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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
Watching TBPN. Today is Thursday, 03/12/2026.
Speaker 2:We are
Speaker 3:in the middle of a blizzard.
Speaker 2:We are
Speaker 1:in the middle of a blizzard. This isn't actually that bad, but it is very cold.
Speaker 2:What do you mean it's not bad?
Speaker 1:It's not a blizzard. Great time.
Speaker 2:A real blizzard The conditions
Speaker 1:are rough. Give this a a a, you know, a a 10 out of 10 blizzard.
Speaker 4:Alright. Well, we
Speaker 1:got go this time.
Speaker 3:We got
Speaker 1:high winds. Just say you've never been to the East Coast before. True. Once. Been a few times.
Speaker 5:You gotta check it on. We're having long time.
Speaker 3:From the West Coast.
Speaker 1:Long way from the TBPN AIPCon. We will be back there tomorrow. There's a ton of news that's going on, shaking the timeline that we will be covering in detail tomorrow. Dwarkash Patel dropped a response to the Department of War's moves to designate anthropic a supply chain risk. There's a whole bunch of interesting nuance conversation.
Speaker 1:We're gonna get into some of that today. Patrick Collison, talked about the nature of drama in Silicon Valley, a very interesting thread that I think we can have a a long conversation about tomorrow. And, Microsoft is fast following OpenAI and Anthropic with Copilot Health, and OpenAI plans to fold Sora into GPT as the sort of productization of consumer LLMs continues. So we'll be covering those stories tomorrow. We wanna say thank you to all of our sponsors that make this show possible.
Speaker 1:It'll be a little bit of a shorter show today, but we have a banger lineup. So we're gonna kick it off with Dan Ives. Wait. Welcome to the show, Dan Ives. How you doing?
Speaker 2:Well, it's happening.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for taking the time and on this very, very cold day to hop on with us. First, introduce yourself. Tell us what you do, why you're here.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Dan Ives. I've covered tech stocks
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Going back to late nineties, you know, on Wall Street. And, look for me, I mean, being here at Palantir
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's in one of our favorite names Mhmm. You know, the last few years. To me, it's the AI revolution. It's almost been the poster child.
Speaker 1:And Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, and I've, in my career going back to early days of Apple, Tesla
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's always trying to find who could be the next one of those. And Sure. You know, my my view the last few years is, Palantir has been been what I view is kind of the golden child of AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you work on separating, like, the narrative the company say? Every company who comes out and, you know, slaps AI on something, renames, slaps a dot AI on their domain versus it's showing up in the financials, it's showing up in the metrics.
Speaker 4:There's only one carp and one Palantir. And I think if you look at the numbers, numbers speaks for themselves. Yeah. And I think the commercial business has really been what's been the jaw dropper Mhmm. For Wall Street.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Because I think that alone, you know, could really ultimately be combined with the government business, a trillion dollar company
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:In the next two to three years. And I think Palantir continues to be one where I think investors continue to underestimate just how big they're gonna be in this AI revolution.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I remember reading the the the it was the Airbus case study a while back. Have you talked to anyone today, doing anything particularly interesting in the commercial sector with Palantir? Like, who who sticks out?
Speaker 4:90% of customers here
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Weren't here two years ago.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4:So I think it just shows now, obviously, they've dominated the government Yeah. Yeah. You know, dominated what we've seen across the board the last few years. But when it when it comes to commercial Mhmm. They they've really changed the whole game.
Speaker 4:And I think what you're seeing is with the AI revolution when it comes to use cases, Palantir is the first call. And I think that's something that's still not factored into the stock in terms of how big the commercial business could be for Palantir. Because when you look at the AI revolution, of course, NVIDIA, Microsoft, you know, you have the semi plays. You have software. But I think Palantir is gonna when when we look out in the next few years, they are gonna be one of the clear standouts Yeah.
Speaker 4:In terms of this fourth industrial revolution.
Speaker 1:What, what advice do you have for investors who are seeing geopolitical tensions rise, war? There's chaos in the markets. Things are jumping up and down. Like, how do you keep a cool head right now?
Speaker 4:I mean, look. In twenty five years doing this, it's like if you sold because of geopolitical in in terms of those issues, that was the wrong move the last few decades. And I think it's one where you take a step back, we are in a fourth industrial revolution. I think tech stocks ultimately make new all time highs this year, but you have to navigate the volatility in the white knuckles. The haters come out.
Speaker 4:The bears maybe win the day.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But I think this will be short lived and that's why to you know, if you look what we see from NVIDIA to Microsoft to Salesforce ServiceNow and, you know, to names like Palantir and some of the cybersecurity, you you have to own the winners Yeah. In these white knuckle moments.
Speaker 1:Have you been following the latest in with NVIDIA? They're gonna be training their own open source models. Do you have a thesis of what that means for the company?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think they'll talk about more GTC next week. Sure. But but it's our view NVIDIA. Look.
Speaker 4:There's only one godfather of AI. It's Jensen, NVIDIA. Mhmm. They're they're now gonna own more and more of that end to end platform. And I think, look, that's the smartest move.
Speaker 4:And Yeah. The reality is is that they're years ahead when it comes to chips. Mhmm. But when it comes to physical AI, the two best players in physical AI are gonna be NVIDIA and Tesla in terms of the two physical best physical AI players.
Speaker 1:I mean, humanoid robots, both. What do you think?
Speaker 4:Look, I think when it comes to autonomous I mean and, you know, Jensen talked about this Mhmm. You know, when we were there at CES, They are looking to go after what's gonna be a trillion dollar market opportunity. Now, I continue to think Tesla is gonna be the ultimate winner when it comes to autonomous. Mhmm. But for NVIDIA Yeah.
Speaker 4:The chips are ultimately gonna be fueled Yeah. By NVIDIA. Everyone trying to play
Speaker 1:catch OEM is gonna need a an autonomy stack. They're gonna need the self driving capability in some degree even if, you know, people are just driving the weekend the car on the weekend for fun, they're still gonna wanna be able to throw it into autonomous mode to get home at the end of the day.
Speaker 4:An eight year old today
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Doesn't need a driver's license when they're 16. And I think I think going back to your point, it's easy to get in these modes where geopolitical, white knuckle moment. Yeah. But if you look, I think ultimately Tesla, autonomous is worth a trillion dollars going to a Tesla story. And I think Nvidia, a year from now, we're looking at 5, you know, 5,000,000,000,000 we talk about, but I think 6,000,000,000,000 markup by 2027 still continues to be our call.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You were at CES? Mhmm. What else did you see that was cool? What was under the radar?
Speaker 1:What were, like, the small trends, the little gadgets? I feel like CES is sort of like a world's fair for cool tech. Yeah. Like, what stuck out to you? Not even as an investor, just personally, you were like, that was fun.
Speaker 4:Look, I think robotics, like, when you look like server robotics would be a good example, like autonomous in terms of what we see. Mhmm. The robotics coming out, I think, is really gonna be we're gonna get also physical AI. Mhmm. I think that is really gonna be the game changer.
Speaker 4:And who are the chip players that are gonna fuel that? Yeah. Of course, it's NVIDIA. Yeah. But then you look down the sort of semi food chain.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think robotics we talk about optimist with Tesla. Humeroid robotics, we are still in the early days of where this is all going. And I think, look, CES for so many years
Speaker 1:zero. Like, they're they don't they barely exist right now. It's demos.
Speaker 4:But Right? That's why we're year three
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Into an eight to ten year build out of the AI revolution. And I think those that are that are getting embarrassed, they're gonna miss what I believe is the next election. Do
Speaker 1:the you humanoid robots will find more traction in consumer? Like, person has one. It's doing their dishes. It's doing their laundry. Or are we gonna not really see these things because they're gonna be in factories first?
Speaker 4:Well, I think at first it's factory. Factory I think that's gonna be the first key use cases. But then consumer Mhmm. I think we look out three, four years, humanoid robots are gonna be something that will become common.
Speaker 1:Everybody has a Roomba already. Look. Yeah. People are used to it.
Speaker 4:It goes back to, like, if you go back over the last ten, twenty years, I could go through many incidents where everyone's like, Apple, why would you why do you need an iPhone when you'd have a Blackbird?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Why ultimately
Speaker 1:Were you following Apple in the nineties? Yeah.
Speaker 4:And and I think that
Speaker 1:Do you remember? What was it like? And we were just reading about Larry Allison yesterday.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And he
Speaker 2:was pointing out that Larry over to
Speaker 1:Apple at one point. Look. They What was that like?
Speaker 4:It goes back to, like and and I've followed Ellison from the beginning going back to late night. It's like, it's trying to explain to investors that these things now look easy and no brainers from Apple, Tesla. But the point, like, you look in 2007, okay, a year later, financial crisis happens. Investors are like, this is a one year AT and T phone. Why would anyone leave their BlackBerry?
Speaker 4:Now you
Speaker 1:have $700 at a time when everything I mean, you could kinda get it subsidized to maybe 400, but that was still like four times the price of most cell phones.
Speaker 4:And the view was that they were never gonna get to a 100,000,000 iPhones, and you're at 1,500,000,000.0 today. But it but it goes back to I could go through many times and test. I go 2022. Jensen, why are you spending money when it comes to AI? You're you're essentially GPU gaming company.
Speaker 4:Yeah. The point is that we're going through one of those periods.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 4:But I think it's gonna be proven to be, you know, the opportunity to own the the tech winners. How did you being one.
Speaker 3:How did you process Oracle's quarter?
Speaker 4:I think it was a huge step in the right direction for software because right now, it's an AI ghost trade. Anthropic has obviously been a big
Speaker 1:AI ghost trade. Explain that term.
Speaker 4:Because you're fighting a ghost. Okay. When you when it comes to anthropic, we're gonna get into cybersecurity. Look what happens to CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, and others. Yeah.
Speaker 4:We're gonna get into software. We'll get sales force service now. It's a ghost trade because the reality is that the data, the stacks, the install base, that's who's gonna be the use case. And that's why Pound two being one, but I'm a huge believer Salesforce ServiceNow and others. When you look at You're you're
Speaker 1:a believer
Speaker 4:in this. I'm a huge believer that this is the most disconnected tech trade that I've seen in my career. Relative to the software. You call it a SaaS apocalypse. But I but I'd call it a ghost trade because you're fighting a ghost.
