use cases. But then, consumer, I think we look out three, four years, humanoid robots are gonna be something that will become common.

• 7:42John Coogan?

  Everybody has a Roomba already. Yeah, people are used to it.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  It goes back to like, if you go back over the last 10, 20 years, I could go through many instances where everyone's like, Apple, why would you, why'd you use an iPhone when you have a BlackBerry?

• 7:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  Why, why ultimately-

• 7:57John Coogan?

  Were you following Apple in the 90s?

• 7:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think that it's-

• 7:59John Coogan?

  Do you remember? What was it like? I mean, we were just reading about Larry Ellison yesterday.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, there was a point that Larry wanted to-

• 8:03John Coogan?

  Taking over Apple at one point?

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Look, they-

• 8:06John Coogan?

  What was that like?

• 8:07Speaker 00

  It goes back to like, and, and I've followed Ellison from the beginning, going back to late, it's like, it's trying to explain to investors that these things now look easy and no brainers from Apple, Tesla, but at the point, like, when you look in 2007, okay, a year later, financial crisis happens, investors are like, this is a one-year AT&T phone, why would anyone leave their BlackBerry?

• 8:33John Coogan?

  It was like $700 at a time when everything, I mean, you could kinda get it subsidized to maybe $400, but that was still like, four times the price of most cellphones.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  And the view was that they were never gonna get to 100 million iPhones, and you're at 1.5 billion today. But, but it goes back to, I could go through many times in Tesla. I go to 2022, Jensen, why are you spending money when it comes to AI? You're, you're essentially a GPU gaming company.

• 8:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  The point is- We're going through one of those periods.

• 9:02John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  But I think it's going to be proven to be, you know, the opportunity to own the tech winners.

• 9:07John Coogan?

  How did you? How did you process Oracle's quarter?

• 9:10Speaker 00

  I think it was a huge step in the right direction for software because right now it's an AI ghost trade. Anthropic has obviously been a big part.

• 9:18John Coogan?

  AI ghost trade, explain that term.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  Cause you're fighting a ghost.

• 9:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  When you, when it comes to Anthropic, we're going to get into cybersecurity. Look what happens to CrowdStrike, Pal, Outdo, and others. We're going to get into software. Look at Salesforce, ServiceNow. It's a ghost trade because the reality is that the data, the stacks, the install base, that's who's going to be the use case. And that's why Palantir being one, but I'm a huge believer Salesforce, ServiceNow, and others.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  Oh, resilient. You're a believer in those.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  I'm a huge believer that this is the most disconnected tech trade that I've seen in my career. Relative to the software, you call it a SaaS apocalypse, but I'd call it a ghost trade because you're fighting a ghost. Oracle, first step in that direction toward fighting the ghost trade.

• 10:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  And I think it speaks to like, look, Ellison, you know, covering, going back to, you know, 25 years. That's someone that understands where they need to get to. Would you take out 50 billion of debt? To get to 600 to 700 billion of market opportunity? That's what they're doing. I do the same thing.

• 10:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, the backlog's massive right now. Uh, well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  Great to be here.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Great to finally meet you. Stay warm out there. You're not, you're not quite dressed for it, but you've got enough energy.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  It's all about the mindset. All about the mindset.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much. We're going to take this headset off, pass it over to our next guest. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Well, we'll keep you quick. We'll keep it short, but thank you so much for joining. Good to see you again. Uh, throw on this headset and then introduce yourself. And hopefully the snow starts to melt off your jacket. You really have a bunch of it. So please introduce yourself and the company.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll do that. Before I do, thanks for having me.

• 11:01John Coogan?

  I got your headphone flipped.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Flipped. Okay.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  This one like. Flip it down there. Perfect.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, these. Okay, so thanks for having me. Yeah. And I'm hopefully gonna be in the studio next time. Yeah, we'd love to have you. That'd be great. But no, I'm Eric Brock. I'm the Chairman and CEO of Andas, a listed company. Yeah. We're a defense and security technology company focused on drones. We have aero platforms. We have counter drone platforms, which are particularly valuable. Yeah, of course. It is part of the cycle. Yeah. We've got ground robots and what we're trying to do is build this portfolio. Yeah. Systems of systems begin to integrate the air and the ground and those capabilities. And of course, that's why I'm at this AIP con. That makes a ton of sense.

• 11:39Jordi Hays?

  First time on the show, can you give us some history on the company, how you got to this point?

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So, you know, we have, if you look at our chart, it looks like we're an overnight success. But as you know, you talk to guys like me all the time. Yeah, yeah. This is a good, you know, 10 plus years in doing what we do. Love it. And, you know, we're doing God's work to really build the technology. And this is autonomous systems is complex. It's a marriage of hardware and software. You're gonna get in the field, make it work. And it takes time. And this is not just for us, it's the industry. And what we're seeing for us for sure, but the industry more generally is that the technology is maturing, right? We're making it useful with customers. So we're on an adoption curve. So, you know, the history of the company is we've been developing technology for a number of years. That's the core. So, yeah, what was the first product? Was it actually like you build a product, you sell it to the government?

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Was that what that was? Yeah, essentially. So we've got, you know, our first product was a drone in a box. So this is a drone infrastructure. It lives in a docking station. And then it takes off. It's got robotic arms, we can swap batteries and payloads. Sure. And that's used for, say, drone as first responder, right? The Dubai police are deploying this, drones everywhere, they fly. So, very useful, but what's particularly important about that, it was really helpful for us to start to break out, is it works, right?

• 12:55Jordi Hays?

  That's always helpful.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  It works. So, but, you know, as we've evolved, you know, in terms of history, I'll fast forward. Yeah. You know, once we were able to sort of demonstrate that we can, we can take these to the end zone and start to build markets and build customers, you know, we really began to become aware of the bigger opportunity. There's many, many players, I say drones, but it's on the ground, they're in the air, they're in the water. And all the critical. Components around these systems, we've built a lot of companies and they're maturing. However, we built technology platforms. Now we have to build businesses and that's what Onus is about. So we've begun to consolidate and bring these, you know, these capabilities into a portfolio. But it's not just separate. We're going to integrate them. You get scale going to market. You get supply chain scale. And that's the whole thesis around our financial model.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  So there's, there's part of it that's more private equity roll up. There's also an investing arm. You take minority stakes as well. Is when you make an investment, are you always looking to build a position over time to where you could own the full company? Or are you also looking at those like venture capital bets where they will just, you know, perform financially?

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so the answer is yes. Okay. So it's all of that.

• 14:00John Coogan?

  Perfect.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  And really what we believe is that, um, there's a couple of things. So, so most of our capital is deployed in control investments. Okay. Cause we want to get that leverage. We want to focus on mature technologies. At the same time, the ecosystem is really important. And I think particularly when we're coming into the public markets, because we're transitioning from venture funded companies to now they're, they're maturing. You know, we need growth capital. It's a different business model. It's a different cost of capital. And that's where the point is. So one of the things we've been trying to do is the public markets are not as, as, um, familiar with a lot of these technologies and systems as compared to the private markets. That's where they were born. So as a leader and the leader we want to be, we think the market needs is we're trying to shine lights and support some of the ecosystem players. Cause we need the ecosystem to grow up around us to get scale, right?

