🔴 Alex Karp LIVE from AIPCon 10 | Alex Karp, Peter Zaffino, Chad Wahlquist, Sam Berry

(00:00) - - Live from Palantir's AIPCon 10 (12:38) - - Ramp raises $750M at $44B valuation (15:19) - - Timeline reactions (23:57) - - Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies, discusses the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption, noting a shift from skepticism to widespread recognition of its value, while cautioning against unproductive overuse. He emphasizes the importance of taste and discernment in effectively integrating AI into business processes, highlighting that successful implementation requires more than just technical capability. Karp also warns of potential nationalization and regulation of AI technologies by governments, urging proactive engagement to address these challenges. (48:04) - - Peter Zaffino, born in 1967, is the Chairman and CEO of American International Group (AIG), having joined the company in 2017 as Executive Vice President and Global Chief Operating Officer. In the conversation, Zaffino discusses AIG's global operations, emphasizing its balanced international and North American presence, and highlights the company's focus on managing complex risks for large clients. He also elaborates on AIG's partnership with Palantir Technologies, detailing how their collaboration has enhanced data integration and decision-making processes within the organization. (01:01:35) - - Chad Wahlquist, a Forward Deployed Architect at Palantir Technologies, discusses his role in assisting clients to decompose complex problems and apply Palantir's technology in innovative ways. He emphasizes the importance of integrating AI with human processes to model business operations effectively, highlighting the ontology's role in providing a structured worldview that enhances decision-making. Wahlquist also addresses the balance between software malleability and enterprise-grade robustness, advocating for adaptable systems that empower users while maintaining security and scalability. (01:22:35) - - Timeline reactions (01:25:22) - - Sam Berry, a USDA employee with a background in engineering and a family history in farming, discusses the diverse roles of the USDA, including food inspections, SNAP administration, and scientific research. He highlights the importance of technological advancements in agriculture, such as automation and AI, to address challenges like workforce shortages and pest control. Berry also emphasizes the need for effective data collection and management to ensure program integrity and support national food security. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ 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.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TBN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Thursday, June 4th, 2026. We are live from Palantir AIPCon. With the Temple of Technology is back in LA.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  Fortress of Finance.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  We will return to it, but it is also a state of mind.

• 0:14Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:14John Coogan?

  We are also sponsored by Ramp. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Big news from Ramp today. Massive fundraiser. We're going to cover it in a little bit, but first.

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  You hear that?

• 0:25John Coogan?

  We've got to talk. Oh, is it still going? I like it. The Ramp song's back. This was, this was early days. We really talked about Ramp so much, turned it into a song. Anyway, the topic of conversation in DC has, it's still in AI world, but instead of talking about approving models before they're released today, it's about the bio threat. Brandon Gurrell wrote in the TBN newsletter today, "The great houses of AI have united behind the bio threat." There's actually a lot more to that because it was a big, long list of signatories from AI, but also from the bio world and biotech and even startups. We've seen former guests of the show sign on. I'm excited to bring some of those folks back on the show in the coming weeks and hear more about this

• 1:09John Coogan?

  because I have this belief that as AI advanced, we got cyber because it was such a tight feedback loop, such a tight verifiable reward. Reinforcement learning works really well in that context. Bio has some similar characteristics.

• 1:23Jordi Hays?

  And it was a very tangible Y2K style moment.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  Where there was, it was, let's just say a powerful business strategy.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is it? Yeah. It was like, is it over? You start thinking about the consequences of this and you don't need to get to AGI, super intelligence god. You can just have a really powerful tool that creates a new problem and that creates full employment for Nikesh Roura over at Palo Alto Networks, who we had a chance to talk to yesterday. And he's been very fortunate in implementing the solutions to the cybersecurity threats posed by new AI systems, some of the new AI capabilities that are rolling out. But bio might be next. And so it's exciting to see that the great houses of AI are uniting behind the bio threat. So let's take you through this. First, I'm going to tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 2:14John Coogan?

  So in 1981, a group of researchers published the primary structure of the polio virus genome in the journal Nature. So they were basically open sourcing the sequence for making polio, which. Just a few years earlier, polio, I think, was on the decline by 1981, but a very, very problematic virus. It's an RNA virus, meaning that its nucleobases or building blocks are A, C, G, U, if you're familiar with RNA, adazine, cytosine, guanine, and uracil. Put more plainly, thanks, Brandon Gurrell, he says, "When the researchers published the primary structure of the polio virus, they gave the world the literal sequence of polio virus building blocks in order from

• 2:56John Coogan?

  start to finish. By the mid 20th century, before mass vaccination, polio was paralyzing and killing more than half a million people per year worldwide." So you have this pretty deadly virus killing more than half a million people per year worldwide, and you have just open sourced it. What happens? So in 2002, researchers synthesized infectious polio virus from its publicly available sequence data. So they didn't actually need any of the polio virus RNA to start. They didn't need it on hand. They didn't need to, it's not like they took a little sample and they just cloned it up and made it bigger. They, they just took the data and they made the actual virus. So this is the, this is the shape of the threat. If there's a new, if there's a new virus or an existing virus or a forgotten about virus and you have the code to it, you can potentially print that RNA

• 3:40John Coogan?

  and then have the virus in your hands, even if you don't have a sample, you weren't able to collect a sample. So instead, these researchers in 2002, they were able to take the published sequence, chemically synthesize short DNA fragments, assemble them into full-length, a full-length DNA copy of the polio virus genome, and then use the DNA to make the viral RNA to fully recover the infectious virus. So in 2005, researchers used these same technologies to reconstruct the Spanish flu, a virus in 1918 that killed 675,000 Americans and had a 2% to 3% mortality rate among those infected. Very, very dangerous stuff. So basically, these two reconstructed viruses showed that having a physical virus on hand was no longer necessary as source material

• 4:22John Coogan?

  to create viruses. All you needed was the blueprints. As long as you have the code, literally just like text in a text file, a bunch of A, T, G, U, you can go and make this as long as you have the equipment on hand, but that is getting democratized as well. And that's what this AI letter is all about. So. That's a situation that we're still in today, except now that we have AI, there are easier ways to potentially reconstruct DNA sequences that could create new viruses. So yesterday, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Dario Amade, Alex Wang, and dozens of other high-profile leaders across AI, tech, policy, nucleic acid synthesis, and biotech signed an open letter called "in support of mandatory nucleic acid synthesis screening and record-keeping." You might have seen it on the timeline, and at first glance, Brandon here assumed,

• 5:07John Coogan?

  and I assumed the same thing, assumed it was another press release from a frontier lab claiming it had just discovered new capabilities in one of its internal models that would ultimately lead to catastrophe. A lot of this doom, fear-based marketing has been happening. So that was sort of the natural reaction, and that's what Brandon felt.

• 5:22Jordi Hays?

  I think some people's reaction would be, are we not doing record-keeping here already?

• 5:26John Coogan?

  That's a great question, and Brandon actually did answer that. But it's not just a PR stunt, and it's not a new capability. They're not saying that the models can just create a novel virus, you know, one-shot, like that is solved yet. It's not there, but they see it as something that's coming down the pipe. And this letter is not this dangerous new capability. It's more asking the US government to force nucleic acid synthesis companies to screen orders for sequences of concern. So, hey, somebody just ordered this, looks a lot like a virus. Like, what are we doing here? You said that you were trying to treat cancer, or you said that you were, you know, trying to make a new peptide, and all of a sudden you're asking for polio virus, or something that looks like polio virus. Like, let's dig into this. That's where they're going with that.

• 6:11John Coogan?

  And so they also need to verify the legitimacy of the customer and to keep a record of what they're sending and to whom. That's a crazy one, that I'm sure you're like, wait, they weren't keeping records? They were, a little bit. He gets into this. So he says, "The reason the letter is coming out now is that the threat of nucleic acid synthesis sequencing getting into the wrong hands has been enhanced by AI." So anyone with an AI tool in the future could, in theory, if the models don't have safeguards on them, could create a sequence that then they go to a nucleic acid sequence company, get printed, send it to them, mix it up, boom, they got a virus. Not good. So, most of the global nucleic acid synthesis industry has already signed up to do some of this. They did, they started this in 2009.

• 6:56John Coogan?

  With what's called the International Gene Synthesis Consortium and roughly 80% of commercial synthesis capacity worldwide is on is is on board, but membership

• 7:06Jordi Hays?

  Oh, great. So 20% is still just hanging out. No, we're good.

• 7:10John Coogan?

  80% of nuclear weapons are safely stored. Don't ask about the other 20%. That's kind of what this letter is getting at because 80%. It was a good first effort, 2009. It's been 16, 17 years. We haven't had

• 7:24Jordi Hays?

  There's a new reason to

• 7:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, but there's a new reason to go further. Let's get that last 20%. That's what they're asking for. So, um, membership is not a strong guarantee that they're actually screening or keeping records of their customers because it's voluntary. The 80% number is also self-reported, for example, and a bunch of other factors contribute to the relative flimsiness of the agreement. So it's not government verified.

• 7:47Jordi Hays?

  You can opt into this program by just saying that you're opting into it, but then even the reporting, once you're opted in, is voluntary.

• 7:53John Coogan?

  So I, I think the way this works is the International Gene Synthesis Consortium is probably a nonprofit NGO, you know, non-governmental organization and every, all the companies, uh, they volunteer. 80% of commercial synthesis volume has opted into this. And then this organization, the International Gene Synthesis Consortium, they say, hey, we've looked at the market and we're covering about 80% has opted into this. We're on board with 80% and, and the government isn't coming in and checking the records. They're not actually saying, okay, well, we, we have a different number because we're the government and you have your this number. Let's verify this number. It's self-reported by that organization, but there's no reason not to trust that organization necessarily. Um, so what else? A bunch of other factors

• 8:37John Coogan?

  contribute to the relative flimsiness of this agreement. Uh, HHS also has guidance in place around the issue, but again, it's voluntary, meaning that the possibility of bad actors getting their hands on dangerous nucleic acid sequences, at least from American companies, still cannot be ruled out. Overall, it's good to see industry leaders signing this letter and doubly refreshing, uh, that the letter is not yet another warning of apocalyptic AI doom, which I think the public has unfortunately become to expect from announcements like this. Hopefully the relevant legislators are paying attention and can make this happen in short order. So I thought that was a good, uh, a good breakdown and I agree with a lot of that. Andrew Curran also has some deep dive on this with some more of the signatories. He shares screenshots of all of these and it really is everyone.

• 9:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Y Combinator.

• 9:23Jordi Hays?

  Patrick Collison.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  Deep Mind, Microsoft, Interconnects AI, Harvard, tons of stuff. And then over in, in the nucleic acid synthesis industry of Twist Bioscience, ANZ, Emerald Cloud Lab, and Kathleen McMahon from Valthos is on here, former guest of the show. So, so good news, but obviously just an early step. This is just an open letter to the government saying, hey, we think you should, we want to support this. We think that the government should start thinking about this. The other news in the bio world.

• 9:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, the news is just that there's incredible momentum in biotech.

• 10:00John Coogan?

  It feels like it.

• 10:01Jordi Hays?

  Early stage biotech after.

• 10:03John Coogan?

  Momentum, but not like volume, not scale yet. Because you're looking at three trillion dollar IPOs going out this year, potentially. So much news in AI, Microns at a trillion, every chip stock is, you know, in the hundreds of billions, trillions. This is much smaller, but.

• 10:20Jordi Hays?

  But it's notable because biotech had been left for dead in some ways. We had a biotech investor on probably 14 months ago at this point who said, I don't even know. I mean, just looking at the returns so far, I don't know why you would invest in this asset class. But of course, every asset class kind of go through, goes through that kind of phase. And clearly there's a lot of momentum.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  And they should be, you would expect that biotech would be similarly power law driven, maybe not as extreme, but if you pull out SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic from.

• 10:54Jordi Hays?

  The power law is universal though.

• 10:55John Coogan?

  Yes, but I feel like the biotech community has a little bit more of like a culture of like base hits, doubles, triples, where they flip companies pretty, pretty frequently in the.

• 11:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had that, didn't we have a guy on that had sold?

• 11:09John Coogan?

  Like three companies, we didn't have

• 11:11Jordi Hays?

  He had two billion dollar exits.

• 11:13John Coogan?

  Yep. And then he joined another company and sold it for three billion like the next day.

• 11:17Jordi Hays?

  And so that So anyways, you have isomorphic labs spun out of DeepMind, Coinbase, or not Coinbase, but Brian spun out or like founded New Limit. You have Retro Biosciences.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  We're going to get Jacob on the show.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  As well. Altos Labs.

• 11:35John Coogan?

  Jeff, the Chad from Amazon, as this puts it.

• 11:41Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic, obviously, acquired coefficient bio as well.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  But Jensen and Larry Ellison at Oracle are also doing stuff. So there's a lot of activity. It's very fun. And I hope we're going to be able to cover this a lot more in the near future.

• 11:52Jordi Hays?

  At what point do the, at what point does like a Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, start joining the press release economy of just coming, I'm not, I'm not saying it'd be a good thing, but coming, coming out and saying, we believe we're, you know, right at the

• 12:12John Coogan?

  Because there are partnerships all the time that happen and they're always just like tucked a little bit deeper in the Wall Street Journal because AI is dominating and even private credit takes the front seat to the bio news. But there, there's a whole bunch of deal making going on. Anyway, there's other deal making going on in fintech. We're going to talk about ramps raised today. But first I'm going to tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. So Ramp.

• 12:40Jordi Hays?

  What's going on in Ramp land?

• 12:41John Coogan?

  Forty four billion dollar valuation.

• 12:43Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 12:44John Coogan?

  Really, really solid traction. Just, you know, every 12, 18 months, sometimes much quicker. Sometimes they do two rounds in two weeks, but the really solid progress. They raised $750 million at a $44 billion valuation. Last time we grew this fast, we were 1/20 of the size.

• 13:01Jordi Hays?

  So they're actually accelerating into the AI. Thing to me. Lots of chatter on the timeline around, you know, other fintech valuations. You compare them.

• 13:12John Coogan?

  SaaS apocalypse.

• 13:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, yeah, you compare them to like, Ramp is now worth more than PayPal.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  PayPal has 32 billion of revenue.

• 13:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:20Jordi Hays?

  But PayPal certainly has.

• 13:24Jordi Hays?

  I would say, you know, probably negative momentum.

• 13:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:27Jordi Hays?