Speaker 4:Oracle, first step in that direction towards fighting the ghost trade.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I think it speaks to, like, look, Ellison, you know, covering going back to, you know, twenty five years.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:That's someone that understands where they need to get to. Would you take out 50,000,000,000 of debt to get to 6 to 700,000,000,000 of market opportunity? That's what they're doing. I do the same thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The backlog's massive right now. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 4:Great to be here.
Speaker 2:Great to finally meet you. Stay warm out there.
Speaker 3:You're you're not you're not quite dressed
Speaker 2:for it, but you I don't know how
Speaker 1:you do it. It's all about the minds and the minds. All about minds. Thank you so much. We're gonna take this headset off, pass it over to our next guest.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. We'll we'll keep you quick. We'll keep it short, but thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 2:Good to see you again.
Speaker 1:Please, throw on this headset and then introduce yourself.
Speaker 3:Hopefully, introduce
Speaker 2:starts to melt off your jacket. Yeah. You really
Speaker 1:have a bunch of Let's go. So please introduce yourself
Speaker 6:and company. Yeah. I'll do that. Before I do, thanks for having me. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I got your headphone flipped. Flipped.
Speaker 6:Oh, okay. This one, like
Speaker 3:Flip it down there. There you Perfect.
Speaker 1:Yeah. These Okay.
Speaker 6:So thanks for having
Speaker 1:me.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And I'm hopefully gonna be in the studio next time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'd love to have you. That'd be great.
Speaker 6:But, no, I'm Eric Brock. I'm the chairman CEO of. Ondos. Mhmm. We listed company.
Speaker 6:Yeah. We're a defense and security technology company. We focus on drones. We have aerial platforms. We have counter drone platforms, which are particularly valuable.
Speaker 6:Yep. Of course. Part of the cycle. Yeah. We've got ground robots.
Speaker 6:And what we're trying to do is build this portfolio
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Systems to systems to begin to integrate the air and the ground and those capabilities. And, course, that's why I'm at this AIPCon.
Speaker 1:That makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 3:First time on the show, can you give us some history on the company, how you got to this point?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Sure. So, know, we have if you look at our our our chart Yeah. It looks like we're an overnight success. But as you you know, you talk to guys like me all the time.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. This is a good, you know, ten plus years in in doing what we we do. Love it. And, you know, we're doing God's work to really build the technology and this this is autonomous systems is complex.
Speaker 6:It's a marriage of hardware and software. You're get it in the field, make it work. Mhmm. And it takes time and this is not just for us, it's the industry. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And what we're seeing for us for sure, but the industry more generally is that the technology is maturing. Right? We're making it useful with customers. So we're on an adoption curve. So, you know, the the history of the company is we've been developing technology for a number of years.
Speaker 6:That's the core. So now we're Well, yeah. What was the first product?
Speaker 1:Was it actually like you build a product, you sell it to the government? Was that what that was?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Essentially. So we've got you know, our first product was a drone in a box. So this is a Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Drone infrastructure. Sure. It lives in a it's a docking station. Yep.
Speaker 1:And then it takes off.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's got robotic arm. We can swap batteries and payloads. Sure. And that's used for say drone as first responder.
Speaker 6:Yep. Right? The Dubai police are deploying this. Yeah. Was everywhere.
Speaker 6:They fly. So very useful. But what's particularly important about that, it was really helpful for us to start to to to break out is it works. Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 6:These these technology It's
Speaker 3:always helpful. It works.
Speaker 6:So but, know, as we've evolved that, you know, in terms of history, I'll I'll I'll fast forward. Yeah. You know, once we were able to sort of demonstrate that we can we can take these to the the end zone and start to build markets and build customers Mhmm. You know, we really began to become aware of the the bigger opportunity. There's many many players, say drones, but it's on the ground, they're in the air air, they're in the water.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. And all the critical components around these systems. We've built a lot of companies and they're maturing. However, we built technology platforms. Now we have to build businesses and that's what Honest is about.
Speaker 6:So we've begun to consolidate and bring these, know, these capabilities into a portfolio. But it's not just separate. We're gonna integrate them. You get scale going to market. You get supply chain scale.
Speaker 6:And that's the whole thesis around our financial model.
Speaker 1:So there's part of it that's more private equity roll up. There's also an investing arm. You take minority stakes as well. Is That's right. When you make an investment, are you always looking to build a position over time to where you could own the full company?
Speaker 1:Or are you also looking at those, like, venture capital bets where they will just, you know, perform financially?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So so the answer is yes.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:Okay. So it's all of that. Perfect. And really what we believe is that there's a couple of things. So so most of our capital is deployed in control investments.
Speaker 6:Okay. Because we wanna get that leverage. Yeah. We wanna focus on mature technologies. At the same time, the ecosystem is really important.
Speaker 6:And I think what particularly when we're coming into the public markets because we're transitioning from venture funded companies to now they're they're maturing. You know, we need growth capital. It's a different business model. It's a different cost of capital. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And that's where the point. So one of the things we've been trying to do is the public markets are not as as familiar with a lot of these technologies and systems Sure. As compared to the private markets. That's where they were born. So as a leader and the leader we want to be, we think the market needs is we're trying to shine lights and support some of the ecosystem players because we need the ecosystem to grow up around us Mhmm.
Speaker 6:To get scale. Mhmm. Right? So even places where you might say, hey, they're competing is that not really leaders have to come together because the the supply chain needs us. We can't be a cottage industry of hundreds of drone players.
Speaker 6:Yeah. The leaders have to come. And if I can help identify that for, you know, the public markets, that that's important. And and we get value from it. And of course, we can make money.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So tell me more about the disconnect between the business and the market. I'm I'm interested to know. There's a lot of investors out there that they don't even need to know the product, use the product, but they know if it's SaaS, it's recur. It's gonna be revenue.
Speaker 1:There's gonna be some high gross margins, some cost, low CapEx, etcetera. Like, how is your business and the business lines that you have? How are they different from other companies that are in the market? Is it you're doing deals with the governments? You're working on programs of record.
Speaker 1:The money comes later, but the contract values get deployed earlier. Like, how financially is it different?
Speaker 6:There's a lot of that, but maybe Leo started the most simple level, which is where you started, which is the drone. Mhmm. The drone in and of itself Sure. By and large is a commodity. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Right? It's not hard to build a quadcopter Sure. A fixed wing drone. What is hard to is to make them autonomous. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Right? That is another layer of of of development and sophistication. So that's one. Mhmm. And then the second layer here is bringing the systems together.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. Right? Air and ground, putting the command and control around it. Of course, that's where is really gonna help us at at massive scale.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:But that's where you start to differentiate, and that's where you can capture margin. Mhmm. That's where you can capture recurring program business. Mhmm. And the and and the thing about the markets are a lot of what we're doing is infrastructure.
Speaker 6:So think about counter drone. Yeah. There's a massive number of locations across the world that need to be protected. And this is not gonna be just, hey, this year we're gonna protect from from from drone threats. It's ten years to build this cycle.
Speaker 6:There's just too
Speaker 3:Yeah. Big If if so returns that way. Last Yeah. Two weeks have taught us anything is that it's any any targets on the table, commercial or military.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. Mean, you know, they they attack the economy. Right? And I think this is a threat that we're seeing today.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. The public safety, the homeless security officials, the the department of war, they've been preparing for this for a long long time, but it's hard. Yeah. So you're seeing a lot of technology including ours that we're under a faster pace of maturation. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And but we're here. It's gonna happen, but it's gonna take some time and it is urgent. And so then the other question is I get a lot is, okay, what happens if peace breaks out? Well, I don't know that anyone's expecting that soon, but eventually we hope that that does happen. Of course.
Speaker 6:We still have to have this protection because you can't you can't you can't be vulnerable. Yeah. The lower skies as they say, you know, is a technology has now made them, you know, is is a different threat than we've ever had, particularly US soil. Sure. So again, this is you you asked about the business model.
Speaker 6:You can think about this as an infrastructure bill for a decade or longer. Sure. So and then, of course, when you install the infrastructure, have to service it. You have to upgrade it. So there's a lot of recurring elements here in our financial model.
Speaker 1:That makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much for taking Hopefully,
Speaker 2:we'll see you in
Speaker 1:the studio much warmer next time. I love it. Let's pop off those headphones, and we'll bring over our next guest. Thank you so much for hopping on. And we will continue our coverage today.
Speaker 1:Well, it's good to meet you. Are doing? How are doing? Good to see you. Let's throw this headphone set on.
Speaker 1:And Can
Speaker 2:you do it over the hat?
Speaker 1:Do it over the hat? I don't know what we do. You can put the hat over the no. There you go. That works.
Speaker 3:See if I got can just
Speaker 2:throw it back on.
Speaker 1:That works great,
Speaker 2:actually. There we go. Can you
Speaker 1:hear me okay?
Speaker 3:I can. Perfect.
Speaker 5:Perfect. Can you hear me okay?
Speaker 3:We can
Speaker 1:hear you just fine. Good. Good. First time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 5:My name is Casey Lane, and I work for a Western sports entertainment and media company called Teton Rich. We do a number of things Yeah. Across the sports media and entertainment Sure. All focused around western lifestyle and western sports.
Speaker 1:That's great. What are the most popular sports that you're covering?
Speaker 5:So we have a television network Yeah. And a subscription based streaming company called Cowboy Channel and Cowboy Plus. We have a linear channel, and then we have a subscription app that covers all of professional rodeo
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:On the PRCA, which is the primary sanctioning body of professional rodeo.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And then we also have a bull riding team
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:In the TKO PBR owned PBR teams league. So those are the two biggest two of the biggest. We also produce a massive rodeo Yeah. Memorial Day weekend at Globe Life Field in Arlington Yeah. And do a variety of other things in western sports.