• 14:44Speaker 02

  So even places where you might say, hey, they're competing is that not really leaders have to come together because the, the supply chain needs us. We can't be a cottage industry of hundreds of drone players. The leaders have to come and if I can help identify that for, you know, the public markets, um, that, that's important. And we get value from it. And of course we can make money.

• 15:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, uh, tell me more about the disconnect, uh, between the business and the market. I'm, I'm interested to know, uh, there's a lot of investors out there that they don't even need to know the product, use the product, but they know if it's SaaS, it's going to recur, it's going to be revenue. There's going to be some high gross margins, some costs, low capex, et cetera. Like how is your business and the business lines that you have, how are they different from, uh, other companies that are in? The market is it you're doing deals with the governments, you're working on programs record, the money comes later, but the contract values get deployed earlier like how financially is it different?

• 15:38Speaker 02

  There's a lot of that, but maybe we'll start at the most simple level, which is where you started, which is the drone, right? The drone in and of itself, by and large is a commodity. It's not hard to build a quadcopter, even a fixed wing drone. What is hard is to make them autonomous, right? It's another layer of development and sophistication. So that's one. And then the second layer here is bringing the systems together, right? Air and ground, putting the command and control around it. And of course, that's where Palantir is really going to help us at massive scale. But that's where you start to differentiate and that's where you can capture margin. That's where you can capture recurring program business. And the thing about the markets are a lot of what we're doing is infrastructure.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  So think about counter drone. There's a massive number of locations across the world that need to be protected. And this is not going to be just, hey, this year we're going to protect from drone threats. It's 10 years to build this cycle. It's just too big. So it's recurring that way.

• 16:35John Coogan?

  The last two weeks have taught us anything is that it's any targets on the table, commercial or military.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Particularly, yeah, I mean, you know, they attack the economy, right? And I think this is a threat that we're seeing today. The public safety, the homeless security officials, the Department of War, they've been preparing for this for a long, long time, but it's hard. So you're seeing a lot of technologies, including ours, that were under a faster pace of maturation. And but we're here. It's going to happen, but it's going to take some time and it is urgent. And so then the other question is, I get a lot is, okay, what happens if peace breaks out? Well, I don't know that anyone's expecting that soon, but eventually we hope that that does happen. We still have to have this protection because you can't be vulnerable. The lower skies, as they say, you know, is the technology is now made them, you know, is a different threat than we've ever had, particularly on US soil.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  So again, this is, you asked about the business model. You can think about this as an infrastructure bill for a decade or longer. So and then, of course, when you're installing infrastructure, you have to service it, you have to upgrade it. So there's a lot of recurring elements here in our financial model.

• 17:39John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Hopefully we'll see you in the studio much warmer next time.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  I love it. Thank you.

• 17:45John Coogan?

  Let's pop off those headphones and we will bring over our next guest. Thank you so much for hopping on. And we will continue our coverage today. What's going on? Good to meet you.

• 17:56Speaker 04

  How you doing?

• 17:57John Coogan?

  How you doing? Good to see you. Let's throw this headphone set on. Can you do it over the hat? I don't know what we do. You can put the hat over the... Oh, there you go. That works. See if I can make it work. You can throw it back on. That works great, actually. There we go. Can you hear me okay? I can. Perfect. Can you hear me okay? We can hear you just fine. Okay, good. First time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company.

• 18:21Speaker 04

  Uh, my name's Casey Lane and I work for a western sports entertainment and media company called Teton Rich. We do a number of things.

• 18:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:29Speaker 04

  Across the sports media and entertainment.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 18:32Speaker 04

  All focused around western lifestyle and western sports.

• 18:35John Coogan?

  That's great. What are the most popular sports that you're covering?

• 18:39Speaker 04

  So, we have a television network and a, uh, subscription-based streaming company called Cowboy Channel and Cowboy Plus. We have a linear channel and then we have a subscription app that covers all of professional rodeo.

• 18:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 18:53Speaker 04

  On the PRCA, which is the primary sanctioning body of professional rodeo.

• 18:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  And then we also have a bull riding team, uh, in the TKO PBR-owned, uh, PBR Teams League.

• 19:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  Those are the two biggest, two of the biggest. We also produce a massive rodeo.

• 19:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  Uh, Memorial Day weekend at, uh, Globe Life Field in Arlington.

• 19:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  And, uh, do a variety of other things in western sports. We have a Hollywood division that produces scripted, unscripted movies, all kinds of stuff, uh, around western sports and western lifestyle.

• 19:24John Coogan?

  A few years ago, I followed JB Moni a little bit. Who's, who are the big stars these days?

• 19:29Speaker 04

  So, the big stars of bull riding right now, um, you know, they, they vary from sort of team to team, space to space.

• 19:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 19:37Speaker 04

  Um, on our team, we have a couple of guys that are like, you know, chiseled old veterans, couple of Brazilian guys. And then we have, uh, a, a, a sort of middle-aged bull rider, I would call him. He'd love to hear me call him that. Uh, named Keyshawn Whitehorse.

• 19:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 19:50Speaker 04

  Who's like sort of the star of our team.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  That's a good name for a bull rider.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  He's awesome.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:55Speaker 04

  But then like there's some emerging talent. Um, there's a kid out of North Carolina named Clay Guyton. And there's a kid that's on Florida's team, but grew up in Texas. Texas.

• 20:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:03Speaker 04

  Uh, named John Crimber. So, uh, always new talent coming in. We, uh, Colby, who's my head coach, just spent four days in Brazil at a, at a combine that PBR puts on down in Brazil to try to find new and emerging talent down there as well. So.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  Very cool. Uh, how's the business growing overall? There's a lot of turmoil in media, a lot of consolidation, but I imagine with the internet, there's more people just becoming aware of bull riding of Western lifestyle sports broadly. But what's it been like the last couple of years?

• 20:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's no secret in the market that Western has, you know, had a renaissance, right? Um, a combination of, of COVID and, uh, and the Taylor Sheridan Yellowstone.

• 20:41John Coogan?

  I was about to say, there's so many different funnels into this world.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  And I look at like.

• 20:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love it.

• 20:45Speaker 04

  I give, I will give Taylor all the credit in the world, but also I look at it as like, you know, that's a little bit of the canary in the coal mine.

• 20:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 20:53Speaker 04

  I think, you know, people particularly in the U S have grown up farther and farther away from farming and ranching.

• 21:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, people are moving to the cities.

• 21:01Speaker 04

  But it's always part of.

• 21:03John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 21:03Speaker 04

  Our ethos, right? As Americans, right? There's this thing right here is the most iconic American symbol that there is. It really is.

• 21:11Jordi Hays?

  John wears one on the weekends. I'll say that.

• 21:14John Coogan?

  I do.

• 21:14Jordi Hays?

  So, uh.

• 21:15Speaker 04

  The weekdays.

• 21:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  And so that, that sort of cultural, you know, phenomenon of what sort of Yellowstone brought and what COVID brought, getting people back outdoors, you know, they couldn't go on vacation. So, you know, I'm going to buy a, I'm going to buy an RV and a side by side and go see the West. And all those types of things.