  Whereas Ramp has incredible momentum and this, this is the standout line. They were 1/20th the size the last time they were growing this fast.

• 13:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:35Jordi Hays?

  And so, um, yeah, just really, really, really, really impressive execution.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:40Jordi Hays?

  And incredible opportunity still.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, so Eric took to the timeline, posted an essay about the third pillar comparing, uh, the previous eras of value creation, the two pillars, uh, people and vendors dating back to 600 BCE. If you're not thinking in millennia, what are you doing here? Tokens emerged as the third pillar in 2026 AD and he calls it the quadrillion token blind spot. Boil down 500 years of finance and it's really just three questions. Who spent what? Was it worth it? What's the bill next month? I mean, people get caught up in all these crazy things.

• 14:23John Coogan?

  I mean, you see this like marketing, I'm sure, and, uh, and ad buying where people will do all these crazy analyses and ROI, RA, ROAS and all this other stuff. And like, and it's, it's always useful to zoom out and just be like, okay, we spent a bunch of money. Did the bank balance go up in this company or not?

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  All, all personal and business finance, finance at the end eventually comes down to, are we making more money than we're spending?

• 14:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I think, uh, yeah, Eric is, is right to dive super deep into like token optimization and thinking about the tools that they're building, but then at the same time, like not, not, don't get lost in the sauce.

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:58John Coogan?

  And like actually zoom out and try and understand like, what is the core value that you're delivering to your customer? Uh, it is answering that question. Um, so fantastic news over there. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. You gotta do it. It's my number one advice for founders these days. There's some other fundraising news. Sabi, the Beanie BCI company is getting preempted at 35 million at 500 million post. This is a leak from Arfa Rock. We'll see where it goes.

• 15:31Jordi Hays?

  This is huge for you.

• 15:32John Coogan?

  Why?

• 15:32Jordi Hays?

  Because you are a beanie guy.

• 15:34John Coogan?

  I do like beanies.

• 15:35Jordi Hays?

  You love to throw on a beanie. A beanie in the morning.

• 15:37John Coogan?

  It just keeps it together. Yeah.

• 15:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  I like a beanie. Very, very.

• 15:41Jordi Hays?

  I, it's interesting. I think that this format, of course, I'm sure they can adapt it to other types of hats.

• 15:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:50Jordi Hays?

  But this format certainly maybe makes it harder to build momentum in places like California, at least Southern California, Arizona.

• 16:00John Coogan?

  Be big amongst creative directors, though.

• 16:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  Huge, huge.

• 16:03John Coogan?

  Potentially.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  Silver Lake, Silver Lake, you know, every.

• 16:07John Coogan?

  It's not too hard to change a beanie into a hat, a cowboy hat.

• 16:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:10John Coogan?

  Like, that's just extra leather around it. You could wrap the beanie in the cowboy hat. You can wear.

• 16:14Jordi Hays?

  Here's what's interesting, though. So Arfa Rock.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:18Jordi Hays?

  Usually.

• 16:20John Coogan?

  It's pretty dialed.

• 16:20Jordi Hays?

  Pretty dialed.

• 16:21John Coogan?

  Pretty dialed.

• 16:22Jordi Hays?

  Pretty dialed. It's almost like he has inside information. It's almost like he somehow got.

• 16:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, we've talked about the game theory of like, does he work at a real, like, tier one venture capital firm that's like, what's the benefit of leaking everything? Is he a lawyer that's seeing all the docs turn around?

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I mean, zero benefit for a lawyer.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  Right?

• 16:41Jordi Hays?

  The.

• 16:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The rush of getting likes on the timeline is pretty universal.

• 16:45Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 16:46John Coogan?

  You're a lawyer, you're just like, I need a banger.

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  Out of fund.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 16:49Jordi Hays?

  For sure.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  And I don't, I don't know anything else.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:56Jordi Hays?

  But he's always taken the view that it can be helpful to the founder to build, because a bunch of people are going to see this.

• 17:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 17:05Jordi Hays?

  That, that this didn't sort of land in their deal flow, land on their desk, and they're going to reach out, right? So it does create momentum, but can certainly be annoying for teams as well. This was notable, though. So 200 million of LOI from B2B customers.

• 17:22John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 17:22Jordi Hays?

  And so, very curious what the enterprise play is here.

• 17:31Jordi Hays?

  But we can work on getting a cool.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Does that mean like, like through hospital networks or through like the healthcare system? Or is it like Mark Zuckerberg wants to go further? He wants to track the brainwaves of the employees, not just the mass movements.

• 17:46Jordi Hays?

  Track your screen and your brain.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  I mean, it could go either way because you imagine like Neuralink has had a bunch of traction and a bunch of amazing. I saw Nolan, the, the first patient P zero on Rogan, talking about playing COD.

• 18:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:02John Coogan?

  With the Neuralink, amazing. And you can imagine that at a certain point, like some sort of partnership.

• 18:07Jordi Hays?

  They have multiple hat form factors.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  There we go. Cat, we're hats coming.

• 18:11Jordi Hays?

  We're good. I was getting really hung up on the beanie. And like, there's so many different enterprise or B to B context. You're in a, you're in a warehouse in Dallas, Texas in the summer.

• 18:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, you don't know. Maybe this, maybe this $200 million LOIs from REI or Patagonia. You know, you don't know who makes beanies. What's the Carhartt? Carhartt makes a great beanie. Go. You don't know any of this stuff. You're, you're, you're completely out to lunch.

• 18:37Jordi Hays?

  I went through, I think I went through.

• 18:38John Coogan?

  The beanie economy.

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  Beanie economy.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 18:40Jordi Hays?

  Beanie market map. Work on it.

• 18:42John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about public.com. Public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more, all with great customer service.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  They just launched a feature today that allows you to connect your favorite chat.

• 18:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:58Jordi Hays?

  App to public.

• 18:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 19:01John Coogan?

  More important than ever, because with public, you're going to be able to go and create the S and P 499. If you don't like SpaceX or the S and P one, if you love SpaceX, you can express your opinion about SpaceX however you want.

• 19:14Jordi Hays?

  Can you please help me build an index for one company?

• 19:16John Coogan?

  Yes. Index for one company or index for everything but one company.

• 19:20Jordi Hays?

  Just buy the stock.

• 19:21John Coogan?

  SpaceX is very divisive. People are extremely optimistic in certain camps, extremely pessimistic.

• 19:27Jordi Hays?

  Goldman, Goldman, very optimistic.

• 19:29John Coogan?

  What'd they say?

• 19:29Jordi Hays?

  Goldman expects SpaceX's AI revenue to surge 100 times by 2030.

• 19:35John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 19:36Jordi Hays?

  Big, big number. I looked at this title and I was thinking like, okay, what's Grok's actual revenue today? If you take out.

• 19:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is their AI revenue today? Is it just Grok subscriptions plus Grok tokens? Do you include X subscriptions? Do you include cloud vendor and Neo cloud contracts? There's a bunch of different ways to measure it. The smaller the number, the easier it is to 100X. But we have seen other AI companies 100X revenues over two years, over three years, four years. Like, the 100X has become, it's not a one of one scenario. It's happened multiple times. And so we have seen these charts many times. And if they execute well, this is entirely possible. It is extremely.

• 20:21Jordi Hays?

  Other notable data points from the roadshow. They, the forecast anticipates SpaceX making about 360 billion of capital expenditures through 2028. Jensen, somewhere, fist pumping. Very excited about that number. Be a new hyperscaler. And anyways, very, should be unsurprising, but very aggressive. And yeah.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  I think the Nvidia OpenAI model is also live too. I saw, the new Nvidia foundation model is also live. We'll have to go check it out and look at the model card soon. See how it's benchmarking. But we got to move on to benchmark because there's new news in the benchmark world. First, I'm going to tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. So.

• 21:14Jordi Hays?

  Moment of silence?

• 21:15John Coogan?

  Moment of silence. Why is that nonsense?

• 21:17Jordi Hays?

  The end of an era.

• 21:19John Coogan?

  I guess, I guess they have been very focused for decades.

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  The last tier one, there was a pure venture capital.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  What did they get called again? Internet boys or something? Soft boys? There was some book about them that was very funny.

• 21:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:34John Coogan?

  E-boys. E-boys is a hit piece of a book title.

• 21:38Jordi Hays?

  That was a fantastic book.

• 21:39John Coogan?

  But the subtitle makes up, makes up for it. And it's a fantastic book. And it's a very interesting story where they actually let a journalist come in and see how they.

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  E-boys, the true story of the six tall men.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:50Jordi Hays?

  Back eBay, Webvan.

• 21:52John Coogan?

  He clearly wrote the subtitle and was like, I gotta take the edge off of this. It's too glazy. I gotta, I gotta take it down a notch. And so he. Uh, he, he threw the E-boys in there, but.

• 22:03Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, big moves from Benchmark.

• 22:05John Coogan?

  What's going on with that?

• 22:05Jordi Hays?

  Clark has a scoop in the Journal. Benchmark has raised $2 billion.

• 22:09John Coogan?

  $2 billion.

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  Across two new funds.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, most notably their first ever dedicated growth fund.

• 22:15John Coogan?

  Hmm. Did they hire anyone who has experienced growth investing? Who could possibly do growth investing there? Someone who's maybe like a bond capital and then founder's fund, then maybe Kleiner? Like someone with that pedigree?

• 22:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, somebody with that kind of background, I think would be fantastic.

• 22:28John Coogan?

  Pretty good for growth investing.

• 22:30Jordi Hays?

  Now that you say that though.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:33Jordi Hays?

  Ev Randall.

• 22:33John Coogan?

  Ev Randall, that's right.

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  They did pick up Ev Randall.

• 22:36John Coogan?

  They did pick him up. They're almost thinking two steps ahead there.

• 22:39Jordi Hays?

  Are they building their fund strategy now, their entire platform strategy around Ev Randall?

• 22:44John Coogan?

  Potentially, potentially. Anyway, uh, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And we are very fortunate to be joined by Alex Karp in just a minute. He's coming in to, uh, speak with us at AIP Con here. We're going to bring him in in just a minute.

• 23:06Jordi Hays?

  While we wait, Austin-based podcaster Joe Rogan reportedly being considered for 60 minutes.

• 23:13John Coogan?

  60 minutes.

• 23:15John Coogan?

  They're gonna have to call it 200 minutes.

• 23:18John Coogan?

  Cause he records long podcasts in 60 minutes.

• 23:20Jordi Hays?

  Hundreds, hundreds. It'll just be called hundreds of minutes.

• 23:22John Coogan?

  Barry, if you're listening, put us in, put us in the ring. We're ready to go. You need tech correspondent, business correspondent, someone who can just chop it up for 60 minutes. We do 60 minutes three times a day. We're ready to go. This is going to be light work for us, Barry. I'm ready, I'm ready. You could do 60 minutes right now. You could do 60 minutes tomorrow. You could do 60 minutes. You could do an extra 60 minutes easily. When you're putting up, we're putting up a thousand minutes a week. It's no problem.

• 23:48Jordi Hays?

  We did consider that at one point early on. We thought, should we do basically a morning show?

• 23:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:54Jordi Hays?

  Take a two hour break and come back and do another show?

• 23:56John Coogan?

  Late night show. Yeah, late night show maybe. Anyway.

• 23:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm still.

• 23:59John Coogan?

  We have Alex Karp here with us.

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  Here we go.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. Welcome back. Thank you so much for taking the time. We're gonna have you grab these headset? These headphones, right? Not these. You can sit here.

• 24:11Jordi Hays?

  No, no, get close, get close.

• 24:12John Coogan?

  Get in here, we got a bunch of questions.

• 24:14Jordi Hays?

  We liked it last time, the three of us were sitting here.

• 24:16Alex Karp?

  We can put the giant.

• 24:18John Coogan?

  Let's put this up here, right here. I'll sit, you can stand, this always works.

• 24:22Alex Karp?

  It makes me feel good.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, get in here, close, this is good. Okay.

• 24:25Alex Karp?

  Feel good.

• 24:26John Coogan?

  How is it going? How is AIPCon this time around? What's changed?

• 24:30Alex Karp?

  Um, well, we're in a phase, each one of these things like marks a time. First of all, you guys are even more baller, more successful.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 24:38Alex Karp?

  Some tendies in your pocket.

• 24:39John Coogan?

  I think it might have been part two of you. We gotta say thank you.

• 24:42Alex Karp?

  You know, it's like, you're looking, you're looking. You're looking bigger and stronger somehow. Hey, are you more attractive in your personal life now randomly?

• 24:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, here's what we're actually focused on, dead hangs.

• 24:52Alex Karp?

  Yeah.

• 24:53Jordi Hays?

  So you came on last time, you said your dead hangs around like five.

• 24:56Alex Karp?

  Oh, no, it's, it's, well, it's plateaued in the last couple of months at 5:30.

• 25:00Jordi Hays?

  5:30. Okay, so we, the thing is like, people are gonna hear that, they're gonna think hanging on a bar.

• 25:05John Coogan?

  Five minutes, eh, whatever.

• 25:07Jordi Hays?

  You gotta go and do it. The audience has to go try to do it. We've started doing it. We're still in the, we're still, what, between, yeah, between.

• 25:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, one in two minutes.

• 25:15Jordi Hays?

  Somewhere around a minute thirty, you feel like your tendons are gonna rip.

• 25:18Alex Karp?

  Thirty, um, 1:30 dead hang is respectable.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 25:22Alex Karp?

  Two minutes is super elite.

• 25:24Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't feel respectable when you have the five minute number, you're looking at the timer.

• 25:28Alex Karp?

  Thanks, strength matters. Now, um, the, the, the thing is, I don't wanna go into rabbit hole in training, the single biggest mistake people make is they try to hang every day, you need recovery, it's like anything else. So if you wanna mimic and get progress, you just do what I do, which is once a week, you hang as long as you can, doesn't have to be super macho, and then that's your day. So like to say, you can do 1:30.

• 25:49Jordi Hays?

  But multiple sets?

• 25:51Alex Karp?

  No, no, you know, one day a week, you do your maximum.

• 25:53John Coogan?

  Max.

• 25:53Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 25:54Alex Karp?

  So like, let's say you could do two minutes, you try to do at least 1:30, you fight to get to 1:30, but you don't fight to get to two minutes.

• 26:00John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 26:00Alex Karp?