Speaker 5:We have a Hollywood division that produces scripted, unscripted movies, all kinds of stuff around western sports
Speaker 1:and western lifestyle. A few years ago, I followed JB Monney a little bit. Who's who are the big stars these days?
Speaker 5:So the big stars are bull riding right now. You know, they they vary from sort of team to team, space to space. Sure. On our team, we have a couple of guys that are, like, you know, chiseled old veterans, couple of Brazilian guys, and then we have a a sort of middle aged bull rider I would call him. He'd love to hear me call him that.
Speaker 5:Mean, Keyshawn Whitehorse Okay.
Speaker 2:Who's, like, superhero. Full rider. Yeah. He's great.
Speaker 1:Good name for all.
Speaker 5:He's he's awesome. Yeah. Then, like, there's some emerging talent. There's a kid out of North Carolina named Clay Guyton. There's a kid that's on Florida's team but grew up in Texas
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Named John Krember. So Mhmm. Always new talent coming in. We Colby, who's my head coach, just spent four days in Brazil at a at a combine that PBR puts on down in Brazil to try to find new and emerging talent down there as well.
Speaker 1:So Very cool. How's the business growing overall? There's a lot of turmoil in media, a lot of consolidation, but I imagine with the Internet, there's more people just becoming aware of bull riding of Western lifestyle sports broadly. But what's it been like the last couple of years?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, it's it's no secret in the market that Western has, you know, had a renaissance. Right? A combination of of COVID and and the Taylor Sheridan Yeltsin. I was gonna say there's so
Speaker 1:many different funnels into this world.
Speaker 2:And and I look at, like Yeah.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 5:I give I will give Taylor all the credit in the world, but also I look at it as, like, you know, that's a little bit of the canary in the coal mine. Okay. I think, you know, people, particularly in The US Yeah. Grown up farther and farther away from farming and ranching.
Speaker 1:Yeah. People are moving to the cities.
Speaker 5:But it's always part of Totally.
Speaker 2:Our ethos.
Speaker 5:Yes. Yes. Yes. Americans. But there's this thing right here is the most iconic American symbol that there is.
Speaker 2:It really is. You know what? John B wears one on the weekends.
Speaker 3:I'll say
Speaker 1:that. Do.
Speaker 3:So weekdays.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And so that that sort of cultural Yeah. You know, phenomenon of what sort of Yellowstone brought and what COVID brought getting people back outdoors. You know, they couldn't go on vacation. So, you know, I'm gonna buy a I'm gonna buy an RV and a side by side and go see the West and all those types of things.
Speaker 2:Are you guys are you guys trying
Speaker 3:to manufacture some type of drive to survive moment? Cause I think what that obviously, to survive introduced the sport more broadly to Americans, but it also drilled down into the individual talent, which that that's something that Taylor Sheridan like, the Taylor Sheridan industrial content complex is not actually getting into the talent that that that you guys are covering.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think it's definitely on the road map of projects that we're looking at. We've done some stuff. PBR has done some stuff. There was a show on Amazon a couple years ago around the first year of our of the team's league that we participate in.
Speaker 5:But, you know, what we are really what you know, my belief
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Is that we have this we have the attention of the country. Mhmm. And and for to some extent, the world. Right? That that's looking at Western.
Speaker 5:The place where people attach passion is sports. Mhmm. So how do we take that interest in Western and drive it towards sport? Because that's a place where we're heavily invested. Right?
Speaker 5:Like I said, we have a whole television network
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And and streaming app in Cowboy Plus that is dedicated to the business of rodeo and and rodeo media. So it's it's definitely something. And and we're you know, we sort of have extensions too. Like, our big rodeo that I talked about that we produce in Arlington, the American, is actually on Fox.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 5:okay. It's not even on our own platform because we're trying to widen the aperture a little bit and get more people into the top of the funnel Yep. To drive them into that sort of fandom.
Speaker 2:That makes sense.
Speaker 3:What's the the next country outside of Brazil that's a pipeline for talent?
Speaker 5:Bull riding in particular is very popular in Canada, Australia Yeah. Brazil, US obviously, Mexico. Argentina is a sort of a new frontier. A lot of it has to do with the level of bull talent that those countries have access to.
Speaker 3:There's two layers, basically.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Because if a guy is really good in Argentina right now, he probably needs to go to Brazil and get on a little bit better bowl and then come here to get on, like, the highest caliber of bowl. Right?
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 5:Sure. If we take a kid straight from Argentina and put them on our bowls, it would be like, you know, going from the pony rides to, you know, riding thoroughbreds. You know what I mean? Yeah. Just because they don't have that level not not that they're not that the the talent's not as good.
Speaker 5:They just don't have access to the kind of bull power that we do here.
Speaker 1:Are there any science or technology stories that the industry is grappling with? I'm thinking about cloning prize bulls or genetic engineering or performance enhancing drugs. Like, are there any areas where the community has sort of grappled with and found, like, a, you know, happy medium on these new tech?
Speaker 5:Well, there's a there's a lot of there's a lot of those scenarios over the years that that have been relevant. Genetics is a huge part of Sure. The bucking bull and bucking animal business. Yeah. You know?
Speaker 5:It's like it's like anything else. Yeah. You know? Race horses run
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Labradors chase tennis balls, and bucking bulls buck. You bring bulls to buck to daughters of other bulls that buck, and you get more bulls to buck.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 5:But there's a a ton to the genetics, and there has been some cloning projects and things like that.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:You know, really, the the revolution the next revolution, I think, in technology in western sports is what we're doing right now with TWG AI and Palantir. Mhmm. And we're bringing we're building a video analytics platform that basically tracks the animal, the rider to provide data. It's Moneyball. It's Moneyball.
Speaker 5:Yeah. To and we pair that with the actual Yeah. Data from, you know, scoring and timing. Yeah. And we're building to the best of our ability to predict.
Speaker 5:Yes. You know, predicted outcome models of this type of bull with this particular rider. This, you know, the these sort of different scenarios. We're using it on the broadcast side to really dive dive deeper Yeah. For the fan base into, you know, why is this why was that ride scored that way?
Speaker 5:Yeah. You know, well, we can go back to this, you know, analytics platform and show you, you know, with with graphics and with with the data, you know, why this bull bucked harder than that bull, essentially. So that those are the kinds of things that we're working on right Yeah. Now to do two things. One, on the bull riding team side to make us better and give us competitive advantage.
Speaker 5:And then sell the Viewership. Pieces and parts of it maybe to some of our competitors Sure. As the analytics platform. Yeah. And then on the viewership side, it really is about informing informing the fans.
Speaker 5:I mean, look, you watch an NFL game now. You know when a guy does a punt return. Oh, wow. That guy ran, you know, 23 miles an hour or whatever the number is. We don't have that stuff in rodeo yet, but we're building that right now.
Speaker 1:Yep. How how do you think about these, like, must see events, like, creating, like, the Super Bowl moment, amplifying all the energy in the entire broader industry into, like, one singular day, minute, hour? What is the strategy there currently? Where do you wanna see it going?
Speaker 5:So that manifests itself in in each of the different sports verticals differently. Like, in professional bull riding Yeah. That moment is the team championships Yeah. In November at T Mobile Arena in Vegas. In traditional rodeo, in the PRCA, that's ten days in Las Vegas in December during the NFR.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But but just like you say that, you know, sports are about moments in time. Yeah. Our rodeo that we do, the American, is like the US Open. Right? It's the top five in each discipline Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Against a group of of, you know, five in every you know, five per discipline from every, know, every other part of the world that have competed on a track through a series of qualifiers and and regionals to get the chance to compete against the best in the world. And if they beat the best in the world, they win a million bucks. Million bucks. Actually, this year, they win $2,000,000.
Speaker 1:2,000,000.
Speaker 5:Okay. Because last year, nobody won it and it rolled over.
Speaker 1:Oh, nice.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 5:So that's kinda you know, those are sort of, like, the big moments in time right now in in in western sports.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you think about the the creator economy broadly, the the personal Instagrams? I was following, like, saw someone who does f one racer, and he's on Twitch in the simulator. And you just have this, like, ability to go go to the actual event, but then also open up your phone and continue that experience. How important is the continuation of the experience across the Internet these days?
Speaker 5:It's hugely important. We and we've we've done a number of events. We've got a we've got a guy in our company who runs our our fantasy gaming business. Okay. He's a former contestant.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Who's a really energetic sort of, you know, personality. Mhmm. And he has done several hosted events where we take the live rodeo feed from our cowboy plus product
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And push it through, you know, alternate platforms like Twitch Mhmm. And bring in people Yeah. To host on their own channels that have never watched it before Sure. And interact with him asking questions like, what's you know, what what the hell are these guys doing? What's going on there?
Speaker 5:You know? So that's a space we're just sort of trying to figure out, I think, right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But in terms of, like, you know, the influencer community
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:Like, you know, our athletes have found sort of their own voice there. Right? Because in rodeo, you know, until these until teams came along in bull riding, rodeo, everybody's like an independent contractor. Right? So my ability as a contestant to monetize my very short career is, you know, can I put a logo on my shirt that's gonna get caught on TV?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Well, now with the emergence of social media, those guys have their own voice, their own place, their own, you know, incentive to get more followers so they can go to these bigger brands and say, hey, Ariat, you know, you gotta pay me x because I've got this many followers and
Speaker 1:I'm talking about your
Speaker 5:brand every week and that kind
Speaker 2:of stuff.
Speaker 1:That makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 3:What's your most memorable bull ride for yourself? So I was never a bull rider. But you have to have taken one out at
Speaker 1:Never.
Speaker 3:Really? Too dangerous?
Speaker 5:So dangerous. It's one of those look. I so I did the time events in in traditional rodeo growing up. My dad was a bull rider, and I think as much my dad, but more so my mom having been married to a bull rider Yeah. Made sure that I never even looked in that direction.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But I'm pretty convinced I don't have the thing.
Speaker 3:The thing. There's a thing The
Speaker 5:thing is the ability to suspend fear. Yeah. It really is. And and every every active bull rider will tell you that they're not scared. And every retired bull rider, five years later when he looks back on it says, no.
Speaker 5:It's not about not being scared. It's about being able to convince yourself that you're not scared.
