TBPN - Alex Karp LIVE at Palantir AIPCon | David Glazer, Ben Harvatine, Danny Lutkus, Jonathan Webb, Nancy Cable, Ryan Asdourian, Drew Cukor, Zack Porter, Kyle Kirkwood, Matthew Jacoby

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

(10:15) - Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies, discusses the company's significant growth, highlighting a 93% increase in U.S. operations and a 94% Rule of 40 score, attrib...uting success to their unique approach of charging clients based on value creation. He emphasizes the importance of aligning software costs with the value delivered, contrasting Palantir's model with traditional software businesses that often rely on client dependency. Karp also underscores the critical role of integrating large language models with high-fidelity data to enhance business operations, advocating for transparency and efficiency in enterprise software solutions. (33:44) - Ben Harvatine, an engineer by training and entrepreneur, currently serves as an Account Strategist and Supply Chain Lead at Palantir Technologies. In the conversation, he discusses his unconventional path to Palantir, highlighting his background in mechanical engineering and architecture, and his experiences at Anheuser-Busch and hardware startups. He also showcases a 3D-printed robot arm demo, illustrating Palantir's efforts to integrate data solutions with physical hardware on factory floors, emphasizing the importance of bringing the right data to the right person at the right time to enhance decision-making processes. (43:17) - Danny Lutkus, a commercial lead for industrials at Palantir Technologies, has been with the company for over 12 years, focusing on business development in the Midwest. He discusses his transition from government projects to commercial sectors, emphasizing his work with major manufacturers like Johnson Controls and Eaton to optimize supply chains and manufacturing processes using Palantir's AI solutions. Lutkus highlights the importance of integrating AI to rapidly identify and implement solutions, reducing the traditional reliance on lengthy strategy consulting processes. (01:04:11) - Jonathan Webb, Co-founder and CEO of The Nuclear Company, is leading efforts to modernize nuclear power plant deployment in the U.S. He emphasizes the need for efficient, on-time, and on-budget construction of nuclear reactors to meet increasing energy demands and counter China's rapid nuclear expansion. Webb highlights the importance of integrating advanced technologies and fostering collaboration with regulators to streamline the construction process and ensure safety. (01:20:21) - Nancy Cable is the Senior Director of Manufacturing at Ursa Major, an aerospace and defense company specializing in hypersonic rocket technology. In the conversation, she discusses the Hadley engine, a 5,000-pound thrust class engine capable of Mach 5 flight, emphasizing its critical role in defense and the need for rapid deployment of such technologies. She also highlights the partnership with Palantir to streamline manufacturing processes, aiming to scale production from tens to thousands of units annually by integrating data systems and improving operational efficiency. (01:34:48) - Ryan Asdourian, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer at Lumen Technologies, discusses how Lumen is modernizing telecommunications by enhancing fiber infrastructure to support AI and multi-cloud environments. He highlights the increasing demand for high-capacity, low-latency connectivity, emphasizing Lumen's role in providing scalable, cloud-ready network solutions that empower enterprises to leverage new technologies and gain a competitive edge. (01:45:43) - David Glazer, Palantir Technologies' Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer since 2020, has been with the company since 2013, holding various leadership roles. In the conversation, he discusses the impact of AI on Fortune 500 companies' gross margins, emphasizing that while costs may rise, the value derived from AI will outweigh these expenses. He also highlights Palantir's significant growth in the U.S. commercial sector, noting a 90% increase in the last quarter, and underscores the company's focus on delivering substantial value to its customers. (01:54:50) - Drew Cukor, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at TWG Global, has a distinguished background in AI, having led initiatives at JPMorgan and the Pentagon's Project Maven. In the conversation, he discusses the challenges of integrating AI into complex organizations, emphasizing the need for a holistic approach that considers people, processes, and technology. He highlights the importance of change management and the necessity for organizations to adapt their mindsets to fully leverage AI's potential. (02:09:57) - Matthew Jacoby, Executive Director of Enterprise Strategic Analytics and Data Science at Racetrac, discusses the company's transformation from intuition-based to data-driven decision-making, emphasizing the role of data in optimizing operations and enhancing customer experience. He highlights the importance of predictive and prescriptive analytics in proactively addressing customer needs and operational challenges. Jacoby also touches on Racetrac's investments in electric vehicle infrastructure and the integration of advanced technologies to stay ahead in the evolving retail landscape. 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Starting point is 00:00:01 You're watching TBPN. Today is Thursday, September 4th, 2025. We are live from AIPCon. It's a Palantiers Conference. It's the, what do we call it? The Office of Ontology. That's right. The tent of tactical strategies.
Starting point is 00:00:16 Many people have been saying this. We have a great show for you today. Folks, we're interviewing Dr. Carp in just a few minutes. We're interviewing a ton of folks from Palantir, a ton of customers from Palantir, some founders, some folks who work at companies that use Palantir should be an interesting day. But first, there is massive news because the browser company of New York has been acquired by Atlassian.
Starting point is 00:00:38 This morning, I was headed to the airport. I got a push notification from the browser company substack. And I opened it. And I saw that they were getting acquired from their own announcement. And I opened X and nothing had been shared. That's actually, I kept scrolling. Randomly subscribed the browser company subsstack. I mean, they have actually a cool thing.
Starting point is 00:00:56 Their username is open. Substack. So the URL is just open substack. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. So I opened it up and I'm like, well, browser company is getting acquired for $600 million. Okay. Posted it a few minutes later.
Starting point is 00:01:09 I think people kind of woke up to it. They announced it. So sorry to front run them. But Josh Miller shares the browser company just signed a merger agreement to be acquired. We will remain independent. Our focus is DIA. I've written and rewritten this post more times than I'd like to admit. But what I keep coming back to is simple.
Starting point is 00:01:25 The work continues and we're grateful for this moment. The work continues because when I stop by the coffee shop near our office. Nobody is using Dia yet. Very humble. Our internet computer vision hasn't been realized. Dia hasn't yet changed how you work on a Tuesday morning. This deal is about giving us the resources, distribution, and monetization muscle to get there. At the same time, it feels disingenuous not to pause and briefly celebrate this milestone. It reflects our team's craftsmanship and relentlessness, the support of our coaches, board members, and advisors and the incredible effort from our deal team. Most of all, we're grateful for what this means for
Starting point is 00:02:01 DIA means we can hire faster, ship faster, and bring DIA to more people. We can now invest in cross-platform support and secure syncing, trained custom AI models designed specifically for DIA. We could see the company from down under getting into the foundation model game, I guess. The weird thing about this is that Elassian already has, they have a rovo, I think is called or something like that. Like they haven't been asleep at the wheel in terms of AI. They definitely have been adding AI features.
Starting point is 00:02:29 You were reading from the last earnings. Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, the last earnings call, at last thing is just a fantastic company. Five billion in revenue, 82% margins, 1.5 billion in free cash flow, 1.4 billion in free cash flow. I'm so glad we brought the soundboard. We're back. And so, and it just doesn't strike me as like, like their last, the last few accuracy that they've done, like Loom, just makes so much sense in the context of the rest of the product suite that they have. You know, they have Trello. They have Hip Camp, which never really beat Slack. Jira tickets.
Starting point is 00:03:02 They have Jira which named after the poster. The poster Jira tickets. And so all of that kind of makes sense as like a bundle. You sell into one in the enterprise. And then once people are tracking issues with Jira, you sell them on, okay, let's do your project tracking. Let's do your looms.
Starting point is 00:03:18 Let's do a whole bunch of other things. And then the DIA browser, sure, it could be a useful beneficiary for like if you're in there. in an enterprise context, maybe you want to track some stuff, but it's very abstract. At last you makes a lot of, atlasian makes a lot of tools that live in your browser. Yeah, but they all run really fine in the browser.
Starting point is 00:03:37 So I think people are puzzled by this generally. And I think the timeline is generally, like you saw the Will DePue post, like there are definitely people that are against this and they're saying that like, well, the vibe, the vibes had turned on the browser company massively over the last call it six to 12 months.
Starting point is 00:03:55 Purely because of the valuation relative to the monetization and the progress of the business. Million users. Yeah, I think they had incredible, incredible marketing, incredible sort of like messaging, comm. The videos are incredible. Like I watched their announcement video and like the little details of the lens flares
Starting point is 00:04:12 and they created taste. It's very tasteful. It's fantastic. But I mean, we demo- So it's cool. I mean, what I like to see is one, it's a real acquisition. They've like cleared the preft stack for sure.
Starting point is 00:04:24 Massively. So the team, the whole team's getting paid. There were some uncertainty about how much they'd raised, but it was somewhere between like 50 million or 75 million and 125 million. It was definitely not 300 million. And at 620 in cash, everyone's getting paid out, which is great. So yeah, I think.
Starting point is 00:04:45 And put another way, it's only six months of Atlassian's free cash flow. Which is like, it feels like a lot, but at the same time, it's like, okay, like half a year of free cash to take a big bet on consumer in an interest way in a market that well I will I don't I am curious to see how they focus in the product on consumers versus enterprise like at last is an enterprise software conglomerate yeah right so you'd imagine that they would take the product in that direction and I do think there's a lot of space to play in there right it's like bringing AI into the browser where yeah people do all of their work yeah what's the steel man for this actually
Starting point is 00:05:27 benefiting the Atlassian Enterprise Suite. Something like... So there's a post here from Varad, Jane. He said, Atlassian bought vibes, not a browser. Never asked the best art collectors how they made their money or why they bought the art. Atlassians a $610 million purchase rhymes with that. The Atlassian problem, they invented bottoms up SaaS.
Starting point is 00:05:47 Anyone could sign up for Jira. No procurement needed. They were the cool tool of 2010, but success forced them up market. Enterprise features, enterprise pricing, enterprise vibes. Today, when founders start companies, they choose Slack, not HipChat, Linear, NotJera, Not Not Confluence. Cache Tag Team has near zero inroads with the next generation. They're Microsoft circa 2014, rich, but irrelevant to anyone building something new. Why the browser company in Loom? These aren't product acquisition. They're guest list acquisitions. Every founder
Starting point is 00:06:19 using ARC, every startup using Loom. That's Atlassian buying access to users. They lost and might never get back. It's building a gallery in Brooklyn so you could get invited to the right dinners in Manhattan. I just I understand the loom acquisition so much more. Yeah. Because Loom is an enterprise tool. It's used by startups. It's using a business context. Sure, it's probably used by some consumers. It just feels like the price feels it feels extremely steep given like Loom had product market fit. Yeah. It's just that it wasn't necessarily going to turn into this massive platform and compounding. But it's growing like crazy. Actually, from within atlasian they called that out on the earnings yeah and so like I think that
Starting point is 00:06:59 the but it felt like a standalone it felt like a standalone product yeah not a platform yet fit nicely totally completely agree with that yeah whereas paying 610 million for a company that that people use yeah but not a lot of people it's a million DAUs apparently something like I don't know I think I thought that number was total maybe maybe it's total downloads I thought that was like total sign-ups yeah but it's small it's small yeah and nobody and no one's using it With Lume, people would adopt Lume and start embedding it in their work life in a way that they would be upset if they no longer had access to it. I'm not sure that DIA is quite at that level yet.
Starting point is 00:07:38 So one bull case I can think is something like this where you bring in this team that clearly has taste, great design, and they kind of give the rest of the Atlassian product suite like a fresh coat of paint. And they kind of revitalize the vibes. The messaging here is that they're going to continue operate independently and scaling the Yeah, but that could just be something that they do for a little bit and then eventually they get interested in, hey, let's bring the team over and work on Jira and work on a V2 of, you know, Lume or something like that. Like that, that's a possibility. And then the other kind of maybe
Starting point is 00:08:09 bull case, which I'm a lot less clear on, is, is there a world where if you have everyone in your organization using an enterprise, AI powered browser, even if they're not on the full Atlassian stack, let's say they use two products. and then they're instead of using hip chat they're using Slack can you scrape more easily the data out of the other enterprise products and centralize them somehow because I bet you if you're a company that's using Jira and Slack those two companies don't get along because it's Salesforce versus Atlassian but maybe if I if I'm if I'm if I'm kind of forced to get along to some degree but the integration is probably really rough we've heard about the data walls and the data the the data the data
Starting point is 00:08:53 wars. And so if you say, hey, instead of trying to, you know, set up some API and and scraping out your Slack data and dumping it into your Jira instance every day, instead of that, have everyone on your team use this enterprise browser. And no matter what tool they use, the data is going to be centralized. So let's go over to Mike Cannon Brooks, the founder of Atlassian. He says, couldn't be more psyched to welcome Josh and Hirsch and the entire browser company team to Atlassian. And with DIA browser, we're going to collectively redesign the browser to help knowledge workers kick butt in the AI era. It's a mission, a joint mission, a huge mission, and one I couldn't be more excited about joining with this team to get cracking on. Let's go.
Starting point is 00:09:39 So yeah, this just tells me, I mean, the most important line here, collectively redesign the browser to help knowledge workers in the AI era. Yeah. The last option is that it just buys them time to kind of take some more shots on consumer. AI, which is clearly a growing category. And Atlassian can underwrite like crazy opportunity more than BC's can. Anyway, we have Dr. Karp. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?
Starting point is 00:10:06 Great to meet you. I'm John. Happening. Big Dan. We're going to have you hold this microphone. Great. Where's the camera? The camera's right there.
Starting point is 00:10:13 You can just see it wherever you want. What is the big announcement from today is, are you trying to tell more of a story around enterprise with this? You know, we're kind of not, I think we're just, it's more like we're crushing it. Yeah. Everyone tells us to be super modest about 93% growth in the US and 94 rule of 40. They may be redefining the rule to like make sure the other people don't like have to live in shame. I keep seeing these articles like in the Wall Street Journal. It's like rule 40 isn't really. It isn't really, yeah, it isn't real because we're like crushing everyone.
Starting point is 00:10:57 You were forced to be humble for a really long time. I was forced, well, people were showering me with humble nuggets all day. It didn't really exactly work. But you know, I do think you have to judge humility by the delta between performance and ego. And I would say somewhat ill modestly, I'm the most humble I've ever been. And, and, and, and, and now, and I just, I think it's like, so, Like, so what we try to accomplish with, uh, the, we've been doing these kind of conference forever. Basically, because everything we've done at Palantir's like completely, uh, it, it's antithetical,
Starting point is 00:11:35 or at least orthogonal to what you would, how you would build a business. You guys look at a lot of businesses. You would never build a software downstream from value creation. It's all basically, how do I make the client feel like they're getting laid when they're getting fucked? That's the whole way you build a software business. And our business, we began in the beginning. tell people, you know, this is a, we're a mutually servicing business. Both sides should
Starting point is 00:11:59 like be happy. And the way we built the business was basically underlying metric I always thought was, you know, the logic of software should be, we charge you something downstream of value creation. That sum is a percentage of the value we create. It's better for both sides because it's significantly less than the value create. It's good for us because there's a multiple in the value. The flaw in the logic was always that. FDE model would basically mean that you'd get a one multiple. So we were structurally misaligned with everyone in finance, everyone, not at the Founders Fund,
Starting point is 00:12:33 but basically everybody else because of that. Now what we've proven with Entology, FDE structures where FDE are actually technical and internal orchestration, which is largely artistic, basically was, now we got very lucky because without large language models, this would not be hypercharged. So it still didn't exactly make sense,
Starting point is 00:12:51 but lo and behold, we have large language models, it hypercharges everything. So downstream value creation is an enormous amount of money. And because of our unit economics now, which are, you know, some people believe are the best in the world, we actually get fairly valued. And what are we doing actually downstairs is we're saying America's central advantage is the plasticity of how we approach, the pragmatism, right? So businesses have to move from businesses where it made sense to have parasitic software products that are like basically helping you. It's not. like one of these things. It's like you believe you're learning to sell. They're selling you on
Starting point is 00:13:27 something that is that you can't get rid of. You then run to Wall Street and say our clients all, we have 50,000 clients that all hate us. They're like, great, that's a software business, because the hating means they can't get rid of you. But a platform business means that you're creating more value than you capture. Well, the way we do, the way we sell is like, and this is why it's just all, it's like all these things are hugely contrary. Our revenues going up, our sales force is going down. The number of people we plan to have in the future is less than now. We are very focused on, you know, everybody's like high volume. The volume makes up for, you know, the fact that revenue decreases per client.
Starting point is 00:14:00 We're not focused on that at all. We believe we're going to make more from people in the future than in the past, sizably more, because it's like why should we not capture a part of the value that we help create? Actually, it doesn't have to be the majority. In fact, it's usually the minority of the value to create. We also believe that for more kind of like kind of architectural implementation, technical perspective, the value is in high fidelity data captured in an ontology with FFRAG. where there's an enhancing factor with LLMs, and that's going to be very, very hard to replicate.