  That's your dead hang day. And then you can basically fuck around the next day, do whatever you want, don't overdo it, but you could do two times one minute with a long break. And then, okay, you just go around, do less and less and less. Two days before, if you had two minute dead hang, you do like four times 15 seconds, the day before you take off. And you do that, just keep doing that in your day. What the mistake people make is they hear my baller time.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  They gotta come for the crown.

• 26:26Alex Karp?

  Fuck that guy.

• 26:28Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the mistake you're making is not doing a course. This could be a whole new revenue line.

• 26:32Alex Karp?

  Hey, well, you guys, I mean, you guys have it for you guys.

• 26:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:36Alex Karp?

  You could be like, hey, call in.

• 26:37Jordi Hays?

  The car method.

• 26:38Alex Karp?

  So, um, yeah, I mean, the dead hang is that it's like, and also some of it's just genetic. Like my other metrics are elite, but that this is somehow alien territory. God given gift.

• 26:49John Coogan?

  What about, uh, what about breath hold underwater?

• 26:51Alex Karp?

  I don't do that.

• 26:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 26:52Alex Karp?

  And I'm not sure I have it. Like I grew up swimming and I think I'm weaker at that. Like I bet you I'd be in your guys' container.

• 26:59John Coogan?

  I, I'm a dive master. I can hold my breath for three minutes.

• 27:02Alex Karp?

  I'm just saying, I'm just, yeah. So I think you'd be like, I think you'd be crushing me on that honestly. But you have like the lung capacity of a whale.

• 27:08John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true.

• 27:08Alex Karp?

  I mean, like, you got like, you guys like.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  If I'm not moving, I'm not using any oxygen.

• 27:12Alex Karp?

  It's like, you're like, you're like, you're like a, like a, like a whale floating out there into the ocean, waiting to surface. So, you know, I say, I'll tell you the difference. Uh, and it is, uh, God, they're always minding me out there, but like, okay. When we first met, it was like, AI, maybe real. Then I would say somehow until about two weeks ago, there was like a holy fuck, this is real. But somehow it's not working, but we're not allowed to say it publicly because we'll look stupid. And then there's a lot of investor hype.

• 27:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:43Alex Karp?

  There still is like investors printing tendies. So you have the investors on one side. I think people realize it's real, but you know, it's like, you know, you have the whole token maxing.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:54Alex Karp?

  And people are on onto that. And then so there's a whole value lecture there.

• 28:00Alex Karp?

  You have a political situation where, you know, people who do not understand basic economics are winning the political argument. So you can, you could, we could talk about where AI is.

• 28:11John Coogan?

  There's a lot here. Let's break it, let's break it up. Let's start with the token maxing thing. Let's start with what's, what's real. How are you actually thinking about deploying AI ROI?

• 28:23Jordi Hays?

  What is, what is Palantir's philosophy around token consumption?

• 28:26Alex Karp?

  Well, like we, okay, we have a product that will allow you to bait. I mean, internally it's called. Something but externally, but really we call it the demasturbatory, like get off masturbation thing internally.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 28:39Alex Karp?

  It's like, people are just like print, like sitting there all day, kind of like a porn addiction. And enterprises are like, okay, we knew this, we believe this will create value.

• 28:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:49Alex Karp?

  But we cannot have people, just like some people.

• 28:52John Coogan?

  Checking the weather with it, just like, and just rearranging deck shows on their personal Titanic.

• 28:57Alex Karp?

  Literally like porn.

• 28:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 28:59Alex Karp?

  Like people are like full on.

• 29:00John Coogan?

  It feels, it feels so.

• 29:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, tool shaped objects, right?

• 29:04Alex Karp?

  Tool shaped objects you're looking at more than you want, you hope no one notices, you're kind of before dinner, after dinner.

• 29:09John Coogan?

  It feels productive to have every email classified with tag.

• 29:12Jordi Hays?

  Here's what it comes down to, like business problems can never be, I mean, sometimes they can be solved purely with money and just spending more, but very often.

• 29:21Alex Karp?

  Actually, I think it's the opposite. So just to give you a weird analogy.

• 29:23Jordi Hays?

  No, and I was gonna say very, very often it's more the opposite where it's about figuring out the right way to do something and then you can use capital to fuel that process, but.

• 29:32Alex Karp?

  Let me give you a thing that's too generous for you guys. Okay. It, it, it's taste plus money.

• 29:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:39Alex Karp?

  And there is no, like AI, like if you look at, like to pick any issue you want to talk about, token mechanism, maxing, what's going on with deploy codes, are other people gonna build ontologies, why are, why, why does our political class not understand AI, especially in Europe?

• 29:57John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:57Alex Karp?

  It's like, yes, because all these things can be scaled in a very valuable, but largely going to commodified way, but you can't scale the taste of like, what is the business problem you want to have to solve and need to solve? At the end of the day, whether it's in the, whether it's the Ukrainians fighting, the Israelis, commercial entities, it's, there's somebody sitting there who's like, okay, but this problem is valuable, this problem isn't. And once that value, that problem is always has, that problem. Almost always, but not always has attributes. So there are some problems you could solve with this. Like, I want to write a report on GDP growth in China, right? Okay, but if it's a problem that requires a knowledge store, like, I want to understand the specialized way I underwrite. We're gonna have a guest here.

• 30:41Alex Karp?

  I want to understand the specialized way I drill for oil and gas that's both legal, ethical, and reduces the cost of production. I want to change the supply chain of my industry, whether that's military, or whether that's building boxes, or whether that's cars. These things require actual, precise, ongoing processes. They are enhanced by large language models. They are not replaced by large language models. And then you get to security issues, like, but for us, like, the whole myth of things is it's just a boon. Because like, yeah, we could take any model, their model, OpenAI model, open model. We can identify, we can now identify vulnerabilities at like 10, 100x. Yeah, but then who patches them? How do you patch them on-prem?

• 31:26Alex Karp?

  How do you patch them on-prem so that your specialized knowledge stays on-prem? Like, if you're any business or intel service, there's a lot of these things are very similar. Like, you're not putting your classified data in a public cloud. Same thing if you're like, you have a special way of farming soybeans. Well, you're not. So it's like, how do you have, how do you, so all these problems are exposed, identified, and then you always have a thing of where's the charisma? Which people really underestimate. And it's not global, there's no global charisma now. Like, so right now, the large language models are very frontier companies are super charismatic with investors. I'll give you some news. They're super not charismatic with enterprises and the people. Like, in a way-

• 32:10John Coogan?

  Even with enterprise?

• 32:11Alex Karp?

  No, no, I mean, it's like-

• 32:12John Coogan?

  Because I understand with the people-

• 32:13Alex Karp?

  No, no, the enterprise people, I have a secret, I have a secret. Like, every company has a secret way of selling. You know what my secret way of selling is? Don't even call it, don't, don't come talk to us. There's a frontier company. Go spend two days with them. And if you're lucky, after you're done, I'll let you in my door. They're like clamoring. They're like, they're like, hey, I'll take your bad brand. Whereas we have a great brand in enterprise. But like, it's like, it's like secret knowledge because the investors love this. They're like, hey, my stocks are all up, everything's up. I mean, Palantir's done very well. We're, like, it, but it's like, and you know, you guys are doing very well, I imagine, right? And it's okay, we're, you know, we can, but I'll tell you what. You go down the street, you talk to a marine, you talk to a bus driver, you talk to the person who owns the bus driving company.

• 32:55Alex Karp?

  They are not happy. They do not like these people. They're tired of people token maxing.

• 33:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:01Alex Karp?

  It looks like masturbation at their, that's cost them money. They, they're like, and honestly, then you have something we're not allowed to talk about in this country, likability. Like, apparently, we have, I think we have like 50, 100 million global fans. We have like 5 million people that wake up in the morning, literally calling me Satan. I didn't know I had that kind of warm hand. But, uh, you know, it's like, that's what they believe.

• 33:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:25Alex Karp?

  And like, and they really believe it. Okay. What people are not allowed to really address is like, we have fans and enemies.

• 33:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You're polarizing.

• 33:34Alex Karp?

  Yeah, we're polarizing, which means both sides.

• 33:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:36Alex Karp?

  These people have one side.

• 33:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:38Alex Karp?

  They're just, it is, so it's like, and it's like, it's a really big-

• 33:42John Coogan?

  Social media companies do have the same problem.

• 33:44Alex Karp?

  Yeah.

• 33:44John Coogan?

  Everyone uses them, but no one likes them.

• 33:46Alex Karp?

  Yeah, but then they also live in a circle, and that circle's printing money.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:50Alex Karp?

  So it's like, you know, when you look in the mirror and you just printed a lot of money, you look pretty fresh.

• 33:55Jordi Hays?

  Is part of it, is part of it that, that some element of the technology, let's just say LLMs, is so magical that the companies involved, that the companies that are making and selling Frontier Intelligence can be bad at a bunch of other things and still grow.

• 34:11Alex Karp?

  Well, no, no, no, they are magical at a certain kind of thing, allowing you to write, for example, code. Now, that code doesn't, can't be used as a knowledge store. So if you look at code in like three different ways, like just using Palantir's model, we have code that's basically infrastructure. So what are the Ukrainians using? What is the Department of War using? What do a lot of our enterprises, we call that primitives. It's basically hardcoded things that, that understand the world. The way you do, it would take millions of technical hours and an understanding of all these enterprises to do it. So it's, it's much more like, how do you build a steel beam? Then you have like code that is written by FDEs. Okay, so that's kind of managed. The reason why FDEs work, the secret is it's actually managed in something that we as a product.

• 34:55Alex Karp?

  So you're writing to a code base, we're managing that, we're increasing our product. It's not just random people writing. Then you have, let's call it free code. That free code is, that's magical. Like you can do it very quickly, it's almost right, it doesn't have to be exactly.

• 35:08John Coogan?

  Dashboards.

• 35:08Alex Karp?

  Dashboards, financial stuff.

• 35:10John Coogan?

  Little flow.

• 35:11Alex Karp?

  Probabilities, sick stuff where you just have to get it.

• 35:13John Coogan?

  One-off analysis.

• 35:14Alex Karp?

  It was magical. By the way, it's magical and not only creates, and it's magical in a way. I know people don't like the porn thing, but it's also addicting. It's like, you know, it's not good for you, but you know, it may lead to damage.

• 35:26John Coogan?

  One more dashboard.

• 35:27Alex Karp?

  One more time, it can't hurt that much. I know my doctor says I shouldn't do it, but it's like, it's like that, right? And you just keep going, and like, and if you're involved in that thing, you're also making money.

• 35:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:39Alex Karp?

  And then last not least, in certain circles, like if you have, you want to be a researcher or you believe essentially it's a religion. So like, you know, and like, one of the things, it's very charismatic, especially to people who've never had a religion. Cause all of a sudden that hole in your heart that was yearning for, I don't know, I would say, you know, a, a established religion, Judaism, Christianity, Islam. Is like being filled.

• 36:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:03Alex Karp?

  And, and all the answers are there, but it is very, very successful at doing things that a company has to do. But it is not actually solving the problem that enterprises are, it is, now it can solve them, that's the trick. It's not, it's not binary. It's not like, you can't say they're not valuing it. They're totally putting our business on steroids. Like without LLMs, nobody would be talking about our ontology, about Apollo managing secure exploits. About our ability to manage an enterprise essentially, as turning all these companies into FDEs. These deploy codes, we love them because now every company wants a deploy code. You know how you do that? You re-platform on Palantir and like, and it actually works. It's not somebody with no taste, who's never done enterprise, who has no earthly clue how these things work.

• 36:48Alex Karp?

  Who's done something else and is like, just imagining they know how to do it, right?

• 36:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, as part, as part of this moment.

• 36:55Jordi Hays?

  Quite entertaining for you because you guys have been working on understanding businesses at a deep fundamental level, creating, you guys have effectively been doing the work that it, that people are promising AI could do for 20 years now, but actually doing it, finding all the really rough, finding all the really rough edges and, and not, and being at a point where you don't have to oversell the technology, you can sell all things, but now there's maybe, here we go, we got it together. Now there's maybe.

• 37:31John Coogan?

  Oh, it's the wrong side, that's why. Flip it around.

• 37:35Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 37:37Jordi Hays?

  There you go, there you go, living the brand, living the brand.

• 37:40Alex Karp?

  Hopefully we got that, I don't know, all this stuff wasn't recorded.

• 37:42Jordi Hays?

  I trailed off, but, but is part of it entertaining to you that it feels like, you know, Palantir has always been, in some ways, not had competitors, because there's nobody with Alex Karp running a company that is, does what Palantir does, besides Palantir. But at the same time, there's been tens of billions of dollars deployed now to effectively do what Palantir does, but just selling the intelligence part, not selling all the underlying kind of infrastructure that you have.

• 38:14Alex Karp?

  Well, they're doing two things. They're selling, they're trying to sell the intelligence part, and they're trying to pretend if you just hire a bunch of people and let them run around their FTEs. Now, the, the very cool thing is when you've been in your basement doing your thing and everyone kind of use it as the freak show, it, it's really interesting and, and, and great to have adoption. The pretty ironic thing is, half the people adopting now don't even know they're copying. But now, the copying thing, it helps and hurts. Where it hurts is in the beginning, it puts clutter in the market.

• 38:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:50Alex Karp?

  And there's, there's no doubt about it. Where it helps, and then we saw this with defense tech, honestly. So like in defense tech, we were the only people, we were the first people, despite what I, I love these, honestly, other podcasters, they're interviewing people or parroting things I said 20 years ago, they don't know it. And it's like, oh, that's so insightful. It's like, yeah, of course it's insightful. Carp said 25 years ago. And like, but it's, but so that kind of, that part is super weird, but, and like, but, but it's, but what really happens when we see is like, it expands the market. So like in defense tech, we would not be doing this well. In, just purely in government, unless there weren't 50 companies that were doing similar things. Because then the people are like, okay, first of all.

• 39:34Jordi Hays?

  You view it as like off balance sheet, sales resources.

• 39:37Alex Karp?

  Well, it's off, well, now that, that's the large, it's, they do two things. They increase the size of the market because de facto, nobody wants to find it underrated market where there's only one person.

• 39:49Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 39:50Alex Karp?

  So like, if you're the one person, the percentage of the defense budget you can get is much smaller. And two, they set up a comparator. It's like, you know, you may not like the freak show. Okay. If like, but have you noticed the people who are serious buy it? And then, then it changed, and then three, it changes the standard. Now, what you're seeing now is like that times 100x.

• 40:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:12Alex Karp?