• 21:32Jordi Hays?

  Are you guys, are you guys trying to manufacture some type of drive to survive moment? Cause I think what that obviously drive to survive introduced the sport more broadly to Americans, but it also drilled down into the individual talent, which that's something that Taylor Sheridan, like the Taylor Sheridan industrial content complex is not actually getting into the talent.

• 21:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's definitely on the roadmap of projects that we're looking at. We've done some stuff, PBR has done some stuff. There was a show on Amazon a couple of years ago around the first year of our, of the teams league that we participate in. But, um, you know, what we are really, what, you know, my belief is that we have this, we have the attention of the country and, and for, to some extent, the world, right? That, that's looking at Western. The place where people attach passion is sports. So how do we take that interest in Western and drive it towards sport? Cause that's a place where we're heavily invested, right? Like I said, we have a whole television network and, and streaming app in Cowboy Plus that

• 22:39Speaker 04

  is dedicated to the business of rodeo and, and rodeo media. So it's, it's definitely something and we're, you know, we sort of have extensions too. Like our big rodeo that I talked about that we produce in Arlington, the American is actually on Fox. It's not even on our own platform because we're trying to widen the aperture a little bit and get more people into the top of the funnel. To drive them into that sort of fandom.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what's the, the next country outside of Brazil that's a pipeline for talent?

• 23:08Speaker 04

  Uh, bull riding in particular is very popular in Canada, Australia, Brazil, uh, US, obviously Mexico. Um, Argentina is a sort of a new frontier. A lot of it has to do with the level of bull talent that those countries have access to.

• 23:27Jordi Hays?

  There's two layers, basically.

• 23:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, because if a guy is really good in Argentina right now, he probably needs to go to Brazil. And get on a little bit better bull and then come here to get on like the highest caliber of bull, right? Like if you took a kid straight from Argentina and put them on our bulls, it would be like, uh, you know.

• 23:46Speaker 04

  Going from the pony rides to, you know, riding thoroughbreds. You know what I mean? Just because they don't have that level, not, not that they're, not that the talent's not as good. They just don't have access to the kind of bull power that we do here.

• 23:59John Coogan?

  Are there any, uh, science or technology stories that, uh, the industry is grappling with? I'm thinking about, uh, cloning prize bulls or genetic engineering or performance enhancing drugs. Like, are there any, uh, areas where the community has sort of grappled with and found, uh, like a, you know, happy medium on these new tech?

• 24:20Speaker 04

  Um, well, there's a, there's a lot of, there's a lot of those scenarios over the years that, that have been relevant. Genetics is a huge part of the bucking bull and bucking animal business. Um, you know, it's like, it's like anything else, you know, racehorses run fast.

• 24:37John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 24:37Speaker 04

  Labradors chase tennis balls and bucking bulls buck. You bring bulls that buck to daughters of other bulls that buck and you get more bulls that buck.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  Um, but there's a, a ton to the genetics and there has been some cloning projects and things like that.

• 24:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 24:50Speaker 04

  You know, really the, the revolution, the next revolution, I think in technology and western sports is what we're doing right now with TWGA and Palantir. Um, and we're bringing, uh, we're building a video analytics platform that, um, basically tracks the animal, the rider, um, to provide data.

• 25:12John Coogan?

  It's Moneyball.

• 25:13Speaker 04

  It's Moneyball.

• 25:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  And we pair that with the actual

• 25:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 04

  data from, you know, scoring and timing.

• 25:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  And we're building, um, to the best of our ability to predict, um, you know, predicted outcome models of this type of bull with this particular rider, this, you know, the, these sort of different scenarios. We're using it on the broadcast side to really dive, dive deeper, uh, for the fan base into, you know, why is this, why was that ride scored that way? You know, well, we can go back to this, you know, analytics platform and show you, you know, with, with graphics and with, with the data, you know, why this bull bucked harder than that bull essentially. So that, those are the kinds of things that we're working on right now.

• 25:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:58Speaker 04

  Um, to do two things. One, on the bull riding team side, to make us better and give us competitive advantage, uh, and then sell the

• 26:06John Coogan?

  Viewership.

• 26:07Speaker 04

  Pieces and parts of it, maybe to some of our competitors. As the analytics platform and then on the viewership side, it really is about informing, informing the fans. I mean, look, you watch an NFL game now, you know, when a guy does a punt return, oh, wow, that guy ran, you know, 23 miles an hour or whatever the number is. We don't have that stuff in rodeo yet, but we're building that right now.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about these like must see events like creating like the Super Bowl moment, amplifying all the energy in the entire broader industry into like one singular day, minute, hour. What is the strategy there currently? Where do you want to see it going?

• 26:45Speaker 04

  So that manifests itself in, in each of the different sports verticals differently, like in professional bull riding, that moment is the team championships in November at T-Mobile Arena in Vegas. In traditional rodeo, in the PRCA, that's 10 days in Las Vegas in December during the NFR. But, but just like you say, that, you know, sports are about moments in time. Our rodeo that we do, the American is like the US Open, right? It's the top five in each discipline against a group of, of, you know, five and every, you know, five per discipline from every, you know,

• 27:25Speaker 04

  every other part of the world that have competed on a track through a series of qualifiers and, and regionals to get the chance to compete against the best in the world. And if they beat the best in the world, they win a million bucks. Actually, this year they win two million bucks. Because last year, nobody won it and it rolled over. So that's kind of, you know, those are sort of like the big moments in time right now in, in, in Western sports.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about the, the creator economy broadly, the, the personal Instagrams, where he was following, like saw someone who does F1 racer and he's on Twitch in the simulator. And you just have this like ability to go, go to the actual event, but then also open up your phone and continue that experience. How important is the continuation of the experience across the internet these days?

• 28:15Speaker 04

  It's hugely important. We, and we've, we've done a number of events. We've We've got a guy in our company who runs our fantasy gaming business. Who's a former contestant. Yeah. Um, who's a really energetic sort of, you know, personality. And he has done several hosted events where we take the live rodeo feed from our cowboy plus product. And push it through, you know, alternate platforms like Twitch. And bring in people. Yeah. To host on their own channels that have never watched it before. And interact with him, asking questions like, what's, you know, what, what the hell are these guys doing? What's going on there? You know, so, um, that's a space we're just sort of trying to figure out, I think, right now. Yeah.

• 29:00Speaker 04

  But in terms of like, you know, the influencer community. Yep. Like, you know, our athletes have found sort of their own voice there, right? Cause in rodeo, you know, until these, until teams came along in bull riding, rodeo, everybody's like an independent contractor. Right? So my ability as a contestant to monetize my very short career is, you know, can I put a logo on my shirt? That's going to get caught on TV. Yeah. Well, now with the emergence of social media, those guys have their own voice, their own place, their own, you know, incentive to get more followers. So they can go to these bigger brands and say, hey, Ariat, you know, you gotta pay me X because I've got this many followers. And I'm talking about your brand every week and that kind of stuff. That makes a ton of sense.

• 29:41Jordi Hays?

  What's your most memorable bull ride for yourself?

• 29:45Speaker 04

  So I was never a bull rider.

• 29:47Jordi Hays?

  But you have to have taken one out at some point.