Starting point is 00:14:30 But again, all of this is kind of very non-traditional. And so what we're really doing in these conferences is saying the same thing we say on the outside. Don't believe anything we're saying. Talk to other people that have done it. We're not, we don't chaperone the people here. So they're like, you can talk about things you like, things you don't like. people are on stage, but learn how to build the business of the future. What does the business of the future look like? Actually, the interesting thing is workers become more valuable,
Starting point is 00:15:03 like actually trained workers become more valuable. This is exactly the opposite of what people are saying, but it's true. The person at the top is actually crazy valuable. People with technical expertise are crazy valuable and everything else is going to be done in Foundry, Entology, and something like an FDA. So like the orchestration of the business is completely different. Where are Fortune 500 companies getting screwed by these AI pilots? We saw this stat like 95% of AI trials in the enterprise aren't converting. What's going on there? What does it look like when somebody sells someone? Well, I mean that there's a technical reason. These are LMs are probabilistic. They're not precise. The value of L of them is when it's essentially
Starting point is 00:15:45 in an ontology wrapper because to actually create value, you have to be able to take the output, serialize it, and deserialize it in the context of the business. So the logic, actions, and security of the business and its tribal knowledge and what it's trying to accomplish. LLMs are vertically crucial, but the error bound is very, very, very narrow and the way you actually do LLMs in the real world, not in theory, not is like,
Starting point is 00:16:12 is that you essentially put them in a concatenated chain where each single thing has to be done as a street unit, because otherwise the underlying math is 95 times 100 separate chains. It's like total. unreliable. And if you do it any other way, you're getting a steak dinner. And that steak dinner is super tasty. It's not going to work. And even worse than the steak dinner, honestly, is that you're being taught how to do something incorrectly. It's like, it's like, okay, I'm going to learn
Starting point is 00:16:39 how to learn from a workster. Yeah. Great, great. The damage that wokeshers doing, mostly on the left, but occasionally on the right, the real damage they're doing is they're teaching you how not to learn. And if you just pick your favorite person right, left center, who's just selling complete garbage. It's all conspiracy. The whole thing. Yeah. It's like, there's no such thing as building. There's no such thing as agency.
Starting point is 00:17:03 You can get away with that BS. Well, if you want to, like, Palantir is lifted. One of the things I'm proudest about in the world is we've lifted people from their mom's garage to their own house. Millions of people. You want to stay in that garage. You listen to those people. And it's the same thing happens in enterprise. They're selling you something.
Starting point is 00:17:20 where you think you're getting late and you're getting fucked. And once you're fucked like that, it's very hard to undo it. And like, yeah, you know, the crazy thing about my life is I'm like this wacky dyslexic. It's actually much harder to be dyslexic, but it's also much harder to get fucked. Because you don't believe, you don't believe in any of this BS. It's like... So speaking of sales, there was the CEO, founder CEO of a CRM company that was making some comments yesterday.
Starting point is 00:17:45 Did you catch? Look, Pallantier, we structurally mind our own business. and I love that everyone minds our business. But I would say that we constantly have people on TV. It always sounds like, you know, the guy in high school who's like, but I'm so nice, why don't I get laid? It's like, it's literally like, it's the same thing. I'm so nice.
Starting point is 00:18:06 I'm so nice. I create all the value and I'm so nice. I'm begging to get laid and no one. It's like, I have such a big this. I have such a big that. And we're like, yeah, we're not trying, dude. We're here. You know, and yeah.
Starting point is 00:18:17 I don't think about you at all. Well, I, it. It's like we are very focused on value creation and we ask to be modestly compensated by that value. And, you know, if you disagree, you don't like us as a client, or you love us as a client, but you think it's like, great, we're doing our thing. You know, in Palatier right now in the U.S. is the market account that counts. We don't have the people. We don't have the time. We orchestrating completely perfectly at Palantir, which of course we don't do.
Starting point is 00:18:47 Because we're like an artist colony, right? We don't have a time to like actually focus on like what we need to like extending certain components of ontology we have to do. Extending Maven for the sake of the West. Building things in classified environments. Extending things with high value. It's like, yeah, we're focused on that and we don't have the time. Like when you're growing 93% off of a very serious base with a de facto de minimis. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:19:17 Yeah. It's the 93, and that's not even our best number. It's 94% rule of 40s. And then people are like, oh, yeah, yeah, well, but we have all the skills. We have all the motion. But, but like somehow our ocean isn't working. It's so big, but it's not. It's like, yeah, great.
Starting point is 00:19:35 You have problems to, you have time to focus on us. We got things to focus on here that are crucial. You guys are, it feels like you're reacting to the changing world and actual, like, customer needs, whereas other players are reacting. Let me give you a more kind of slightly philosophical, economic thing. What the large language model does, models do in combination with ontology and FTEs and knowing what you're doing is it creates period of optimality over time. We're not there exactly, but every single tech company in the world is going to be paid
Starting point is 00:20:07 based on value creation. Maybe that's not completely true today. It will be true tomorrow. So when any company is saying something, you really have. to ask given that the aspiration of LLMs are transparency and competence. Broadly defined, they've actually the big cultural shift on enterprises, people running enterprises believe that this thing should work. I should know the cost of the components in my business to the second. I should know how to rebuild things if there's a macroeconomic strategy. I should be able to put the bomb on your head and not on his head.
Starting point is 00:20:41 Okay, so that basically means every conversation in the future is going to be, you create X value, I'm going to pay you Y. And the central problem, a lot of the larger kind of less agile sclerotic companies have is it's like they can't, it's very hard to move from I get paid because you can't get rid of me to I get paid because you could get rid of me, but you don't want to because you're creating so much value. But that's where the future is going. And like people talk about like, you know, how are we going to, you know, get, do 10x and revenue, blah, blah, blah, with the same or less people. It's like, yes, but the whole market's going to have to move to value creation. And we're in the business of that and try to do it. You know, it's not.
Starting point is 00:21:23 Yeah. Do you think long term that the gross margins of software companies will change materially because of like LLM inference costs, like token factory costs, that type of thing? Well, you mean like enterprise software companies? Yeah. If I look at like the Fortune 500, right now there's like a set number of gross. margin that's out there should we expect like gross margin compression based on well I I I don't know what well first of all I think I let me just give you a
Starting point is 00:21:50 trans I think first of all skilled workers are going to become more valuable sure you're going to be paying them more they're going to be happier it's exact downstream politically it's very hard to argue for anything but high-end immigration so like why do you need more people like we got to make the people we have here work so like politically it's like you know I'm an on happy Democrat, but running around saying, oh, crime isn't an issue, when everyone knows crime is an issue, it's like suicidal BS and no one believes it. And now that wokeism is luckily, mostly, at least in that way, you know, not as punishing, we can all just admit the obvious.
Starting point is 00:22:23 So like transparency is going to be like, so the people are like workers are going to become more expensive, the overhead's going to become less. Truly, basically, artist shaped people are going to be incredibly valuable and they're going to demand to be very highly paid. So, but the aggregate cost structure will come down, but more importantly, the products you build are going to be much closer to what the market wants in real time. And then, again, just an obvious thing, this is happening like we have 10x growth in America compared to Europe, same people, same products, same everything. So it's like, and then the other thing, the point that's a little less obvious that I think people ignore is time is not time. We always assume a minute of time is a minute of time.
Starting point is 00:23:00 It's not. Like, it's like from the time you want to do something to the time it happens, If that's 10% of the time, you've just got a 10x. So it's like, you know, it's like Pounder's not these kind of atrophied companies. They really, they, every, it takes them three years, five years to get a year. It takes us a week to get a year. So it's like, you know, it's like that's actually what explains the numbers in a weird way is, yes, but what if five years represents 40 years? What if I'm saying in the next five years?
Starting point is 00:23:28 It's not, we're actually, it's like the whole problem with the DCF model, actually, that experts love is, A, they don't understand product. Then B, they kind of extend the DCF if they like you. So it's like, oh, I like the person. The DCF is super long. Give them an extra decade. Get them an extra decade. There's steak dinners.
Starting point is 00:23:42 But the real problem that they somehow don't understand in the DCF amount is a year is not a year for poundier. Like a year is like, we don't do holidays. I'm working all the time. I'm working. Honestly, I sometimes hate the enemies of Palleteer, but God, do they get me to go back to orchestration? Because I'm going to fuck these people. Like, you know, and the basic way I'm going to do it is going back to like dyslexia. you know like organization orchestration of we're going to have the best products the best
Starting point is 00:24:08 people I'm going to recruit those people I'm going to make sure they're the most valuable and I'm going to put them in enterprises that value us and if you don't value us go go work the people that hate us try them out yeah do you have advice for young people I mean you said like artists like people not literally art yeah and you said the company is like an artist colony yeah what do you just become an artist well people underestimate like their artistry because like from a young age you get huge benefits for conforming. And you can say, well, I don't.
Starting point is 00:24:37 I mean, the central advantage of being dyslexic, we can't conform. So that ends up being a huge, because you just can't. So you're gonna have to, so your basic thing you've to emerge, do not conform. And by the way, the people who are telling you simplistic bullshit, that means, you know, like meritocracy isn't gonna matter,
Starting point is 00:24:53 you're not gonna judge, all these conspiracies. It's so you can't do wealth accumulation if you're in this country, like in America. I think actually a lot of these things are true in other country. But in this country, they're teaching you how not to learn how to be complacent, how to give up your agency, how to fail, and how to blame it on anyone else. And if you're, so you have to say it's like all that to that.
Starting point is 00:25:13 Yeah, reject that. That's kind of. And then you have to really, really look at people and judge them by their fruits. The best way to learn is to look at somebody and say, okay, well, you know, it's like, you know, you work with somebody like the co-founding team at Pallenture. So you have Peter, Joe, Stefan, Nathan. Like, part of what made us so good is it's like, okay, you can measure yourself. It's like, you know, when I started at Pallantier, I actually just, because I just wanted to be left alone. I was like, yeah, I'm going to make some money.
Starting point is 00:25:40 I'm going to move to Berlin. I'm going to live a debauchrous life. That was my goal. Like, I'm moving to Berlin. I thought I needed 250K. I was like, at 250K is a minimum, a million dollars of maximum. I'm moving to Berlin. It's going to like, debauchery forever.
Starting point is 00:25:52 Bergheim. Yeah, well, I had to like, yeah. So it's a remote office there. But like you then measure yourself and it's like, okay, well, I'm highly. differentiated on measure on on managing complicated people who have to believe their opinion is their opinion but still have to build a product that actually delivers value that's my differentiation and so like you you surround yourself and then remember you have to remember the persuasion
Starting point is 00:26:21 being persuasive and being right are not correlated so you have to really look at people who are historically right rebuttably give them the rebuttable presumption that they are right and work back to discover if they're right or wrong, not just, and like in all these things. And like, for example, on the Pallenture thing, it is a great lesson. Go listen to our critics. Whatever critic you love, we're a conspiracy theory. So like you could take the left wing version, which is like, Pallenture is stripping you
Starting point is 00:26:49 of your civil liberties with some people on the right belief. Pallentier is a Jewish conspiracy run by a, a MUT, somehow, okay, whatever, you know, it's like, okay, well go, actually, how does the product work? Does the product protect data? How does it protect it? Is it better than any other company in the world of doing this? How do you build a company? Do you think it's just like an allocation based on a conspiracy?
Starting point is 00:27:10 Why did we work? Yeah, just pick your conspiracy and that's the strategy. And then, but then unpack it and learn for yourself. Like, did this work? How did this work? How did they do it? Assume that at every single decision, if it was a decision anyone else would have made, you would not have worked because that's a commodity. Commodities aren't valuable. And then apply that to your life. What part of this do you understand?
Starting point is 00:27:30 Like, you know, what part do you not understand? understand what part do you understand better than them what part could you do better than them and the weird thing about l-lm ontology foundry is this actually will work for anyone watching this podcast yeah if you're watching this podcast and you enjoy this you've already passed a test i don't care whether you're a welder a plumber a carpenter an astrophysicist or a somebody who'd like to build a business or just want to get rich or you want to get enough money and move somewhere and do what i to Berlin. It's not the right place anymore. But any case, but you've already passed that test. Now go out and pass the test for life. Yeah. You said Germany is not the right place anymore?
Starting point is 00:28:12 Like, what is your current mental model for the state of the world order? Like, is America in decline? Do we need to bring things back? Like, who are the power players? America is power payer number one right now. And like all this media BS, it's like, you know, you got to compare America to. And you can't compare America to some thing you're, pretending in your head could be America. Compare it to Europe. I don't know, were you gonna compare it to China? Like, you wanna have no rights? You know, I mean, again, I'm actually not anti-Chinese culture,
Starting point is 00:28:42 but CCP, you know, it's like, compare it to Europe, but like no tech industry. Everyone rich was born rich basically, or with almost no exceptions. The most important Germanic company, I hope someone from Germany is listening to this, Compt out of Palo Alto, is Piet Petitiel and Ish. It's like the only German company since SAP
Starting point is 00:29:02 that's real. Like, they won't listen to us. Like, just think about that. You have Peter Thiel, like the most important venture person, maybe that's ever lived. Co-founder of Pallenture and you have me. It was like some way, you know, basically partially dramatic, did my PhD in German.
Starting point is 00:29:17 And you have no tech industry. Wouldn't you have us on fucking speed dial? Yeah. I mean, like on speed dial. Like, you don't have to listen to what we're saying. You don't have to agree with what we're saying. Who are you talking to? Who are you talking to?
Starting point is 00:29:29 You're talking to your, like, I don't know. expert that came here and studied us. Trust the experts. Trust the experts. Yeah, it's like energy. Like we're like they will. Do you think that there's optimism around the idea of like somebody. You can't pick up the phone call, right?
Starting point is 00:29:45 Oh no, no. I think I pick up. It's crazy who calls me. It's like it's honestly like I can't talk out of school calls me. You'd be surprised and I'd begin every call with. Don't listen to me. Very few people have. I'm going to give you the freak show answer.
Starting point is 00:29:58 You probably want to ignore it. This is what I think and they're like, huh, okay. Oh, yeah, okay, some callback, some don't. But yeah, of course, I mean, I have a lot of, I mean, like, honestly, we have a huge retail. A crazy thing about Germany is a huge retail investor base. Sure, sure, sure. They don't admit it in public, but in private, they're like, keep going, keep going. But yeah, no, I'm just saying, the point I'm saying is, you know, it's like, oh, so then it's like energy, technical talent, understanding how to manage the technical talent.
Starting point is 00:30:27 That's an art. Like, we have the right venture people, the right entrepreneurs, the right spirit. generations of people who are entrepreneurial here it's like no tall poppy syndrome yeah well it's funny you mentioned that that's like yeah like we were very well this is a thing we have to fight for this yeah because that no tall pop what that basically means and in every people may not realize this but in any every other culture I know of and like and I lived broad into Germany Europe incredible cultures but if you your head sticks above the line it gets cut off
Starting point is 00:30:58 yeah there's one culture where that doesn't happen here the only thing is we have to for that because the thing that unifies the woke left and the work right is they don't like the consequences of meritocracy they want to work back to the inputs so in that that like just will screw society it's like you've got to be able to allow people to succeed wherever they go now i was kind of still progressive you know it believes it i super would like the inputs to be fair but the outputs those are the outputs the results of freedom okay last question we got to get you out of here um being i walked by your office there were some kettlebells what are the kettlebells for Oh, okay. Well, this is slightly long. I'll give you a short version.
Starting point is 00:31:34 So to be a cross-country skier, you've got to train year-round. So you need substantial V-O-2 max, and actually you need to be strong per unit of weight. So as an example, I do three days a week of kind of above and below lactate threshold running, but mostly pretty far, and then once a week kind of at. And then I do two days of strength, one day of like endurance strength. And currently, the thing I'm actually really proud of is I just started doing hang from a bars or dead hang like four months ago. And I hit four minutes and 36 seconds. Four minutes and 36 seconds.
Starting point is 00:32:12 What's the goal? What do we do? Well, actually my goal for the, yeah, you have to be a number of times. This isn't just money. No, I mean, my goal for the year was for actually the next 12 months was was four minutes. Okay. But then there's the number two. You got to get those numbers out.
Starting point is 00:32:32 Well, no, but the number two, the second best mountain climber in Norway. I don't know if you know his name. But he, I have a picture. He did four minutes and 22 seconds. Ooh, there you go. What can I do? I did it part time. Thank you for having us.
Starting point is 00:32:49 I appreciate your work. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Congrats. Thank you. Thank you. We will bring in our next guest in just a few minutes. Can you imagine?
Starting point is 00:33:01 Can you imagine the Fortune 500 CEOs that just want a meeting with Dr. Carp just to get energized? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like they're like, I'll pay for the steak dinner, even though you're selling to me. I'll pay for the steak. Yeah, you bring the energy. Yeah, who pays for the steak dinner? Fantastic.