  And it does change like recruiting, retention, and like how you build a company. And we're, we're always think, you have to think about how to, being dyslexic is a huge advantage there. Cause like, you don't have a playbook and now that we need, you need things to shift and we're doing that. The, the, the central thing though, that it's just cannot be developed. Even if you understood the playbook, a lot of these things are like, appear like, it's like, you know, LM code appears like pounder code, but isn't for deployed thing, appears like pounder, it isn't ontology, you could theoretically copy parts of it, but they're essentially structures that are built deep into organizations that we own. And by the way, take you three years and then three years, we're in a completely different world, but. There is this magical thing called taste.

• 40:55Alex Karp?

  Like, in the end of the day, the reason why you guys have done so well. It's, of course, there's aptitude and diligence and showing up and all those things. Yeah, but you have to be able to differentiate between two people who are in business, one of whom is saying something that sounds weird that is insightful, one of whom is parroting something that sounds weird and that's all they're doing. And a lot of people, very few people can do that. And if you have the same thing, like, the enterprises that succeed, there is a taste arbiter. And at Palantir, we have taste, we have taste in every product, taste in every deployment, taste in every casting. Who puts the people there? How do you put them there? How do you organize the thing? Our ontology then does that technically. How do you manage the whole arg with taste? Who should be in charge?

• 41:40Alex Karp?

  What data sets should come in? What are the ways in which you protect? What is, what should you push into the public crowd? What should be on-prem? What, what should, I mean, leaving aside the law and like wars or ethics, what do you want to protect? What should you protect? What should you not protect? Because, quite frankly, you want that to be out there so you can get more data. All those things are arbitred by taste and then you have to have the credibility of having taste. That's a real problem for a lot of these places because they don't have, they're popular with their friends, they don't, they really don't understand how unpopular they are in enterprise. Like, they think it's like, oh yeah, it's like the way I think I have a problem with like professors at Columbia. It's like, no, it's a real problem. Like, they think I'm Satan.

• 42:22Alex Karp?

  And, you know, it's like, I, I, I think, you know, we grew up in the same community. Let's talk about Heidegger. They're like, they don't want to talk about Heidegger. So, it's like, it's like, yeah, and so, that's just a, it's a weird thing. It's gonna be a super, the one thing I would say for anyone listening, if you're listening to this and you're chillaxing and not active, I'm not saying you have to agree with me politically or anything. Yep. There, the, like, partly because of this dynamic and it's very self-inflicted because, I, I, I'll tell you, I can't name names. I called Many of the Titans of this world and like started this six months ago, like every couple of days. We're going to be.

• 42:59Jordi Hays?

  You call them every couple of days?

• 43:01Alex Karp?

  Like some of them, I'm like, yeah, we're gonna be, I mean, you know, it's like, honestly, they're like the batch. They they find me very entertaining. Like, I'm not sure. Like, so they call, because, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like, oh, yeah, this is gonna be entertaining.

• 43:11John Coogan?

  You're gonna pick out.

• 43:11Alex Karp?

  Yeah. So, in any case, so I've been telling them for six months, we're gonna be nationalized.

• 43:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:18Alex Karp?

  We're going to be nationalized. And they're like, why would anyone nationalize? Never happened in America. It's never, why would anyone nationalize us? We're so likable. We're creating so much value. Like, okay, I'm not gonna debate that. I know how likable I am. I'm not gonna tell you how likable you are. But I am telling you, and you know, the momentum on this is on the side of people in national. And we don't get our act together and figure out ways we can say, hey, look, there are problems here we're gonna deal with. These things are not gonna, yes, they are gonna create opportunities. You have to talk openly about how these things are valuable because we have adversaries. You can't just say these things, all that stuff. So the primary risk, honestly, to Palantir and a lot of these other countries is, and then it's going to be nationalized.

• 44:00Alex Karp?

  Before national, it's gonna be regulated by people who don't understand this. And now they'll tell you in private, I'm working on this, I'm da, da, da, and this is in this lobby. It's just like, not gonna work. So like, that's something like, if you're listening to this and you're like, look, you know, you don't have to agree with me on all my proclamations. I got a lot of. By the way, there's some people who think I'm saying we should have a draft, too lazy to read. I'm just saying we should, like, in a world where everything is changing. Everything is changing. Don't we have to find some communal structure to remember we're American? You don't like my, you don't like my idea of like, we all do a week in the park? Great. Come up with some other idea. We can have no idea, you know, and like, and then they're like, well, I'm saying I do not want a draft, just to be explicit. They're like, oh, that's pro war.

• 44:42Alex Karp?

  No, honestly, you know, most of our wars are fought because no working class person is making a decision. You start making sure everyone is involved in everything. I'll see you how few wars we fight. It's actually the anti-war position. But in any case, disagree with everything. If you're, we have on the right and on the left people, people who have no earthly clue what they're talking about, right and left. All they're talking about is how much they hate us. And those of us who are sensible in the middle. You know, too many of us are chill waxing like it like nationalization, it can't happen. America would never do that.

• 45:13John Coogan?

  Sleepwalking.

• 45:14Alex Karp?

  Sleepwalking into and you guys have tendies to protect now. You guys should be on the front line of this. Like you got full to, oh, I'm sorry. I have a, I have a full on very impressive corporate leader coming on. So I gotta, I gotta turn it down.

• 45:27Jordi Hays?

  Last question, last question, if we have time. How are your conversations going with Fortune 500 CEOs around headcount planning? There's been so many layoffs this last year that people were saying, hey, we're getting so much out of AI. We're able to, you know, cut back here or there. People inside tech often know like these, maybe there's just a reduction because there needed to be a reduction. Or got bloated, maybe they do need to fund some AI initiatives.

• 45:57John Coogan?

  Declining business model, like getting outcompeted by someone.

• 46:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the business just doesn't have momentum, but how are those conversations going? What does it look like?

• 46:03Alex Karp?

  Like the, like I, by the way, I talked to Fortune 500 companies, I talked to unions, I talked to soldiers, I talked to fire. If you upscale somebody, they're more valuable.

• 46:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 46:14Alex Karp?

  And like all these, whether it's people working on batteries, people driving trucks, people, corporate leaders. And again, this is where I think we have to be very careful to be more disciplined on the corporate side. Like if you run around saying AI allowed you to fire two thirds of your workforce and you did it because maybe your competitor's kicking your ass.

• 46:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:32Alex Karp?

  That could, that is a really like, you might as well just go sign up for Bernie Sanders manifest. And part of the thing is they really believe that can't happen. So they're free riding on the fact that it could. Like we have, and it just cannot work anymore. These things are very, very explosive. The American people sense that there is something dangerous here. And when people are playing with that fire, it's like, it's a, they assume the fire won't burn their hands. That's not the world we're in. That fire is going to consume us. And what we see, again, the warfighting example is just the most neutral, not for everybody. But like the soldiers at the bottom have gotten much more valuable.

• 47:09Alex Karp?

  And I don't even just mean the special operators, which obviously they're in a different league, but like every, the people doing a lot of the operations now are doing our product, they're high school. Vocationally trained, you see this everywhere. The, the, the modern enterprise is going to have like we have a, a, a true like very, very, very smart person coming on and it's like you're going to have a very smart executive. He's much better at hiding it than I would be if I were him, but that's, you can talk to him about that. But, um,

• 47:41Alex Karp?

  and, uh, and then very talented, creative people with taste all up and down the stack. Any case, I think this is time for me to

• 47:49John Coogan?

  This is time.

• 47:50Alex Karp?

  We, uh,

• 47:51John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  Great to catch up.

• 47:52John Coogan?

  Always fun.

• 47:54Alex Karp?

  Oh, they want me to stay for two minutes or what? I'm only going to stay, look, but he's got to be the star.

• 48:00John Coogan?

  Uh, the other headset is great.

• 48:02Alex Karp?

  Put him, put, you know, go in here. Yeah. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna take off after a minute.

• 48:07John Coogan?

  And why don't you, you know, put that headset on.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  Carl, why don't you introduce our guest?

• 48:12John Coogan?

  Microphone on the left.

• 48:13Alex Karp?

  Well, I, you know, let, he's, he's, he's one of the smarter people in, in business. Has developed

• 48:23Alex Karp?

  unique ways to underwrite that did not involve firing people. And someone, and someone I admire.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  Thanks, Alex.

• 48:31Alex Karp?

  With that, I'm gonna let you guys go. Make sure to tell them that the ontology powers.

• 48:37Speaker 03

  Always selling. Hey, thanks for coming on the show. It's great to meet you.

• 48:40John Coogan?

  Thank you. Uh, yeah, please, uh, kick us off with like a bit of a more formal introduction.

• 48:46Speaker 03

  Yes, I'm Peter Zaffino. Um, I'm the executive chairman as effective on Monday of, of AIG. I used to be the chairman and CEO and have, you know, worked with the company for nine years to help transform it. It was in a place where underwriting profitability was challenging, operations were challenging, data was challenging, capital was challenging. Uh, so, you know, had a great team of people with me to transform the company.

• 49:11John Coogan?

  So give us a, give us a shape of the business in terms of the different business lines, the different products, the international footprint, the workforce, like what, give us the scope and the scale here.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  Global company with a little bit of a unique footprint. We're 50% international, 50% North America. But our second largest country after US is Japan.

• 49:31John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  We have a big business in India.

• 49:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  And then we have a very big business in the UK. We do complicated risks. So you could think about what's happening in the Middle East now with shipping, marine, energy. We're heavily involved in that.

• 49:46John Coogan?

  So something where there's not an existing futures contract that a company can just go and hedge. It's not, no. Oh, I'm going to buy some oil futures because I fly planes around and I know I'm going to need diesel fuel in a couple of months. And so I'm going to hedge that out. This is for more complex risks.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  It's for more complex risks.

• 50:03John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 50:03Speaker 03

  And you know, think about the largest, you know, sort of customers in the world and big oil companies, you know, Fortune 500 companies. But we also have a personal insurance business, which will cover things like accident, health.

• 50:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:16Speaker 03

  That are distribution to consumers.

• 50:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:19Speaker 03

  So we have a real balance.

• 50:20John Coogan?

  Part of that feels like if you're talking about insuring a Fortune 500 company against a geopolitical risk, that feels like a meeting that takes place in a boardroom. It feels like there's a lot of folks with a lot of trust built up over years to understand each other's businesses. But then there's probably a lot of other underwriting happening and teams putting together comps and spreadsheets and data. And I want to know about the intersection there. It feels like the business is, and I don't know if it ever will be, just one click checkout for insurance products for Fortune 500 companies. But what is the interface between the quantitative, the qualitative, the relationship and the data? And then how is that changing?

• 51:01Speaker 03

  So the quantitative, you have to start at the portfolio level.

• 51:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  And you want as much data as you possibly can to look at deterministic.

• 51:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  Modeling, probabilistic, and then stochastic. And I think once you understand, like you're mean and you understand the standard deviation around that, then you have to apply it to, you know, sort of the widgets, which is each policy.

• 51:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  Throughout, you know, the globe as well as. Ways in which you structure insurance.

• 51:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:25Speaker 03

  So for us.

• 51:25John Coogan?

  You can't look at, you can't look at an individual policy in, in isolation. You're, you're managing portfolio risk, risk to the entire firm. And, and that's something that's happening probably 24/7, I imagine.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  It's hard, and that's what led me to Alex Karp.

• 51:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  You know, it's, it's hard to get the aggregation done.

• 51:42John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 51:42Speaker 03

  Anything that looks like real time.

• 51:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  It's usually static. It can be 30, 60, 90 days.

• 51:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 51:48Speaker 03

  And your portfolio could change. I mean, it's not going to change dramatically, but having the ability to, you know, sort of assess risk and use the quantitative data.

• 51:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  To make better decisions on a daily basis is the aspiration of the way the company's going.

• 51:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:01Jordi Hays?

  Take us back to your first meeting with Karp. Curious what the experience was like. It's a unique individual.

• 52:07John Coogan?

  Call you?

• 52:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I was actually introduced by a board member many years ago. And it was really in this pursuit of not necessarily foundry or AIP or ontology. That's where it led us, but it was more on sort of the quantitative ways in which I was looking at the portfolio. And could he help me think through computing? And could he help you think through sort of portfolio optimization? And I just got more and more intrigued. I mean, you see the brain. I mean, he just thinks about things. He doesn't hold back. I mean, so he's, so I always knew where he stood with, with me and with AIG, but just developed a very strong trusting relationship. And they're such a tremendous partner that we're able to iterate with them

• 52:52Speaker 03

  almost like no other company, because we do things in 90 day increments. Because going out like a year or two years is, is too static. And so we actually build our relationship on 90 day goals.

• 53:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 53:03Speaker 03

  And that's been incredibly effective.

• 53:05John Coogan?

  What is, you know, a lot of the AI companies talk about scaling laws, exponential growth and token production, or even revenue in many cases. But what's growing exponentially in your business? Are you bringing exponentially more data into the platform every year? Exponentially more compute resources, teams, number of policies? Like what, what is the, what is the thing that's experiencing a boom right now?

• 53:32Speaker 03

  Most important part, I believe, in terms of business is that you have to have a business solution you're trying to solve for. So for us, it was more data,

• 53:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:41Speaker 03

  Better data.

• 53:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:42Speaker 03

  And then reduce cycle time. So in other words, like when we get the data that comes in from our distribution partners, how fast can we get it with higher quality data and more data to the underwriter to make decisions?

• 53:54John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  And then how do we actually make the adjustments?

• 53:57John Coogan?

  What's the example of distribution partner in this context?

• 53:59Speaker 03

  So it'd be like a insurance broker or insurance agent.

• 54:02John Coogan?

  Makes sense, yeah.

• 54:03Speaker 03

  Or, you know, someone who has their client is a customer.

• 54:07John Coogan?

  Sell your product effectively. Exactly, okay.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 54:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. What else, Jordy? Do you have something?

• 54:13Jordi Hays?

  Where was I gonna go? The...

• 54:17Speaker 03

  Alex wants us to cover ontology.

• 54:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll get there. So there's been, we primarily, I mean, we at least started covering early-stage startups. There's been a debate in our kind of little sub-industry right now around a bunch of new insurance-focused startups that are growing incredibly quickly. And there's a debate going on. Is one, maybe AI makes it more possible to underwrite risk? And if you can do that well, grow very quickly. The other side, you know, says, hey, you know, if you're hyper scaling an insurance company, maybe that's not, maybe you don't want to work with a company that is, you know, going through that hyper...