• 29:49Speaker 04

  Never.

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 29:50Speaker 04

  Never.

• 29:51Jordi Hays?

  Too dangerous?

• 29:51Speaker 04

  It's so dangerous. It's one of those, um, look, I, so I did the timed events in, in traditional rodeo growing up. My dad was a bull rider and I think, uh, as much my dad, but more so my mom, having been married to a bull rider. Made sure that I never even looked in that direction. Um, but I'm pretty convinced I don't have the thing.

• 30:14Jordi Hays?

  The thing.

• 30:14Speaker 04

  Um, there's a thing there. The thing is the ability to suspend fear.

• 30:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:19Speaker 04

  It really is. And, and every, every active bull rider will tell you that they're not scared. And every retired bull rider, five years later, when he looks back on it, says, no, it's not about not being scared. It's about being able to convince yourself that you're not scared.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 30:32Speaker 04

  For that moment that, cause when you, you know, I'd love for you guys to come to an event, right? Get behind the chutes. When the whole thing is, when the whole, you know, 25,000 pounds of steel around you is shaking because a bull's moving. And he's 1800 pounds.

• 30:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:48Speaker 04

  And 140 pound guy is about to climb over the chute and get on him. Like, there's, I just don't have it. It just doesn't, it just doesn't exist in my brain, the ability to just shut that switch off.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  I think you have it. I would love to see, just, I, I have full faith. You do it. You're good. I'll be watching. I'll be rooting for you.

• 31:08Speaker 04

  And, and look, I mean, with, you know, I compare it, uh, you know, there's a lot of comparables, right? You think about, um, you know, Indy car drivers that are going, you know, 240 miles an hour down the back stretch at Indianapolis. Or you think about, you know, motorcycle racers or, or UFC guys. UFC guys compare a lot to that, I think. Um, but to a person, when you bring those guys.

• 31:32Jordi Hays?

  180 pounds.

• 31:35Speaker 04

  To a person, when you bring those guys to a PBR event and they watch it live, they, they're like, I, I can't believe that this, that this is a thing. We just had, uh, we were just in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago and we had Ben Roethlisberger with us on the back of the chutes. And he was just going crazy because he's not, you know, been up that, that close and personal with it.

• 31:53John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 31:54Jordi Hays?

  Thank you guys. I appreciate it. I look forward to coming to an event at some point.

• 31:58John Coogan?

  Headphones from you and have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Welcome back to the show. Uh, it's been a little over a year, right?

• 32:07Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you Ted.

• 32:09John Coogan?

  Good to see you Ted. Uh, for those who aren't familiar, please introduce yourself, Thomas. How long have you been working at Palantir?

• 32:15Speaker 05

  I've been here 16 years.

• 32:16John Coogan?

  16 years. There we go. There we go. Is this the coldest AIP con you've been freezing?

• 32:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're freezing. I got married down the street, actually. No way. And in an outdoor wedding with no contingency plan. Wow.

• 32:30Jordi Hays?

  Sounds like this.

• 32:31Speaker 05

  The weather was great. Oh, the weather was great.

• 32:32Jordi Hays?

  So you picked the venue this year.

• 32:34Speaker 05

  Karma. You got good luck, this is the bad luck. But anyway. You can only roll the dice so many times.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  Talk about your role, talk about how it's changing. I'm very interested to know how the role of the forward deployed engineer is changing this year, this month because of AI agents. But take me through a little bit of the history and how you think it progresses from here.

• 32:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, so my role primarily for 16 years, what I've been doing is going on site, deploying our software over and over and over again.

• 33:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:01Speaker 05

  And I think the this year question is really prescient because having done it for 16 years, I'm pretty good at it, I kind of know how to do it.

• 33:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 05

  And as I go and see what our teams are doing, it looks like a complete alien. It is, I don't recognize it.

• 33:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 33:14Speaker 05

  At all.

• 33:16John Coogan?

  Is that because of timing or actual roles or what people are doing?

• 33:20Speaker 05

  I think there are two things that are primarily, that are actively changed. And then two implications of it that really happened. The two things that have actually changed is the timing, the pace is rapidly accelerating to zero. You can start and within a day, you can have an application that actually matters to a business. And that.

• 33:39Jordi Hays?

  And what's driving that? Is that, is that your guys' internal process or is it the technology getting better?

• 33:45Speaker 05

  I think it's three things. One is, maybe most important is the market is now demanding much more from software than it's ever demanded before. And so that cultural expectation is a huge part of it. Of like, this has to matter. This has to be in the fight.

• 33:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:58Speaker 05

  You know, this has to be really relevant.

• 34:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Everyone's used ChatGPT, like they know what it's capable of. And then they show up to work and they're like, why am I still filling out the same form 10 times?

• 34:07Speaker 05

  This thing's magical.

• 34:08John Coogan?

  My, yeah, work sucks.

• 34:10Speaker 05

  And.

• 34:11John Coogan?

  And it shouldn't.

• 34:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, and that demand is huge.

• 34:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:13Speaker 05

  And it is like a huge accelerant for us. Then the second is having been building the infrastructure that presume the models are going to get better.

• 34:19John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 34:20Speaker 05

  And the, and if you're ahead of the infrastructure and you're presuming like, hey, what's going to have to be where these things are actually load bearing in very highly consequential, regulated decisions that have to be made a thousand. Thousand times which integrate different decision making processes across system or across people across systems. You're going to need infrastructure that's able to do it. That that infrastructure has matured a lot over time. And then the models themselves are getting better. And so that means that you can now have software go from legacy rigid defined by its limitations to immediate adaptive. And it can be embodied, maybe not like literally embodied, but embodied in the way that you want it to be such that it works. Which is the second thing that I think is just dramatically changing about the process, which is it never made sense for your best people to engage with what the technology is that runs your business.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  What does that mean?

• 35:06Speaker 05

  When you think about like every organization has this at the edge and they have it in the C suite.

• 35:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:12Speaker 05

  They have the thing at the edge, which is like the guy who runs the plant.

• 35:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:15Speaker 05

  And the guy who runs the plant knows why it works.

• 35:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 35:17Speaker 05

  Knows why it breaks.

• 35:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 35:18Speaker 05

  Every time something needs to be fixed, like you know, John.

• 35:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:21Speaker 05

  Right? Like John makes makes makes.

• 35:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:23Speaker 05

  Work. And in some ways, John was like the least levered person by technology because everything you'd buy with enterprise technology would be to standardize, to enable management.

• 35:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:30Speaker 05

  And that person worked around the system. They had their access databases, their own Excel macros. They had their own way of operating.

• 35:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 35:36Speaker 05

  Now the technology can be John's Iron Man suit.

• 35:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:39Speaker 05

  And so that means that it now makes sense for John to spend all of their time. And you have to earn this. This is what the forward deploy engineer do is earn the time of the best people so they can dictate what the system is that actually runs so that their company can be more differentiated.

• 35:50John Coogan?

  Got it. Okay.

• 35:51Speaker 05

  And then at the top, you can do this with the CEO and a lot of my conversations is this is what the company that's going to dominate my industry is going to look like in 2030. And then our FDE's job is to say, okay, well, let's get an MVP of that done by Easter.