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 5:For that moment that because when you you know, I'd love for you guys to come to an event. Right? Get behind the chutes when the whole thing is when the whole, you know, 25,000 pounds of steel around you is shaking because a bull's moving, and he's 1,800 pounds Yeah. And a hundred and forty pound guy is about to climb over the chute and get on him. Like, there's I just don't have it.
Speaker 5:I did it just doesn't it just doesn't exist
Speaker 3:in my brain, the ability to just
Speaker 5:shut that switch off.
Speaker 1:I don't blame you. You have it. I would love to see. Just I I have full faith. You do it.
Speaker 1:You're good. I'll be watching. I'll be rooting for you.
Speaker 5:And and, I mean, with you know, I compare it you know, there's a lot of comparables. Right? You think about, you know, IndyCar drivers that are going, you know, 240 miles an hour down the backstretch at at Indianapolis, or you think about, you know, motorcycle racers or or UFC guys. Like, the UFC guys compare a lot
Speaker 1:to that, I think.
Speaker 5:But to a person, when you bring
Speaker 2:those guys
Speaker 3:a 100 and eighty pounds.
Speaker 5:To to a person, when you bring those guys to a PBR event and they watch it live, they they're like, I I can't believe that this that this is a thing. We we just had we were just in Pittsburgh a couple weeks ago, and we had Ben Roethlisberger
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 5:With us on the back of the shoots, and he was just going crazy because he's not, you know, been up that that close and personal with
Speaker 1:it. Well, thank
Speaker 5:you so much for taking the Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:On the shop.
Speaker 2:I look forward to coming to a event
Speaker 1:at some point. Headphones from you, and have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 5:Will do. Thank you, guys.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. Welcome back to the show. Hey. It's been a little over a year. Right?
Speaker 1:We talked to last
Speaker 3:you, Ted.
Speaker 1:Good to see you, Ted. For those who aren't familiar, please introduce yourself, Todd. How long have you been working at Palantir? I've been here sixteen years. Sixteen years.
Speaker 1:There we go. There we go. Is this the coldest AIPCon you've been to? You're freezing.
Speaker 7:I got married down the street actually, and in an outdoor wedding with no contingency plan. Wow.
Speaker 2:What And I was like is weather was great.
Speaker 1:Oh, weather was great.
Speaker 2:Let's say you picked the venue this year.
Speaker 1:Is the car ride. You got good luck. This is the bad luck. But anyway me roll the dice so many times. Talk talk about your role.
Speaker 1:Talk about how it's changing. I'm very interested to know how the role of four deployed engineers changing this year this month because of AI agents. But take me through a little bit of the history and how you think it progresses from here.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So my role primarily for sixteen years, what I've been doing is going on-site deploying our software Yeah. Over and over and over again. Yep. And I think the this year question is really prescient because Right.
Speaker 7:Having done it for sixteen years, I'm pretty good at it. I kinda know know know how to do it. Yeah. And as I go and see what our teams are doing, it looks like a complete alien. This is I I don't recognize it Sure.
Speaker 7:At all.
Speaker 1:Is that because of timing or actual roles or what people are doing?
Speaker 7:There are two things that are prima that are actively changed and then two implications of it that Uh-huh. The two things have actually changed the timing, the pace is rapidly accelerating to zero. Mhmm. But you can start, and within a day, you can have an application that actually matters Mhmm. To a business.
Speaker 7:And that
Speaker 3:makes And what's driving that? Is that is that your guys' internal process? Or is it the technology getting better?
Speaker 7:Think it's three things. One is I mean, maybe most important is the market is now demanding much more from software than it's ever demanded before. And so that cultural expectation is a huge part of it. Like, this has to matter.
Speaker 2:This has to be in the fight.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:You know, this has to be really relevant.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Everyone's used ChatGPC. Like, they know what it's capable of, and then they show up to work, and they're like, why am I still feeling This thing's magical. My sucks. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Work work sucks.
Speaker 7:And And it shouldn't. Yeah. And that demand is huge. Yeah. And it is, like, a huge accelerant for us.
Speaker 7:Then the second is, have you been building the infrastructure that presume the models are gonna
Speaker 3:better? Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And the and if you're ahead of the infrastructure and you're presuming, like, hey. What's gonna have to be where these things are actually load bearing in Mhmm. Very highly consequential regulated decisions that's made a thousand times Mhmm. Which integrate different decision making processes across system or across people, across systems, You're gonna need infrastructure that's able to do it. That that infrastructure has matured a lot over time, and then the models themselves are are getting better.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. And so that means that you can now have software go from legacy, rigid, defined by its limitations to immediate, adaptive, and it can be embodied. Maybe not, like, literally embodied, but embodied in the way that you want it to be such that it works. Which is the second thing that I think is just dramatically changing about the process, which is it never made sense for your best people to engage with what the technology is that runs your business.
Speaker 1:What does that mean?
Speaker 7:When you think about, like, every organization has this at the edge, and they have it in the c c in the c suite.
Speaker 6:Okay.
Speaker 7:They have the thing at the edge, which is, like, the guy who runs the plant. Yep. The guy who runs the plant knows why it works.
Speaker 2:Sure. He knows why
Speaker 7:it breaks.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 7:Every time something needs to be fixed, like, you know John. Yep. Right? Like, John makes makes makes
Speaker 1:Yeah. Work.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And in some ways, John was, like, the least levered person by technology because everything you'd buy with enterprise technology would be to standardize to enable management.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 7:And that person worked around the system. They had their access databases Yep. Their own Excel macros. They had their own way of operating.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 7:Now the technology can be John's Ironman suit. Yeah. And so that means that it now makes sense for John to spend all their time, and you have to earn this. This is what the forward deployed engineer do, earn the time of the best people so they can dictate what the system is that actually runs so that their company can be more differentiated
Speaker 1:over And
Speaker 7:then at the top, you can do this with the the CEO, and a lot of my conversations is, this is what the company that's gonna dominate my industry is gonna look like in 2030. Mhmm. And then our FDE's job is to say, okay. Let's get an MVP of that done by Easter. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Do companies I mean, in this world where companies are demanding more from software, do they do they understand what Palantir does? Do they understand the value prop more now? Is it easier to explain to them, or is it getting more complicated because the tools are more complicated and the capabilities are more complicated?
Speaker 7:It's easier to explain because we spend no time explaining it, and all you do is show it. Okay. Yeah. And so it's like the tortured explanation, I kind of think, which is a derivative of I need to understand everything because this decision that I'm gonna make, I'm gonna be stuck with forever. I'm be locked into this system.
Speaker 7:I'm gonna have to use This is, like, made sense for how people procure the enterprise technology. We're stuck small enough. Process
Speaker 2:Yep. You know,
Speaker 7:these things. And now it's, show me that it works.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 7:And show me that it works. And so I wanna spend virtually no time explaining why works and just showing you how it works. And then let's talk about how to make it work 10 times better for
Speaker 2:you.
Speaker 1:So put aside, like, Palantir's hiring plans and just talk to me about the American economy. Do we need more forward deployed engineers as, like, a society for where we're going?
Speaker 7:I think the thing that the forward deployed engineers embodies for us and why I always get a little bit stuck you know, I talk to a lot of companies that are like, hey. We're we're thinking about the FD model. Does it make sense? Or are we gonna do it? Sure.
Speaker 7:And the place where I always get stuck is, well, if you're not building our company, I'm not sure you should do forward deployed engineers. Sure. Like, I don't think it's intrinsically good or or it's intrinsically bad.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. The reason we do
Speaker 7:forward deployed engineers is our core philosophy, the core business strategy is that we're gonna build the technology so our customers Mhmm. And if that's your your core thesis, then of course you need forward deployed engineers. Because if you wanna win, you have to be able to deliver, and you have to be able to do it. And then you also need to figure out for our customers, and we also have to win.
Speaker 6:We have
Speaker 7:to scale our capabilities. We have to be able to invest in R and D. So we have to be able to figure out how to synthesize those things back into scalable technologies that allow us to deliver for our customers more and more over time. That is a highly tasteful exercise of like what gets synthesized, what gets prioritized. Frankly, I think if you didn't have SHAAM, it would be impossible.
Speaker 7:Yep. Like, I I I wouldn't do it that way. But the thing that I think for deployed engineering does embody, which I would argue we need more of in society, is it's sort of the rejection of the financialization and managerialism that defines what you think a business can look like with software versus saying the point of software is to enable creation. It's to enable the end customer to work. And by the way, we've proven that you can do that and build a really scalable profitable business at the same time.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Where where do you FTEs fit into the customer life cycle? Is it is it is it kind of a reoccurring engagement? I'm thinking about the last two weeks. We have so many different supply chain disruptions, a lot of companies that are that are leveraging Palantir to run their operations.
Speaker 3:Are they or or I imagine all the systems are are built to be able to withstand chaos. That's kind of the point. But at the same time, do you ever redeploy forward forward deployed engineers during moments like this?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I would think of it in two ways. One is for us, the forward deployed engineer is a CapEx investment. Right? You're installing the factory.
Speaker 7:You're building the initial ontology. You're training the the existing customer to be able to wheel the technology in the way that they want it to. And forward deployed engineering done well is kind of kind of a CapEx investment. And then the place where it's not is and where you do have reengagement is our goal is to continue to push the bounds of the ambition of, like, what do you want to do? Not can I deliver the same thing more efficiently to the next customer, but given what you've done today, have you thought about doing this?
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And have
Speaker 7:you thought about doing that and pushing the boundaries of the creativity and then having the connected connectivity back with our core platform seems to say, we're gonna completely throw away our entire road map and focus this around this one singular customer because if we can do this, they can win. And by the way, we're gonna build the primitives that allow us to build things that our other customers win with.