• 55:01John Coogan?

  The iron law of the universe.

• 55:02Jordi Hays?

  Yes, yes, maybe.

• 55:03John Coogan?

  What goes up fast must come down fast.

• 55:04Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, talk about, talk about what AI has actually enabled, where you're excited about it, where it's failing broadly, maybe where it's overhyped. And you can, I guess, tie that into everything you built with Palantir.

• 55:20Speaker 03

  There's never been a time, in my opinion, whether it was, you know, introduction to fintech and sure tech, how to use algorithms, how to build data lakes and repositories for data. There's never been a time... In my professional career, so it's 35 years in big companies. Yeah. That I've seen the ability to change how an organization actually runs itself. And that can come from big companies like Palantir or Google. Or it could come from, you know, companies that are being funded by venture. And have a very specific niche that can be, you know, additive to the organization. And what I think is happening, we talked about the sort of data ingestion portion, getting that into a digital workflow.

• 56:06Speaker 03

  Using large language models to extract more data from what comes in. But also helping underwriters make decisions that are, you know, more comprehensive. You also have the ability in the way in which you service customers to be much better through the use of AI. I think companies generally, my observations are struggling with the orchestration of how you actually drive agents, people and data. Into an organization and once that is solved and it's certainly on its way, capabilities are there. Then you start to think about the entire end to end chain being very different. Yeah. What I think about Palantir, while they've been such a critical partner, as long as we evolved together.

• 56:49Speaker 03

  But in that data ingestion, to be able to take structured, unstructured, text, all sorts of data and get it into a workflow. And a fraction of the time helps us on the things that I tried to achieve is like we have now. Data that we probably wouldn't have used before because it wasn't good. Or we couldn't translate it, couldn't get it into the digital workflow. And then we start to build out an ontology. And I really do think it's incredibly important. If there's one thing I look at for our organization, certainly the advancements of LLMs. Their ability to do things more autonomously now where we started with the binary gen AI. Now we're into a Gentic AI where it can just do things autonomously for so much longer. Without the ontology of actually building, like what the sort of digital twin of your business looks like.

• 57:34Speaker 03

  Where are you taking, how you evolve it becomes very challenging. So we've been able to do things with Palantir. I'll use the ontology example again, we did the full ontology of AIG. And then we went to look at an acquisition called Everest, which had about $2 billion a premium. We got Palantir into work with our team, we could build an ontology of Everest's portfolio on top of ours in four days. And quite frankly, what we started to learn again about that evolution is that. You always relied on data lakes or global data repositories. What we found is that we could get, you know, sort of foundry and start to build out this ontology with going to the admin platforms. All of a sudden, these repositories and the central places of getting data and make

• 58:18Speaker 03

  sure it's scrubbed wasn't as relevant. So I think we continue to advance that in, in the way in which we are looking at our business.

• 58:25John Coogan?

  I have a la- I have one last question. Just on the actual change management, the organization, like how the office feels, how did you go about actually working with Palantir? Do you set up your own internal Palantir workforce who sits alongside FDEs? Do you let Palantir come in and plug in like one person per team that you have set up? Like, was there a best practice? Did you go with the best practice? Like, what was the actual, like, experience of deploying the forward deployed engineers? They get deployed into the organization. That's got to be a unique situation.

• 59:03Speaker 03

  First is making sure Alex and then, you know, two of the senior executives, Ryan and Ted, that everybody knows what we're trying to do together. So we start there. Then we wanted to embed the engineers with our team. So if we had a business leader that was trying to drive the underwriting output, you'd have, you know, technology from AIG, you would have some of the change management, but you have the engineers sitting there with our teams throughout the entire process. Because the iteration is really important in terms of translating what you're trying to achieve from the business side, and the engineers actually helping us think through the application of some of the LLMs or ways in which we could circumvent some of the things that we were doing.

• 59:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Jordan, anything else?

• 59:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  Well, insurance has to be the most important topic.

• 59:44Jordi Hays?

  No, no. The last, if we do have a second, I don't know, I was not sure on timing. What, how are you, how are you thinking about, you know, workforce planning? Asked Karp about this, and he said to ask you.

• 59:58John Coogan?

  Token budgets.

• 59:59Jordi Hays?

  You know, we've, we've stayed, you know, as, as you've had this way, wave of AI layoffs, we've been over and over and over reminded people that if you have an individual and you give them more capability, you make them more productive, you make them more efficient. A thriving business will want to hire more people, right? Because you can get more out of every individual. And so we've tried to remind people that over and over and over as you know, companies that oftentimes are, you know, underperforming or bloated for whatever reason. But what's your kind of philosophy around hiring, headcount planning, RIFs, all that stuff in this kind of new era?

• 1:00:39Speaker 03

  We've been focusing on, I heard Alex at the tail end and I agree with him. So we're focusing on growth. We're focusing on reskilling and actually training our employees to be in a different part of the workflow. Now, you would do this, I believe in all of this, you have to still have great end to end process. And so things that have been, the human's been an LLM trained how to do things like outside of a normal workflow has to, you have to get rid of that. So I think that's just normal business.

• 1:01:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Speaker 03

  But you know, our aspiration is not to implement, you know, AI or anything that we're doing with our partners to eliminate jobs. I mean, it's about growth, reskilling and finding ways in different markets to have exponential growth and opportunity and having a lot more insight in the business that we run.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  That's a great optimistic vision. I love it. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  Thanks for coming on.

• 1:01:27John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your time. And up next.

• 1:01:29Jordi Hays?

  Next.

• 1:01:30John Coogan?

  We have Chad Wahlquist. First, I'm going to tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Chad?

• 1:01:40Jordi Hays?

  Great overcoat. That's a new one.

• 1:01:42Speaker 04

  It's a popular one.

• 1:01:43Jordi Hays?

  That's an Aliano special.

• 1:01:44Speaker 04

  It is.

• 1:01:45John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. He is the master.

• 1:01:48Jordi Hays?

  Giving us a run for our money.

• 1:01:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's fantastic. Anyway, kick us off with an introduction on yourself, how you fit into Palantir, a little bit of backstory. I'm sure we have a ton of questions to run through.

• 1:01:57Jordi Hays?

  First, how often do you guys do these things? Because it feels like this feels like an annual, it feels like an annual event.

• 1:02:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:03Jordi Hays?

  But, but.

• 1:02:04John Coogan?

  We're getting the call every three months now.

• 1:02:06Jordi Hays?

  Carp talks about, you know, manipulating time. You know, a quarter at Palantir is like a day or a year at another company.

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  That is exactly.

• 1:02:14Jordi Hays?

  So that kind of makes sense.

• 1:02:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm like actually 23.

• 1:02:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, the time warp is really, we do these quarterly. So I'm a forward deployed architect, technically.

• 1:02:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:24Speaker 04

  I do what is needed.

• 1:02:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:26Speaker 04

  And so doing the needful is kind of the Palantir way is like, there's no job below me. And so no matter if I'm out on the edge with customers, I'm talking to executives, explaining the ontology, doing YouTube videos. That's all what I'm doing. So really the goal is how do we help people decomp problems differently and apply the technology in ways?

• 1:02:41John Coogan?

  Can AI do decomp?

• 1:02:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:02:44John Coogan?

  Okay, unpack that because that feels like the secret sauce. That feels like the special thing about Palantir is actually being able to bring someone in who understands an organization. I think a lot of people see AI tools. A lot of people see AI tools. No, a lot of people see AI tools and they and they think, okay, very defined workflow, input, output, but now instead of just math that Python can deal with, you can deal with some text and that's great. But decomp, to me, has always felt less like, let's go into your HR system and understand the basic job description and like, oh, someone uploaded this resume versus, oh, Steve actually does this completely

• 1:03:23John Coogan?

  outside of that system and marketing has two, two platforms for this thing and engineering has three systems for CAD files and they're all the kluges that have built up over decades, sometimes hundreds of years for some of these organizations. Like, that's what was so special about the forward deployed engineer program, the Palantir model. I'm surprised to hear you say AI can do it at all. It feels like the final boss.

• 1:03:49Speaker 04

  Well, this is where the really the Palantir thesis is humans and AI working together. And so the way we think about this is modeling our business process. We heard some other people talking about this of modeling my business process and the ontology. Because the LMS doesn't don't necessarily have a worldview or world model of your business and your operations, the ontology provides that. And so when we talk about decomp, this is really about actually now I make more data computables. Well, so we think about LMS on the agents and I'm interacting with, but also we use LMS to make more data computable and then model that in ontology of how things are really working. And so what we're actually doing a lot of times now is is building out that worldview and then running multiple agents over this actually being combative towards each other, right? And so actually working against each other and having critiques.

• 1:04:35Speaker 04

  And so after you do that, you can also then give the human, human in the loop feedback about this and iterate on this. And what we find is that's really a scaling mechanism. It's like a new power tool, right? I think you guys were just talking about this, the kind of the perspective around jobs and all this stuff. It's like when you gave carpenters power tools, there weren't less carpenters, there were more. I could do more with it. It's an empowering thing.

• 1:04:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. So how often, like, I'm interested in the, like, the pie in the sky Palantir pitch, understand your entire business, run your entire business on. Palantir and then some of the nitty gritty where sometimes like the low hanging fruit is like, wait, there's a like, there's someone's job to just like, take a form and type it into a sheet. Like, we have, we've had image recognition for a long time. Let's actually go and implement that and get that into a database, get that into the ontology, get that into Palantir. So then we can start building on top of it. And it feels like there might be a tension there. Obviously, both processes are speeding up.

• 1:05:34John Coogan?

  But how do you, how do you sort of like, keep the project centered around the big goal? While still chopping wood on all the things that actually need to happen?

• 1:05:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think this comes back to the forward deployed piece and like, what do we deliver? Outcomes. And we work backwards from that, rather than, hey, I have this data, I'm going to build a data warehouse, and then I'll build reports because all my data is in one place.

• 1:05:52John Coogan?

  That's, that's the, that's the field of dreams and no one shows up. Yep.

• 1:05:55Speaker 04

  Right. And so really, when we decomp things and work backwards from that, you know, the simple things like the form filling out, there's a lot of that. Now, the one approach that we see a lot is, you know, enterprise software is going to force you into their box.

• 1:06:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:06:07Speaker 04

  Right. You go fit, you go fit into this box.

• 1:06:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10Speaker 04

  Well, then, you know, okay, did I take away the special sauce, which was my company? Because people were doing these, all these kind of amalgamations, hey, 40 ways to do a PO.

• 1:06:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:18Speaker 04

  Well, maybe it is okay to do 40 ways, but my software can't handle it and it's fragmented, right? And so there's, there's actually a middle ground because, you know, for a long time, customization was kind of a four letter word, right? No one wanted to do that. And I think that's where we think about malleable software. Actually, how do we help you be more different, not more similar?

• 1:06:34John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:06:35Speaker 04

  And that's so that when we decomp problems, thinking about not only the, the kind of the quantitative piece, but the qualitative piece and the people and process around this, how do we enable those people to do the things that made them special?

• 1:06:47John Coogan?

  Is, is software getting more malleable? Because I, I can look at it two ways. I can look at, one, you know, obviously, AI agents are incredible at coding. They can run, they, they can make changes very, very quickly that would take you a day in just a few minutes.

• 1:07:02Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:07:03John Coogan?

  At the same time, I see, you know, so many screenshots of people saying, I implemented this feature. Again, the GitHub is plus a million lines of code. And at a certain point, like, the context window is growing as fast as the code generation is growing. Like, there's a, I'm a believer in the answer to bad slop is good slop and more slop, maybe. But what are you actually seeing on the malleability of software? Because sometimes the most malleable software in the past has been, oh, well, there was a really incredible engineer who figured out this problem and baked it down to a 2000 line repo.

• 1:07:37Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:07:37John Coogan?

  And you can actually just put in your own context window. So it becomes more malleable and you can use it as a building block.

• 1:07:42Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:07:43John Coogan?

  And that feels like that's going away. And I want to make sure that we've, that we're ready for when it goes away and it remains malleable.

• 1:07:50Speaker 04

  Well, I think what, what's missing is the, the malleable enterprise scaffolding that you.

• 1:07:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:07:54Speaker 04

  And that's what we think about the ontology and foundry and the platform. And then Apollo that allows us to go deploy these changes.

• 1:08:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:08:00Speaker 04

  And so it gives us the right amount of structure, but the right amount of freedom. So I think that's the balance we try to find is that malleable, malleability in the middle, where we can actually scale, we can enable people to do things differently, while still creating enterprise, you know, grade, robust, secure, scalable software. And so it's actually a balance there about how I can enable that engineer that, you know, has been doing that. Now they can write code much faster, they can oversee things. And that enterprise scaffolding in the middle allows us to actually create the right guardrails, create a safe system of work for them to go develop things in. And then it's also the feedback loop. So the other thing that we do with our ontology and our platforms is implicit and explicit feedback from users using it. So the OODA loop that I create and really that OODA loop allows our customers as they're

• 1:08:44Speaker 04

  doing workflows, they're giving feedback to agents. Now can agents help them do more?

• 1:08:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:48Speaker 04

  Based on the feedback. So both explicitly saying, hey, that was wrong and this sucked, or I chose this option. Now, if you do that enough, agents can start to learn from this. We actually store that in our ontology to allow it to scale. So it's really that human centric process around AI. AI is not like, we shouldn't be thinking about AI from the sake of AI for AI. It's AI to enable humans to do more.

• 1:09:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07Speaker 04

  That's the frame.

• 1:09:08John Coogan?

  OODA loop, observe, orient, decide, act.

• 1:09:11Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:09:11John Coogan?

  Right? I have a different question, but you can, you can go.

• 1:09:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, if you were giving, if you had 30 minutes to give feedback to the AI labs, what are the kind of key areas? Let's say the frontier labs, right? Leading models. What, uh, what are the kind of key areas that you would be focused on?

• 1:09:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think when we think about the enterprise space, you know,

• 1:09:34Jordi Hays?

  One, you're like, don't compete with us.

• 1:09:36Speaker 04

  No, actually, like, I think optionality is a good thing. Like, I am agnostic to where you store your data, where you store, what model you choose, what compute you use. So like, we can allow you to use any of that. Because the last thing that actually drives an outcome is replatforming, moving to another.

• 1:09:51John Coogan?

  And that goes back to the on-prem culture, the secure cloud cultures, ITAR compliance. Like, this is in the DNA of the company.