• 36:03John Coogan?

  Do companies, I mean, in this world where companies are demanding more from software. Do they? Do they understand what Palantir does? Do they understand the value prop more now? Is it easier to explain to them? Or is it getting more complicated because the tools are more complicated and the capabilities are more complicated?

• 36:19Speaker 05

  It's easier to explain because we spend no time explaining it and all you do is show it. And so it's like the tortured explanation, I kind of think, which is. A derivative of, I need to understand everything because this decision that I'm gonna make, I'm gonna be stuck with forever. I'm gonna be locked into this system. I'm gonna have to use it. This is like made sense for how people procure enterprise technology.

• 36:38John Coogan?

  Sure, where stuff's more flexible now.

• 36:39Speaker 05

  Analytical process, these things. And now it's like, show me that it works.

• 36:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:44Speaker 05

  And show me that it works. And so I want to spend virtually no time explaining why it works and just showing you how it works. And then let's talk about how to make it work 10 times better for you.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  So put aside like Palantir's hiring plans and just talk to me about the American economy. Do we need more forward deployed engineers as like a society for where we're going?

• 37:04Speaker 05

  I think the thing that the forward deploy engineers embodies for us and why I always get a little bit stuck. You know, I talk to a lot of companies that are like, hey, we're thinking about the FTE model. Does it make sense? Are we gonna do it?

• 37:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 37:16Speaker 05

  And the place where I always get stuck is, well, if you're not building our company, I'm not sure you should do forward deployed engineers. Like, I don't think it's intrinsically good or it's intrinsically bad. The reason we do forward deployed engineers is our core philosophy, the core business strategy is that we're gonna build the technology so our customers win. And if that's your core thesis, then of course you need forward deployed engineers. Because if you want to win, you have to be able to deliver and you have to be able to do it. And then you also need to figure out for our customers, and we also have to win. We have to scale our capabilities. We have to be able to invest in R and D. So we have to be, figure out how to synthesize those things back into scalable technologies that allow us to deliver for our customers more and more over time. That is a highly tasteful exercise of like what gets synthesized, what gets productized. Frankly, I think if you didn't have Sham, it would be impossible. Like, I wouldn't do it that way.

• 38:01Speaker 05

  But the thing that I think forward deployed engineering does embody, which I would argue we need more of in society, is it's sort of the rejection of the financialization and managerialism that defines what you think a business can look like with software. Versus saying, the point of software is to enable creation, is to enable the end customer to work. And by the way, we've proven that you can do that and build a really scalable profitable business at the same time.

• 38:22Jordi Hays?

  Where do you FTEs fit into the customer lifecycle? Is it kind of a reoccurring engagement? I'm thinking about the last two weeks. We have so many different supply chain disruptions. A lot of companies that are leveraging Palantir to run their operations. Are they, I imagine the systems are built to be able to withstand chaos. That's kind of the point. But at the same time, do you ever redeploy forward deployed engineers during moments like this?

• 38:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, I would think of it in two ways. One is for us, the forward deployed engineer is a capex investment. You're installing the factory, you're building the initial ontology, you're training the existing customer to be able to wield the technology in the way that they want it to. And forward deployed engineering done well is kind of a capex investment. And then the place where it's not is, and where you do have re-engagement is, our goal is to continue to push the bounds of the ambition of like, what do you want to do? Not can I deliver the same thing more efficiently to the next customer? But given what you've done today, have you thought about doing this? And have you thought about doing that and pushing the boundaries of the creativity? And then having the connectivity back with our core platform seems to say, we're going to completely throw away our entire roadmap and focus this around this one singular customer. Because if we can do this, they can win. And by the way, we're going to build the primitives that allow us to build things that our other customers win with.

• 39:40John Coogan?

  How much of the discussion between FTEs and Palantir folks and corporations is around just explaining the capabilities of modern AI models versus previously? Like what a software system could look like? Like, how is that changing? Because it feels like we're in this crazy capability overhang where like the models move so fast, the technology is getting so much better that you can take two weeks off and come back. And that thing that you were smashing your head against the wall on has just been one shot by the latest model.

• 40:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, I I don't know. In my world where we live, that isn't true. Like, we've seen very little, what I would call like cannibalization of the existing thing, but we have seen the I get to re-decomp this problem. I could reorganize around what these things are. And so a lot of it is a, are you building an engine that presumes change in the underlying technology? Or are you reselling what most enterprise IT art, systems, people, organizations are, which are, I need to presume stability and manage risk costs and effectiveness. You do need to now build a system that presumes rapid rate of change.

• 40:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. So where where are you seeing more value in using generative AI models to build deterministic software faster? Versus actually deploying a stochastic model, a non-deterministic model into an enterprise workflow? Because I imagine that a lot of your systems, a lot of your customers are saying, look, I don't care that the latest model is ninety nine point nine nine percent. I would rather have a system that's a hundred percent verifiable, because at least I know that if I've defined it in a particular way with business logic, I get the same output no matter what.

• 41:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, I can tell you the anti-pattern and the pattern that's working. So the anti-patterns are called like the pejoratively, the private equity mindset of how to deploy this software. Which is, you have now three types of, call it cognition computation. You have traditional computing, you have human thought, and then you have generative AI. The the the private equity model is saying, I'm going to take this new form of cognition and try and replace old forms of cognition and do the exact same thing I'm doing before with with slightly fewer heads. So then you have the anxiety around job loss. You have the, hey, I'm going to increase margins, but but but so what? And I think that is a dramatic underuse of the technology. One, it's a lot harder than it looks to do that, to turn something that's non-deterministic into something that is deterministic.

• 42:08Speaker 05

  But more importantly, it's why would you do that? It's so powerful if you put it into white space, like let it run like a thoroughbred by decomping problems into where it's actually useful versus trying to replace something in the old kind of sclerotic enterprise technology estate.

• 42:22Jordi Hays?

  How have you processed, there's a bunch of AI rollups, holding companies, people, you know, venture people that are trying to maybe take something out of the PE playbook, but build some type of advantage by applying AI better. How, like, what do you think their prospects are? One of those things that sounds, uh, sounds really straightforward, uh, but, uh, easier said than done.

• 42:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't know any specifics, so it's hard for me to opine what they're doing. But the first question that I would ask is to, um, understand what the culture of those companies are. And why I think like, private equity is just, uh, culturally not built to do technology. To do this technology right, you have to presume that you're wrong at the outset, not presume that you're right. That's very hard from my experience with working with folks in private equity. And so if you can build a culture that presumes that you need to create, iterate and discover what the thing ought to be versus do the deductive kind of, uh, management consultant playbook of, you know, I've talked to all of these firms and like, the weird thing is everybody ends up with the exact same target that they're gonna go to because they have the exact same deductive framework of like, this is what it looks like. They process a lot of papers. It's like, okay, and then somehow everyone's doing accounting rollups.

• 43:30Speaker 05

  So then where's the alpha, like the investment thesis is on? And then I think the execution is going to be a lot harder than they think it is.

• 43:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, Ted Mabry, thanks so much for taking the time.

• 43:38Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you.

• 43:39John Coogan?

  Stay warm out there. We will grab those headphones and talk to you soon. Jordy, would you rather have $10 million or access to ChatGPT in 2012?