Starting point is 00:33:18 Well, I believe we have our next guest pretty much ready. Ben Harvartine from Palantir for a deployed engineer that has been in Palantir for nearly eight years. So many good quotes in there. I don't take holidays off. I don't take holidays off. Oh, yeah, the team is getting ready to post. Anyway, I'm excited for this one. Ben?
Starting point is 00:33:40 Ben, welcome to the show. Good to have you. We are going to have you hold this microphone as much as you can. But why don't you kick us off with an introduction on yourself and I'd love to know how you found your way to Palant to it. That'd be super interesting. Yeah, it's kind of an odd path. I studied mechanical engineering and architecture in college.
Starting point is 00:33:58 So not what you would think for software company. worked for Anheiser-Busch. Oh, no way. Beer company for a year. That was a great sort of transition from college life to a jolley. What were you doing at Anheiser-Busch? It was a management training program,
Starting point is 00:34:11 communication-based. Yeah, yeah. After that, random hardware startup for a bit. Went to another hardware startup. But I had some buddies from college who had worked here. And the thing about Palantir seemed like everybody had just kind of like more autonomy
Starting point is 00:34:25 and authority than I saw anywhere else. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. So what do you want to show us today? Can you give us a little tour? Yeah, I've got a little kind of toy demo though. Yeah, one robot.
Starting point is 00:34:37 Bringing a robot is a great sign of respect in our culture. Yeah. Thank you. Well, you know, you can imagine, you know, when we have, you know, events like this, there are a lot of demos. It's pretty screen heavy with software stuff. And we've seen a lot of, I'd say, like increasing demand for our edge offerings and hardware offerings. We're really trying to push the technology further and further down.
Starting point is 00:34:58 to the shop floor and into the field. And so I wanted to put together something, just a little kind of toy demo that made that a little bit more tangible for people who are here. Yep. So walk me from my understanding to how we get to the edge,
Starting point is 00:35:13 how we get to robotics. Because my famous, like the case study that comes to my mind for Palantir in terms of like making things in the physical world is like the, I think the Airbus example. So I, and whenever somebody says, oh, what does Palantir do?
Starting point is 00:35:27 I'm like, okay, imagine a plane There's a bunch of different parts. You got to have a certain amount of seatbelts. You got to have a certain amount of engines. You got to have a certain amount of fuel lines. You got to have a certain amount of chairs. And all those come from different places. And they all have different lead times and strengths.
Starting point is 00:35:39 And they need different safety requirements. Did they get checked off? And so you put all of that instead of just in a loose database. You put it in a database. But then you have Palantir that's actually tying everything together. So you know if there's a lead time on engines, you need to order more seatbelts in three weeks instead of two weeks. And that's kind of how I explain Palantier in terms of like make a big thing that's complex.
Starting point is 00:35:58 Is that roughly right? And then how do you walk from that to like, we need Palantir to somehow interface with like a robotic arm? Yep. Yeah, I mean, that's roughly right. Like the way I think about it's like anywhere you go, people have data scattered all over the place. So the first step is can we get that all into one place? Got it.
Starting point is 00:36:13 Then can we model that data so it's as easy to work with it as is to talk about the concepts that represents? Yeah. Just like, make it kind of. So there's this big meme in Silicon Valley and Defense Tech right now that like there's a whole host of manufacturing guys. They're all aging out. they're 65 and everything that they know about how to make a widget, whether it's a chair or
Starting point is 00:36:33 a rocket motor, it's in their head. They haven't written it down. Maybe it's in some loose notebooks. And so this is kind of a way to jump and start getting more data online, right? We're actually not throwing out the data. We're capturing it. Correct. Yeah. And really like the whole point of any of these data exercises is you just won't put the right data in front of the right person at the right time to make the right decision. Yep. And then just be able to close the loop and learn from it. And so if you're looking across the supply chain, it's how you do it. If you go down to a factory floor, the process is there, that's how you do it. And so when it comes to this robot, we're basically just like pushing that edge further. So instead of, you know, popping up an alert
Starting point is 00:37:06 on a screen that tells somebody to go do something, what if you could actually just tell the robot to go to it? Okay. So again, sort of a simple like toy example here, but the basic idea is that, you know, this is a little work cell that we made with a robot arm and a camera 3D printed, right? Yeah, it's all, yeah, it's all 3D printed. Even the arms are 3? Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, I didn't realize that. Cool. And so, you know, it's kind of set up to be a dumb terminal that kind of works and looks like, you know, the robot arms you'd see on a factory floor. You can give it moves to take. Maybe you can ask it for a picture, but past that, it's not doing any heavy computation on board.
Starting point is 00:37:40 But then you can push, you know, that data to an edge hub that can run embedded models, can run embedded ontology. So you can actually take that, that kind of model of the world in terms of objects, relationships, actions, and models. And you can push that down to the edge. And even if you have like a network sparse environment where you don't have that real time uplinked to the cloud, you can continue to run off of that ontology. Yeah, we were looking at semi-analysis. They put the five levels of robotics. I forget exactly how many levels there were. But they were trying to map the self-driving car analogy to physical robotics. And I believe like level zero or level one, like the most basic was you have a pre-programmed robotic arm that's doing the exact same move. It's taking the windshield and put it on the F-150.
Starting point is 00:38:26 And it's this huge arm and you can't go near it because there's no cameras on it whatsoever and if you step in that work cell, it will kill you if you don't if you're not careful And this seems like a step towards like level two We're able to actually understand what different products mean if there's oh this type of product shows up There's going to be more likely that there's a defect or you need to adjust what the robot is doing How can you actually get that data into something that's actionable? Yeah, and even in like this simple demo we've got you know it'll trigger alerts on you know, it tries to execute move and you end up with like a block like jammed up here. Okay, it'll realize that. Okay, you got a jammed hopper.
Starting point is 00:39:02 Yeah, that sort of stuff. Okay. Interesting. Where does this play in like the stack of other software? I know when we talked to, what was it, DRAC, our buddy Phil, he was saying that like he's working with automotive companies, but then they also have a lot of, there's a lot of like lower level control software on machine lines. Some of that's from German companies that I think we're. just talked about with Dr. Karp. But like where do you see Palantir playing in the
Starting point is 00:39:32 stack you have a bunch of data the database you put Palantir on top but then at a certain point there might be some robotics company that makes the robot and then they also might have some control software with kind of a messy API or something like that. Yeah I think we can be pre-agnostic about how far up or down the stack we go so we've got I'll pull this box this this is this is the node that goes on the edge right so this is a this is an example with an edge node that one of our partners edge scale makes. Okay.
Starting point is 00:40:00 So this is that box that you can stick in the closet. Yep, yep, network to those existing machines that you have on the floor if you just need a turnkey solution. Yep. And I think at the other end of the extreme, that's where we've got something like this where this really at the end of day is an ontology defined piece of hardware and that the machine itself, its entire configuration, the state machine is running everything about it is defined in the ontology, lives in the ontology.
Starting point is 00:40:24 And it's like really just like a bespoke piece of hardware. running that ontology native software it's a monument so yeah you you know if you've got like more nascent operations or greenfield operations you think about some of the companies we work with in defense tech it's like they can go all the way down the stack if they want to sure for some of the you know the larger more established customers that we're working with yeah the plug-in-play solution yeah what we know what's the sweet spot for the specs on an edge scale like edge node like something on the edge like I think it really do you need to be running like
Starting point is 00:40:55 a large language model that feels like like something that you could do on a 4090. I'd say it depends on the application. Like we've done some like examples of that even like previous AIP cons. It's like do we need the like the local app served up with a chat bot for the line operator who can just be like what's going on? And it just talks to you. Yep. There's a and it's not just purely deterministic.
Starting point is 00:41:16 Okay. If if the block is blocked then send the error message instead it's it's actually interpreting a bunch of data and then kind of non-deterministic. Yeah. So I'd say it's like, you know, I think like anything, it really depends on the application and the users. Because again, there are a lot of guys that are working on these lines, guys and girls where they don't need another screen in their life. And so it's really finding like what's the right way to interface with those operators to ultimately just drive the better decision making. How much is, like how much is the, what is the role of the FDE in this kind of new era, new territory? Because it feels like.
Starting point is 00:41:51 Yeah, are you graduated from being an FTE yet or is it once an FDE, always an FDE? I think it's once an FD, always an FD. I try to keep my hands on keyboard as often as I can still. You know, still flying out to, you know, ever axle factories in rural Kentucky or whatever. That's awesome. Yeah, I think the closer you can stay that stuff, the better. I think really, like, the role of the FD is like just like it always has been go on site with the customer. Don't just understand, but internalize their problems, their challenges, you know, and so.
Starting point is 00:42:20 Go create some value. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for hopping on the stream. We appreciate having you. Congratulations on everything. Thanks for bringing your baby. Yeah, you can definitely take this out here. I will grab this and we will have our next guest, Danny Lucas from Palantir coming in.
Starting point is 00:42:37 He also has a demo. Do you guys know if the demo is going to need the HTML cable? Is that right? Okay, so we will bring in Danny whenever you get a chance. Yeah, let's bring in our next guest. There he is. What's gone on? Welcome to the show.
Starting point is 00:42:56 All right. Great to have it. That is bold. Doing a demo is on a live stream. This is live. Literally, anything you share on your screen, potentially will go out to the internet forever to be baked into the future super intelligence.
Starting point is 00:43:13 Yeah, baked into the training models of the future, into the pre-training data. So be very careful. Don't leak anything. But introduce yourself. Tell us what you're going to show us. Yeah, absolutely. Microphone?
Starting point is 00:43:24 Oh, yeah. Sorry, my bad. What's going on, guys? My name's Danny. Let's see here. I'm an engineer of Palantir. I've been a Palantir for about 12 years. In terms of like my role, it's hard to describe.
Starting point is 00:43:37 Like, I'm sure everyone at Palantir said that. I guess like if I had a role or a title, I do a lot of our business in the Midwest at this point. So first six years of Palantir, I was on the government side. I did work with Department of Justice, U.S. Special Operations, CIA, National Counterterrorism.
Starting point is 00:43:54 Center. After my wife and I had her first kid, she was like, hey, could you not go to weird places in the world anymore? And I was like totally reasonable. Reasonable requests. We moved back to the Midwest and I switched over the commercial side. And that's kind of like what I do now is like grow our business in Midwest. Yeah. What's like a what's a like just line drive solution that you like just total wheelhouse solution for, you know, I imagine like a large enterprise customer in the Midwest. Yeah. What I focus on a lot is manufacturing in the Midwest. So you can like there's huge manufacturers in the Midwest,
Starting point is 00:44:30 whether that's like Johnson Controls or Eaton or Moulson Coors, Cummins Engine. So it's a widgets factory. Yeah. They're making widgets. They're buying parts. They're assembling them and you have to understand the flow rate. Where's the rate limiting factor? How can we increase flow?
Starting point is 00:44:48 This is where I think we have the most differentiation from a product perspective. Because it's like, like I can actually affect. the physical world. Sure. And then I can measure how I affect it. And then I can learn and approve how I affect the physical world the next time. Right. Whether that's like, hey, I'm in supply chain and I'm short on inventory, like, how do I
Starting point is 00:45:06 solve that problem in the most effective and optimized way versus like I'm trying to manufacture something. And like, how do I make sure my machines are running? I have the right labor. I'm trying to do the right thing. And so like the real magic behind all this too is like these, yes, they start off as like singular use cases that are like. pretty great like straight shot but then like when you start to connect these workflows together
Starting point is 00:45:29 and it's like oh the machine's down like and i have this material like what do i do and how do i go do what do you want us to show us today i can kind of hold this for if you want we're getting good sound on this okay cool yeah we're walking through it what i was going to demo is i think like one of the interesting things and i'm sure you've like talked to a lot of different palatirians today is like we are never going to purport to be like a strategy consulting type of thing when we engage with customers. Like we're never going to purport to be like, oh, like a, hey, we're experts in X, Y, or Z. And the great thing about that right is like, we're true to like who we are. The bad thing about that right is like companies will identify
Starting point is 00:46:11 and the organizations that we like that we work with will identify like, hey, I know this is a problem, right? But like there's a huge amount of time between like, hey, there's a problem and then let's go like implement a solution. And the dependencies on actually getting to that faster are like, I have the internal SMEs that can actually like understand the problem and come up with the right solution and do the feasibility and all that great stuff. Or I go work with like strategy consulting. I pay millions and millions of dollars to get a deck that tells me like,
Starting point is 00:46:44 hey, this is the solution that we think you should employ with the right like ROI and this approach and we've done this feasibility study and we think that you should go do that. And so like we find that as a huge impediment to like our own growth, right? Like why should I wait months? Yeah, you don't want them to go spend millions of dollars. No, I want to go. Some random group to then recommend a Pallantir product. That's 100% right.
Starting point is 00:47:06 And so like what we've been exploring more is just like, well, why can't I use AI to do that? Like why can't I like give a fairly haphazard business, like a description of business problem and use agents essentially to like structure that into a better business problem description to do the necessary research about like what are the potential solutions of the things that I could and should deploy to go solve this problem can I generate ideas with all the requisites of how I actually employ those ideas and actually generate a proposal where then I also have like agents as critiques on that proposal to be like is this technologically feasible is this like financially feasible all the things that you would expect like strategy
Starting point is 00:47:51 consultants to do for you like I should just be able to do that in a day and come up the proposal but then like I don't know if you guys have talked to anyone about AI FTE but then like I should just then be able to use the output of like this to then go build it yeah like I should just be able to say like cool here's the solution I need to go build input into AI FDE build right and go from like you know what would have taken six or nine months until until we ever get engaged to like, well, I think this is a problem. Like, let's just go do it like in the next week, right? Does that make sense?
Starting point is 00:48:31 Yeah, it makes sense. I have some follow-up questions, but maybe jump into the demo first. Cool. I think like my immediate, I guess, question, maybe it's relevant. It's like, how do you ensure kind of quality, right? Because like you didn't say this, but like someone else in another context might call this like vibe code. sort of like generating like a deep research report on like a problem and a potential solution and then like you know sort of prompting your way to an implementation and today you know just
Starting point is 00:49:05 like code quality and product quality ends up popping up but I'm sure that totally I think about my take on this is like when you start doing anything with AI or large language models like there has to be a human in the loop right not only to make sure that quality is coming out of the other side, but also to ensure feedback loops are occurring and right. And then you can take that context and start getting closer and closer to a Jesus take the wheel moment where like, where like you actually have built trust. Because like part of this is not actually like, I think, a technology problem. It's like a people in process problem where like people actually build trust in it. And also you get all the tribal knowledge that's not in any
Starting point is 00:49:49 system actually incorporate in some knowledge context that you can start to build off of over time but I think that's like that's the that's the trick is like humans always have to be in the loop right to begin but then like you build trust until you actually do the Jesus take the wheel moment yeah so yeah with this demo what is the design is like an internal tool or something that you would actually thought about a lot of our customers are starting to use this to start to shorten the cycle time of going from like initial problem identification to implementation so like is that for is that for customers that are already
Starting point is 00:50:25 using Palantir? Yeah so like we've started using this primarily with like a lot of existing customers right but then the cool thing about it is I don't know if you guys have heard where like all of the things I'm going to show you are kind of like native components of the platform but then we've developed this capability where we can say like hey this is actually a really repeatable workflow what if we package this up and then just it's way easier to deploy where we can just like deploy there deploy there deploy anywhere basically cool yeah so walk us through it up and maybe bring it a little bit closer so oh yes you guys can actually see it oh yeah yeah go ahead yeah yeah let's do
Starting point is 00:51:04 it no here we go we're saying text messages or anything like that all right cool um I used to work in the aviation space a lot and I fly in and out of Newark which like if you can guys do that you know that's a real pain in the ass yeah so let's let's start there let's just say like um redesign hey I'm a oh yeah for sure go ahead so like the problem the problem that I'll type in basically is like hey I'm an aviation expert like we're seeing significant delays around like Newark Airport because there's not enough runways and the runways are too short like what should I do to optimize my flow basically to solve this problem.
Starting point is 00:51:46 Sure. So like, now you guys get to see me type. It's always fun. Yeah, this is interesting. I, yeah, a ton of questions. I've always wanted to redesign the LAX, like streets. Yeah, the flow of traffic. Yeah, that is a wild choice by LAX.