Speaker 1:How much of the discussion between FTEs and Palantir folks and corporations is around just explaining the capabilities of modern AI models versus previously, like, what a software system could look like? Like, how is that changing? Because it feels like we're in this crazy capability overhang where, like, the models move so fast, the technology is getting so much better that you can take two weeks off and come back. And that thing that you were smashing your head against the wall on has just been one shot by the latest model.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I I don't know. In my world where we live
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:That isn't true. Like, we've seen very little what I would call like cannibalization of the of the existing thing, but we have seen the I get to re decomp this problem. I can re reorganize around what these things are. And so a lot of it is are you building an engine that presumes change in the underlying technology, or are you preserving what most enterprise IT or systems, people, organizations are, which are, I need to presume stability and manage risk, cost, and effect? Is it you you do need to now build a system that presumes rapid rate of
Speaker 1:Yeah. So where where are you seeing more value in using generative AI models to build deterministic software faster versus actually deploying a stochastic model, a nondeterministic model into an enterprise workflow? Because I imagine that a lot of your systems, a lot of your customers are saying, look. I don't care that the latest model is 99.99%. I would rather have a system that's a 100% verifiable because at least I know that if I've defined it in a particular way with business logic, I get the same output no matter what.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I can tell you the antsy pattern and the pattern that's So the antsy patterns are called, like, the pejoratively Mhmm. The private equity mindset of how to deploy this stuff
Speaker 1:so
Speaker 2:far Yeah.
Speaker 7:Which is you have now three types of, call it, cognition computation. Sure. Traditional computing, you have human thought
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And then you you have generative AI.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:The the private equity model is saying, I'm gonna take this new form of of cognition and try and replace old forms of cognition and do the exact same thing I'm doing before with with slightly fewer heads. Mhmm. So then you you have the anxiety around job loss. You have the, hey, I'm gonna increase margins, but but but so what? And I think that is a dramatic underuse of the technology.
Speaker 7:One, it's a lot harder than it looks to do that to turn something that's nondeterministic into something that is deterministic. Yep. But more importantly, it's why would you do that? It's so powerful if you put it into white space. Like, let it run like a thoroughbred Sure.
Speaker 7:By decomping problems into where it's actually useful versus trying to replace something in the old kind of sclerotic enterprise technology estate.
Speaker 3:Yeah. How have you processed there's a bunch of AI roll ups, holding companies, people, you know, venture people that are trying to maybe take something out of the PE playbook, but build some type of advantage by applying AI better? How like, what do you think their prospects are? One of those things that sounds sounds really straightforward, but easier said than done.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I I don't know any specifics, so it's hard to me to opine what they're doing. But the first question that I would ask is to understand what the culture of those companies are and why I think, like, private equity is just culturally not built to do technology. Mhmm. To do this technology right, you have to presume that you're wrong at the outset, not presume that you're right.
Speaker 7:That's very hard from my experience with working with folks in private equity. And so if you can build a culture that presumes that you need to create, iterate, and discover what the thing ought to be versus do the deductive kind of management consultant playbook of you know, I've talked to all of these firms and,
Speaker 1:like Yeah.
Speaker 7:The weird thing is everybody ends up with the exact same target that they're gonna go to because they have the exact same deductive framework of, like, this is what it looks like. They process a lot of papers. It's like, okay. And then, somehow, everyone's doing accounting roll up, so then where's the alpha? Like, the investment thesis is on.
Speaker 7:And then I think the execution's gonna be a lot harder than they think it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, Ted, Mabrey, thanks so much for taking the time.
Speaker 3:Great to have you. Thanks
Speaker 1:a lot.
Speaker 2:Out there.
Speaker 1:Will grab those headphones Alright. And talk to you soon. Jordy, would you rather have $10,000,000 or access to ChatGPT in 2012?
Speaker 3:This is such a funny question because it reminds me of the, like, you know, $10,000,000 or dinner with Jay Z.
Speaker 1:Dinner with Drake or something with Jay Z. It it is a But in but in this
Speaker 3:case in this case, we were talking about this off air. Yeah. And if you had ChatGPT ten years ago, you could make hundreds of millions of dollars in so many in so many silly ways. Right? I'd be like I'd be like, same day essays for college students.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You need an essay? You got something to do? Great.
Speaker 1:We got one. If you were the
Speaker 3:only person with that type
Speaker 1:of Yeah. Crazy.
Speaker 3:No. And and Ben was saying, you know, like, even even on the image and video side
Speaker 2:Oh,
Speaker 3:yeah. It's like, I'll generate any asset that you want.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Commercials.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Commercials. That that I mean, that would be crazy. People would be like, how did you do this in a day? Even even just, like even if you don't have codex, but you just have Chateappity, you can probably, you can probably piece together so much software that that you could go sell as an actual company.
Speaker 3:Yeah. There's a million different really, really funny because it sounds it sounds
Speaker 2:like
Speaker 3:a
Speaker 2:silly question than you when you
Speaker 1:actually think about the capability. It's it's it's remarkable.
Speaker 3:I would build a very, very thin wrapper,
Speaker 2:which is absolutely great. That's one
Speaker 1:that if you just if you just actually go and sell this, like, futuristic technology, everyone will assume you're you're you're a time traveler.
Speaker 2:We're doing pretty well. We're doing
Speaker 3:pretty well. The the the snow is is hitting my my feet.
Speaker 1:The computers are working. The stream is up. This is a miracle. We are we are. It is so cold that the computers weren't charging at at one point.
Speaker 1:We I I've I've heard, you know, if you're in the desert, you need fans for your computer to keep it cool. We probably need to get some of those, but I never thought we'd have to get heat pads. Oh, they have the team the production team has heat pads on the computer. And we should be joined by Alex Karp in just a few minutes. So thank you for tuning in.
Speaker 1:Thank you to our sponsors for making this possible.
Speaker 3:And More news. Trump administration's set to suspend the Jones Act to oil prices.
Speaker 1:Was this what this was Alex Alex Epstein was talking about?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, lot of people have wanted this forever Yeah. Because the the Jones Act obviously has had some unnecessary or or unintentional consequences. Right? Sounds really good on paper.
Speaker 3:But But least some difficult Yeah. Certain things. In not the way that Situations. People would have expected. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Quartz says, why don't they just tokenize the oil in The Middle East and transport it across permissionless financial rails, thereby avoiding the Strait Of Hormuz altogether?
Speaker 1:Here's your oil NFT. Here's your here's your gasoline.
Speaker 3:Here's something we need to figure out. Helium Oh, helium exposure. Qatar's shutdown of liquefied natural gas production has shaken about a third of global helium taken about a third of global helium production offline, affecting chip makers who rely on helium for semiconductor manufacturing. Mhmm. Helium has no viable substitute in the chip process, and no other source can immediately replace Qatar's supply with helium containers already filled before the world before the war remaining stranded.
Speaker 3:If the disruption persists, helium shortages could force chip makers to deprioritize lower margin product lines, reinforcing the existing allocation towards AI memory and deepening an already severe memory shortage.
Speaker 1:Find me the Alex Epstein of Helium today. Find me the Scott Nolan of Helium. There's gotta be someone out there who's been building a startup around Helium. I actually did talk to someone. I don't know that I should share, all the details, but they were looking at a startup that was going to buy a pretty significant, like, you know, helium mine or something like that.
Speaker 1:And they they had a whole business plan for it, and I think it, this was years and years ago. But it was a fascinating industry. I I dug into it for, like, you know, about an hour with this this friend of the show. Lots to learn more about rare elements and minerals and all the different impacts that recent news cycle has on all aspects of the economy. Hopefully, an Odd Lots episode on helium soon.
Speaker 1:That that would be that would certainly be welcome.
Speaker 3:In Philly, 600 tubs of French dip mysteriously showed up at several restaurants.
Speaker 1:Is this real?
Speaker 3:And Brooks says, yeah, it's an affiliate inquirer. Brooks says it's starting. It's starting.
Speaker 1:It's starting. Who knows? It's very ominous. What what what dip? French dip?
Speaker 1:Is that, like, sour cream and
Speaker 3:No. With the sandwiches.
Speaker 1:Right? French dip? Oh, well, French dip is a sandwich, but is it also a topping?
Speaker 2:I know.
Speaker 3:But it's a soup. It's a but it's it's the the
Speaker 4:You
Speaker 1:dip the sandwich in it. The au jus. Au jus. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:I'm getting it.
Speaker 3:Sue Hale says the run on inference capacity is coming. You have been warned.
Speaker 1:Inference capacity. I mean, we've seen that with Claude going down. The the the the GPUs are on fire over on over in OpenAI with the Codex team, TBPN resetting limits. Someone made a button that that a website that's just have the codex limits been reset. And you can just go to this website.
Speaker 1:It's one of these, like, one one off vibe coded pages. And
Speaker 2:Sam Hogan.
Speaker 1:If TBP resets them, you can go and check your codex.
Speaker 3:Sam Hogan says real GPU shortage has never been tried.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We could be we could be getting close. There's a lot of demand, especially if NVIDIA is starting to keep the chips. Ty this is huge news for Tyler. He's been pitching Jensen on keeping the chips for himself and building an AI model or an open source model, and that was the that was the big news.
Speaker 1:What was the total headline figure? Something like $26,000,000,000 over five years investing in open source LLM development, something like that? It was a big number.
Speaker 3:26. Big number.
Speaker 1:It was a big number. Not the biggest number we've
Speaker 2:ever heard. Another big number.
Speaker 3:Netflix is paying 600,000,000 for Ben Affleck's company. This was reported earlier in the week that they were acquiring it, but there was no number. 600 is a lot bigger than what I imagined. I was looking at it as like a, you know, hey. This would be a nice soft landing for, this film company, but pretty significant outcome.
Speaker 1:Yes. 6 hundred's a big number. It'll be very interesting to see what Netflix does with that. We tracked a little bit of the there's a new Kalker market up on which Hollywood studio, which traditional Hollywood studio, big Hollywood studio will release a fully AI generated film or scripted series by 2027. And I think Netflix was in the lead, but just barely.
Speaker 1:It's so early. So we'll see where all of that goes.
Speaker 3:Redbird is the big backer of Interpositive Oh. Which Redbird is also Capital? Yeah. Big backer of the of the Warner Brothers deal.
Speaker 1:Are they an investment bank or investment firm as well? They do both. They take positions and and advisory. Right?