• 1:09:58Speaker 04

  And so how do we actually enable people where they are?

• 1:10:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Speaker 04

  Instead of the focus on, oh, if you replatform everything to Palantir, everything will be great. And like, well, actually, you've probably been replatforming for years. Can we enable what you have to go do these new things? So when we think about like, the model companies and it's, you know, how do we ensure that we can get the feedback loops around, you know, tool usage? And, you know.

• 1:10:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's the kind of, that's the kind of stuff I was wanting to get your point of view on. It's like, I'm sure you're getting into the nitty gritty with individual models, where, where they're spiky, where there's, you know, where there's shortcomings, et cetera.

• 1:10:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we, we actually just launched, I just put a YouTube video out last week on this, a new tool called Evolve. We talked about it in the kind of the halftime show where customers are using actually AI to help them understand which model. So like, maybe, you know, the meme around, hey, make it exist first and then make it good.

• 1:10:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:49Speaker 04

  Most of the time I see people building with agents, they're using the latest frontier model.

• 1:10:53John Coogan?

  Always.

• 1:10:53Speaker 04

  I just got it working.

• 1:10:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:55Speaker 04

  And then all of a sudden, the token maxing and everything else, and you're like, oh, my gosh, I just blew through my whole budget.

• 1:10:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:00Speaker 04

  So we built a tool called Evolve that will actually go analyze the logs in production about how these models are operating, what people are doing with them, the architecture over it. And actually be able to swap out different models from different providers. Or, hey, actually, for most of this workflow, you can use this model that's older and actually, without thinking and test time compute, it's more deterministic.

• 1:11:20John Coogan?

  Or even cached models.

• 1:11:21Speaker 04

  Cash models. And then, or, hey, if you actually just have this piece of data in ontology, then you would eliminate all this in 50% of your cost.

• 1:11:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:28Speaker 04

  And so, you know, some of those customers, McCarthy talked about this at our halftime. They, they were able to, in two days, eliminate 60% of their token cost. By re-architecting, picking a different model and prompt tuning. So it's the combination of all those. The permutations get really hard, especially when it's in this probabilistic models. We have tools to do this in the deterministic.

• 1:11:47John Coogan?

  Prompt tuning, it's a, instead of don't make mistakes, it's okay to make some mistakes. If the mistake is going to cost just a little bit, I'm fine because don't make any mistakes. That's going to cost me a fortune.

• 1:11:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, there, there, there was some chatter yesterday around something a model was doing to be more efficient was talking and like this bad.

• 1:12:09John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, man.

• 1:12:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Cave man prompting.

• 1:12:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. The cave man prompt method actually works.

• 1:12:14Jordi Hays?

  What, how, how often are you working with a company that is having, call it like a mini chat GPT moment within their enterprise? And then they're just like, let's not tell anyone about this. Because I imagine like there's all these, there's clearly places where.

• 1:12:31John Coogan?

  What does that mean? Their product is taking off like chat GPT or?

• 1:12:34Jordi Hays?

  So they've found a way to apply AI in a way that is highly, highly effective and gives them an edge.

• 1:12:39John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Yeah, like the theoretical like Renaissance technology had to transform.

• 1:12:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. So, so X people are very loud, right?

• 1:12:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:47Jordi Hays?

  They figure, they, they're like, I just had this.

• 1:12:49John Coogan?

  I'm using everything.

• 1:12:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just had a product work for 30 hours on this thing. They'll talk about it. But if you're a Fortune 500 and you figure out how to do something, it's not like you want to like put, put your hand up and say like, guys, like I figured something out, right? Like the secrets are valuable and these advancements and kind of breakthroughs are not going to be uniform.

• 1:13:08John Coogan?

  The airline industry will never be the same. Your direct competitor copies you and you're like.

• 1:13:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so, and so part of, part of why, you know, right now, the meme is token maxing. And that's an obvious, going to be an obvious area, area of debate. People are happy to go talk about it, say, you know, CEOs might say, hey, let's stop doing this. But there has to be all these other kind of pockets of interesting moments where we won't hear about them until they become kind of like standard operating procedure.

• 1:13:39Speaker 04

  Or you see it in the, the, the earnings and the economics piece, right? Yeah, yeah. So I, yes, unfortunately X is not the real world.

• 1:13:48Speaker 04

  You know, and there's a lot of grift and noise and, you know, podcasting PMing and, you know, that kind of stuff that goes on. But I, I think in the real world, yes, there is the haves and have nots. I mean, we were just talking about AIG. Like, when you can start to actually do the underwriting and, you know, have quotes back in hours or days instead of months on these highly complex enterprise, you know, kind of insurance agreements. If you don't have that, how are you ever going to compete?

• 1:14:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:13Speaker 04

  And so when we think about this as the N of one, right, you know, that, those are the companies that we're going after. And we see where there are those moments that are not public.

• 1:14:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:20Speaker 04

  It's the competitive advantage.

• 1:14:21Jordi Hays?

  That's such an interesting category, because you can imagine AIG, you know, is, you know, working with a potential customer or renewing a policy, and that customer is going and talking to all of AIG's competitors.

• 1:14:33Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:14:34Jordi Hays?

  And if AIG is able to turn around, you know, a quote or a policy in 24 hours, and then it takes another player, you know, two weeks because it's, you know, complicated.

• 1:14:47Speaker 04

  Email and spreadsheets.

• 1:14:47Jordi Hays?

  So many, so many teams will just say like, hey, we, you know, you know, especially once you have two bids, you can basically say like, okay, there's that third, fourth, fifth, we'll kind of wait on those because we have a good option here.

• 1:14:58Speaker 04

  Well, it builds trust.

• 1:14:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:59Speaker 04

  The other piece here. So when you think, when you see people operating that with that level of efficiency, what else can you do? So I see this, whether I'm doing, you know, SAP migrations, the least sexy thing you could talk about. But hey, if I can cut your SAP migration.

• 1:15:12John Coogan?

  Let's give it up for SAP.

• 1:15:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's like the least, you know, exciting thing on, on paper. But actually, if, if you're spending hundreds of millions of, yeah, you guys get it. But hundreds of millions of dollars on a migration, and we can cut it in half.

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:24Speaker 04

  That's a massive deal.

• 1:15:26John Coogan?

  Back on the OODA loop, observe, orient, decide, act. On the observation side, what is the supply and demand imbalance for dashboards? Like, and what I mean by that is, is when you're working with a company, is there, is there more demand for dashboards? More people asking, hey, we need a dashboard for this, we need a dashboard for that. And you have to back people off and say, I don't know if the dashboard's right for this. Like, you might just want to do an ad hoc analysis or actually go and see. Versus, you're seeing so much opportunity that you're like, okay, we want to push dashboards out everywhere. Like, walk me through dashboarding right now. Because I've always been like, sort of like, oh, the too many dashboards, you build them and then no one looks at them.

• 1:16:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I want to kill all dashboards.

• 1:16:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:16:12Speaker 04

  Dashboard, I mean, KPIs and dashboards should be a byproduct of operational applications where I'm making decisions. So we talk about the UDL. I have to actually act for things to hit the bottom line, be valuable.

• 1:16:21John Coogan?

  In the actual application.

• 1:16:22Speaker 04

  In the application. So as I need those things and it's going to inform a better decision.

• 1:16:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:27Speaker 04

  That's where I want those metrics. That should be a byproduct. Now, if I go out with the goal of building a dashboard, it's going to be the Field of Dreams again.

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:33Speaker 04

  No one shows up.

• 1:16:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:34Speaker 04

  And so, yes, it should be, you're going to have to build some of those things. The other side of this also is, when you think about a data warehouse, like, literally, I won't go too deep into this technical riff, but like, you know, Kimball and Dimension Modeling was built in 96 for scaling databases. And you're still modeling in the same way in 2026 for your dashboard, your tableau, whatever those things are. And like, that's not actually how the world works in rows and columns. You need complex things to model how the world really works. And that's what we think about the ontology, which means I can reuse it for an operational application, KPIs, agents, all in one single ontology, which makes it the compound effect where as I add things in, I'm now compounding with each individual decision I'm deciding, working with, gets better and better and better for

• 1:17:18Speaker 04

  the next use cases I connect across my business.

• 1:17:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is there an analogy there to just the deployment of AI tools currently? I'm just reflecting on the NoSQL boom. And I don't know how much strong this was. This is probably just like an online take, but this idea of like, why would you ever want a relational database? Why would you ever want a schema? Dude, don't ever do a migration ever again. And the future looked like a win-win, almost. Like, I think Postgres installations probably grew and so did MongoDB and other non-relational databases. And people use Redis for things. They use all sorts of different tools. And we built, and we stood on the shoulders of giants and we got more giants. And then, you know, that means full employment for you, obviously. But, but I'm wondering, like, as, like, are you seeing

• 1:18:01John Coogan?

  glimmers of, of the AI tools eating into different pieces of the technical stacks? Or is it all like, yes, and across the enterprises?

• 1:18:11Speaker 04

  I think it's yes and. And in a couple of different things there is, when you think about the real world, it is not just rows and columns. You can't describe everything with measures and attributes.

• 1:18:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:21Speaker 04

  And so it's actually multimodal. And so like, we think about this in our ontology, where you can have one semantic object that actually has a CAD file and an image, a CV model and tabular stuff in one semantic thing of a plant.

• 1:18:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:33Speaker 04

  Which means I'm starting to talk in the language of my business. So being able to have the multimodal representation where in other places, oh, I have to have MongoDB and I have to have SQL database here and I have to have an S3 bucket here to put all of these different things to store them in ways. Well, we can do that all in the ontology, vectors, everything else. So that's really the goal around how do I model the real world, how it actually works and make that transparent. So you're not having to figure out which technology to put in a time series thing for sensors on a, you know, oil platform. Yep. Don't care. Right. And that's where we want to have the non-differential to have living like truly in the platform to remove the friction about getting stuff done.

• 1:19:10Jordi Hays?

  How common is it for a business with more than a hundred million dollars of revenue to have very little understanding of how their business actually works? Like maybe they own, maybe they own, maybe they know like the main thing, which is like, you know, we make a product and try to sell it for more than it costs to deliver.

• 1:19:27Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:19:29Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but, but is, is some element of, uh, how, how much can chaos and mystery be reduced effectively today? Because it feels like we're entering an era, like you go back, um, you know, 50 years and, uh,

• 1:19:48Jordi Hays?

  the level of like mystery in a large company would have been like, is almost unconceivable today, right? Cause you have different time zones, different offices, you know, no email, all that stuff. And now like mystery and chaos is probably, uh, reduced dramatically, but, uh, still there's companies that, that, uh, maybe, maybe before you start working with them, I'm curious what those look like.

• 1:20:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, we work with a lot of, a lot of different varieties of companies. Um, you know, I joke that a lot of times, you know, companies make money by accident. Like they don't actually know what their most profitable product is. And often they're trying to sell the thing that isn't, isn't actually the most profitable and actually not selling the thing that actually is profitable. And it comes back to how they've modeled their datas to aggregate it up to KPIs and other metrics. When you actually need to model at the finest grade, how your business operates to get a true cost of goods sold, for example, or true cost to serve. Like that's very complicated. It's very complex. So like, we really think about how do I embrace that complexity so that I can truly understand tactically at the edge, how do I do more of the things that are good and less of the bad? It's that simple. And those get peanut buttered across

• 1:20:54Speaker 04

  with KPIs and metrics and people don't actually know how their business is operating. I can't tell you whether it's a hundred million dollar company or a 50 billion dollar company. How many times I see this, that they don't actually understand how they're making money at a fine grain.

• 1:21:08Jordi Hays?

  Last question.

• 1:21:12Jordi Hays?

  Is there a world in the future where a company gets created, let's say on Stripe Atlas, and the first account they sign up for, other than that is, let's say, a Palantir?

• 1:21:21Speaker 04

  Ooh, yes. I would love that. And so we do have a Palantir for builders program. We have small companies. There's people here that are two-person startups, you know, that are working in their attic in Canada. I mean, like, so it is literally any size company, come work, there's a free dev tier, people can come build. There's actually a Shopify integration in Palantir. You can go hook up to your Shopify and pull in Palantir. There are people doing this. Now, are we always great at selling it or telling the story? No. But there are companies doing this, and I do think there's a day where it's going to be ubiquitous. Because I also think, you know, there's some guys here that have, you know, they, hey, my business is dying. I was, you know, I was down 10% negative margin on what I was selling. And through using Palantir,

• 1:22:05Speaker 04

  they watched our YouTube videos and they built it themselves and increased to a nine or 10% positive margin in three months. And so like, people can go do it. I think that's the great American story is like, how do we enable that? And I think we'll get there. It might take a little time.

• 1:22:18John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:22:20Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:22:20Jordi Hays?

  Great to catch up. Great to see you.

• 1:22:22John Coogan?

  We'll talk soon. Our next guest is joining in just 15 minutes. We're going to go back to the timeline. First, I'm going to tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify Figma files with design system context.

• 1:22:38Jordi Hays?

  It's so crazy how many companies.

• 1:22:42Jordi Hays?

  Are their whole strategy is like, we're going to hire guys like Chad?

• 1:22:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:46Jordi Hays?

  And they're gonna, they're gonna do stuff.

• 1:22:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:48Jordi Hays?

  He is, he is, he is the final boss of FDE.

• 1:22:51John Coogan?

  What, what, what, what drove the FDE meme? Was it, was it Palantir going public? Or was it?

• 1:22:56Jordi Hays?

  I think it was Palantir going parabolic.

• 1:22:58John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe. Yeah, once.

• 1:23:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because it just, it just.

• 1:23:02John Coogan?

  There was like a chart because before it was like, okay, yeah, successful company, but like, no one really knows where the valuation is going. Now it's like, my, my uncle just told me that he made a bunch of money.

• 1:23:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, that, but also they had been banging the FDE drum.

• 1:23:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:19Jordi Hays?

  Or the, and getting the consulting accusations.

• 1:23:22John Coogan?

  People had earplugs in to the banging of the drum and the, and the earplugs came out.

• 1:23:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but when you're, when they were a 10 to 20 billion dollar company, a lot of people could still convince themselves that they were right. It's just a consulting business.

• 1:23:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:23:37Jordi Hays?

  And that gets harder, harder to.

• 1:23:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, very popular.

• 1:23:40Jordi Hays?

  Ignore. We covered this very briefly, but, but yeah, very excited for Joe Rogan to be hosting his, you know.