Starting point is 00:52:09 Just constant, constant traffic. It wasn't too bad this morning, fortunately. But we did have a funny incident with a member of our team who first day John arrived got through security oh yeah and almost managed to miss his flight because he was getting a breakfast by a former guest and friend of the show I would call I would call them texted and said you know this is no time to take shots of the dyslexic he had missed he had made a mistake and confused gate nine for for gate six right and and there is no gate six that happened
Starting point is 00:52:43 particular terminal. Anyways, had it to a different terminal. I've mine, uh, thank you for covering. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. So it doesn't have to me. So right now I just, I typed in, I like, yeah, a lot, pretty rough problem statement. I'm an aviation expert. I want to solve problems around EWR airport. Yep. Uh, there are two few runways and the runways are too short. How do I optimize traffic flow? Okay. Around it to minimize disruptions. Okay. So that's kind of like the first point. And what's happening here is like the first set of agents is basically taking that as a problem description and actually like putting more structure around it. So it's not like my
Starting point is 00:53:13 you know my like misspelled problem statement like cleaning it out it's like a prompt engineer effectively that's right that's right and so on the left side of the screen you can actually see some of the logic of like what happened the train of thought here of like hey here's the problem statement I can see the system prompt like what the task prompt is what the LLM like responded to when they saw this to them actually then creating and structuring this problem which is like hey the core objective is I want to optimize air traffic flow around new Work Liberty International Airport to minimize disruptions to delays and efficiencies.
Starting point is 00:53:48 It puts out like key requirements. Yep. Like prioritize aviation safety standards. It gives out restraint, uh, constraints. Nathan Fielder would be happy to hear that year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Um, it gives out constraints like limited number of existing runways restrict, uh, simultaneous operations, et cetera, et cetera.
Starting point is 00:54:06 So like this looks pretty good to me like is the initial problem description. Um, way better than like the garbily cook. two-sentence thing that I did. So now I want to like start to get into the phase of like actually starting to do research on this to say like what are potential tools, what are potential approaches to actually solve this problem. Yep. And so what's happening right now is like now we're going into kicking off into more of like an agent. Yeah, just branching a bunch of agents to go do deep research. And so yeah exactly. So like now on the screen I can see that same like core objection, uh, objective function over on the left what it's working towards. Yep. And then I can
Starting point is 00:54:43 start to see as it's running on the left, like research topics as it's doing research, pop up and modeling. This is all built in like native foundry tooling. Sure. How how inference heavy is this? Because it feels like it's going to town right now. Yeah, I'll show you I'll show you kind of like the under of how we're actually doing the research. Yeah, it is a unique, uh, it is a unique like, like, I don't know, like problem set because it's like going to town is something we worry about when we're talking about like, oh yeah, you have a billion consumers and $10 really adds up. Yeah. But if it's like a problem as important as this.
Starting point is 00:55:19 If you're talking about, if you're talking about, you know, optimizing an airport, I think I can, I think I can deal with a $100 inference bill. Yeah. I'm going to be okay with that. For sure. So the other thing that I think is interesting here is that like I think agent is like a very, there are a lot of definitions for what an agent is, I think, at this point in time, like, one definition is like, and this was like kind of our first approach.
Starting point is 00:55:41 which was like, hey, let's build a set of logic that NLM actually orchestrates different parts of that logic between, and it can use tools, like you deterministic tools, or it can write back, or it can access and query things to ultimately do some type of automation. I think the other definition of what an agent right now
Starting point is 00:56:02 is more of a chat interface. And then in that regard, right, I wanna be able to give that chat interface, like access to tools, right? And so in this case, like what I've given the agent access to is a bunch of different tools. First, like, I can see the model that I'm using behind the screen here. And like, from our perspective, like,
Starting point is 00:56:24 we think the models are mostly like commoditized at this point. There might be certain models that are better at different things, and you actually probably want to use these things interchangeably, and actually have an evaluation framework that based on the tasks that you're asking it to do will, like, select the right model for that particular task. task. But in this case, right, I'm using GROC 4. And then like for the tools in particular, like I've given it access to like conduct research. So I've given it some ways in which it
Starting point is 00:56:50 can actually reach out and use different either internal or proprietary information of the organization that we're working with or reach out and use something like perplexity. Yeah. To do like more AI-based search. I've given it the ability to like generate like create code blocks. If it's like coming up with an ROI and it needs to do napkin math, Like I want to say like I want you to allow you to actually like generate the code, but also then run the code Yep to see like what what the result is and then I mean it seems like all of this is All of this is kind of like frontier level but available broadly but the Palantier value is that you actually have Like data that isn't just available on that's right and so like if I'm actually an airport and I actually have specific data about you have
Starting point is 00:57:34 Schama Well the thing that stands out to me is like if you're a large enterprise. Yeah, you want to work with with Foundry and have that ability to be model agnostic. And like where does the leverage flow in that situation where when Foundry can just sort of decide on the fly, what form of intelligence do I want to use for this problem set? Very cool. So I can see like kind of like the train of thought on the right, like what it's doing. And so it's going to go, it's already using the research kind of tool.
Starting point is 00:58:04 And you can already see the research topics starting to like pop up here. So like this is an example of an application right that like a user would use they would they know nothing about foundry right They're they're logging into an application their job is like go do this thing right But then behind the scenes you have a lot of different options for how you're setting up this logic sure I don't know how much you guys have seen foundry but this is an example of what we call AIP logic I could write all of this orchestration and code if I wanted to I'm fairly lazy So I use the lower code tool sure which is AIP logic and so here I can just like set up up a bunch of different orchestrations for how I want a function to run.
Starting point is 00:58:40 In this case, I'm putting inputs for what I want the query to be, which is around like that problem statement we talked about. And I'm setting up functions for how it can like reach out to different types of sources. So like the first one is like if I had an internal kind of like proprietary information on schematics of a runway or planes or what types of runways planes can land on, things like that like that's all information that then I can make available to the LLM to go to a combination of like semantic and keyword search against it to find the right information to go do research against but then like as a backfall then I'm just like also giving it access to go inquiry perplexity right and go say like hey
Starting point is 00:59:19 go find what's out what else is out on the internet to actually go do this research about this particular problem right and then bring that back and then the last part of this is like an action then to like go capture all that information and store it back into the ontology layer and foundry awesome so So this is kind of like what it's doing live. It's still working. It's working. And it's writing as we like, as it's doing research, right?
Starting point is 00:59:44 So it's like, what is the current runway configuration, operational capacities, and key limitations at EWR, including details on runway links, numbers, and how the impact aircraft operations. And so then it actually gives me like, this is pretty good information. It will cite the sources where it's coming from and everything like that, right? Yeah. What are effective non-infrastructure strategies for optimizing airport throughput right and so in this case right it's actually saying like
Starting point is 01:00:10 hey there's this performance-based navigation is a corner zone right I remember hearing that if you if you have the plane board from the back to the front it'll load way faster but no one wants to do that because the it's a business model thing yeah because people pay to be at the front of the plane and they want to get on the plane first but if there was another proposal that was like load all the passengers that have window seats then all the passengers that have middle seats and then all the passengers that have aisle seats and they all kind of just flow in.
Starting point is 01:00:39 No one's quite figured that out. But yeah, I mean, I could imagine that it could come up with a bunch of different proposals for, you know, similar just kind of like rethinking of the flow of traffic. I think we're getting short on time here. One question. Let me like zoom forward.
Starting point is 01:00:54 I'll show you kind of like an end product here. Please. Which is like, let's go. I already ran this today. I was like hanging out with the American Airlines guys because like we're making fun of EWR. which is not their hub. But yeah,
Starting point is 01:01:08 this is like an idea that it generates. And then like I get a summary of what that idea is. And then it automatically develops critique agents. Yeah. That are like looking and evaluating on different type of like, different criteria, right? Which is like, hey, can I, what's the risk assessment and mitigation evaluation? What's the economic feasibility of actually doing this?
Starting point is 01:01:29 Like what is the safety and regulatory compliance evaluation? And then it's going to run. one, like those evaluations using that agent as a, like a task criteria. Yeah. To actually then say like I can see the guidance that we gave the agent, right? And it's task. And then it has to go evaluate to see if it makes sense from that perspective. Yep.
Starting point is 01:01:49 Right. And it even like generates its own models and its own code to say like, hey, is this feasible from like it can I do basically nap, like napkin math? Yep. And say like, can I come up with like how I could calculate this and actually go and like run and how close is this output do you think to what a larger yeah strategy pretty I think it's like pretty aligned right because like they're not they in normal times like these strategy consulting firms aren't getting access to all the
Starting point is 01:02:19 data and so they're like being like okay come up with the idea do the research generate the idea of guess a little bit then like I need to do some napkin math on like how I would think about actually like critiquing this idea and then ultimately like I need to come up with a proposal right and here's like the end proposal for what I think you should go do same framework where I have agents then writing portions of that proposal and then from there right it's just like copy paste that proposal and the AI FTE and like start building right last last quick question are you feeling the reindustrialization yet are you seeing new entrance into the Midwest building things or is it
Starting point is 01:02:58 more legacy players just trying to try to increase I think it's like A lot of what I work with are companies like Eaton, which are like 100-year-old companies or like Johnson Controls, 100-year-old companies that are saying like, how do I actually use this as an advantage to do better, right? Like, and that's like where I think is interesting is that like maybe five years ago, this was really hard. Like people were like, yeah, I don't trust it or I don't believe in it. I think now what's interesting is they're like, I trust it, let's go. Like it's just the second time is faster. sit down and give him a demo. That's right.
Starting point is 01:03:35 Well, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks so much for joining. Thanks for having you guys. Brave to do a live demo. We're going to our next guest. Yeah. Great. Any great work.
Starting point is 01:03:42 I'm a great listener. Thank you. Yeah. Love it. Have a great rest of the conference. You're the man. And we'll bring in our next guest. Jonathan Love from the nuclear man himself.
Starting point is 01:03:55 Welcome. Sorry to keep you waiting. Today is a great name to have a company. Great day to have a company. Great day. It starts with the. I don't know if you saw the browser company. So the free press sold for $200 million.
Starting point is 01:04:08 The browser company sold for $620 million. Everyone is all in on companies that start with the today. There we go. But give us the intro on the nuclear company. What's the plan? And where are you in that plan? What's the plan? So to my understanding, we're the only company
Starting point is 01:04:28 in the Western world focused on the deployment of new nuclear. What does that mean? I assume some of your communities probably followed the nuclear industry a little bit. I mean, there's no AI without power. I just talked in that talk earlier about, you know, China is about to pass the U.S. as the largest nuclear power in the world. Yeah. Our thesis is the reactor is not the problem.
Starting point is 01:04:52 There's a lot of legacy reactors that are operating in the U.S. There's some of the best performing reactors on planet Earth. There's a lot of startups, dozens, designing new reactors. that are all going to be great reactors. The problem is being able to deploy those reactors on time on budget. We have the safest operating nuclear fleet, the highest performing operating nuclear fleet. You're talking about the Navy?
Starting point is 01:05:14 I'm talking about the US. Broadly. We have about 100 operating plants. I mean, today, 20% of the power in the US comes from nuclear. That's nuclear that was built in the 60s and 70s. We've built two reactors in 30 years. So what are we? We're the deployment arm.
Starting point is 01:05:29 And what does that mean? So think of if you're American Air, airlines or Delta, you don't call GE or Rolls-Royce. You don't just call to buy a jet engine. You call Boeing or Airbus. If I handed you a jet engine or a Ferrari engine or a Bugatti engine, no matter how great that engine is, you're going to be like, what are we doing? So we want to be the full solution to deliver that power plant to either a hyperscaler, to a utility, to a foreign government, or potentially to operate those on our own. And the good thing is we're not competing with any of those reactor companies in the market, we're a partner of them.
Starting point is 01:06:03 So once they go from R&D to manufacturing to design to implementation, there's a big difference between white labcoats designing projects in an R&D lab to living in a construction site where you know, I've done, much of our team's done. I mean, I've built 8 million square feet of stuff at the last thing, you know, got a team of builders that worked for Elon, building gigafactories, built the last nuclear power plants here. we want to be that team that when you're ready to go deploy your reactor, you know, we can partner with you, get that reactor in the field and get it up and operate. Your partners on the reactor side, how much of what they're doing is just remembering how we used to build reactors as a country versus doing that new innovation.
Starting point is 01:06:44 So there's really only two incumbents in the U.S. And that's Westinghouse and GE. And, you know, obviously we're talking to them. And then there's a lot of- And they built Vodal, the most recent nuclear power plants to come online. that were successful, but over budget and over time, correct? Oh man, it was, yeah, I hired everybody off that team. So Georgia, Vogel three and four first down.
Starting point is 01:07:06 Yeah, what we wanted to do. No, no, no, no, we wanted to hire. Like if people look at that and go, abject failure, I go, no, no, no, these are lessons learned. This is like what went wrong. Guys, it's nuts, man. Like it took 10,000 people at the peak of construction on that construction site.
Starting point is 01:07:27 Guys, go to a rock concert. Look at 10,000 people and think they're showing up to work every day. You don't want an amphitheater just to meet your team. 10,000 people managing the project with paper. No way. Guys, last decade, we're not talking 40 years ago. I'm talking in the last, this thing finished last year with wheelbarrels and wagons of paper. So you're looking at 10 to 20% efficiency for the people working.
Starting point is 01:07:54 And, you know, the audience and the larger viewership might go, lazy Americans. No, I'm not buying it. We are not giving our teams and people the advantages to win. The American spirit and fight alone, God, I'm believing it as much as anyone. It's not enough. We got to bring technology tools capability. That's where we're partnering with Palantir.
Starting point is 01:08:12 So I'm taking hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, which is what it takes to build one of these power plants, putting into a data lake, segmenting that data out. So if certain parties want to secure their data, they can't, then having LLMs and AI on top of that, giving predictive analytics. So when the supply chain's delayed the night before, a construction man or woman's waking up in an RV and a trailer at 3 a.m. Okay, I'm going to be redirected at 315. I go there at 345. I go there. Giving our frontline teams all the tools, technology, and information, we can do it. We're not splitting an atom. We're not going to Mars.
Starting point is 01:08:46 We're just building the most dominant AI-enabled platform on planet Earth. And we're going to slash that 10,000 down to 5,000. We're going to go to seven years instead of 12 years. China's building these one gigawatt reactors for five billion in five years. There's no reason we can't do it in five or four years. I'm not going to name the number. My team will get really upset with me on the price side. But there's no reason these two reactors took 12 years and 36 billion.
Starting point is 01:09:10 Let's talk about timelines in the industry broadly. Because there's some recent, I guess, I don't know if I can't remember if it was an EO or just a broad directive from the White House saying, like, we want new nuclear breaking ground in the U.S. in the next 12 months? Is that, is that brother? It could be us. So we are imminently close to a recovery project
Starting point is 01:09:32 that I'm not supposed to talk about. So I'm not going to name the state. And, but it's a $20 billion recovery project. Recovery bringing old capacity back online. Yeah. Yeah. So $9 billion walk away. They spent $9 billion on this nuclear,
Starting point is 01:09:48 two gigawatt nuclear power plant, didn't finish it, walked away. So we are getting brought in. and we're imminently close. If we win that, you all should definitely come. This tiny little team that's two years old that partnered with Palantir to go recover this animal and finish it.
Starting point is 01:10:05 We'll love to have you all in our construction. Yeah, yeah. When you think about what they spent, what is the value that's just sitting there on the dirt? Certainly not $9 billion, but are you picking up a couple million? It's a big number. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:10:18 No, it's a lot of big stuff. I mean, hopefully they've ports of concrete that's still there or something. It looks like, I mean, if you walk on it, we're on, I'm not allowed to say we're at, right? Yeah. Oh, God, I almost did. So we're in America. We're in America.
Starting point is 01:10:33 We're in America. We're in American sound effect. We are in America. We're not afraid to say it. We're in America. But the, when you walk this site and you look at it, it looks like, you know, aliens landed and just left. Because it's in rural America where this big infrastructure. So there's a lot of value there.
Starting point is 01:10:50 There's been some value that's, you know, not. not quite where it should be. But we're going to go, we're going to get that thing, hopefully later this year, early next year and be in that construction. We have an author, Dan Wang on the show, maybe last week. He wrote a book called Breakneck, and he, and he compares and contrast China to the United States. And he calls China the engineering empire driven by an engineering mindset.
Starting point is 01:11:14 The solution to everything in China is just more engineering. Build a train to nowhere, build a bridge, just build housing, build everything, build, build, build, build, and in the United States, he calls us the lawyerly society. And we are, everyone in politics is lawyerly or a lawyer lineage. And so one of the problems that I've heard in nuclear is that oftentimes you go to build something, you think, okay, I got a plan. It's compliant with all the laws.
Starting point is 01:11:38 And then the laws change. And all of a sudden you're back to square one. You've got to rip out all the pipes because they said no copper. Now you've got to use lead pipes again or whatever. How much of that do you think is real or how much do you think? Because that feels like something that you can speed up by. analyzing all the legal code constantly and the regulatory filing speeding that up. But some of it also has to happen on the other side, right?
Starting point is 01:11:59 Like it's not just enough for you to be using AI to submit documents fast. You need review fast. So what's going to happen on the other side? Oh, God, I have so many comments on this. Just just rant. So how long do we have? Yeah, we got a couple of minutes. So, yeah, I mean, this is the hot button issue for me.