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exciting. Well, we should be joined by Alex Karp in just a minute. Anything else in the timeline worth
Speaker 3:I thought this was interesting. And one of, at least, Anthropic's only marketing growth person Oh, yeah. One interview. Extremely impressive what what he was able to handle on his own, obviously Yeah. Using the tools Yeah.
Speaker 3:To their fullest extent. Yeah. But a lot of people thought it was funny because it's like, hey. You're you probably, like, should've growing that fast.
Speaker 2:People. Like, you could
Speaker 3:probably add more people.
Speaker 1:Oh, good growth people are hard to find. They are. You know? It it is it is difficult. But, yeah, it would be interesting.
Speaker 3:Gotta talk about Cursor.
Speaker 1:What's going on with Cursor?
Speaker 3:Cursor is having what sound like early talks to raise more money at somewhere around $50,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:That was maybe 60. I mean, it's just a massive up around. What was the last round?
Speaker 2:18 or 20?
Speaker 1:30. 30. Okay. So nice little step up. A lot of lot of doom and gloom on the timeline around Curse.
Speaker 1:We were debating this yesterday. Fascinating just how big the market is, where adoption sits.
Speaker 3:But the reporting says they're growing at 25% month over month. Incredible. To the And
Speaker 1:and at that scale, 2,000,000,000 ARR, something like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I just think we keep getting these data points that show that the world is much bigger than whatever people are saying on x Yep. On any given day.
Speaker 1:Yep. Right? Yep. Yeah. It's, yeah.
Speaker 1:It it's easy to read into, Kyle Russell's post about, like, his team, which is truly, the cutting edge most, you know, most online group of folks shifting over and and shifting away from from cursor, but, there's still probably, applications where it makes a ton of sense. And bunch of companies that are happy with the product and continue to pay, continue to continue to grow. And then there's also that interesting thesis about maybe there's a, a world where they act as a, like, model router in some ways, and are and are piping different services in. Who knows what the margins look like in the in the limit, but, you know, certainly certainly could could, continue to grow. What else is in the timeline while we wait for Alex Karp to join TBPN live?
Speaker 3:I mean, the big news is Taco Bell is adding a skin care item to its men menu. Mountain Dew Baja Blast under eye patches are gonna be infused with caffeine and citrus.
Speaker 1:That's essential if you're in a code red. If you're in a code red, get the Baja Blast under it's under eye shadow. I don't even know what that is. But you can get it at Taco Bell on the menu at any Taco Bell. Is this, like, some limited drop?
Speaker 1:Is this some viral stunt? Is this real? I don't know. Have to check it out. Dean Ball is Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Dean Ball is going forth with Emilio Michael. That's right. They're they're they're trading blows about, what does it mean to have a constitution? Should who should be who should write that? Who should give the models their personality?
Speaker 1:And, I mean, we'll talk more about this tomorrow, but Dwarkash Patel has a great post summarizing a lot of his thoughts, working through all of the different philosophies of when the government should be in charge, when different public companies should be in charge. Dean Ball's main point is that, you know, maybe constitution wasn't the right term or maybe it's a charged term or a loaded term that people read into. But, Dean Ball's point is that, there is no way to train an LLM that doesn't have a personality. Even if it's the most robotic personality, that's still a personality. Well, we are joined by Alex Karp.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show. Thank you so
Speaker 3:much Good to see you.
Speaker 1:For taking the time. You guys
Speaker 2:would with or without hat?
Speaker 1:Whatever is comfortable for you. You can do hat.
Speaker 2:Cold out here.
Speaker 3:Is it
Speaker 1:on. It's cold. Day day for you. You're always out skiing. You're
Speaker 2:you're cold. Done it. Yeah. We need to get we're close to getting skis. Look.
Speaker 2:We could we allow you to know we were supposed to do something physical.
Speaker 1:It's starting to stick.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's starting to stick. Oh, I like this vibe. Now I feel like a newscaster. Feel important.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is good. They You're, like, eight feet tall. People don't realize that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He's not standing up because it'll be, like he's, like, count track for all of us. He's, like, he's, like, eight foot. Last time
Speaker 1:we talked to you, I think you were doing four minutes on the dead hang. What's it up to now?
Speaker 2:Five zero five zero five.
Speaker 1:505. What about in the cold, though? That's
Speaker 2:what I'm Sorry. We need to have a special minute for that. Yeah. Yeah. 505.
Speaker 2:For those of you who haven't done a dead hang, first of all, go do it. Why is it important? Well, there there are very few things that are proxy indicators that are accurate for health.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like dead hang, farmers walk body weight, and v o two are the three ones that count.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I don't think anyone really
Speaker 1:one rep match bench bench press. That's all I focus
Speaker 2:on. Okay. Well, you know, it's like feel
Speaker 1:like I feel like as long as a really impressive bench press, I'll I'll live Yeah. A short but glorious life. Yeah. I don't know. Can they say something about that?
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's Who want to live a long Yeah. And glorious life when you can live a glorious short life?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think that's what they tell you before they give you a bad salary in something like that. I was like, actually, I think I think it's like, yeah. It's or it's like, yeah. My social life is so great.
Speaker 2:I only have a bot, but I enjoy it. Yeah.
Speaker 7:It's A
Speaker 2:kind of logic. No.
Speaker 1:But, no, it's Dead hang is important.
Speaker 2:Dead hang is crucial. Okay. And you really need to go work on it, especially anyone watching Okay. Your podcast
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Is likely to outperform. Yeah. You wanna have some you know, you wanna be able to do something with that outperformance.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, dead hang.
Speaker 2:Like, yeah. Well, the dead hang may be a proxy indicator for other things you could do with your outperformance. Yes.
Speaker 1:You know? But And, you know,
Speaker 2:not everyone is yeah. Not everyone is, like, six foot nine. They're like, you may not need a dead hang, but the rest of us.
Speaker 1:Well, the I I can cheat because most of the pull up bars, I can't stand
Speaker 2:on the floor. That's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I can hold forever.
Speaker 2:You can forever. That's right. That's right.
Speaker 1:But but when you're not dead hanging, what should people be doing with the new coding agents? How important is it to learn to code? How important is it
Speaker 2:to Look. There there are two that everybody's worried about, like, their future, but there are basically two ways to know you have a future. One, you have some vocational training. Okay. So it's like or two, you're neurodivergent.
Speaker 2:And and I when I say neurodivergent, I mean broadly defined. Like, your guys are sitting here. You coulda had a corporate tool job. Yeah. You coulda been, like, I don't wanna pick on Goldman, but, like, just say, you know, like a job.
Speaker 1:I applied there.
Speaker 2:They took me down. But yeah.
Speaker 1:See, I I did work at
Speaker 2:whatever. You coulda had a job where you're like You tried. You tried to fail. It's like, yeah. No.
Speaker 2:Actually, maybe they didn't know the right way to test. Yeah. Like, it's like yeah. They were like like, you know Yeah. Hey.
Speaker 2:Whatever. I'm not picking on one or the other. I'm just saying, you you you know, they're like, you're probably here. You think you're here because it's actually, you probably wouldn't have been able to do that shit because there's like it's the same thing as sit down in class and learn some bullshit. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Like and you just regurgitate it. Mhmm. Like, that's not a valuable thing. Mhmm. If you are actually have insights into anything and you have real technical expertise
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, you know, you can look at a company, but you actually can look at it because you know something about how these things work or something about how clients work, you know. Then all the other stuff that used to be precious, like being able to do low end coding Mhmm. Being able to do low end luring, being able to do low end reading and writing. Mean, you got this is like I feel like Odin came down and was like, I'm gonna make the world just right for dyslexic. It's like it's like, yeah.
Speaker 2:I know Odin has come down from our Lockheed has come down and said, you know what, Karp? You suffered so much as a kid. Yeah. I'm just gonna make the whole world. So everyone else can suffer.
Speaker 2:I don't want that. It's like now, but it's really an inversion. Like, everybody with, like, the normal shape skills are dyslexics because, like Yeah. The meaning, the thing they can do that used to be valuable is not so valuable. The thing that they need to learn to do is, like, be more of an artist, look at things from a different direction, be able to build something unique.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. I think and you see this on the battlefield, like, one of the most underappreciated things about fighting a war, which is the I mean, there are basic core things civilizations do, like build technology for war
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Is every society fights differently. Every component of the society fights differently. And when, like, American as allies, we do not even approach these problems in the same way. What it makes America lethal more so than any currently country is, like, a combination of, obviously, the technology, which we're super interested in and and and believe we're paying a huge part in. But it's, like, twenty years of, like, operators figuring out what worked, what not what worked in a manual.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Like, what worked in reality. Also, even selection. If you look at the selection of people, like, meet, like, tier one operators Mhmm. They don't look anything like what people would think.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's not like the movies. They're like these, like, these they're like this big and like Yeah. You know, it's like because like refining. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We have we have we have specialized ways of doing that. All that is crazy valuable. As a proxy indicator, people who are getting their news from you are just likely to massively outperform. Mhmm. People are getting their news from something that's a regurgitation of you gotta vote for one party or the other.
Speaker 2:Sure. And then the the real problem we have in society is not your listeners or Palantir's customers or our partners. It's like, well, what happens to everyone else? Are they gonna lynch us? Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Because, like, that's the real problem. Like, these products, like, what we're building, like, our our our our agents mean that, like, the most I mean, the most powerful people in the Democratic Party are highly educated female voters. And these technologies, like, they love they I mean, like, yeah, I actually get along with all these people in private, there's a public dispute. But, like, largely, I've talked to Daria over and over, and it's like, yeah. You love one company because they they're not pro Trump.
