Palantir CEO Alex Karp on Tokenmaxxing & Taste

This is our full conversation with Alex Karp, recorded live at AIPCon 10. We discuss why he believes taste is the most important competitive advantage in the age of AI, how enterprises are struggling to turn AI hype into real business value, why "tokenmaxxing" and AI overuse can distract companies from solving meaningful problems, and the growing risk of AI regulation and nationalization. Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.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.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, get in here, Klaus. This is good.

• 0:01Alex Karp?

  Feel good.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 0:02Alex Karp?

  Feel good.

• 0:03John Coogan?

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

• 0:07Alex Karp?

  Um, well, we were in a phase.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:09Alex Karp?

  Each one of these things like marks a time. First of all, you guys are even more baller, more successful.

• 0:15John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 0:16Alex Karp?

  Some tendies in your pocket.

• 0:17John Coogan?

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

• 0:20Alex Karp?

  You know, it's like.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  You blew us up. You're one of the biggest guests.

• 0:22Alex Karp?

  You're looking bigger and stronger somehow.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 0:25Alex Karp?

  Hey, are you more attractive in your personal life now randomly?

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

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

• 0:30Alex Karp?

  Yeah.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 0:31Jordi Hays?

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

• 0:33Alex Karp?

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

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

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

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Five minutes.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  How hard could it be? 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.

• 0:49John Coogan?

  Under two minutes, I think.

• 0:50Jordi Hays?

  Between, yeah, between.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, one in two minutes.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

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

• 0:56Alex Karp?

  A thirty, um, 1:30 dead hang is respectable.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00Alex Karp?

  Two minutes is super elite.

• 1:01Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:05Alex 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.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  But multiple sets?

• 1:28Alex Karp?

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

• 1:30John Coogan?

  Max.

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:31Alex Karp?

  So like, let's say you could do two minutes.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:33Alex Karp?

  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.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:37Alex 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.

• 1:45John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46Alex Karp?

  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 ball time.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  Crown.

• 2:03Alex Karp?

  Fuck that guy.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:10Alex Karp?

  Well, you guys, I mean, you guys have it for you guys.

• 2:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13Alex Karp?

  You could be like, hey, call in.

• 2:15Jordi Hays?

  The car method.

• 2:15Alex 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.

• 2:26John Coogan?

  What about, uh, what about breath hold underwater?

• 2:28Alex Karp?

  I don't do that.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:29Alex 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.

• 2:36John Coogan?

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

• 2:39Alex 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.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true.

• 2:46Alex Karp?

  I mean, like, you got like.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  And if I'm not moving, I'm not using any oxygen.

• 2:50Alex 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, it may be 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.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18Alex Karp?

  And then there's a lot of investor hype.

• 3:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:20Alex 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.

• 3:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:31Alex Karp?

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

• 3:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:37Alex 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.

• 3:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, 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. Uh, how are you actually thinking about deploying AI ROI?

• 4:00Jordi Hays?

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

• 4:04Alex 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.

• 4:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 4:17Alex 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.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:28Alex Karp?

  But we cannot have people, just like some people.

• 4:29John Coogan?

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

• 4:35Alex Karp?

  It is literally like porn.

• 4:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 4:37Alex Karp?

  Like, people are like full on.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  It feels, it feels so.

• 4:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, tool shaped objects, right?

• 4:41Alex 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.

• 4:47John Coogan?

  It feels productive to have every email classified with tabs.

• 4:50Jordi 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.

• 4:58Alex Karp?

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

• 5:01Jordi 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.

• 5:09Alex Karp?

  Well, let me give you a thing that's too generous for you guys.

• 5:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:13Alex Karp?

  Okay. It, it, it's taste plus money.

• 5:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 5:17Alex Karp?

  And there is no, like AI, like if you look at, like, to pick any issue and 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? 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.

• 6:03Alex Karp?

  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. 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.

• 6:48Alex Karp?

  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? How do you patch them on-prem so that your specialized knowledge stays on-prem? Like, if you're any business or intel service, 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.

• 7:31Alex Karp?

  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-

• 7:47John Coogan?

  Even with enterprise?