Starting point is 01:12:16 We have the safest operating nuclear fleet in the world and the highest operating capacity. This industry, don't get me wrong, the legal BS, yes, we all agree. But the victim mentality of the industry, the victim mentality of entrepreneurs in San Francisco acting like high school kids blaming the regulator. Brother, it ain't that hard. We hired the number two at the NRC, Laura Dudes. She's on our team. We're walking into the NRC going, what do you need?
Starting point is 01:12:45 We're going to be fully transparent. We're going to be fully compliant. They should be incredibly critical. it's nuclear for God's sakes. If there is one, and here's the other one, big misnomer of Voo. And it's working, right? The fleet's safe.
Starting point is 01:12:58 We have had in decades, 100 operating nuclear power plants, not one person in this country has died from radiation fallout. 0.0. That is perfection. So the private sector needs to stop being a victim and just start doing what we're doing and figure out how to partner with the regulator.
Starting point is 01:13:19 We're seeing no problems. So the other kids that want to cry on Twitter, go for it. You want to sue the regulator, go for it. We're just going to go in and partner with them and figure out how to build bigger, faster, lower costs, safer higher quality than ever before. And I will say what we're doing with Palantir. Well, here's the good news. To the people designing reactors and you're ready to go deploy them, what you're doing and what I'm doing have nothing in common. I have a team, again, me and my wife were living in an RV, got engaged on the last construction site.
Starting point is 01:13:49 I've got guys that were building Vogel 3 and 4, had heart attacks on the construction site, had people living at the gigafactories. That is a totally different world. Let us take your drawings, your great R&D, drag it into reality, and we're going to build that trust with the regulator with you. But I do think we got to go pencils down, swords down on blaming the regulator. Now, the legal, you know, that's a whole verse engineer thing. That's a whole other topic we could take on.
Starting point is 01:14:17 But we need the regulator to challenge us to be safe. And we just as an industry, I have to figure out how to comply and get the job done. Yeah. Great rant. I would love to see you and Karp rant together. Yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:14:29 What did Palantir show you that made you go with them? Was there a key case study that made you realize a family that's about to be the first, the only company in the U.S. with commercial nuclear under our watch? I'm like, what did we do right? What are others doing?
Starting point is 01:14:46 We're just building a team to go build and kind of reactor, technagnostic is the other is the other stuff managed by the government is that what you mean like or is it just older companies that there's no one that's actually focused on building everyone's designing new reactors sure I just want to build stuff so I could build a Westinghouse a GE reactor you know any one of the new advanced reactors we just want to build so then the last year what we did is we looked at everything hired somebody over here a lot smarter than me was it Tesla was at Microsoft looked at all the different AI platforms what can we do we
Starting point is 01:15:18 knew what we wanted nuclear OS. So nuclear OS is the you know again all all aspects of data related to the project into a data lake predictive analytics to our frontline teams no one's even close man yeah this is it I'm not trying to be like a sales job I would like to get like a commission yeah I was gonna guess that there's not another great alternative that this would have been nice to look at a couple options and decide well here's the good thing I mean it's just the most secure platform the way the way it is configured you know we're going to go build the most dominant AI-enabled nuclear platform and we're doing it with Palantir.
Starting point is 01:15:53 So it took us about a year of study. It took us a couple months of planning. And now we're just racing right now to go kind of build those solutions and it's working. Yeah. What's the structure of the financial milestones for you? Because I imagine that a lot of this doesn't look just like fund everything with venture capital. There's probably some project finance. Oh, definitely.
Starting point is 01:16:13 And then there's actually a customer who might be not you that's paying you. paying you just to manage the construction right so for our business model so Topco you know the nuclear company you're investing your VC dollars into technology and team which this town knows yeah that big you know buckets a capital project capital I hired a big boy CFO that's raised 10 billion in his life he was CFO with jb at redwood similar to how like the neoclods will go and build new data centers but then there's there's project on the project yeah you know we're the ones getting it to completion we get an equity earn out in the project we get a feed during construction.
Starting point is 01:16:48 Sure. And then there's multiple either we could build on transfer to a large utility, we could build on operate for a hyper scaler, we could build on transfer to a foreign government, or we could operate it ourselves. So there's a few ways we get there, but the debt and equity is going on the project, not through us now. I mean, our valuation's not to a point to where I could put
Starting point is 01:17:09 $20 billion on our balance sheet. Yeah, but I don't know, maybe in a couple years, let's talk, let's see how this goes. So, you know, we're, you know, again, very just bullish on Pallantir, and I don't know whoever listened to that talk earlier, it's, I mean, the binary outcome is it's us first China. And all the tech bros and the badass CEOs and the badass Fortune 500 tech executive, here's what I would say.
Starting point is 01:17:32 We got to leave our ego at the door. China is fucking kicking our ass. That, I hope, was not recorded. Everything is, we're live. So, look, it is, look, the reality is it's not even a competition. We're losing so bad and we've got to work together. So I would say to the community watching, you know, push me, be hard on me, critical on me, that's fine. But let's figure out how to challenge each other and work together because it's a binary outcome right now.
Starting point is 01:17:58 It's us first China. It's not even close. They're winning at so many categories and we've got to figure out how to work together. And that's what I think Palantir and a unique framework they're bringing. Not only the technology, but the mentality of how do we work together and win? And, you know, now it's all going to be about performance on that construction site, on time, on budget, high safety. Well, and I love your position in the nuclear kind of market broadly and that if somebody can build great reactors, you can help them actually become a real business based on it and not have to worry about every single point in the staff. We got a partner, man. That's the thing, right? This is where China is going into the Middle East, fully vertically integrated, going MBS, we will do it all. One shop stop. They don't want to.
Starting point is 01:18:44 work with three constructors and somebody selling a reactor. No. So like how do we partner together, go as a coalition, we're going to deliver power globally. We're going to deliver power in the here in the US. But I do think figuring out how we, you know, bring down this ego of like there's so many silos and we need to challenge each other. But that's what I would say to you all because there's a lot more people on this listen to you than listen to me. How do we bring our tech community together are big CEOs who are important and great but if you compare them to China we're not winning so it's like how do we do that and go win collectively fantastic well I think we have our next guest here we're going to take a look at some rocket motor so thank you for thanks for
Starting point is 01:19:24 joining us thank you for doing this work I appreciate it have a good rest of your day up next we we have Nancy cable from Ursa major we'll bring her in and do you want us to try and bring that in here what do you think it I'm happy to bring it in bring it in bring in the engine bring in the engine right okay it's device we got an engine coming on the show it's shocking that it was clear through security we we we we when we do these remote shows we we sometimes have to bring a very very suspicious looking Wi-Fi hotspots uh Ben and the boys brought a Wi-Fi hot spot through the actually I think I had to walk it into the Capitol through a very odd place here maybe pick up the microphone and we'll throw it on the table
Starting point is 01:20:11 Yep, we can throw it on the table. I think we'll be okay. You'll sit your own gently down. Okay. Incredible. This is a wild demo. We've met someone, first rocket engine. Nice to meet you.
Starting point is 01:20:24 I'm John. Nancy. Nice to meet you. Thanks for coming on. We've had people bring fish to the show, sushi that was extracted or the fish was killed with a robot shinkay. That was a fun one. We had somebody promise us to the show. SpaceX engine to yeah oh yeah we gotta follow up on seven but but this is the best demo
Starting point is 01:20:47 we've gotten so far this is fantastic this is a good day for us yeah so explain to us what is this and what's your business and introduce yourself yeah absolutely so i'm nancy cable i am the director of operations for ursa major and we are an aerospace and defense company so we are deploying primarily right now hypersonic rocket technology which is what this is this is our hadley engine so a 5,000 pound thrust class, proven hypersonic flight capability. So this thing right here has flown Mach 5. Really critical in the defense space right now. We must field technology, and we must do it faster.
Starting point is 01:21:24 And that's what Hadley and some of our next-gen products are enabling. Now, correct me if I'm wrong. The value of the hypersonic missile is that it has the maneuverability of a cruise missile with the speed of an ICBM, and so is maneuverability a piece of this? Is this like a? Maneuverability is a piece of this for our customers. So a lot of interceptor technology is what current applications. And for our next-gen products, the maneuverability and the storability of the fuels are also
Starting point is 01:21:51 front of mind. Yeah. And help me understand where EURSA major fits in the overall stack of like the primes and the different supply chain. Like are you developing whole weapons systems that sell directly to the DOD? Are you partnering with other companies that we might be familiar with? Where does there some major fit in? Yeah, absolutely.
Starting point is 01:22:10 So we're doing, we aim to be disruptive. And disruptive means that we want to break the mold of what some of the primes and the government have traditionally done, which is these years or even decades-long deployment cycles of development and qualification. And to do that, we do want to push the industry. So that does mean not necessarily fielding the weapon system ourselves, although that is on the horizon, but putting ourselves in the position where we're partnering with the government, partnering with the primes and forcing them to push the envelope on how fast we can get these products into the spaces that they need to be.
Starting point is 01:22:43 So right now, huge focus on just manufacturing excellence, costs, speed, reliability. Absolutely. And that is most of my role is on the manufacturing side and making sure that I can take this excellent technology that our rocket scientists have developed and scale it so that's available to market. Right now we're on, you know, looking at the order of tens to hundreds of units a year. that needs to be tens of thousands of units a year. And that's really where the Pallenture partnership comes in. How does Pallenture for the years? Yeah, absolutely. You might think that engineers are great at data flow.
Starting point is 01:23:18 But if we were to look at this rocket engine here, different engineers designed the turbo machinery and the injector and the chamber. And all of them came up with a unique way to process their data, a unique test system, a different network drive, a different place to store the information. Different network drive. That is, I wasn't expecting that. And that's, well, and I think this is the story of, you know, we have a small company here
Starting point is 01:23:43 maybe 10 people and we probably do have like six different like Google drives and different folders for different data. Well, that's the interesting thing, right? It's just the natural chaos of things. In every industry, rocket propulsion included. Yeah. Ends up feeling like, man, I'm 15 years behind. How could anyone possibly store something on a C drive?
Starting point is 01:24:01 Yeah, yeah. But when you're focused on getting the hardware to work, you just want to move fast. you're not necessarily focused on the efficiency. And so putting the data efficiencies front and center, even before Palantir, our aim was right data, right people, right time, right decisions. I loved what Dr. Carp was saying about people happiness. People are not happy when they feel behind.
Starting point is 01:24:21 They are happy when they feel ahead, when they can make real-time decisions. And leveraging Palantir out onto the shop floor and into the back end of our data structures means that we can get the information to people so they can be real time and then even predictive. predictive about how we're doing manufacturing. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:24:37 So how does someone at Eursa Major actually interact with Palantir? Is it on the iPad, on a phone, on a computer while we're working at test bench? Great. Great question. So we've been with Palantir about three months now. Okay. So, so early. And right now, the daily interactions are mostly with our engineering and programmatic teams.
Starting point is 01:24:59 We've built some inventory modules. We've built in, you know, looking at our engineering line of balance, our chance. change management systems. But like we were hearing from our nuclear, you know, from nuclear, the people on the floor doing the work are actually the most important people in the factory. If my technicians can't build an engine, we cannot deliver to our customers. So that is the next endeavor that we are a few weeks into with amazing results so far is to actually make Palantir a manufacturing execution system. Make it the shop floor portal. One data source, one source of truth, one program, from
Starting point is 01:25:34 raw material ordering ordering all of the parts producing all of the parts internal through fielded data on our at our customers yeah is you almost call it like an ERP almost yeah so we actually we have an ERP right this is what everyone does everyone has they have an ERP for enter enter undersized resource plan yeah accounting accounting function all of your work orders the PLM a product lifecycle management and then an MES is the traditional thing a manufacturing execution system and we have said why not use Palantir It's already integrated.
Starting point is 01:26:05 I don't want one more monolithic software. Connect it with the ERP, actually pull some of the functions out of the ERP. Yeah, I remember hearing the story. I don't know how true it is, but something about like SpaceX built like a ton of custom software for everything they needed to do
Starting point is 01:26:17 and then eventually I think the team like spun out and built a business around that. Yeah, well SpaceX, actually, so they have a product and it's kind of the gold standard. Everyone who's worked at SpaceS. It's like, I want that one. It's like, I want that one. And that really is the, you know,
Starting point is 01:26:32 the magic of that software. is everything in one place, which is what ontology brings. Everything we need in one place. Very cool. So what's it going to take to go for making tens or hundreds of these to tens of thousands? The physical process matters, of course, right? We are a hardware company. You look at the complexity of this and you can understand why we're not going to be forward with a robotic automation line.
Starting point is 01:26:56 So making sure we have the right tools, the right fixtures, the right machines, you know, 3D, printing is critical to what we do here. Yeah. 80% of the rocket, all of these metallic components are metal 3D printed. Yeah, developing some of our own unique alloys. So scaling the machines is probably the longest lead time for us and then setting up the correct tools, fixtures, as you can imagine, test stand infrastructure is really big. But not having the data around that in silos.
Starting point is 01:27:29 So when we need to build hundreds of these, I need to know where every piece part is at every moment so that we can make the best real-time decisions possible for quality for the customers. So the physical infrastructure is really what we're most familiar with. And now Palantir is helping us with that digital infrastructure side of things. I've been in manufacturing my whole career. 80% of the line down scenarios have ever had where we stop building product. You want to guess what they're from? Lacking inventory? It's lacking inventory. It is not having a component and so we think about like yeah a rocket engine is really physically complex that's not actually the hard part hard part is getting all the pieces
Starting point is 01:28:09 where they need to be to build a 1200 component rocket engine and it's things like that that the the ontology is helping us off a couple years ago I said it's funny I don't know I don't know if this is a hubris but I feel like you could put this together John what that's kind of that's a point right a manufacturing execution system so actually putting the pieces together is the easy part but it's like making the parts and making sure you have them at the right time is the real challenge. So it's like doing a puzzle over like, you know, 20 days type of thing.
Starting point is 01:28:39 Yeah, I mean, we joke it's like Lego, Legos for adults, but you can see it really just is a collection of fittings, fittings and fasteners. And that's kind of the point. How can we have a system that makes it so easy and so obvious how we manufacture these that I could pull the two of you in and say, build a rocket engine and you could do it with confidence. We've got young kids. I think they would enjoy putting one of these together.
Starting point is 01:29:00 Yeah, yeah, a couple of years ago I sat next to somebody on. on a plane who was selling, it was pipe bending, pipe fitting, whatever this is, tube bending. Yeah, he said, I mean, my business is tube bending. And I was like, what? And he was like, yeah, he was going to SpaceX specifically to sell tube bending machines to them. I didn't realize there was a whole industry.
Starting point is 01:29:19 It's a whole, yeah. It's a in person to make sure that they don't run out. Absolutely. It's a way, it's a whole industry. If the tube isn't bent, you can't make the rocket. If the tube isn't bent, you can't make the rocket. Crazy. And tubes actually carry some risk.
Starting point is 01:29:31 There are some of the finest walled components on the rocket, right? This has a lot of mass to it. Tubes are often, can be where failures happen. So in an ecosystem, right, we need to test them, but also where did this tube come from? What day was it bent? What was the lot of stock material?
Starting point is 01:29:47 What revision was I on in my CAD model? Sure, sure, sure. What testing did this engine undergo? All of that currently, I could find in our systems. Interesting. And it would take me hours, but. But if it's all in one place, yeah. If it's all in one place,
Starting point is 01:30:00 and we have a consolidated tool at set traceability. That's incredibly cool. Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you so much for bringing your baby on the track. This is a great sign of respect. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what's cooler than carrying around a hypersonic rocket engine?
Starting point is 01:30:12 I love it. Everyone loves it, but the TSA. Oh, yes, yes, yeah. Rough one to travel with. Yeah, anyway, thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, absolutely. Well, gentlemen, lovely to meet you. Yeah, thanks for coming on.
Starting point is 01:30:22 Yeah, thank you so much. We have our next guest ready, or should I talk? We have a couple minutes. Why don't you tell us about some ads? Do you have some ads you can run? I'd love to hear some ads. You want to talk about ramp.com? Ramp.
Starting point is 01:30:35 Ramp. Ramp. Ramp. Ramp. Let's go through some of Ramp. I did want to, while you pull that up, I did want to talk about Matt Huang. Oh, yeah. The Paradigm and the Stripe team introducing a new payments-first blockchain called Tempo.
Starting point is 01:30:52 Matt says, as stable coins go mainstream, there's a need for optimized infrastructure. Tempo is purpose built for stable coins and real-world payments born from Stripes' experience and global payments. global payments and Paradigms' expertise in crypto. To ensure Tempo serves a broad array of needs, we're excited to be working with an incredible group of initial design partners, including Anthropic, Kupang, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, LeadBank, Mercury, New Bank, Open AI, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Charter, Visa, and more. Tempo's payment-first design includes predictable low fees, payments, gas, and any stable coin, payments-first U.X, opt-in privacy, scale.