• 43:51Jordi Hays?

  This is such a funny question because it reminds me of the like, you know, uh, $10 million or dinner with Jay-Z.

• 43:58John Coogan?

  Dinner with Drake or something with Jay-Z.

• 44:00Jordi Hays?

  But in this case, in this case, we were talking about this off air. And if you had ChatGPT 10 years ago, you could make hundreds of millions of dollars in so many, in so many silly ways, right? It'd be like, I'd be like, same day essays for college students. You need an essay? You got something to do? Great, we got one.

• 44:18John Coogan?

  If you were the only person with the technology.

• 44:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, crazy. No, it, it, and Ben was saying, uh, you know, like even, even on the image and video side.

• 44:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:28Jordi Hays?

  It's like, I'll generate any asset that you want.

• 44:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, commercials that, that. I mean, that would be crazy. People would be like, how did you do this in a day? Even even just like, even if you don't have codex, but you just have chat GPT, you can probably, you can probably piece together so much software that then you could go sell as an actual company. There's a million different ways.

• 44:47Jordi Hays?

  That really, really funny because it sounds it sounds like such a silly question.

• 44:51John Coogan?

  But then when you actually think about the capability. It's remarkable.

• 44:54Jordi Hays?

  I would build a very, very thin wrapper.

• 44:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's one. If you just if you just actually go and sell this like futuristic technology, everyone will assume you're you're you're a time traveler.

• 45:07Jordi Hays?

  We're doing pretty well. We're doing pretty well. The the the snow is hitting my my feet.

• 45:13John Coogan?

  The computers are working. The stream is up. This is a miracle. We are.

• 45:19John Coogan?

  It is so cold that the computers weren't charging at one point. We I've I've heard, you know, if you're in the desert, you need fans for your computer to keep it cool. We probably need to get some of those, but I never thought we'd have to get heat pads. Oh, they have the team, the production team has heat pads on the computer. And we should be joined by Alex Karp in just a few minutes. So thank you for tuning in. Thank you to our sponsors for making this possible.

• 45:42Jordi Hays?

  More news. Trump administration set to suspend the Jones Act to tame oil prices.

• 45:49John Coogan?

  Was this what this was Alex Epstein was talking about?

• 45:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of people have wanted this forever because the the Jones Act obviously has had some unnecessary or unintentional consequences.

• 46:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, it sounds really good on paper, but.

• 46:04Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, so yeah, we're getting it in not the way that people would have expected.

• 46:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:11Jordi Hays?

  Gwart says, why don't they just tokenize the oil in the Middle East and transport it across permissionless financial rails, thereby avoiding the Strait of Hormuz altogether?

• 46:21John Coogan?

  Here's your oil NFT. Here's your here's your gasoline.

• 46:24Jordi Hays?

  Here's something we need to figure out. Helium. Helium exposure. Qatar's shutdown of liquefied natural gas production has shaken about a third of global helium, taken about a third of global helium production offline, affecting chipmakers who rely on helium for semiconductor manufacturing. Helium has no viable substitute in the chip process, and no other source can immediately replace Qatar's supply. With helium, containers already filled before the world before the war, remaining stranded. If the disruption persists, helium shortages could.

• 46:58Jordi Hays?

  Forced chipmakers to deprioritize lower margin product lines, reinforcing the existing allocation towards AI memory and deepening an already severe memory shortage. So

• 47:08John Coogan?

  Find me the Alex I've seen of helium today. Find me the Scott Nolan of helium. There's got to be someone out there who's been building a startup around helium. I actually did talk to someone, I don't know that I should share all the details, but they were looking at a startup that was going to buy a pretty significant, like, you know, helium mine or something like that. And they had a whole business plan for it. And I think it, this was years and years ago, but it was a fascinating industry. I dug into it for like, you know, about an hour with this, this friend of the show. Lots to learn more about rare elements and minerals and all the

• 47:48John Coogan?

  different impacts that the recent news cycle has on all aspects of the economy. Hopefully, an Odd Lots episode on helium soon. That would be, that would certainly be welcome.

• 48:00Jordi Hays?

  In Philly, 600 tubs of French dip mysteriously showed up at several restaurants.

• 48:06John Coogan?

  Is this real?

• 48:07Jordi Hays?

  And Brooks says, yeah, it's in the Philly Inquirer. Brooks says it's starting.

• 48:12John Coogan?

  It's starting. Who knows? It's very ominous. What dip? French dip? Is that like sour cream?

• 48:19Jordi Hays?

  No, with the sandwiches, right?

• 48:21John Coogan?

  French dip? Oh, well, French dip is a sandwich, but is it also a topping?

• 48:26Jordi Hays?

  I know, but it's a, but it's the

• 48:29John Coogan?

  You dip the sandwich in it. The ajou, ajou. Okay, okay, I'm getting it.

• 48:33Jordi Hays?

  Sue Hale says the run on inference capacity is coming. You have been warned.

• 48:38John Coogan?

  Inference capacity. I mean, we've seen that with Claude going down, the GPUs are on fire over on, over at OpenAI with the Codex team, Tebow resetting limits. Someone made a button, that, a website that just have the Codex limits been reset. And you can just go to this website. It's one of these like one off vibe coded pages. And if Tebow resets them, you can go and check your Codex.

• 49:01Jordi Hays?

  Sam Hogan says, real GPU shortage has never been tried.

• 49:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, we could be, we could be getting close. There's a lot of demand, especially if Nvidia is starting to keep the chips. This is huge news for Tyler. He's been pitching Jensen on keeping the chips for himself and building an AI model or an open source model. And that was the, that was the big news. What was the total headline figure, something like $26 billion over five years investing in open source LLM development, something like that. It was a big number.

• 49:30Jordi Hays?

  Twenty-six. Big number.

• 49:31John Coogan?

  It was a big number, not the biggest number we've ever heard.

• 49:33Jordi Hays?

  Another big number. Netflix is paying 600 million for Ben Affleck's company. This was reported earlier in the week that they were acquiring it, but there was no number. 600 is a lot bigger than what I imagined. I was looking at it as like, you know, hey, this will be a nice soft landing for this film company, but pretty significant outcome.

• 49:56John Coogan?

  Yes, 600 is a big number. It'll be very interesting to see what Netflix does with that. We tracked a little bit of the, there's a new Cal Street market up on which Hollywood studio, which traditional Hollywood studio, big Hollywood studio will release a fully AI-generated film or scripted series by 2027. And I think Netflix was in the lead, but just barely. It's so early. So we'll see where all of that goes.

• 50:23Jordi Hays?

  Redbird is the big backer of Interpositive.

• 50:27John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 50:29Jordi Hays?

  Which Redbird is also.

• 50:29John Coogan?

  Redbird Capital?

• 50:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, big backer of the Warner Brothers deal.

• 50:33John Coogan?

  Are they an investment bank or investment firm as well? They do both? They take positions and advisory, right?

• 50:40Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 50:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Exciting. Well, we should be joined by Alex Karp in just a minute. Anything else in the timeline worth?

• 50:47Jordi Hays?