• 7:48Alex Karp?

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

• 7:49John Coogan?

  Because I understand with the people.

• 7:50Alex 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, 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, hey, I'll take your bad brand, which 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, 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.

• 8:33Alex Karp?

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

• 9:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:02Alex Karp?

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

• 9:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You're polarizing.

• 9:11Alex Karp?

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

• 9:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:13Alex Karp?

  These people have one side.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:15Alex Karp?

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

• 9:19John Coogan?

  Social media companies too have the same problem.

• 9:21Alex Karp?

  Yeah.

• 9:21John Coogan?

  Everyone uses them, but no one likes them.

• 9:23Alex Karp?

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

• 9:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:27Alex 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.

• 9:32Jordi Hays?

  Is part of it, is part of it 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-

• 9:48Alex 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 as a 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 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.

• 10:32Alex 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.

• 10:45John Coogan?

  Dashboards.

• 10:46Alex Karp?

  Dashboards, financial stuff.

• 10:48John Coogan?

  Little flow.

• 10:48Alex Karp?

  Probabilities, sick stuff where you just have to.

• 10:51John Coogan?

  One-off analysis.

• 10:51Alex 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.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  One more dashboard.

• 11:04Alex 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.

• 11:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:16Alex 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 is 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.

• 11:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:40Alex Karp?

  And, and all the answers are there, but it's 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 L L Ms, nobody would be talking about our ontology, about Apollo managing security exploits, about our ability to manage an enterprise essentially, turning all these companies into F D Es. These deploy codes, we love them because now every company wants to deploy code. You know how you do that?

• 12:18Alex Karp?

  You replatform 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. Who's done something else and is like, just imagining they know how to do it. Right?

• 12:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. As part, as part of this moment. 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, 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.

• 13:09John Coogan?

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

• 13:12Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 13:15Jordi Hays?

  There you go, there you go.

• 13:17Alex Karp?

  Hopefully we got that, I don't know, the rest of the stuff wasn't recorded.

• 13:19Jordi Hays?

  I, I trailed off, but, but is part of it entertaining to you that it feels like,

• 13:26Jordi Hays?

  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 guys built.

• 13:52Alex 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.

• 14:24Alex Karp?

  Where it hurts is in the beginning, it puts clutter in the market.

• 14:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:27Alex 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 it's, I, I love these, honestly, other podcasters, they're interviewing people who are 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.

• 15:11Jordi Hays?

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

• 15:15Alex 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.

• 15:27Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 15:27Alex 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.

• 15:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:49Alex 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.

• 16:33Alex 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 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?

• 17:18Alex Karp?

  What data set 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. 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. And, you know, it's like, I, I, I think, you know, we grew up in the same community.

• 18:03Alex Karp?

  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 going to 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, and I'm not saying you have to agree with me politically or anything. Yeah. 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.

• 18:37Jordi Hays?

  You call them every couple of days?

• 18:38Alex 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, they find me very entertaining. Like, I don't know, sure. Like, so they call, cause yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like, oh, yeah, this is gonna be entertaining.

• 18:48Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna pick out.

• 18:49Alex Karp?

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

• 18:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:55Alex 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, all that stuff. So the primary risk, honestly, to palette here and a lot of these other countries is, and then it's going to be nationalized.

• 19:37Alex 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, 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.

• 20:17Alex Karp?

  They're like, oh, that's pro war. 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 any case, disagree with everything. If you're, we have on the right and on the left people, uh, 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 the nationalization, it can't happen. America would never do that.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  Sleepwalking.

• 20:51Alex 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, 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.

• 21:05Jordi 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.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  Declining business model, like getting outcompeted by someone.

• 21:37Jordi Hays?

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

• 21:41Alex 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.

• 21:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 21:51Alex 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 competitors kicking your ass.

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:10Alex 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. 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.

• 22:55Alex Karp?

  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 gonna 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, uh, um, 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.

• 23:27John Coogan?

  This is time.

• 23:27Alex Karp?

  We, uh.

• 23:28John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 23:29Alex Karp?

  Great to catch up.

• 23:30John Coogan?

  Always fun.