Starting point is 01:31:31 100,000 transactions per second, an EVM compatible built on wreath. Tempo eases the path to bring real-world flows on chain such as global payouts, pay ends, and payroll, embedded financial products and accounts, fast and cheap remittances, tokenized deposits for 24-7 settlement, micro transactions, agentic payments, and more. Matt says we're building tempo with principles of decentralization and neutrality. That includes stablecoin neutrality. Anyone can issue a stable coin. We might be able to have a TBPN coin. That sounds exciting.
Starting point is 01:32:05 And any... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was clearly a joke. No, but I was talking about a USD-TPN. Yes. One-for-one stable coin that we issued to... It does not move. It does not move.
Starting point is 01:32:21 You can't make it move. It won't budge. Independent and diverse validator set with a roadmap toward a permissionless model. So apparently they're already in a private test net. And anyways, two two power players, paradigm and, and Stripe coming together. It sounds like they're positioning, I guess Matt is running tempo, but they're positioning this as they're both investors and tempo. So I think they really do want to take a decentralized approach. So not,
Starting point is 01:32:51 so this is not downstream of like the stripe acquisitions directly, Privy and Bridge. So I have a post here from Zach Abrams, founder of Bridge. He says, bridge, which one of the first companies to use blockchain to solve core payments problems. During our journey, we've seen how even the most performant blockchain struggle with basic financial services use cases. A few examples, a payroll transaction consistently failing when Trump launched. That's interesting. So when the Trump coin launched, apparently people that were running payroll, like, you know, couldn't get. On bridge with stable coins? No, no, no. He's not talking about, he's not talking about Bridge specifically, but he's saying, like, if you were trying to pay employees at the time the Trump coin launched,
Starting point is 01:33:31 Who's paying employees in Trump coin? No, no, no. Not in Trump coin. Like that day, I think it was like a Saturday or it was a Friday. I forget. Exactly. But when it launched, if you tried to pay, there was so much activity on chain at that moment.
Starting point is 01:33:44 Like, good luck, you know, paying like a freelancer or something. So, yeah, the example would be like, I'm trying to pay a freelancer in stable coins, like on chain. Because obviously, like, your default payroll providers are just using, like, you know, Web 2 rails or whatever. And that wasn't brought down by the Trump launch, right? Okay, got. Aid disbursements taking days due to low transactions per second and projects to later
Starting point is 01:34:06 canceled due to six-figure upfront gas costs. Tempo is new L1 built specifically for payments. And so anyways, quite the team they've put together here. Yeah, we've got to get some of the folks on the show and have them break it down because I'm very interested in why not Salana, why not Circle. You know, like it feels like there's a stable. The other question is why not another L, like why not an L2? Exactly.
Starting point is 01:34:34 Exactly. Exactly. But this is something unique and they must have put a lot of time and effort into it. So congrats to them on the launch, but we will want to know more. Anyway, I believe we have our next guest. Welcome to the show. Ryan. Ryan, I'm John.
Starting point is 01:34:50 Ryan, it's pleasure. Welcome to the show. We can hold this microphone. Why don't you kick us off an introduction on yourself? All right. What brought you here today? Perfect. I'm Ryan as Dorian.
Starting point is 01:35:00 I'm the chief marketing and strategy officer for Lumen and we're here at AIPcon talking about all the great things we're doing together to modernize telecom. Lumen's a... Let's give it up for modernizing telecom. Yeah, exactly, right? Finally. It's fun because it's decades of complex, operational.
Starting point is 01:35:21 I think Palantir is helping us modernize into this new world that you need for AI-ready, multi-cloud world that is what everyone's here talking about. Yeah. How do you define? break down more of what you do in telecom specifically. Yeah. So, Lumen is, you know, for decades, we have basically been connecting the world. Okay.
Starting point is 01:35:41 It starts with connection. And then in the last, in the last bit of time, the world has needed new ways of connecting. Yeah. We're bringing that infrastructure. We're bringing control. If you think about the way it was before, it was like one port, cables in the ground? All fiber, right? Everything that's running across fiber.
Starting point is 01:35:58 Got it. Those super fast connections you need. One port, one connection was the way of the world. We're changing that. We're getting it cloud ready, cloud enabled, remote control, all of those things that give you that redundancy, all the things that power AI. That's what Lumen is doing and we're connecting the world.
Starting point is 01:36:17 Okay. Who's the customer right now? We have lots of customers. So we're really focused on the enterprise. The enterprises that are building these new capabilities, data center operators, hyperscalers of course and so we've announced some of the work we've done on the backbone the infrastructure backbone of the AI economy but what we're really
Starting point is 01:36:38 doing is enabling businesses new things new new technologies that they want to give them a technological advantage we're disrupting this industry to help them disrupt their industry yeah yeah so I mean obviously there's like an immense amount of money flowing into data centers yeah is a lot of that actually going into like new bandwidth requirements between data Like the basic narrative is like, yeah, they might spend a billion dollars training something, but it's all happening within one data center. Well, so the thing you hear about a lot and you guys have talked about a lot as well is compute, storage, cooling, all those things that are needed. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:37:14 The missing link is connectivity. And realistically, it's something that has really emerged as of recent to say there are new types of connectivity, new next gen fiber. Yeah. That has way more capacity than the world has ever needed before. sure we're we're growing leaps and bounds over by 2028 we'll have about 66 million route miles of fiber and that is growing you know three to five X what we've had before okay and that is the capacity of the world needs yeah so there's a some sort of is that capacity being used inefficiently today or or or is demand still way out stripping supply the demand is completely maxing out it's why we are
Starting point is 01:38:00 these investments in the ground. And we're not only, the hypers, I'd say, the tip of the spear. They're consuming a lot of this. They're looking for a lot of this data center to data center connectivity. But it's really enterprises everywhere that are now saying, you know what, we also need that type of bandwidth. And some will take it dedicated, some will take it shared. But the need is completely outpacing with the needs of the last couple decades have been.
Starting point is 01:38:27 Yeah, try and make that more concrete for me. Because I feel like most people's interaction with AI is I send the most condensed packets possible across the internet, just a couple lines of text. Yeah. And then a bunch of GPUs light on fire at the AWS Data Center, Azure, if I'm using GPT5, and then it sends back text. This is not rich video. This is not VR. I buy, I immediately like intuitively, intuitively understand like if we're in the metaverse world and we're streaming 4K stereoscopic, that's super. bandwidth heavy how is AI bandwidth heavy so it's actually great listening to the
Starting point is 01:39:05 customers that have been here at AIPcon because you hear American Airlines you hear BP you hear some of these customers that are talking about their infrastructure all of the scheduling the inferencing the the planning that is happening in real-time and adjusting that is not just people typing in their prompts into the text it is systems talking to systems and this is where the data explosion has come from. It's all happening in the background. Okay, yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 01:39:33 So even though I fire off one query to GPT5, if it's doing deep research, it might be pinging 75 different websites and that's driving up, total internet use. Yes, and the systems are also creating their own queries. Yeah, we saw that with the demo from Palantir. Like, you know, he typed one line of text to help optimize this airport.
Starting point is 01:39:54 And then it was like 20 minutes. That's right. Okay, yeah, that's right. And so this is where the disruption in telecom works. And if you really think about what has changed in telecom over the last 25 years, the answer is not much. When you can take one port and you can put lots of services on that port and put the control in the customer's hands, you've changed the way people in our, it's cloudifying telecom.
Starting point is 01:40:19 And in this new world of what is happening with cloud, like cloud 2.0, that is the necessary bandwidth control and precision that you need in connectivity. What does cloudifying telecom mean? Is it mean like more like multi-tenant on the actual fiber lines? Like instead of a hyperscaler owning one route, then they're bidding it out and spot rates or something? Yeah, multi-tenant is a good way to think about some of the services on top of, you know, in the past, you've literally, if you think even back to old telephone switches, you've had, you know, the one wire to one wire it's been one port to one service. You add a service, you out a port,
Starting point is 01:41:00 it's a truck roll, it's a person coming out. Cloudifying it is bringing all of that technology to the users, giving them that interface, that portal where they can say, I need these services, I need them in these locations, I need this speed, I need the bandwidth turned up. It's network as a service. Yeah, so a higher level of abstraction.
Starting point is 01:41:17 Yes. And yeah, more, like almost like a virtual machine on top of the telecom infrastructure so it can be provisioned on an ad hoc basis. Yeah, and one of the biggest changes, I think, in the economics, this AI economy is also, if you think about a network subscription, if you will, of the past, you sign up, you get a certain amount of bandwidth. But if you look at the companies of today, if you look at the sports industry, manufacturing industry, health care industry, they have these spikes that are massive. And so we're providing that network as a service where it turns up, turns down, and then customers are paying for. what the it's a consumption model and again that's part of this cloudifying model
Starting point is 01:42:00 which has not hit telecom till what we're looking to transform so yeah help me understand the the new shape of the telecom industry in your business like I imagine that there's some genius scientists that comes up with a faster fiber optic cable yeah that is manufactured somewhere then someone purchases that they buy some land they bury it in the ground maybe they get some rights and then at a certain point someone's you know leasing or essentially charging a toll along that toll road. Do you sit all, are we completely vertically integrated?
Starting point is 01:42:31 So we sit vertically integrated, but I think what- Do you do R&D on new fiber optic technology? We work with a number of partners on that. And then we're also thinking about the AI optimizations on that fiber. So if you think about intelligent routing, if you think about redundancy, if you think about all those things
Starting point is 01:42:50 where you could have something as simple as a fiber cut in the ground. Sure. Maybe it's on purpose, maybe it's not on purpose. purpose but something aware of that and then you need to dispatch someone to go fix it you can't have any interruption to the services you're running so we have to have that redundancy yep on top of that our customers and enterprises everywhere I think they started
Starting point is 01:43:09 mostly building with one cloud yeah now if you think about this multi-cloud world where they're hitting Azure GDC AWS they're hitting all of them at the same time with the same applications in different regions across the US sure they have to seamlessly let those systems talk to each other And they don't want a direct connection to each of them. That's where we started. But now they want to be able to live in this fabric where their systems can talk to all of these, in all the regions, get all of the data and process faster because that's part of the disruption they want.
Starting point is 01:43:44 Last question for me. How does Palantir fit into that? Yeah. So if you think of the operational complexity of the decades of past, you know, you've built all these networks. We talked about fiber in the ground. Think about the systems over those decades that have been built up. One of the things Palantir is helping us with
Starting point is 01:44:04 is managing this operational. You sort of see an abstraction of this in LA when there's the fire and the boxes with the telephone lines just explode. Yeah. Why didn't they build a box that doesn't explode? And so you imagine that that's where, that's where the power lines work.
Starting point is 01:44:22 The fiber optic lines, yeah, they're newer. But there's probably still some stuff that might go wrong if it was installed 30 years ago. Yeah, well, there's identify that early. There's that and there's the software layer that is running all of those. Gotta make sure that that's up to date and not crashing. And Palantir's helping us optimize those,
Starting point is 01:44:38 helping us bring them together. And what we are building for customers is then a system that they don't have to think about the optimization they need in their network. We're gonna help automate that. We're gonna help bring AI to that network. work. And that's part of this partnership. And it's also, frankly, the most exciting part about disrupting telco. It's not an industry that too many have talked about disrupting for a while.
Starting point is 01:45:06 It's ripe for it. It's needed. And this AI multi-cloud era, Lumen's here for it. That's very exciting. Anything else, Jordi? Love it. We were running late. So thank you so much. This is great. Thanks for having me to be. All right. I'll grab this. Thank you. We have our next guest coming into the studio. Drew Kukor, I think we actually have multiple. We might need to pull up an extra chair. We have lads. We have lads coming in.
Starting point is 01:45:33 If we want to bring everyone in, we can pass the mic around. Whatever you guys want to do, we have multiple. Oh, okay. Hey. Oh, hey. Just me. Oh, how are you doing? Sorry.
Starting point is 01:45:44 I'm John. Welcome. What's up? Great to meet you. How you doing? Good. Good. Could you kick us off with an introduction for those you don't know?
Starting point is 01:45:54 Okay. I'm Dave. Dave Glazer, been a palantir for 12 years, and I'm a CFO. Pre-IPO? Pre-IPO, yeah. Or DPO, right? DPO, yeah. Since like when our prior to CFO retired, who's actually on the show recently.
Starting point is 01:46:10 Yeah, Colin, I talked to him. He retired in 2017, and since then I've been leading to the finance team. Yeah. So my big question for you, gross margins for the Fortune 500 in the AI era, are we going to see a structural shift? You know, the inference bills are skyrocketing. Inference per token is dropping, but then Jevin's paradox, and we're doing more token inference than ever before.
Starting point is 01:46:34 Re reasoning models are kind of staying expensive. And we saw in the journal earlier this week, maybe last week, software company called Notion, said that they saw their gross margins drop from 90% to 80%, not bad still. but there is, does seem to be some sort of impact. And I'm wondering how you think it might play out for the really big companies. Yeah, look, I think this is one of the things that we've been sort of saying is like LMs are commodity me commodity cognition. Right. And so like essentially it's like it's getting, they're getting better and better.
Starting point is 01:47:05 Yep. Right. Elo scores better and tokens are getting cheaper. Right. And as Alex said, I don't know if you watch Kito, but like, you know, he's talking about, okay, like, how do you actually derive value from that raw output of an LM? And so it's like, I think it's like, they're all output, it is getting cheaper. We're still like very early days on these models. And you're seeing them just sort of like up into the right in ELO score.
Starting point is 01:47:24 And so these like things combined, I think are going to make it cheaper and cheaper over time. And I think we'll see sort of on gross margin. I think you look at some of the other things like hyperscalor costs, right, from a lot of these places. I think like people's gross margins have survived, right? They're more efficient. They're all this. And so I think like we will see. But like I think that is, it's going to be much more about like how you're deriving
Starting point is 01:47:46 value from them than like well the cost is going to be so overwhelming but they're super like totally it's like focused on the value and I do think over time it's like people are going to be able to manage this cost yeah yeah it feels like it feels like higher costs potentially but so much more value and it's pretty easy to tell yeah I'm spending a lot on inferencing a certain LLM API but obviously I'm delivering more value and so I'm charging also you have to think about the position that Hallantier sits in we got a product demo earlier I've mine was leveraging like a bunch of different models and like that position of having leverage and being like we are the product we have the data we have
Starting point is 01:48:20 the customer relationship and we can vend in whatever intelligence sources we need in order to accomplish the task like that's a better position than being if you're a gvety wrapper and your product is really four oh and you're just kind of like reselling that right yeah yeah yeah like and i do think it's like yeah like i think it's going to be all about the value rather than like well the value's there but the cost is superheritive yeah How are you thinking about positioning Palinger's story in commercial in the United States over the next couple of years? Like what is the right framework? People have always had the wrong mindset.
Starting point is 01:48:57 It's consulting shop. What do they even do? Blah, blah, blah. Like, what is the right frame of mind to be in? Look, I think the right frame of mind is like we're delivering a tremendous amount of value to these customers with these customers. Right. It's like, and they're needed to in this, right? And it's like, you deliver that value.
Starting point is 01:49:14 And we're like just at the beginning. it. So you look at like our US commercial business like grew over 90% last quarter. It's still relatively small, right? And it's like we have through so much runway there. Yeah. Right. Like we it's like just that that business has like sub 400 customers. Yeah. Right. Like that is when you look sort of across a lot of other companies, it's like that's, you know, it's like we're doing all this with such a like a small customer base. And obviously it's rapidly growing, but you know, it's like it just shows the amount of runway that's had. Yeah. Do you do you think that people should be thinking about the commercial business
Starting point is 01:49:45 business as like a bundle, like a competitor to a bundle of products that already exist or something that's entirely net new or displacing an entirely different class of spend in the enterprise. How can people even wrap their mind around that? Some version of all the above, right? So it's like when you think about, you know, you're not like head to head who we're we competing with. And then everyone's like, but I don't get it. It's like, is it a combination of right? We're not really, we're competing against like the Frankenstein monster that almost. to every large corporation has.