Speaker 2:That company's taking your job. How are you gonna feel about that company when you find that you have no job? Mhmm. What what what do you think the the Republican Party's gonna do to products that do not support our military? What do you think the Democratic Party's gonna do to products even if you're voting for them that are taking away the jobs of every one of your constituents Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And saying, oh, people are gonna love you so much, and you're gonna be poor. Mhmm. By the way, we love you so much. We're gonna give you a little handout once a month.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So apply that to the the the SaaSpocalypse narrative, the enterprise SaaS. There's an idea that the first jobs that will be taken might be the enterprise software products that exist, haven't really innovated, have locked in, and they're gonna be replatformed. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. If you the the the thing that these technologies do is they also make it harder to lie about is what part of the political realm. If something's not creating value or something's not working or there's corruption, you can't lie about it. Mhmm. And nobody believes that all software companies actually create value.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. I mean, the famous thing that we all learned was that we rejected, that you were learned and people taught you is, like, your software company is supposed to give the client a feeling they're getting laid while they're getting fucked.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now, if that's how your products actually are, you are now, you are gonna get fucked. Mhmm. Like and this is gonna happen so quickly. Mhmm. And the simple test for people who are looking this is, does this product or in our case, we were never pure software.
Speaker 2:We're actually like a hybrid of, like
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Humans Yep. FTEs, augmented humans, so AI FTEs
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then orchestration, and then and essentially, what we would call primitives, like Yeah. Taking the tribal knowledge of institution, coding it into logic, and then using that to be extended in LMs. Okay. But we don't have to explain that to our clients.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know? So so so there's there was always this always Palantir consulting firm. Is it all just people? Is there any real software?
Speaker 1:I feel like that narrative went away.
Speaker 2:Oh, no. No. They they couldn't invest in those because we were a services company. Exactly. And now now it's like and now
Speaker 1:But it's but is is is actually having that service
Speaker 2:Oh, no. Billing better in the future? No. No. It's not better.
Speaker 2:It's underrated. It's crucial. It's crucial. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, all these places that made fun of us Yes. They're running around and trying to get FTEs. Course, getting an FTE is like yeah. It's like yeah. It's not as easy as it sounds Yes.
Speaker 2:Because you have to know how to manage it, where to put the person, how to extract value. Yeah. And then you need all these products that augment the FDA. Yeah. What are those products?
Speaker 2:Ontology. Yep. Foundry. Yep. FDI AI things that we've built.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:What we the being able So so the value of the business is not a monolithic code base that never changes. It is the people. It is the deployment. Is the relationships. Is that how you're thinking about the business these days?
Speaker 2:Well, actually, the way I I'm telling you, like, when you walk around here
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They only care they don't care about any of that. Yeah. What they care about is you transform my business in Yep. In three months. Yep.
Speaker 2:It would have taken three years, I e, it would never have happened.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:That's what they care about. Yep. Now then there's a question of how do you do that? Mhmm. And that is a con that is a concatenate artistry.
Speaker 2:It's like
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Select client, select where you would start, Select ways in which innovate in ways they would not accept. Innovate in places they do not understand you should innovate. Learn to manage these very complex by the way, it's not just culturally complex. It's tribal knowledge. And much of that tribal knowledge is in rules that they have to apply because there are all sorts of rules about manufacturing, hospitals, war, rules that are applied that they're not saying they apply Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Laws, like, all sorts of regulate regulatory things on top of all that. All that has to happen very rapidly. So you would need and, like, without going into details, like, I'm in the middle of, like, every single one of these discussions in almost every breakdown. It's like people do not understand how institutions work. Yep.
Speaker 2:They don't understand how the software would work. They don't have the LLM would work. They don't have the product that would actually work in that environment. And they still, at the end of the day, are not saying, we're gonna charge on value.
Speaker 1:Okay. How do institutions work? Why is it that we get these genius models that are a 160 IQ? They can solve incredible math, and they're not just, like, everywhere all the time.
Speaker 7:What is
Speaker 2:slow No. I mean, the simple version is they're one sixty against a test.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But the test isn't the it's a concatenation. The simple math would be, it's one sixty on one test Mhmm. But you've gotta pass differentiated tests over a long period of time. So it's a thousand tests. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So de facto, by the fiftieth step, it's zero IQ. Mhmm. But then there's also there's also yeah. I mean, it's like it's it's it's insane. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, no I love when I hear about all this is gonna replace, then I get to our clients, and they're like, could we have more? We don't even have the capacity. Capacity. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's It's like like it's it's like it's it's a a surreal thing. Like, would you guys like to be FTEs? Because we need some help.
Speaker 2:If you're in the audience completely seriously and you're aligned, broadly speaking with America is a great country, you don't have to agree about anything else. And you're out there, and you're technical or just smart. Apply. We need you.
Speaker 1:Okay. America is a great country. Put aside democrat. Put aside republican. Is democracy the correct formulation to decide the future of AI?
Speaker 1:Should the American people be voting to decide American. Be handled by private companies?
Speaker 2:No. America well, it depends. Like, it it like yeah. Great. So in the war fighting context
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The Department of War Yes. Has to be the arbiter of what gets deployed. But as a citizen, I vote for the Department of War. Correct? Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Okay. No.
Speaker 2:Okay. But but I'm just saying so I I wanna split domestic and and foreign. Okay. Because, like, we in this country have god given rights, literally given to us by a higher being.
Speaker 5:There's a
Speaker 2:right of free expression, which Mhmm. We're exercising all the time Yeah. And is very important to us. There's a second amendment, which I exercise. I I shoot very well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I would encourage you guys and other people to listening to avail yourself of the second amendment. Yes. It it was not it is there to protect ourselves in case the first amendment fails. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That's the reason it's there. Mhmm. There's a a fourth amendment which is essentially we have a right to privacy. Privacy. Okay.
Speaker 2:We have those rights. Mhmm. Adversaries trying to kill us in Iran do not have those rights. Sure. And I don't believe I've never believed in extending our rights to foreign countries that are adversarial to us.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. I don't even really believe I don't like you know, in Germany
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Where I lived half my life, they don't have a First Amendment. Mhmm. They don't believe it. And by the way, they've never believed in the First Amendment. They have other rights.
Speaker 2:That's great. I'm not gonna dispute that, but I want our rights here. In this country, if you're gonna tell the American people you're building what is clearly a dangerous technology, it's dangerous because it it will likely take your job Mhmm. If especially if you're white collar. So Mhmm.
Speaker 2:If you're voting, you know, you're a highly educated person.
Speaker 3:Flipped Have on that in the last, like, six months or so? Because I think I think the last time we talked, your general mindset was, like, high agency, highly productive people will be able to continue to leverage the tools to deliver
Speaker 2:value within organizations. Yeah. I think if you're neurodivergent and high agency and you're highly educated, that's great. But if you're not neurodivergent and you're, like, lawyer fourteen five zero six, that's a problem. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Okay. But let me get to this, and they're they're linked, but it's okay. On domestic stuff, I we have rights that are not subject to minority rule. Like, the majority can vote against us having Fourth Amendment rights. I want that I want that litigated at the Supreme Court Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Because I we are not our constitution is not about majority. It's actually about the rights of the minority. And it's our right. All I bet you the three of us have opinions that are very much in the minority Sure. That we wanna be able to say, at least in the privacy of our own home.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right? And so so that there are real issues. I'm super sympathetic with restrictions around the use of these products in a domestic context even though it's funny. People out there, every conspiracy theorist thinks, yeah, it's insane.
Speaker 2:I'm the only one. Conspiracy theorists, you may hate this, but there's one person protecting your rights to be a conspiracy theorist that actually has a seat at the table, and that person is me. You may not you may not wanna hear that truth, but it's it is fucking true. Yeah. And maybe do a little more reading before you pontificate on your absurd and obviously ill formed and many times stupid opinions.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Okay. So because, like, you're attacking the person who's protecting you, idiot. It's, like, fucking so stupid. Do do do use one of the bots to correct your opinion.
Speaker 2:It's like, I'm being attacked online now. Yeah. It's like, doctor Karp is anti progress for that because of my whole life. I'm the only just telling you the truth. These things are gonna take your job.
Speaker 2:Okay. So then but in the war fighting context, and it's the primary justification for these products has to be it's it's they're two relevant powers now, Us and China. Mhmm. This is a have have not world. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It's going to be either us or them basically deciding the world order. Because, like, these other countries, and maybe India will will will get involved, maybe the Arab, non Arab, Middle East. But currently, on the trajectory we're on now, there are two places where these things are being developed and deployed. It's us or them. Yep.
Speaker 2:And I'm not particularly, you know, I'm not I'm not out to hurt China. I'm just out to I think we should win. Yeah. I'm not trying to hurt them. And in that context, you can't say we're not gonna do x, y, and z.
Speaker 2:I mean, I give you examples, but, like Sure. There are datasets that are publicly available in The US market that should I don't think should be used against you and me Mhmm. In a law for law enforcement context more than with the help of, say, AI agents and ontology.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But if you don't use it on the battlefield, you obviously, Iran's gonna use them. But you don't think they can go online and buy those products?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and by the way, without going into somewhat classified data, those things are in combination with other things lethal. Mhmm. Like, a lot of people who wanna hurt America on the battlefield end up dead Mhmm. Because of our ability to aggregate and then figure out what's going on in the battlefield before they can figure out what we're doing. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And so, like, I'm very much in favor of it for moral reasons, but I'm also in favor of it. Like, don't know how else you explain this to the American people. We're we're gonna take your job. We're gonna take away you're gonna eviscerate your ability to to to have money and power Mhmm. But that we're not gonna defend you on the battlefield.
Speaker 2:It just seems like yeah. Well, they're gonna you know what's actually gonna happen? That nobody believes me in tech, but there's gonna be a movement in this country that gets very strong very quickly to nationalize these things. It's gonna be take away our money. The bill billionaires are evil.
Speaker 2:You may not have heard that. Yes. Super evil. Yes. And if you take away their money, it'll help poor people.
Speaker 2:Yes. That's really important to understand. Yeah. Making rich people miserable is the only way to help poor people. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's obviously true.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Say once you've learned that, the next thing you're gonna learn is we have to nationalize a techno
Speaker 3:They're gonna they're gonna quote you on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, it's like They quoted you on
Speaker 1:on So so, I mean, it sounds like you're you're you're closer to Dario on, you know, potentially 50% of early stage white collar job loss. Like, you're you're you're aware that there's a risk at least Every one's probability. You're aware of it. Well, what do you see as the solution?