• 1:23:47John Coogan?

  It's rumored. This is a rumored leak. It is not confirmed by any means yet, but.

• 1:23:51Jordi Hays?

  But I like the sound of it.

• 1:23:52John Coogan?

  It would be, it's a very different direction.

• 1:23:56Jordi Hays?

  This was a good post. I wanted to bring it up. Buco Capital says, it's really incredible. The absolute AI garbage and all caps of people are comfortable sending to their coworkers and bosses. There's a good chance productivity will actually decrease as AI adoption increases because everyone is busy waiting through AI slop. I don't think, I don't think it'll actually, I don't think it'll actually get there, but I have had, I have had moments over the last month where if somebody has sent me, you know, a deck for their company or materials and I can tell that 90% of the work that went into it was on prompting.

• 1:24:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:34Jordi Hays?

  And I have a very like visceral reaction toward it, especially for like early stage companies where ideas.

• 1:24:42Jordi Hays?

  And the way in which you go about doing things matter so much that it's almost like, you know, painting this initial vision and things like your, your go to market, product differentiation, why you'll actually win, like use AI to make your team slide. That's great, right? Just taking like a set of facts and making it look good, right? You're giving somebody a bio, something like that.

• 1:25:09Jordi Hays?

  But I just remember I, I, I got this deck. I was clicking through it. And I very respectfully said, like, go and like, do this yourself.

• 1:25:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:20Jordi Hays?

  Because, uh, just because you've made something that, that looks like a deck.

• 1:25:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:27Jordi Hays?

  But you didn't do the sort of like fundamental work to actually present this in a way. If you looked at each slide individually.

• 1:25:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Your eyes kind of glaze over.

• 1:25:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:38John Coogan?

  And, and you just sort of like lose focus, stop paying attention.

• 1:25:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's like, it would have been more, it would have been more compelling to actually just have a bulleted list of like problem.

• 1:25:46John Coogan?

  I mean, a lot of times you can just say, hey, just send me the prompt because I can instantiate it in my head. I can imagine the rest of the paragraphs. I have the context window preloaded.

• 1:25:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:56John Coogan?

  For, for myself. Yeah. Uh, we should talk about the new Audi, the Nuvo Lari. Is this real? Motor one? This seems real.

• 1:26:03Jordi Hays?

  It's real.

• 1:26:04John Coogan?

  It's a big deal. It's the, it's the brand's first supercar since the R8. Twin turbocharged four liter V8 hybrid, 217 mile per hour top speed. That is 10% faster than a Cayenne Turbo GT. What is the Cayenne Turbo GT market doing right now? Is it tanking? Depreciation must be just through the roof on this news because you have a car that's 10% faster. And so why everyone, everyone was going to be rotating out of.

• 1:26:30Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I, I, I think they did. I, I think the new Velari.

• 1:26:33John Coogan?

  It's a really cool design. It's a really cool design.

• 1:26:35Jordi Hays?

  Feels like somewhat Cybertruck.

• 1:26:37John Coogan?

  Cyberpunk-y, futuristic. I don't know. It just checks the box for like the next supercar for me. And in a way that the.

• 1:26:45Jordi Hays?

  Ben says it can't touch the R8.

• 1:26:46John Coogan?

  Oh, can't touch the R8. Okay. Okay. Well, it goes zero to 60 in 2.6 seconds. Well, almost a thousand horsepower. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. And our next guest, Sam Berry is here from USDA. Welcome to the show.

• 1:27:04Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:27:04John Coogan?

  How are you doing? Very good. Good to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on down. Let's throw this on and just like that.

• 1:27:10Jordi Hays?

  Cool.

• 1:27:11John Coogan?

  On the left side. So introduce yourself a little bit. Tell us about yourself.

• 1:27:15Speaker 05

  All right. Yeah, my name is Sam Berry. I am proud to be working at the USDA.

• 1:27:20John Coogan?

  What do you do there?

• 1:27:21Speaker 05

  Right now, I'm the chief.

• 1:27:22Jordi Hays?

  Nominal determinism. Do you know about nominative determinism?

• 1:27:26Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:27:27Jordi Hays?

  It's the idea that, you know, a person's name could possibly influence or, or, uh, but, but Berry and working at the Department of Agriculture is like, pretty perfect.

• 1:27:38Speaker 05

  No, it's incredible. Actually, my, uh, the Berry's came over here from France in, um, like 1640.

• 1:27:44John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:27:44Speaker 05

  So we've been here for a long time.

• 1:27:46John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:27:46Speaker 05

  And, uh, it was all farmers.

• 1:27:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:48Speaker 05

  There you go. Yeah. It was like all farmers up until my grandpa.

• 1:27:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:52Speaker 05

  Then he became a, a materials engineer, actually, and worked on jet engines.

• 1:27:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:57Speaker 05

  And so then his sons became engineers. My dad became an engineer and then I was an engineer. So we're kinda

• 1:28:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:28:02Speaker 05

  Trying to bring the two together.

• 1:28:03John Coogan?

  There you go. Back to the USDA.

• 1:28:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:28:05John Coogan?

  What, what, what is the shape of the USDA? Like, what, what is the shape of the organization headquarters? Do you go in the office? Is this, you know, US, you think just America, international footprint? Like, do you travel for work? What's it like working there?

• 1:28:18Speaker 05

  Well, actually, it'd be kinda interesting to ask you what you think. Like, what are the things that you think USDA does?

• 1:28:23John Coogan?

  Uh, they grade the milk and the steaks.

• 1:28:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:28:26John Coogan?

  That's what I think about it. So I imagine that at some point, farmers send the cows to you and you kinda inspect them and say, this is a good cow. Is that what happens?

• 1:28:37Speaker 05

  There's like, there's inspectors. There's a whole area that does that.

• 1:28:40John Coogan?

  I imagine there's like a series of certifications, but, but, but, what, what else is happening?

• 1:28:45Speaker 05

  So all kinds of stuff. So do you know that, like, food stamps?

• 1:28:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:48Speaker 05

  But SNAP is inside of USDA.

• 1:28:49John Coogan?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 1:28:50Speaker 05

  I didn't know that either. I thought, I figured it was in like HHS or something, but, uh, yeah, it's in USDA.

• 1:28:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:55Speaker 05

  So that's a hundred billion dollars a year. It's kind of a big deal.

• 1:28:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:59Speaker 05

  So we do, we have SNAP that's in the Food Nutrition Service.

• 1:29:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:02Speaker 05

  Uh, Forest Service is inside of USDA.

• 1:29:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:29:05Speaker 05

  Like crazy.

• 1:29:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:06Speaker 05

  Uh, and then FPAC is like what you would really think that USDA, it's like the farmer facing, like,

• 1:29:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:29:13Speaker 05

  where farm programs are and where they do acreage reporting, like the stuff I talked about today.

• 1:29:16John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:29:17Speaker 05

  Um, then there's Rural Development.

• 1:29:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:29:19Speaker 05

  Which is like loans, like a bank. Basically to do loans or all kinds of things.

• 1:29:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:29:25Speaker 05

  Actually, in some of the reviews, I came in on Doge and there's like beachfront hotels that are being funded out of RD. So there's like a lot of things that need to be cleaned up.

• 1:29:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:29:35Speaker 05

  Yeah. And then there's like food inspection service and then there's actually a huge scientific arm.

• 1:29:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:41Speaker 05

  That's inside of.

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  That makes sense. Testing things and.

• 1:29:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, like labs.

• 1:29:45John Coogan?

  Advancing.

• 1:29:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:29:46John Coogan?

  Different pesticides.

• 1:29:47Speaker 05

  So things that, I mean, I actually become very passionate about it because I certainly didn't have an appreciation for it. I thought the same thing. It's like grading meat.

• 1:29:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:55Speaker 05

  Milk, you know?

• 1:29:58Speaker 05

  But like our, we are so uniquely positioned as a country because of the fact that we can feed ourselves.

• 1:30:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:04Speaker 05

  Yeah. And like, that is not the case for a lot of, a lot of countries.

• 1:30:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Isn't America basically a net exporter of food too? You hear about this in the China debate all the time, will they buy XYZ product from us as retaliation?

• 1:30:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:30:16John Coogan?

  And yeah, you just don't think about it, but.

• 1:30:19Speaker 05

  Yeah. So like China can like minimally feed itself, like bare minimum, it could like keep itself alive.

• 1:30:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:25Speaker 05

  But you know, they're getting like, like we just did a big deal with them to move a bunch of beef over there.

• 1:30:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:31Speaker 05

  Kind of got some negative press on that. So it's important to know it's, I forget exactly what it's called, but it's like the parts of the cow that we don't eat here. So it's a little misleading to say like the amount that we're sending over there.

• 1:30:41John Coogan?

  But also all these trade deals are like very complex and there's like six different moving parts. We get batteries or they get the chips and like, these are always like, you know, seven part negotiations. It's hard to look at anyone in isolation.

• 1:30:53Speaker 05

  But I mean, I think it's a little surprising that agr- like food is actually part of that. I mean, and even in warfare, like agriculture, the food supply is usually hit before anything like kinetic even happens, you know? And then before even the world knows that it's warfare.

• 1:31:07John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:31:08Speaker 05

  You know?

• 1:31:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:31:09Speaker 05

  Because you can do that and you can do things to, you know, impact a nation's food supply in the future. And so agriculture is like a really big deal.

• 1:31:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:31:17Speaker 05

  Really important. So all this to tie back to, I wanted to talk about the labs.

• 1:31:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:21Speaker 05

  Cause this is like a whole area inside of USDA, but we do all of these things, like invest in figuring out. So like personally, I try and avoid like GMOs and we eat, you know, like we drink raw milk and we get our meat from a local farm. But GMOs are actually really important.

• 1:31:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:36Speaker 05

  Because if we were hit with some kind of. Adverse event or something and we needed to create corn that like could survive a drought better. Like we have the science and the research to be able to do that.

• 1:31:47John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:31:47Speaker 05

  And it's a huge edge that we have like geopolitically.

• 1:31:51John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah.

• 1:31:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, talk about, uh, over the years, I've read so many stories of, you know, this, uh, this insect has been detected in, you know, some region of the US and there's speculation on is it, um, you know, kind of foreign interference, things like that. Is that, is that in USDA domain is trying to help monitor and track and make sure that, um, pests. Yeah, pests, pests, like pests are obviously naturally occurring, right? They flourish for their own reasons. Or there can be, um, some, uh, some sort of malicious intent as well. Is that in your guys?

• 1:32:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, cause they're not necessarily naturally occurring, right?

• 1:32:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:29Speaker 05

  And, uh, so one that we have going on right now, and I'm not saying this one's not naturally occurring, but the, uh, new world screw, screw worm.

• 1:32:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:36Speaker 05

  That's coming up through Mexico.

• 1:32:37John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:32:38Speaker 05

  So our secretary, which by the way, I couldn't say enough good things about Secretary Rollins. I mean, she's incredible, just an actual like genuine good and like it's unbelievable what she's able to accomplish. Uh, but new world screw worm is something that's falling in USDA's, uh, you know, responsibilities. And this is like a parasite basically that's coming up through Mexico and it's like a flesh eating parasite. So it's like really hardcore.

• 1:33:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:00Speaker 05

  So we're developing a lab.

• 1:33:02Jordi Hays?

  Human flesh?

• 1:33:03Speaker 05

  Uh, no.

• 1:33:04Jordi Hays?

  All sorts.

• 1:33:04Speaker 05

  No, but you know, I don't think you want to be around it, but no, it's for like cattle mostly is what it impacts. Um, and so we're developing a lab and like sterilizing flies, which again, like personally, I don't really like any of this stuff, but it's better to be doing this and be able to protect our nation.

• 1:33:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:20Speaker 05

  Than like, if we let this just come and flourish in our country, I mean, it'd be very detrimental.

• 1:33:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:24Speaker 05

  So I'll have to go back.

• 1:33:26John Coogan?

  And if you're, and if it's a necessary, you know, technique that needs to be harnessed, it needs to be harnessed securely and it needs to be harnessed with, uh, you know, the right teams in place to make sure that whatever's rolled out is rolled out effectively and safely, right?

• 1:33:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's just so important, you know, there's, uh, Like tech, there's so much farther we can go with technology, but we have so much right now. And so many people are just blackpilled, right? And I think it's important, I think you should be like blackpilled on certain things, but you should probably take a lot of pills. Like it should be red pill and black pill and white pill at the same time. Because like we have a long way to go. And when we're just like sitting, feeling sorry for ourselves, like it's not a good position to be in. Like this is the most incredible country on earth. And other countries are advancing though, you know, our edge is like, our edge doesn't come for free.

• 1:34:15John Coogan?

  No, we gotta work at it.

• 1:34:16Speaker 05

  We gotta keep pushing at these things. But when we do this, like when there's a parasite that's, you know, coming into our country and we're able to just like use biology to combat it. Like that's incredible that our country can do that.

• 1:34:27Jordi Hays?

  Talk about these more SMB scale farmers and their approach to technology. I think a lot of people would be surprised at how much, how much these individuals, at least from, from what I've experienced, are happy to lean into technology. I met a group in Texas that had developed, this was years ago, so pre-AI boom, developed their own SaaS product to help manage their operations, like a, a tool that, that they had built by discovering problems that they had on their property. And I just thought that was, that was really fascinating and cool at the time,

• 1:35:07Jordi Hays?

  because I think Silicon Valley would have maybe some expectation that, that there might be an aversion to that until you get into the more like enterprise grade scale.

• 1:35:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it's a really important topic because you're essentially talking about like democratizing access to technology. Right? And certainly with, with like AI becoming so much more widely available, that was a big step forward. But I mean, and this is a big point that's being hit on at this conference and what Palantir is really focusing on is those LLMs become useless if they're not. If you're not deploying them in the right way with the right like data boundaries, right? So, you know, I think that's something that we're seeing even in our universities. We do a lot of university research and like all the, you know, kids or whatever, the university students, like they're wanting to do experiments with LLMs and do like meat grading, like better meat grading, because that's something that can happen at the farms. And if you can make

• 1:36:01Speaker 05

  that automated, then, you know, our ability to produce beef, you know, is greatly impacted. But there's a major issue in succession planning right now for farms, right? Like this is a big thing that's happening. Like the farmer generation is getting very old and kids don't want to go and run the farm.

• 1:36:18John Coogan?

  A lot of them went to big cities and jobs and white collar work and stuff.