  I thought this was interesting. And one of, at least Anthropic's only marketing growth person did an interview. And extremely impressive what he was able to handle on his own, obviously using the tools to their fullest extent. But a lot of people thought it was funny because it's like, hey, you're, you probably like, you're growing that fast. You could probably add more people.

• 51:12John Coogan?

  Well, good growth people are hard to find. They are. Yeah, it is. It is difficult. But yeah, it would be interesting.

• 51:21Jordi Hays?

  Got to talk about Cursor.

• 51:22John Coogan?

  What's going on with Cursor?

• 51:23Jordi Hays?

  Cursor is having what sound like early talks to raise more money at somewhere around 50 billion dollars.

• 51:32John Coogan?

  Maybe 60. I mean, it's just a massive up round. What was the last round? 18 or 20?

• 51:37Jordi Hays?

  30.

• 51:37John Coogan?

  30, okay. So, nice little step up. A lot of doom and gloom on the timeline around Cursor. We were debating this yesterday. Fascinating just how big the market is, where adoption sits.

• 51:50Jordi Hays?

  But the reporting says they're growing at 25% month over month.

• 51:54John Coogan?

  Incredible. And at that scale, 2 billion ARR, something like that.

• 51:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I just think we keep getting these data points that show that the world is much bigger than whatever people are saying on X on any given day.

• 52:07John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep, yeah. It's, yeah, it's easy to read into Kyle Russell's post about like his team, which is truly like the cutting edge most, you know, most online group of folks shifting over and shifting away from Cursor, but there are still probably applications where it makes a ton of sense and a bunch of companies that are happy with the product and continuing to pay, continuing to grow. And then there's also that interesting thesis about maybe there's a world where they act as a, like a model router in some ways and are piping different services in. Who knows what the margins look like in the limit, but, you know, certainly, certainly could, could continue to grow.

• 52:51John Coogan?

  What else is in the timeline while we wait for Alex Karp to join TVPN Live?

• 52:56Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the big news is Taco Bell is adding a skincare item to its menu. Mountain Dew Baja Blast Under Eye Patches are going to be infused with caffeine and citrus.

• 53:07John Coogan?

  That's essential if you're in a code red. If you're in a code red, get the Baja Blast. It's under eye shadow. I don't even know what that is. But you can get it at Taco Bell on the menu at any Taco Bell? Is this like some limited drop? Is this some viral stunt? Is this real? I don't know. Have to check it out.

• 53:26Jordi Hays?

  Dean Ball is going back and forth with Emile Michael.

• 53:30John Coogan?

  That's right. Uh, they're, they're, they're trading blows about, well, what, what does it mean to have a constitution? Should, who should be, uh, who should write that? Who should give the models their personality? Uh, and, uh, I mean, we'll talk more about this tomorrow, but Dwar Kesh Patel has a great post summarizing a lot of his thoughts, working through all the different philosophies of when the government should be in charge, when different public companies should be in charge. Um, uh, Dean Ball's main point is that, uh, you know, maybe constitution wasn't the right term, or maybe it's a charged term or loaded term that people read into. But, uh, Dean Ball's point is that, uh, there is no way to train an L L M that doesn't have a personality, even if it's the most robotic personality, that's still a personality. Well, we are joined by Alex Karp.

• 54:15John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 54:20John Coogan?

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

• 54:23Jordi Hays?

  Keep your hat on, it's cold.

• 54:25John Coogan?

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

• 54:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we need to get, we're close to getting skis, look.

• 54:32Alex Karp?

  Do something physical.

• 54:33John Coogan?

  It's starting to stick.

• 54:34Alex Karp?

  It's starting to stick. Oh, I like this vibe. Now I feel like a newscaster.

• 54:38John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 54:39Alex Karp?

  Yeah. This is good. You're like eight feet tall. People don't realize that. He's not standing up because it would be like, he's like counter accurate.

• 54:47Jordi Hays?

  For all of us.

• 54:50John Coogan?

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

• 54:53Alex Karp?

  Five oh, five oh five.

• 54:55John Coogan?

  Five oh five. What about in the cold though? That's going to affect it, right?

• 54:58Alex Karp?

  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.

• 55:05John Coogan?

  Why is it important?

• 55:06Alex Karp?

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

• 55:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:11Alex Karp?

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

• 55:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 55:16Alex Karp?

  I don't think anyone really-

• 55:16John Coogan?

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

• 55:19Alex Karp?

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

• 55:21John Coogan?

  I feel like, I feel like as long as I have a really impressive bench press, I'll, I'll live-

• 55:25Alex Karp?

  Yeah, you know-

• 55:25John Coogan?

  A short but glorious life.

• 55:26Alex Karp?

  Yeah, I don't know-

• 55:27John Coogan?

  Didn't they say something about that?

• 55:28Alex Karp?

  Yeah, that's-

• 55:28John Coogan?

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

• 55:33Alex Karp?

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

• 55:43John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 55:44Alex Karp?

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

• 55:47John Coogan?

  Dead hang is important.

• 55:48Alex Karp?

  Dead hang is crucial.

• 55:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 55:49Alex Karp?

  And you really need to go work on it, especially anyone watching-

• 55:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 55:53Alex Karp?

  -your podcast.

• 55:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 55:54Alex Karp?

  Is likely to outperform.

• 55:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:57Alex Karp?

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

• 56:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, like dead hang.

• 56:02Alex Karp?

  Like, yeah, well, the dead hang may be a proxy indicator for other things you could do with your outperformance.

• 56:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 56:06Alex Karp?

  You know, but, you know, not everyone is- Yeah, not everyone is like six foot nine and like, you may not need a dead hang, but the rest of us-

• 56:14John Coogan?

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

• 56:18Alex Karp?

  Yeah, you, that's right, yeah.

• 56:19John Coogan?

  And I can hold forever, basically, as long as I can stand.

• 56:21Alex Karp?

  That's right, that's right.

• 56:22John Coogan?

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

• 56:30Alex Karp?

  Look, there, 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.

• 56:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 56:39Alex Karp?

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

• 56:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:49Alex Karp?

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

• 56:53John Coogan?

  I applied there, they turned me down.

• 56:54Alex Karp?

  Well, yeah.

• 56:55John Coogan?

  I, I did work at Cinel for a little bit though.

• 56:57Alex Karp?

  You could have, you could have had a job where you're like a-

• 57:00John Coogan?

  He tried, he tried and failed.

• 57:01Alex Karp?

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

• 57:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:04Alex Karp?

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

• 57:20John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:21Alex Karp?

  Like, and you just regurgitate it, like- That's not a valuable thing. If you are actually have insights into anything and you have real technical expertise. 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 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 dyslexic.

• 57:56Alex Karp?

  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. 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.

• 58:40Alex Karp?

  And when like, Americans analyze it, we do not even approach these problems in the same way. What it makes America lethal, 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, these, they're like this big and like, you know, it's like, because we have, yeah, we have, we have, we have specialized ways of doing that. All of that is crazy valuable.

• 59:25Alex Karp?

  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.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 59:37Alex Karp?

  And then, 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?

• 59:48John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:48Alex Karp?

  Cause like, that's the real problem. Like, these products, like, what we're building, like, our agents, mean that, like, the most, I mean, the most powerful people in the Democratic Party are highly educated female voters. 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, I've talked to Daria over and over, and it's like, yeah, you love one company because they're not pro-Trump, that company's taking your job.