Speaker 2:Well, first, we just have to I mean, well, I mean, the obvious thing is, okay. We can't have any migration here. Like, how are gonna create more job? Like, it's like you have to what the problem in fairness, not that people wanna be in the business of being fair to policy leaders, but that we are dealing with technologies that will determine the policy decisions. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So you can't just pretend they're not happening. Mhmm. Like, step one is, like, we it's going to be hard and but possible to make this society work given that transforming it requires these technologies. Mhmm. All like, I really like the people here.
Speaker 2:They're not here because they like me. Like, maybe they're here for my jokes. Yeah. High quality in some cases. But they it's like a long trip and we're here and I'm the only one who likes this weather.
Speaker 2:It's great weather. I brought it for you. It's but they're here because they've seen their business being transformed. Yeah. And this is happening in America more than it.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. We have to win those battles, but the costs are gonna be very high.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And so you have to work back from, okay, the costs are gonna be very high. We we can't put oil on the fire. It's like, you know, it's like, well, getting jobs for all Americans is gonna be hard and people maybe who become Americans. But it's like you have to have different policies around migration. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:You have to different policies around how we train people. Like, currently, if you're a young kid in high school and you're neurodivergent, they're literally track chaining into your chair and feeding you medication so you can have skills that are not valuable.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, it's so it's like and and then we'll probably over time have to have, like, a discussion of, like, yeah, if you go into this career, you're not gonna have a job. Mhmm. Like, a really honest discussion about that. These are the places where you will likely have a job. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And yeah. Help me What
Speaker 3:you know, it it seems like we, as a country, will probably head down a more European path where it is becomes very, very difficult or near impossible to let people go. Do you think that's correct? So you mean in Germany, it's much harder to to lay someone off.
Speaker 2:I mean, I And
Speaker 3:that does impact I mean, that does impact the the growth of of companies.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:But I think many Germans would argue that's probably
Speaker 2:You know, Germany's I mean, I won't I'll I'll answer your question. Germany's an interesting place. I did this thing in German where I basically told the truth, which you're not allowed to do in Germany. It's like, you know, it's kinda really bad situation and the economy sucks. The migration thing's a complete disaster, and the energy situation is like compounds everything.
Speaker 2:And I got thousands of people literally saying, thank god someone told the truth. And there are a lot of people like you guys, young people building things that feel hampered and and and are correct to feel hampered. I I think the American version, if we're not careful, is not gonna be the German version. I think it's gonna be hang the rich. I it's like, I think it's gonna be not protect everybody else.
Speaker 2:You're gonna be like, oh, look. This is too dangerous, and we're gonna hang the rich, but not really help the poor. And in fairness to the German version, like, you know, German, like, health insurance, insurance, all that stuff, it works. Yeah. Like, I was I was poor in Germany for, like, a decade.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, like, I had I had the best life on the planet. Like, it's like being poor in Germany is like being better than being rich here in some in some days.
Speaker 1:So basically, policies that lift the floor, reeducation, training.
Speaker 2:You're so if you wanna do what we could do here Yeah. We the things we could adopt from Germany are Germany has three high schools. Yeah. Two are vocational. Sure.
Speaker 2:One is academic.
Speaker 1:Better education.
Speaker 2:Better programmatic Yeah. Vocational. A vocational it also has a bad like, a weird vibe here. Like, vocational training in Germany is very technical. Like, the people building the cars at BMW Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Or even in the French version Airbus, like, very complicated jobs. They didn't go to college. True. They went to a very, very high end high school. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they come out without any debt. Yeah. And that stuff is really valuable. Yeah. So if you wanna Amazing.
Speaker 2:You you have to completely transform our educational system and and go very young into, like, training people to do things. You also need to change our testing system Mhmm. Like, different forms of intelligence. All of our tests are built around things that are were valuable in the industrial revolution. Sure.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. It's like, you wanna pull out all the dyslexics, all the neurodivergence. Everybody who can't sit or needs to build or wants to build have to go into a select a separate slot of, like, yeah. We should have gotten you before you got turned down at Coleman.
Speaker 2:And, like, said, this is like, that's a waste of your time.
Speaker 3:You could be building something important. And What else goes would be a part of the good outcome? Rescaling.
Speaker 2:The the the most important part of the good outcome is what we show our adversaries, you can't fuck with us. And we're the best we have the best military in the world. I hope I believe we're doing that right now. On the good outcome side, we yeah. We go around.
Speaker 2:And then on the commercial side, we go to all these high infrastructure, you know, hospitals, manufacturing, all these things, complicated infrastructure, and we AI enhanced all of them so the products are legitimately the best in world. And we rebuild manufacturing in this country. Like, a big problem for us, including on the battlefield, is our manufacturing just is not up to where we have to be. Yep. And that, by the way, requires rescaling scaling humans, and we're doing this all over the place.
Speaker 2:I mean, the guy writing a lot of the scripts for the target these people, they're like high school, college grads, the people building batteries and all these things using our products. These are high school, college grads. There's a lot of opportunity there. But, you know, one of the things I told the Germans, and I would say to us is we I was like, you know, in Germany, you have to call it a crisis. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:We do need, like this is a crisis moment. America is in tomorrow is not gonna look like it looked at all, or we're gonna have radicalism on right or left. Mhmm. The the the problem the danger is if we don't do these reforms, you are gonna get the pitchforks. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Because that then the only solution people are gonna have is, well, you know, let's go after the unlikable rich people in tech, especially AI tech. And then but but then what can work is, yeah, close the borders, keep them closed, start doing huge vocational efforts, change how we test aptitude, like, so we have an accurate diagnostic of where you could be slotted, Be ruthless and, like, you know, it's it's like in in certain find out new ways to test and do ruthless testing and slotting. And then also go around to universities and just I mean, you know how when you, like, you wanna smoke a cigarette, it's like this this cigarette may be harmful to you. Maybe we should be putting that in universities. This university this this university is harmful for your investor.
Speaker 2:You know, I'm libertarian. You wanna go to
Speaker 3:university debt may be harmful
Speaker 2:to your future financial health. For for you and your personal life. Explain to someone you gotta have a million dollars in debt. Yeah. Million dollars in debt.
Speaker 2:I mean, maybe if you're six nine and you you can get away with that, but the rest of us have to provide.
Speaker 1:That's funny. Help me square this idea. You you were you were talking earlier today about people misunderstanding your business. And Yeah.
Speaker 3:What's it like to read about your business?
Speaker 2:Oh, I mean, first of all, it's I mean, the part I used I I hate it, But then the part I love is and it's like you are valuable your your value is pretty directly con convergent with people's inability to understand what you're doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's like it's like all these technologies are potentially commodifying everything.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. So if you are a business that is, you know, not services, not product, but both, but also works on tribal knowledge of data, And every single business you make is individual. And so, yeah, that's a crazy valuable business.
Speaker 1:True in a lot of industries where if the broader business community doesn't understand your business, you might have a short report, but you'll have a way less competition because people aren't copying you.
Speaker 2:Well, it's to copy certain, like, like, and and and we we neglect this. Like Yeah. You know, almost, like you even see it culturally, like, luxury products dominated by the French, watches dominated by the Swiss, currently certain kinds of war fighting dominated by America. Yeah. And it's like, it's it's very hard for people to eviscerate these cultural advantages, and our products augment that, which makes it, you know, augments the the differentiated specific Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Over the generalizable. And and and that's where literally all the value is gonna go. And this is gonna be like a waterfall. And that that's the problem with a lot of software companies. It's like it's like product a b c t.
Speaker 2:But but but then when you read it, it's like like one of the more depressing things that you guys probably confront, but it's like a market market huge market opportunity for you. It's like, where are the experts? Like, it's like, you know, it's like this shit. It's like, you know, you you hope and pray. Like, I'll tell you the funniest thing about my life now and people internally know.
Speaker 2:Almost every day, I'm like, wait a minute. I'm the adult in the room here? Yeah. It's like everywhere I go, it's like it's like, wait a minute. I like, I and it's like there it it's like and and it's big.
Speaker 2:So it's it's surreal when you read about these things, but and it's it used to really frustrate me, but now I kinda just think, well, like, I can't believe we're still viewed as crazy. It's like everything we're doing is the only thing that's where I mean, like, don't wanna, like, spend a lot of time on our baller accentual accentually baller numbers from last year, but it's like, you know, clearly, our shit works. Clearly, nothing is working at that level. And you would think they would take, like, I don't know, ten minutes to think, okay. Well, the thing I believed and I thought it would work didn't work at all.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But this thing I thought was insane is has like a rule of one twenty seven Mhmm. When like no one like, is considered like and, like but they don't and and and and then and I yeah. But it it's sometimes frustrating, honestly. And the hard part actually is I kind of view it as a feature.
Speaker 2:Internally, we get these bright eyed kids. Mhmm. So it's so funny. I mean, one get the best people in the world. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But, you know, just like I was probably at 21, they're very romantic. It's like, but why does the adult not understand this? It's like, but but but the adult expert tells me it's like, I don't know when you guys had to drop this huge moment when you realized that, like Yeah. The adults are, like, you know, on crack or something.
Speaker 1:Like, it's Okay. Yeah. Last question. Would you rather have $10,000,000 or access to ChatGPT in 2012? It's a viral question.
Speaker 1:It's going viral right now.
Speaker 2:I have to choose one or the other? Yes. I mean, okay. I'm just
Speaker 3:I don't think he needs don't think he needs
Speaker 2:to know. Can I can I have my social life in grad school?
Speaker 1:Oh, there we go.
Speaker 2:Okay. So that's on your head. How about you got a new pick? We just have
Speaker 1:to ask you. Because
Speaker 2:it's like, you know, it's like, great. I I gotta take something I valued. Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The most valuable thing for social life in grad school. Well, thank you so much for taking this on. Good job, Alex. It's fantastic to
Speaker 3:have you.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. Yeah. And that's our show today, folks. Thank you so much for tuning in to TBPN. Today, we will be back in the TBPN AIPCon tomorrow at 11AM Pacific.
Speaker 3:Sign off with us?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Point at the camera. Oh. Goodbye.
Speaker 3:Have a good one. Cheers.