Starting point is 01:50:17 And then you're also competing, like, particularly in government. But it also applies in particular large corporations. It's like custom-built software. So it's like those two, you're competing against that. And over time, you're obviously going to sort of eat into a lot of the spend. But it's like only because of the value that's being delivered. And then it's like you don't maybe need some of these point products. Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 01:50:37 It feels like it's like transformation, net new technology that would not get built in the enterprise otherwise. Correct. And then once you build that, once you build that compounding data asset, then perhaps you don't need some of the other products. Yeah. How is your framework or philosophy approaching the finance function at Palatier change? Because I feel like there's like very distinct eras where, you know, the change. Yeah, it every day. Does it, do you feel like you have to update it every day? Like, because in some ways, like when you talk, when we talked to carp earlier, it's like he's bringing that same energy and like philosophy. it feels like it's somewhat consistent, even though, you know, numbers go up and down and all that good stuff. Yeah, look, well, look,
Starting point is 01:51:20 I challenge any CFO wording for carp to have hair, right? So, look, I think you've got to step back and say, okay, like, how do we approach finance? Right. And it's like, this is a company, like, and, you know, people have said it a lot, like, we don't have a playbook, right? And obviously, there's a way that's run, the company's been built over the last 20-ish years.
Starting point is 01:51:41 I've been lucky enough to be here for 12 of them. But like, you know, and because of that, it's like we're very unique, right? And what that means is like, we are constantly changing what we're doing, right? And so like a lot of things, you know, you talk about Ford Deploying engineers in the early days, oh, that's consulting,
Starting point is 01:51:53 that's this, obviously, I'll just build the product that we have today, right? And so, what you weren't optimizing on, in those days was financial statements that Wall Street would want, right? Because it's, and then it's like, but because of what we built today, not because, or,
Starting point is 01:52:08 Because of what we built, we have financial statements Wall Street loves, but it wasn't built for that purpose. Sure. Which is crazy valuable, right? Because it means we're so differentiated and we're doing things the way that we want to do them. Right? And the company was built that way. So can you tell me the story of how the COVID era changed the Palantir's financials? I remember seeing that T&E fell off a cliff and it never really came back. And that was, was at the time I was talking to people who were looking at the company, they were pretty excited about what that meant.
Starting point is 01:52:45 And it felt like it was almost like a structural shift for the company. But is that a reasonable story to tell? Is that apocryphal? Look, it's part of the story. Right. And so I think like what would happen with COVID? It was we could no longer like you just couldn't be as much at a customer site. Right.
Starting point is 01:53:01 And so then it's like, well, we got to extend the product further. Right. And like this is a story that keeps happening in Palantir. It's like, well, you know, we only. only have, you know, around 4,000 people, right? Or you look at sort of our headcount growth, like if you go back two years, it's up 12% from two years ago, revenue is up 88%.
Starting point is 01:53:19 It's like, well, how do you do that? It's like, well, the product's gotta be better. Right? And you have to have products like AIFTE, like all these things that are constantly evolving and like that is a story of Palantir. It's like you're trying to do something, you're either resource-contrain or somehow constrained.
Starting point is 01:53:33 It's like, what do you do to meet that? And it almost always is product led. Yeah, it makes a 10 sense. I know you have a busy day, so we'll let you go. Awesome. Thanks so much for helping. Thanks for joining. We'll talk to you soon.
Starting point is 01:53:44 We will bring in our next guests in a minute. Jordy, do you have any breaking news? I got a piece here from Skook. Scoke says Alex Karp trying his best to get TBPN banned from YouTube. I will say, I think it was like the least family-friendly, 10-minute segment of the hundreds of hours that we put out. It was some of the best. Some of the best.
Starting point is 01:54:05 There's a lot of fun. I'm glad that Scoot's enjoyed the stream. And thank you for YouTube for keeping us up. Keeping us up. We might, yeah, we might be. Thank you to stream for keeping the stream live. Thank you. Couldn't do it without them.
Starting point is 01:54:20 We'll bring in our next guest. Guests, we are ready to keep rocking and rolling here. Who we got? At the United States. Two chairs coming in. Come on in. Come on in. Pull over.
Starting point is 01:54:31 What? How you doing? We got Indie Call Drive before you. Oh, fantastic. Amazing. Performance engineer. Very cool. and then apartments.
Starting point is 01:54:39 Fantastic. Dream combo. You didn't have to sell me now. I'm in. How are you doing? Good to meet you. I'm John. Hey, Kyle.
Starting point is 01:54:46 Pleasure. I'm John. Nice to hear. Jordie. To be you. Guys. Lads. We got the lads.
Starting point is 01:54:50 We got the last. Take a seat. Take a seat. Do you guys want to share? Yeah. We'll share. We'll share. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:54:58 Great. So yeah, why don't you to kick us off with the introductions? Let us know who you are. I'm sorry, you got stuck with a rough chair. I couldn't figure out how to the chair to sit up properly. Don't even try. It's not going to work.
Starting point is 01:55:11 I already tried it. Anyway, introduce yourselves. So I'm Zach Porter, a senior simulation engineer with Andreda Global on the IndyCar program. Cool. And I'm Kyle Kirkwood, driver of the number 27 Honda for Andretty Global. Fantastic. Yeah, and I'm Drew from TWG. Fantastic. How do all of you fit together?
Starting point is 01:55:28 We're all under the TWG umbrella. Basically, a bunch of different businesses within that. Drew can probably speak to it a little better than I can. Yeah, I mean, it's a family. It's a great holding company. We have tons of businesses from insurance to asset management, investment banking, and, you know, sports, media, entertainment, Western lifestyle. And, of course, the crown jewel of just about everything is the awesomeness of motorsports. Yeah. And the Andretti team in Indy car.
Starting point is 01:55:56 How long have you been involved with Indridi? That's my fourth season at Andretti. Fourth season? Yeah. Third season. Losing track of time here. I think it's my fourth. No, it's my third. It's my third season with them, but I've also, I've been a part of the family for longer than that.
Starting point is 01:56:11 I was with them in Indy Lights and then I joined back with them in IndyCar. So really five seasons, actually, if you combine it all. Yeah. And I get to be this suit guy. Yeah. So I sit and watch this, but I've been here a year. Oh, fantastic. Yeah. And yeah, and walk me through the flow of like why you're here specifically at AIPCon. Why are you working with Palantir? Yeah. So in IndyCar, we have a ton of data. Yeah. in a ton of different siloed places. Sure. It sits, you know, from stuff that we control, like our car setup database and stuff. But it also sits in, like, databases from IndyCar that we don't control.
Starting point is 01:56:45 Sure. We have to consume all these things, and they're all connected. They all represent performance. They all represent the pieces of the car and how they go around the track and how we get faster and how we're relatively performing against the competitors. And so we came to Palantir and worked down this path to try and connect to all these disparate datasets into one place where our engineers can make better decisions faster sooner. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:57:05 Because in the end, you know, for practice one to practice two, or practice two, qualifying, whatever it is, there's this limited amount of time that we have to make a decision. The practice is coming whether you're ready or not. Yep. So the more informed we can be, the better decision we can make in theory, the faster we can iterate and be more competitive. So yeah, it feels like the, maybe we're just in the era of like, you know, small micro-optimizations just add up to greatness.
Starting point is 01:57:29 Are there any stories from your career or just racing in general that's out to you where someone just discovered some secret that just gave them a massive advantage. I'm thinking of in sailing there was this maybe it's a fake story, I don't know, but this idea that there was in the, what's the big sailing cup that Ellison races in, America's Cup? Yeah, it's all catamaranes now and the story goes that they were all racing monoholes and someone looked in the rulebook and said there's nothing that says you can't bring a catamaran and then one day somebody brought a catamaran and just beat everyone and it was just one of the most fantastic stories have there been any eras that you've studied where someone's just figured out something that just
Starting point is 01:58:14 rewrote the I mean it would never be like this again but you had the the fan car in F1 right yeah tell me about this yeah yeah tell me the full story I don't know the full story I don't know you do either we're in an era of motorport now that things are super tightly regulated sure really hard to find these big gains yeah what he's referencing back in the day there there was an era where where aerodynamics were kind of king and they, the guys did a similar thing. They looked at the rulebook and said, hey, there's nothing that says we can't power the air inside the car on their own. So they
Starting point is 01:58:41 built a car that had big fans at the back of it and skirts that ran down the side and the car literally sucked its way down, so just so much extra down force. I don't remember exactly how long it existed but it wasn't very long as it was immediately out. But it was fundamentally dominant. And there's been a lot of those kind of things now and over over time, but now we're kind of in this era of
Starting point is 01:59:00 fighting for these hundreds of seconds, these little micro moments and that's where being able to drill down through big data is powerful for us. Yeah, yeah. I imagine we'll be like we do a live show, right? So speed and timing is important. And sometimes we're like, oh, this document isn't here. We don't have this link and things like that. You guys are racing around a track where every millisecond matters.
Starting point is 01:59:23 And so if you're jumping between different data sets and systems of record, I can imagine that can be a disaster. Yeah. And it's not just while Kyle's on track, yes, he's doing all of that. But then as soon as he's back, it's between sessions as well. The clock's always ticking. We're competing on the track and off the track. Yeah, I mean, we just have such little time to go through so much data.
Starting point is 01:59:46 And to be able to piece it all together and understand a full picture, you have to do a lot of different things, which our engineers are very good at, but it's time-consuming. So if there's a way to actually consolidate it, simplify it, and make things more efficient, then it's going to allow our engineers to make better decisions. down the road, which is optimizing performance on the race track. Okay, talk about the tension between the three of you. I imagine that you only care about speed, you care about speed and manufacturing.
Starting point is 02:00:10 Can we make it and you care about speed? We all care about manufacturing capability. And cost, maybe? Cost. Look. So what are the tradeoffs? Obviously everyone cares about speed and winning, but there are layers to the tradeoffs because you can't just always turn every dial to 11, right? Well, I mean, look, you know, I spent 30 years in the Marines.
Starting point is 02:00:29 Yeah. you know, we got tired of fighting wars on PowerPoint. And, you know, for business, we're getting tired of, like, making decisions off of rudimentary and incomplete systems that provide only partial solutions, and it just takes forever to get data together. Yeah.
Starting point is 02:00:47 And so, you know, from a business perspective, we have to look at it and basically say, look, we want to transition to something better. And the cost of that is not just material, like dollars. It's also change. It's changing mindset. And as you can see from Andretti, like, they're all into this. Like, this team is ready to make that transformation.
Starting point is 02:01:06 But it'll still come across, right? There's people who are stuck in their ways. Look, I like to do things this way. I'm not used to that much data coming at me. I can't make decisions that fast. Like, this is transformational. And really, fundamentally, it's people, money, it's organizational. And obviously, when you've got a great team, like, it's just going to go like a hot knife through butter.
Starting point is 02:01:25 It's going to be amazing. That's great. Yeah. Walk me through some of the benefits. and try and give me some anecdotes about where games have come from throughout your career. Yeah, I mean, like, for us, we take in so much time series data on the car specifically. That's the representation of what Kyle is doing on the track and what the car is doing and all of that. And being able to connect that data to his feedback and ensure also that that data is clean and it is correct.
Starting point is 02:01:54 You know, it's not like a car that's just rolling down the road and it's hanging around and putting some sensor data out. like he's flogging the thing around the racetrack and occasionally touching walls and other cars and that's really touching It's really difficult sometimes to keep to make sure every system is working perfectly It's a never-ending battle of trying to do that and so you know we're we're working really hard with some ML models and some stuff to pick out sensor anomalies and flag them automatically So that our systems engineers don't miss them and they can go drill down and figure out why that sensor's failed or where and what their knock-on effects are and in the end just get that part replaced immediately so that the next outing the next time we're on track we know the date is going to be as good that's been the earliest easiest wins for us is kind of in that space yeah yeah is there a how do you think about budget budgetary constraints that's something that's just said internally like how do you work through I'm happy that I don't have to
Starting point is 02:02:44 worry about you know drill but even zooming out for those who might not be familiar like I mean we saw some we saw some drama earlier this week about salary caps and and different ways to get around things like how do you think about setting the budget for the team and then actually executing against that because that's got to be the last the last phase against how do you actually deliver something that you can deliver on race day every single day with reliability and not need to cut the cost later let me let's talk like this is innovation yeah okay so we got to be careful here yeah right so if you come in I mean obviously there's dollar budgets yeah because it's not unconstrained yeah but at the end of the day like what we want to
Starting point is 02:03:24 do is we're talking about a fully connected business here sure so they've got an HR shop, they've got a tech team, they've got engineering, they've got a ton of groups that all need to be brought together. So apart from just the car and the magnificence of what we're doing, you've got to bring it all together. And so we need room and space to be able to build out a complete connected business. Yeah. Because frankly, every signal across the business is value. Sure. And by squeezing and optimizing and making things run more efficiently, we end up with a better sport. Yeah. And like I think at this point, we're in that journey. And And so costs are going to be, you know, not giant, but constrained, and we're going to deliver,
Starting point is 02:04:03 and we're going to watch and see as this evolves until we land somewhere where we can finally say, this is it, this is the benchmark, and this is what we should manage off of. For us, we're going to ask for every tool we possibly can to make the car better. He's going to, he's expecting us to do that job. And in turn, we turn around to the commercial side of our business and look at them and say, hey, it's your best job to go out and find that sponsorship, find those things. Because if we don't use this tool, our competitors will. Yep.
Starting point is 02:04:29 And we're in the business of winning, and if we're not going to try to do that, then why are we here? Take us through the next few months in the calendar, the rest of the year, the next year. So we literally just ended the last race of the season like three days ago, four days ago. So we officially start our offseason, and this is where we sort of take some of our use cases and our ideas that we've sort of half-baked and trialed some stuff and look at it and productionize it. Sure. And in the end, try and get all of these, or at least the first initial use cases ready to go for St. Pete, 2026. That's kind of the target and there's a ton of prep from here to there.
Starting point is 02:05:02 Yeah, and I'd say in the off season, racing is so expensive that you're limited on how much testing you can actually do on a racetrack, right? So it's very important that all the data that we collect and we utilize is actually making a difference, and we're actually able to progress with the data that we have. So that's where the engineers come in, right? We've got a massive group of engineers that take a lot of prize. their work and they have five, six months from now until until the start of the next season that they dig in through maybe one or two tests that we get, maybe some wind tunnel stuff, maybe some various other things, shaker rigs, we call it. But we can't really get on track
Starting point is 02:05:41 that much because of how expensive it is. So a lot of what we do is in the SIM world and it's very data driven. Yeah, what does the rest of your offseason look like? Are you training, running? I saw the F1 movie and Brad Pittson running around. Are you running or are you a technical guy or both? You know, training is important, right? Yeah, I mean, you have to be, as a racing driver, you've got to be like a certain weight, certain size. You have to be, you've got to have good endurance, but you also need to have some strength
Starting point is 02:06:11 to be able to wheel the car around. Right, we don't have power steering. You're hitting the brake pedal as hard as you possibly can. And we're pulling up to four or five Gs for an hour and 40 to two hours at a time. So it can get very physical, very fast. No power steering. No, in the car, and the car makes over 5,000, 6,000 pounds of downforce. imagine driving your road car that weighs 8,000 pounds or something like that around without power steering.
Starting point is 02:06:34 You should flash that on the screen when you got the driver view so that you guys get a little credit. People assume it's like turning the wheel of a Tesla or whatever. Yeah, no, it's much tougher than people tend to realize. That's specific to IndyCar racing, though. Indy car racing, we don't have power steering. F1 does a lot of sports cars that you see. They do have power steering, but Indy car itself, they do it for the sport. and they've kept it that way for many years.
Starting point is 02:07:00 So it's a little bit old style, but at the same time it's good because it really translates it. A little bit, right? Yeah, it creates a sport out of it, right? It's a little bit more physical. People don't look at it as much as like, oh, you're just driving a car around some roads
Starting point is 02:07:14 or pushing pedals, turning wheels. Now there's actually a physical side to it. So the offseason is a lot of training, preparation. We do a lot of sim work and driver in the loop simulators. And yeah, it's just being ready for the next race that comes up. It's hard, though, because you don't have G forces.
Starting point is 02:07:30 You can't simulate G forces for a driver. So having that involved is something that you get acquired to as a season progresses, if I'm being honest. What's your daily? I'm sorry? What's your daily driver? When you're not on the track? My daily driver. So that is one of the great things about being a racing driver is you don't have to own a car.
Starting point is 02:07:51 Oh, you don't have to own a car. You, so I race for. You get loaners or something? Yeah, exactly. So I race for Honda, right? an indie car and I have a... S-2000. No, word with underlighting.
Starting point is 02:08:02 Glow? You have glow on the S-2000? I have a Accura MDX. Very cool. Since they're sister companies, right? And then I also... They're not sending you an NSX? They don't make the NSX anymore.
Starting point is 02:08:14 They still got them laying around. Give them a call. We'll talk to them. We'll say, we need it. We need it ripping around in NSX. And then I also erase sports cars for Lexus as well. Cool. And LFA every day, obviously.
Starting point is 02:08:26 They also don't make an LFA. anymore so yeah just a million two dollar car I can just go rip and depreciate real quick yeah yeah I mean I have 500 at home okay that's the other car that's great yeah well thank you guys for coming on this is fantastic anything else you're sharing before you get out here okay enjoy the rest of the conference thank you so much for helping you we'll talk to you soon have a good one goodbye um jordy any other breaking news going on we have our next guest coming into the studio in just a minute. I believe we have.