• 1:00:14John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:15Alex Karp?

  How are you gonna feel about that company when you find that you have no job?

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:19Alex Karp?

  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 products, even if you're voting for them, that are taking away the jobs of every one of your constituents?

• 1:00:31John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:32Alex Karp?

  And saying, oh, people are gonna love you so much, and you're gonna be poor.

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:35Alex Karp?

  By the way, we love you so much, we're gonna give you a little handout once a month.

• 1:00:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:39Alex Karp?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  So, apply that to the SaaS apocalypse narrative, the enterprise SaaS, there's an idea that 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.

• 1:00:55Alex Karp?

  If you, the thing that these technologies do is they also make it harder to lie about, is 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.

• 1:01:07John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:08Alex Karp?

  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, was like, your software company is supposed to give the client a feeling they're getting laid while they're getting fucked.

• 1:01:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:26Alex Karp?

  Now, if that's how your products actually are... You are, now it's you who are gonna get fucked. Like, and this is gonna 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, humans, FDEs, augmented humans, so AI FDEs, and then orchestration, and then, and 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.

• 1:02:02John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:02:10Alex Karp?

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

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:02:14Alex Karp?

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

• 1:02:16John Coogan?

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

• 1:02:20Alex Karp?

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

• 1:02:23John Coogan?

  Underrated, it's crucial.

• 1:02:24Alex Karp?

  It's crucial.

• 1:02:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:24Alex Karp?

  Like, all these places that made fun of us,

• 1:02:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:02:27Alex Karp?

  They're running around and trying to get FDEs.

• 1:02:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:02:29Alex 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.

• 1:02:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:37Alex Karp?

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

• 1:02:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41Alex Karp?

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

• 1:02:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:47Alex Karp?

  What we, being able to,

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  So, the value of the business is not a monolithic codebase 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?

• 1:02:57Alex Karp?

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

• 1:03:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01Alex Karp?

  They only care, they don't care about any of that. What they care about is you transformed my business in three months. It would have taken three years and I would never have happened.

• 1:03:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:09Alex Karp?

  That's what they care about.

• 1:03:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:11Alex 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, and 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 around men. Manufacturing hospitals or rules that are applied that they're not saying they apply laws. Like all sorts of regulatory things on top of all that.

• 1:03:50Alex 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 them a value.

• 1:04:13John 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 the time. What is slowing down adoption?

• 1:04:25Alex Karp?

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

• 1:04:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:28Alex 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.

• 1:04:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:40Alex 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 insane.

• 1:04:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Alex Karp?

  Like no, I love when I hear about all this is going to replace and then I go to our clients and they're like, could we have more? We don't even have the capacity. Like it's like, it's a surreal thing. Like, would you guys like to be FTEs? 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.

• 1:05:13John 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?

• 1:05:29Alex Karp?

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

• 1:05:36Alex 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. 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 the 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. 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.

• 1:06:22Alex 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. 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. They don't believe it. And by the way, they've never believed in a First Amendment. They have other rights. That's great. I'm not going to dispute that, but I want our rights here. 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.

• 1:07:03Jordi 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.

• 1:07:20Alex 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. Okay, but let me get to this, and they're linked, but it's okay. On domestic stuff.

• 1:07:38Alex Karp?

  I, we have rights that are not subject to majority rule. Like, the majority can vote against us having Fourth Amendment rights. I want that, I want that litigated at the Supreme Court. Because I, we are not, our constitution is not about majority, it's actually about the rights of the minority. And it's our right, all, I bet you the three of us have opinions that are very much in the minority. Sure. That we want to be able to say, at least in the privacy of our own home. Right? And so, so that, they're 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.

• 1:08:20Alex 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, cause 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 gonna take your job. Okay, so then, but in the warfighting context.

• 1:09:04Alex Karp?

  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, 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 gonna do X, Y, and Z. I mean, I give you examples, but like, there are data sets that are publicly available in the US market.

• 1:09:47Alex Karp?

  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. Yeah. 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?

• 1:10:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Alex Karp?

  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. 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 to 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.

• 1:10:45Alex Karp?

  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.

• 1:10:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:10:53Alex Karp?

  That's really important to understand. Making rich people miserable is the only way to help poor people.

• 1:10:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Alex Karp?

  That's obviously true. Say, once you've learned that, the next thing you're gonna learn is, we have to nationalize the tech.

• 1:11:03Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:11:05Alex Karp?

  Yeah, well.

• 1:11:06Jordi Hays?

  They've quoted you on.

• 1:11:07John Coogan?

  Well, so, 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?

• 1:11:23Alex 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.

• 1:11:54Alex 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.

• 1:12:36Alex 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 track 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, 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.

• 1:13:05Jordi 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? 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.

• 1:13:35Alex 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 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,

• 1:14:19Alex 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 was like, being poor in Germany is like, being better than being rich here in some, in some days. Basically, policies that lift the floor, re-education, training. 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. Sure. One is academic. Better education. Better programmatic vocational, vocational, it also has a bad, like, a weird vibe here.

• 1:15:02Alex Karp?

  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 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."

• 1:15:45Alex Karp?

  And like, said, this is like, that's a waste of your time, you could be building something important. And, uh...

• 1:15:51Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:15:54Alex 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. I 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,

• 1:16:39Alex Karp?

  the people 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, the problem, the danger is if we don't do these reforms, you are going to get the pitchforks. Because that 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 efforts, change how we test aptitude.

• 1:17:23Alex Karp?

  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?

• 1:17:49Jordi Hays?

  Debt may be harmful to your future.

• 1:17:52Alex Karp?

  And your personal life. Explain to someone you got a million dollars in debt. 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.

• 1:18:03John Coogan?

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

• 1:18:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what's it like to read about your business?

• 1:18:15Alex 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.

• 1:18:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:32Alex Karp?

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

• 1:18:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:37Alex 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.

• 1:18:51John 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.

• 1:19:02Alex 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.

• 1:19:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:18Alex 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, it'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?

• 1:20:02Alex Karp?

  It's like, everywhere I go, it's like, it's like, wait a minute, like, and it's like, 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... 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.

• 1:20:43Alex Karp?

  This thing I thought would be sane 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? 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.

• 1:21:25John 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.

• 1:21:38Alex Karp?

  I have to choose one or the other. I mean, okay, I'm just.

• 1:21:42Jordi Hays?

  I don't think he needs.

• 1:21:45Alex Karp?

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

• 1:21:47John Coogan?

  There we go. Okay.

• 1:21:50Alex Karp?

  New pick.

• 1:21:51John Coogan?

  We just have to ask.

• 1:21:52Alex Karp?

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

• 1:21:55John 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.

• 1:22:03Alex Karp?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:04John Coogan?

  And that's our show today, folks. Thank you so much for tuning into TVPN. Today, we will be back in the TVPN UltraDome tomorrow at 11 a.m.

• 1:22:11Jordi Hays?

  You want to sign off with us? Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:13John Coogan?

  Point at the camera. Goodbye.

• 1:22:15Jordi Hays?

  Have a good one. Cheers.