• 1:36:21Speaker 05

  So, you know, this is a big thing that is H2A. Yeah. You know, these H2A visas where like a lot of the farmers are actually still saying like, we need the help from, you know, we need immigrants to come and help us. And, you know, the best way that we can solve that is through automation. So I think that that's something I would love to see USDA do more of or, you know, it's something that needs to be answered. I don't have an answer for you right now, but in order for us to continue to, you know, remain self-sufficient and providing food.

• 1:36:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. Whenever you have a dwindling workforce, increasing the leverage and productivity of the existing workforce allows you to maintain overall aggregate productivity. This is general technological leverage. So it makes a ton of sense.

• 1:36:59Speaker 05

  Do you know anybody that's becoming a farmer?

• 1:37:01John Coogan?

  Well, we know some folks, we've had a number of entrepreneurs on the show who are getting into ag tech, building, we've had the founder of the laser weeder that uses, a lot of people don't like pesticides, but they don't mind if, if a pest is zapped with a laser because that's just heat that's being transferred to the particular plant right there. And the tomato plant continues flourishing. So he uses just cameras and lasers, very cool sort of modern solution to something that people have had a lot of beer around around different pesticides.

• 1:37:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, we had a fruit picking robotics company.

• 1:37:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, orchard as well, but, but mostly from tech side, usually with some family lineage, sort of returning to the roots or tapping into their networks to go back. But I mean, truthfully, I don't know that many people. That I grew up with, I mean, I grew up in LA, so not much farming activity. I knew one family that had an avocado farm.

• 1:37:53Speaker 05

  I mean, it actually, it would be super base to be a large scale farmer, like more people should do it. And

• 1:37:57Jordi Hays?

  We need a, maybe you could be the Alex Hormozi of farming.

• 1:38:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, for real. I mean, you can, so USDA, one of the great things that USDA does is you can get financial assistance. Like you get big time, like big time loans. USDA, you have to go through the process and they were actually doing a loan modernization effort right now, trying to make that better. But like USDA will fund it for you. You got to pay it back, but you can like get the interest rates.

• 1:38:17John Coogan?

  Very, very low rate, subsidized, yeah.

• 1:38:19Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, one of our administrators at USDA, he like pulled up his phone one day and he's like, look, it's a planting day for me. And it was this John Deere app. It's like the most advanced, you know, like, he had all these tractors going and there's still people sitting in the tractors, but it's to the point where it basically could be fully automated. So, I mean, you can get yourself a couple thousand acres and just start, you know, growing corn or weed or cotton, like cotton and then, you know, whatever.

• 1:38:43John Coogan?

  Talk about data collection. I feel like data is the lifeblood of, you know, any decision making, any Oodle Loop, anything related to Palantir USDA. And I'm wondering about like, you mentioned that screw worm. You got to track that thing. It shows up on some cattle rancher's farm and they're detecting it or they're seeing symptoms. Maybe they know roughly what percentage of the herd is affected. But how do they actually get that information to you? Are they going to USDA.gov slash report incident? Or are you pulling things from their filings? Like, how, how do you want that to evolve? I imagine that, that with more AI and technology, where it's only as good as the data that we can actually put into the

• 1:39:27John Coogan?

  system. So just broadly data collection, where is that going these days?

• 1:39:31Speaker 05

  Well, if you don't mind, instead of screw worm, I'd like to focus on SNAP.

• 1:39:33John Coogan?

  That's a great idea, yeah.

• 1:39:34Speaker 05

  So SNAP is funded by the federal government.

• 1:39:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:37Speaker 05

  But it's administered by the states.

• 1:39:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:39:39Speaker 05

  So when it comes to, so something that we're doing right now, and it was one of the first things that our secretary did, like on our first day, was that she did a data call to all the states that, you know, we want all of your SNAP data to understand how, because it's our responsibility as the funder of this program to understand the integrity, like to verify the integrity of the program.

• 1:39:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:56Speaker 05

  So we put a request out there, but it has to come from every single state.

• 1:39:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:59Speaker 05

  And a lot of the state programs, they're not technical or they've got contractors that, you know, it's just a difficult thing to get us the data. But then there's also a bunch of states that are just not complying, you know, for whatever reason, which it shouldn't be a problem. I don't understand what the problem is.

• 1:40:12Speaker 05

  But the importance of so that program, that's a hundred billion taxpayer dollars a year like that's pretty substantial. That's an area where we really want to have all angles of the data available so that we can deploy AI and become really smart in detecting fraud. We want to get it to the point where if somebody's committing SNAP fraud, we should be able to it's like your card, right? If you if somebody stole your card and did a transaction that wasn't recognized, like your card shut off. Yep. Right? Yep. So we want to get to the point where we're very intelligent and we're confident enough in the system that we can do that. When there's fraud detected, it's off immediately. Because it's an important program, you know, we want to be able to support people that can't support themselves. But it's it's not arguable that there's a massive

• 1:40:55Speaker 05

  amount of fraud in there. I mean, even the the organization itself does like an audit every year and they're at like if there's 12% improper payments, improper payments is kind of a bad

• 1:41:06Jordi Hays?

  word. 12, 12 billion a year.

• 1:41:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, right. And that's just like kind of based on

• 1:41:10Jordi Hays?

  That's money that that's that could actually be going towards the intent of the program.

• 1:41:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:41:16Jordi Hays?

  Which is to provide food to people that otherwise wouldn't be able to get it.

• 1:41:21Speaker 05

  And there's other, you know, you could like grok how SNAP has been used to fund like international crime organizations and like terrorist groups and everything. So it's it's being exploited at a huge level. And I mean, it's something that our secretary has prioritized, but that's probably our biggest F pack. What I talked about today is like our most complex system of data. But the SNAP challenge is like the biggest or like the SNAP environment is probably the biggest challenge on the data front.

• 1:41:53John Coogan?

  What's next for you? Are you making a career out of this? Are you gonna go be a farmer?

• 1:41:57Speaker 05

  Hopefully both. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, um, yeah, I've got some farmland.

• 1:42:02John Coogan?

  You do?

• 1:42:03Speaker 05

  Trying to convert it. It's like woods right now. But What state?

• 1:42:07Jordi Hays?

  Where's that?

• 1:42:08Speaker 05

  In Virginia. So actually, when I lived in Michigan, we had like a little bit of a farm. We had some goats and sheep and a bunch of chickens and ducks. Now, you don't ever want to get, you don't want to get ducks, you don't want to get goats. Ducks are like really savage, actually. Yeah. Like a chicken sleeps, you know, so like it's got a normal cycle, like at nighttime it goes into the coop and it like sleeps.

• 1:42:28Jordi Hays?

  Ducks don't sleep?

• 1:42:29Speaker 05

  No, ducks do not sleep. No. They like, and our house was kind of this like really unique house, so the windows were like on the ground.

• 1:42:35Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:42:36Speaker 05

  And the ducks would come and just stare at us in the window. No, they're savage. They just like, they sleep for like 10 minutes at a time. So they'll just like waddle around and then sleep for 10 minutes. You have to have the right balance of female and male ducks.

• 1:42:47Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:42:47Speaker 05

  Otherwise, it's like, it's really ugly.

• 1:42:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, chickens are a lot. I grew, I grew up with chickens and most of the time they're, they're cool. My dad would build these sort of like complex contraptions to automate the opening and closure. Interesting. So he would use like irrigation to, on a timer to fill a bucket, which would lift there. Lift it and let it out? Lift it up, yeah. Interesting. But, but then I still, core memories as a kid was waking up, my dad would yell like, there's a fox in the coop. And then we'd be like running out. We'd be, it would be like game on. Yeah, yeah. Or you get like skunks in there. Or coyotes, maybe. Yeah, we would just, everybody would get up and try to go deal with it. That's kind of be satisfying. That's way more satisfying than some software bug.

• 1:43:32Jordi Hays?

  There's so much fear and doom and, and blackpilling around data centers. I wanted to hear from you how your, I imagine your, your role is to be an advocate for, for farmers as well on, on, on water supplies, things like that. California went through, you know, probably many, many really rough years from a, from a water supply. And a water scarcity standpoint, thankfully, you know, had a lot of rains over the last few years, but how, how are you working with farmers or, or what is the situation around the, the kind of like tension between a lot of farmland, could also be great land for?

• 1:44:17Jordi Hays?

  Data centers, right? And there's been some

• 1:44:21Jordi Hays?

  pretty high profile stories where farmers either sold their land. But from your side, you're trying to make sure that we have, you know, can produce an abundance of food, you know, from a, from a national security standpoint. So how are you guys thinking about that balance?

• 1:44:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think the best solution is putting the data centers in space, you know, like which is totally led by Elon and people are jumping on that train, but it's going to be a couple of years, it sounds like before they're to that point. We're actually USDA is pursuing a partnership with SpaceX. And that, that part isn't, isn't ready yet. We don't really have a need for that, but it's, there's a partnership on the technical side. But there's also just on the like conceptual side of the fact that like we're aligned because we do care about conservation. You know, there was a lot of green stuff that was like, you know, not stuff that we care about, but we do care about conserving our land. And putting data centers in space just makes a ton of sense, but that being a couple of years out. So for today, you know, I'm actually pretty passionate about this because in my hometown of Celine, Michigan, it's like small town, mostly farmland.

• 1:45:16Speaker 05

  They're putting a data center in there and it's like, you know, 30 miles from Detroit and Flint and like all these very industrialized areas. And so it's very confusing to me why we wouldn't be putting these data center and they're like struggling areas. Detroit's doing all right, but like Flint's struggling big time. Like why not put a data center there where there's already the infrastructure. There's like, it's already developed land. But instead it's like taking these small townships and, and plopping them in the middle. And the people don't really like it. Now the boards seem to like it for some reason, the councils. So I don't know what's up with that. But it doesn't align with what the people want.

• 1:45:55Jordi Hays?

  It creates, it creates a massive amount of tax revenue that can be used to fund a bunch of other programs.

• 1:46:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it's got to actually flow back to the people who are in the town. And I think that there's like a disconnect there sometimes.

• 1:46:08Speaker 05

  Actually, this is kind of outside, but something that I do think is probably going to happen is, you know, there was this big shift to go to the cloud, right? It's like everybody kind of had their own servers. You know, it's on-prem and now we're in the cloud. And it's like, really, you just took, you like moved it across the street, right? And now that people are becoming more aware of like what that means and when it's like, oh, my data's in AWS. Or, you know, it's like, and maybe this is a global company and how much can I really trust this company? That there's going to be a shift back to caring, actually, actually caring about where your data is living. So I think a good business opportunity would be, I, I think there's a world where there's a culture that comes up around data centers. Cause like me personally, like I want to build, like my house is like, uh, like I'll have a kill switch for my wifi.

• 1:46:53Speaker 05

  And then like, we've got the data in the basement.

• 1:46:55Jordi Hays?

  You've got your raw milk supply.

• 1:46:57Speaker 05

  Got raw milk, no, like we're ready to go. I mean, I was ready to go off the grid before I came and joined the government. This is a much better option, but still like I care about my data. I don't really want to use YouTube music anymore for my music. Cause now my recommendations are getting worse and you're like very beholden to that. It's like, I could very easily just

• 1:47:12John Coogan?

  Have the music.

• 1:47:12Speaker 05

  Buy my music and write a simple program to like, make my recommendations and it would be way better. Because there's certain artists that are not getting recommended because they're not, you know, prioritized behind the scenes. So, but not everybody's going to want to manage their own servers, right?

• 1:47:26John Coogan?

  Jensen just announced a data center that bolts onto the side of your house.

• 1:47:29Speaker 05

  Oh, that's sweet.

• 1:47:30John Coogan?

  And, uh, I mean, and there's more stuff that's coming that way. I mean, people are doing it with the Mac minis, can't really do the frontier AI on the Mac mini just now. But in a few years, you know, the DGX desktops, like it's all coming and I think it will be more of an option.

• 1:47:44Speaker 05

  So just to like, kind of wrap this up, so there's this, um, uh, or this like topic, the, uh, one of the things that USDA does is we pay 600,000 federal employees. So like we pay secret service, we pay DHS, we pay, it's like, it's like a thing inside USDA.

• 1:47:58John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:47:59Speaker 05

  And so the, the payroll system that does that is a mainframe. And people literally explained it to me, like this thing has a personality, like you have to like, you can't touch it the wrong way. You have to, it has to have like the right environment to work and it like all these things. I mean, like a dozen people came to me and told me all these things. So then I went and visited it. I was like really excited to, you know, encounter this being. And, uh, it's like a A five-year-old, brand-new IBM server. You know, it's just like, it's not, there's no tapes. There's not like a team of people.

• 1:48:28John Coogan?

  You're underwhelmed.

• 1:48:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like, you know, it's like this big.

• 1:48:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:48:32Speaker 05

  But I was expecting like a, like a small micro data center or something.

• 1:48:36John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:48:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, so totally modern. And it like, I like formed this connection with it. And I was like, we have had so many conversations about you. And I just thought that like, this is potentially a future where it's like a data center or a coffee shop. You know, like, people might want their data to be hosted in a place that's like aligned with their views.

• 1:48:54John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, yeah.

• 1:48:55Speaker 05

  You know, because it's like, I can trust, like, I don't want this in my house.

• 1:48:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:58Speaker 05

  But I can like, trust this, like, cool company, local company that my, my data lives there. Because I don't need it distributed across the globe. It's like, I'm here.

• 1:49:05John Coogan?

  No, that makes sense. That's interesting.

• 1:49:07Speaker 05

  Country intelligence.

• 1:49:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:08Speaker 05

  We talked about this.

• 1:49:09John Coogan?

  This is the future. I love it.

• 1:49:11Speaker 05

  Uh, anyways.

• 1:49:12John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:49:13Speaker 05

  Great to meet you.

• 1:49:13John Coogan?

  This is fantastic.

• 1:49:14Speaker 05

  Thanks for doing this work.

• 1:49:15John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:49:16Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:49:17John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:49:18Speaker 05

  We will wrap up the show.

• 1:49:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:20Speaker 05

  Thank you for tuning in with us today, folks. We will be back on Monday.

• 1:49:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:49:26Speaker 05

  And we look forward to it.

• 1:49:27John Coogan?

  Some business to do tomorrow, but see you Monday. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the newsletter, tbpn.com. And have a wonderful weekend. We'll see you later.

• 1:49:36Speaker 05

  Goodbye. Goodbye.