Starting point is 02:09:02 Who do we have? We have someone else coming on. Okay, okay, cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're good whenever. We kind of ran late. Now we're running a couple minutes early. We will keep it going. Palantir CEO, Alex, oh, I got to do these again.
Starting point is 02:09:17 Palantir CEO, Alex Karp thinks the value of skilled workers is spiking even as big tech companies, possibly his own may shrink. Our revenue is going up, our sales force is going down. down he said on TBPN the number of people we plan to have in the future is less than now very cool We scoop we're scoop maxing we're news maxing everybody What else? I think we're ready for our next guest if you want to I'm looking good lots of posts Welcome to the stream if you're ready we're good we can we're we're happy to have you how you do it happen
Starting point is 02:09:51 Thank you thank you so much for taking time Welcome to the show thank you any relation to brand Brandon Jacoby with a eye. I don't think so. I think you guys thought it differently. We have a buddy who works. He's a designer and we like to poke fun of him because he is. We call him Jacobi and whenever we have a design problem we always call him.
Starting point is 02:10:09 The last name sticks with that one. Yeah. Anyway, please introduce yourself for the stream. Who are you? What do you do? Happy, sorry, I'm out of breath. You're good, you're good. So Matt Jacoby.
Starting point is 02:10:18 I'm the head of data science and analytics at Rastrack. Okay. Southeast-based fuel and convenience retailer. Yeah. And shout out to my wife or letting me come up. here because we're technically on vacation this week. I heard this is crazy. The grind never stops.
Starting point is 02:10:32 You couldn't mess. I got the memo about lock-in season. Well, it's you gentlemen. I couldn't pass up the chance to participate. We really appreciate it. Okay, so. It's great to have you. Yeah, so break down the business a little bit more.
Starting point is 02:10:43 Give me a sense of the scale. What the day to days like customer, you know, obviously, we have a general idea, but give us more. Yeah, yeah, happy to share. So roughly 700 retail locations across our family of brands of racetrack, raceway. And golf. A lot of people don't realize that we own golf. We go golf.
Starting point is 02:11:00 Yep, yep. 10,000 employees, associates in our stores, and people at our store support center in Atlanta. A lot of people don't know either. We're top five largest privately held company in the state of Georgia, and we are top 15 in the United States. Thank you. We have a something about.
Starting point is 02:11:19 So walk me through a little bit of the history of the company, because I imagine that what we're going to talk about in terms of like, you know, software, artificial intelligence, is a revision to the way it was done years ago, right? So yeah, walk me through a little bit of the history, get me up to speed. Oh, wow. Well, I can't speak to all of it.
Starting point is 02:11:37 I've been there about two years. But what I can say is that we've done a really great job of focusing on transformation, specifically data-enabled transformation. Actually, I just wrapped up a conversation about this downstairs. But if you ask me, one of the purest use cases for transformation is converting from gut-based and tribal knowledge-based decision-making to data-driven. And therefore, after that, analytics into AI-based transformation.
Starting point is 02:12:05 So we've really focused heavily, even before my time, on making the best decisions we can with data. And so our partnership with Palantir has really allowed us to take that to the next level, right? The proverbial next level. I promise myself I would avoid buzzwords in this conversation, but it may not happen. But yeah, it's been a conscious and concert. effort by our leadership top to bottom to really make that happen and it's not it's not easy at times right you're you're asking people to step out of what they've done in the past and to trust data and math that may or may not be right if we're just being candid and so we've
Starting point is 02:12:44 really grown and focused and developed on on building that muscle with the organization top to bottom it's been a it's been a really really interesting and impactful two years with with our team this far walk me through some of the concrete ways that you can use data to make a decision at racetrack. I remember there's this funny story. It might be apocryphal, but I heard that I always do this or I tell some story that might be entirely hallucinate. But so the story goes is that McDonald's needed to figure out how to place a bunch of restaurants.
Starting point is 02:13:22 I'm sure that this is something somewhat related to what you have to do. you decide where the restaurants go and they did a ton of analysis and they figured out this street corner was the best and that street corner was the best and they spent millions of dollars in consulting and they put them all there and then Burger King came along and said yeah just put one next to McDonald's and there's some beauty there there's some there's some hilarity there but but you can imagine that that's the type of very tractable problem where should I put a put a thing also like store layout planograms figuring out what goes on promotion when pricing dynamic pricing There's a whole bunch of things that I could imagine you do, but like walk me through what you did last week or at the individual at the individual store level where it's like, hey, we're out of this product. Yeah, yeah, what are the problems with the most recent like case study you did. Yeah, yeah, great question. Look at you talking about planograms. So, so yeah, we like to say that we're always focused on the customer. At the end of the day, it's our customers and it's our associates that make this massive business continue to run and drive. And so you're hitting on inventory. That's that's a really.
Starting point is 02:14:25 important use case. But even more important than that is making sure that we have the right levels of people at our stores to meet that customer demand. There's nothing worse than when you go up to a gas station to fill up your gas tank and there's a yellow bag on the handle. Or I would actually argue it's even more painful when you put it into your and then it's slow or yeah. So there's that and there's also the inside experience, right? We take pride in our in our food offering. So fresh pizza, fresh sandwiches, breakfast sandwiches.
Starting point is 02:14:58 And that takes people, that takes time, and that takes hours, and making sure that we have the right level of people in the store, right number of hours, and the right skill sets as well. It's not just, you can't just throw hours at these problems. You need to understand the skill set
Starting point is 02:15:14 to meet that demand and meet those expectations of the customer, because at the end of the day, it really is that customer that makes us continue to thrive. And you know, we've got this pin on, We're celebrating 95 years. We've been here a long time, and we expect to be here a lot longer. 95 years ago, software didn't exist. It truly did not exist.
Starting point is 02:15:32 And now you're sitting here implementing AI and the largest enterprise software platform possible. Switching gears, a little bit of a hot take. Have you been surprised by the developments in just how the electric car has rolled out? Like there was a moment when everyone was like, do not get in the gas station business at all. It's going to be all electric.
Starting point is 02:15:57 All these companies are cooked. And then we saw the consumer kind of pull back from that and want a different experience. And maybe they have a daily that's a, you know, Tesla. And it's great. But then they also still are in the gas world in some ways. Have you, has there been optimism inside the company for the future? Well, we are certainly investing in the future. I was going to say people that are charging EVs, they want to,
Starting point is 02:16:21 they still want to get fresh people. pizza, right? To do. Yeah. Yeah. And we're actually taking a unique approach where we're developing that infrastructure and and those customer venues on our own. So we've chosen to really understand the customer and do it in a way that meets their expectations
Starting point is 02:16:38 because we can't predict what the future is going to hold 100%. So different experience right now because you might be stopping for 20 minutes instead of two minutes or five minutes. That's a great point too. So you have a more captive audience for a longer period of time. And we take a lot of pride and all, exactly. Throw something else. Come get some racetrack swag in the gas station.
Starting point is 02:16:58 Yeah, or anything. Fresh pizza or what have you. But yeah, we're certainly not turning a blind eye. So what lays ahead? That's cool. You know, we have certain strategies and things that we're talking about to make sure that we stay ahead. It does feel like it's a unique opportunity now
Starting point is 02:17:12 to actually take that seriously. You've seen where this market stabilizes. And there's also just the standardization around NACS now. Like the actual charging port is standardizing. So that probably makes the infrastructure cost a lot, a lot less or a lot less risky, I guess, for you. Yeah, very, very exciting. So walk me through the actual scale of the Palantir implementation. Are you early days?
Starting point is 02:17:33 Are you trying to roll this out to all the employees? You said 10,000, wasn't it? Something like that. Do you want everyone to interface with this? Or is this more of like a managerial tool that would be used to like make decisions about how to run the business? Yeah, that's a great question. I think right now we've really focused in on use cases that, are driven at the managerial level
Starting point is 02:17:51 or the head, the store support center level. But that's certainly not to say that there aren't implications at our stores because there certainly are. And I think as we progress and as we deploy more and more use cases, I very easily could see
Starting point is 02:18:07 getting the technology in our front line associates hands as a real value add and frankly a differentiator. Yeah. Have you had any problems with different enterprise software companies not playing nicely together. You don't have to name names, but we've just been tracking this story
Starting point is 02:18:24 that there's now some AI companies that come out and say, hey, we want to take your Google Docs and get it to talk to your Slack, and Slack is owned by Salesforce, so they don't want to talk to each other. And I'm wondering in the retail context if like a POS system and an inventory management system, like there might be some similar sharp elbows, or is it all pretty copacetic? Yeah, I think it's fairly copacetic, but mostly because of our IT team and the really great work that they've done from a data architecture standpoint and consolidating everything centrally
Starting point is 02:18:52 and really removing the need for kind of call it peer-to-peer communication of those platforms. Because everything goes into data like exactly, exactly. And again, I think that that team really deserves a shout-out too. So while our team is in the business, the IT and the data team has really been an enabler for us. We have a wealth of information and data
Starting point is 02:19:14 that we can make some of these really complex decisions with. And without it, we would be severely hamstrung and would be working on challenges like pulling out of POS systems or what have you and so we've kind of we're past that level and we have a really strong data lake and infrastructure and architecture to support all of the the nerdy math that my team loves to do yeah awesome yeah what what what what else are you trying to identify going forward is I mean I imagine that like the base case is just like I want to know what stores are overperforming underperforming
Starting point is 02:19:47 but then ideally you want to be able to predict which stores are going to start underperforming and intervene beforehand. Is that roughly? Yeah, roughly. I think it depends on the use cases. And again, not to throw buzzwords out there again, but we break down analytics into four main types. There is the descriptive, so the old school reporting and dashboarding,
Starting point is 02:20:04 Tableau, Power BI. The diagnostic, which explains the descriptive. And then my team really steps in on the predictive and the prescriptive front. So, you know, think about predictive maintenance or hey this this fuel pump is predicted to go down in the next two or three weeks that that predictive and prescriptive approach allows us to pivot again transformationally away from being reactive to being proactive with things that really impact our customers so we like to
Starting point is 02:20:36 really focus on hey where are the customer pain points how can we peel that onion how can we how can we solve some of those so they have a better experience and that that drives a lot of it too So yeah, there's a world of use cases out there, and we're really just scratching the surface. Very cool. One last question for me. Are there bad actors in the gas station business that intentionally pump the gas slow
Starting point is 02:21:01 to drive people into the convenience store? Oh my gosh. Conspiracy period. That flies in the face of everything that we think. Really? That is not a front. Just the, so there's, we like to joke a lot about, you know, on my team and maybe others share the sentiment or don't, but is it worse if a pump isn't
Starting point is 02:21:22 working or is it actually worse if a pump is slow? And I actually think my experience are the most painful when I go up to a pump and it just, it's slowly ticking. At least when you see a bag, you see the yellow handle. You know just don't even try there. Don't go there. I don't go there. I just remember maybe it was because when I was a kid and I was broke and I'd put like $20 on pump five and it just felt like it'd go fast. And now as an adult, I can, I just get, but I'm getting like five times the amount of gas. See, you weren't going to racetracks.
Starting point is 02:21:53 You pretty. Very off brand for racetrack to do anything slowly. Yeah. Speed is in the name. This company. Racetrack. For 93 years. 95 years.
Starting point is 02:22:03 95 years. I can't wait for 100. You'll have to come back on. Yeah. I would love to. 100 years of racetrack data analysis. Break it down. We'll do a hundred hour stream straight.
Starting point is 02:22:13 Year by year. I mean it must be fascinating. Name every data point. I mean just pulling like the revenue over a 93 year ramp like that's got to be fascinating. That'd be interesting fascinating anyway. Thank you so much for coming on and interrupting your vacation before us. Yeah, this is great. I'll talk to you. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. Enjoy the conference. And that's our last guest for the day. That's our last guest for the day. This is fun. Started out with a bang. We should run out we should run through a thank you to all the sponsors that that make this possible. We told you about ramp.com, time is money, save both.
Starting point is 02:22:47 We are of course powered by re-stream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations. Of course, we won't need to tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster, go to Figma.com for all your design needs and get compliant on Vanta.com. Manors risk, prove trust continuously. We also got graphite.deb supporting us,
Starting point is 02:23:07 code review for the age of AI, Polymarket, of course. Some big news out of Polymarket, was a major trade deal. We'll talk about that tomorrow. Okay, okay. Julius, what analysis do you want to run? You can chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds.
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Starting point is 02:24:40 Bezell.com. Your Bezell concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. And they would love to find you a orange band. An orange band Aquas. Business Insider has a scoop here that says Palantir CEO, Alex Carp says top tech talent is about to get crazy valuable. Alex Carp CEO of Palantir set on quote unquote TV. Why do they put us in quotes? This is the dividing line. Why do they put us in quotes? This is the dividing line. This is the dividing. line TV closed the laptop okay so close business insider the website business insider well says that top I think I think we got to if we just got to put like the just one of the words in quotes it can't be quote business business business
Starting point is 02:25:28 insider business insider I got to look at I actually have to look into this company because I love business and I love I love I love I love Insider Trayder. Insiders and business. Isn't that the lore? Isn't that the lore? Henry Bogg it, the guy who started business insider. Loved insider trading. I think he lost his license. I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. Okay, look this up. Business, insider, insider history. And more breaking news. Justin Bieber is launching swag to tonight, the new album. What does that mean? And Meek Mill posted two hours ago. Meek Mill becomes AAI founder.
Starting point is 02:26:14 So according to Wikipedia, according to Wikipedia, Henry Blaggett was charged with civil securities fraud by the U.S. SEC, settled the charges. There we go. He was permanently barred from the securities industry by the SEC and the NYSE.S.E.
Starting point is 02:26:32 The charges rose during the dot-com boom at Merrill Lynch, which included issuing materially misleading research reports on internet companies and making exaggerator or unwarranted claims about them to customers. And then in 2007, four years later, he co-founded Business Insider, which is a fantastic hunt. It's so funny. He's so funny. He's the, he was in the business of insider trading and he said, why did I combine? They didn't say insider trading.
Starting point is 02:27:04 They said civil securities fraud. It doesn't sound great. But, you know, after a seven-year run, Jeff Bezos purchased the stake in Business Insider. And he had a great run, 2007 to 2023. Anyway. There's so many great quotes from the carb segment. This one, I would say, he says, I would say modestly, I'm the most humble I've ever been. You would never build a software company downstream from value creation.
Starting point is 02:27:33 It's all, how do I make the client feel like they're getting laid while, they're getting F. So good. The founder, Adam, who introduced AI key, a small device that lets AI control your entire phone, just plug it in and ask it to complete a task. He's saying all of this, all of this and still no TVPN invite. We should, we should probably have them on. A lot of people, a lot of people were, uh, said, no thanks because, uh, I guess he
Starting point is 02:28:02 previously worked in military intelligence and, and, uh, people didn't, feel inclined to plug a hardware device into their into their phone but but we're in the capital of military intelligence right now it looks like he sold out the the initial batch so let's have them on uh adam you know the timeline in turmoil anyone who puts the timeline in turmoil is welcome on the show i'll come to follow right now and we will make it happen we're a lot of people are having fun with the stream this is a great reaction uh anyway uh that's our show we got to get out of the United States and back to the United States? We do.
Starting point is 02:28:41 Last thing, this is just because it is breaking and it's funny. Open AI plans to launch an AI powered hiring platform by mid-2020, putting the outfit in close competition with LinkedIn. With LinkedIn. The company also wants to start certifying people for AI fluency. Are you AI fluent? This seems, this seems, yeah, this seems like more of a Mercore competitor. than LinkedIn maybe? I don't know.
Starting point is 02:29:10 Yeah, we need to dig in more to that. But the other odd thing is that wouldn't Microsoft get a copy of whatever they build? So wouldn't Microsoft get access? Like if they build a new, I mean, that's the deal. That's the nature of the deal is that they get the rights to open AI's IP. So if they build something that's valuable. But if they build a network, then that's a separate thing, right? Because the IP doesn't matter as much.
Starting point is 02:29:34 Like the weights to GVT5 are not as valuable as the chat GBT app. So yeah, maybe maybe there's something there. I don't know. Whoa. People have been complaining about LinkedIn for a long time. So maybe there's breaking news. What is this? Donald Boat says that he has art for the Ultradome.
Starting point is 02:29:51 Oh yeah. Yeah. I was talking to him about that. I'm very excited. Great. He made something. Great. Well, I wish we could keep streaming, but we got to get back to the Ultronome.
Starting point is 02:29:59 Okay. Let's go. All right, folks. Anyway, thank you. We'll see you tomorrow. Today. We love you. Back to a regular show.
Starting point is 02:30:04 show tomorrow. Have a great afternoon. Bye.

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