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

Episode Date: March 12, 2026

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com(01:21) - Dan Ives is a prominent American technology analyst and Managing Director at Wedbush Securities. He is widely known for his coverage of major tech companies, particularly Apple, Tesla, and Microsoft. Ives frequently appears in financial media, offering commentary on the tech sector, market trends, and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. Over the years, he has built a reputation for being one of Wall Street’s most visible and outspoken tech analysts. (11:03) - Eric Brock is an American business executive and technology entrepreneur best known as the Chairman and CEO of Ondas Holdings. Under his leadership, the company has focused on developing private wireless networks and autonomous drone technologies used in sectors such as defense, rail, and industrial infrastructure. (18:07) - Casey Lane is a business executive who serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Teton Ridge. Teton Ridge focuses on producing and promoting Western lifestyle content, including rodeo and equestrian sports, media production, and live events that celebrate Western culture. (32:07) - Ted Mabrey is a technology executive and entrepreneur who serves as the Global Head of Commercial at Palantir Technologies. In this role, he oversees the company’s commercial business, helping private-sector organizations adopt Palantir’s data analytics and artificial intelligence platforms. (54:18) - Alex Karp is an American businessman and entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Palantir Technologies. He helped found the company in 2003 alongside figures including Peter Thiel to build software that helps governments and organizations analyze large, complex datasets. TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://Ramp.comAppLovin - https://axon.aiCisco - https://www.cisco.comCognition - https://cognition.aiConsole - https://console.comCrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.comElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.ioFigma - https://figma.comFin - https://fin.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comGraphite - https://graphite.comGusto - https://gusto.com/tbpnKalshi - https://kalshi.comLabelbox - https://labelbox.comLambda - https://lambda.aiLinear - https://linear.appMongoDB - https://mongodb.comNYSE - https://nyse.comOkta - https://www.okta.comPhantom - https://phantom.com/cashPlaid - https://plaid.comPublic - https://public.comRailway - https://railway.comRestream - https://restream.ioSentry - https://sentry.ioShopify - https://shopify.com/tbpnTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comVanta - https://vanta.comVibe - https://vibe.coFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TV. Today is Thursday, March 12th, 2026. We are in the middle of a blizzard. In the middle of a blizzard. This isn't actually that bad, but it is very cold. What do you mean? It's not bad. It's not a blizzard.

A real blizzard would not give this, you know, a 10 out of 10 blizzard. All right. We got high winds. Just say you've never been to the East Coast before. True. It's been a few times. You got to track it on. We're a long way from the West Coast.

We're a long way from the TPP and Ultradome. We will be back there tomorrow. There's a ton of news that's going on, shaking the timeline that we will be covering in detail tomorrow. Dorcasch Patel dropped a response to the Department of Wars moves to designate Anthropica's supply chain risk. There's a whole bunch of interesting nuanced conversation. We're going to get into some of that today. Patrick Collison talked about the nature of drama in Silicon Valley, a very interesting thread that I think we can have a long conversation about tomorrow. And Microsoft is fast following OpenAI and Anthropy.

with co-pilot health and OpenAI plans to fold SORA into GPT as the sort of productization of consumer LLMs continues. So we'll be covering those stories tomorrow. We want to say thank you to all of our sponsors that make this show possible. It'll be a little bit of a shorter show today, but we have a banger lineup. So we're going to kick it off with Dan Ives. Welcome to the show, Dan Ives. How you doing?

What's happening? Thank you so much for taking the time. And on this very, very cold day to hop on with us. First, introduce yourself. Tell us what you do while you're here. Yeah, Dan Ives. I've covered tech stocks going back to late 90s on Wall Street. Look, for me, I mean, being here at Palantir, it's one of our favorite names, you know, the last few years. To me, it's the AI Revolution. It's almost been the poster child. And I've, in my career, going back to early days of Apple, Tesla, it's always trying to find who could be the next one of those.

And my view the last few years is a Pallentier has been, what I view is kind of the golden child of AI. Yeah. How do you work on separating like the narrative, the companies say every company who comes out and, you know, slaps AI on something, renames, slaps a dot AI on their domain versus it's showing up in the financials. It's showing up in the metrics. There's only one carp and one Pallantir. And I think if you look at the numbers, numbers speaks for themselves. And I think the commercial business has really been what's been. the jaw dropper to Wall Street.

Because I think that alone could really ultimately be combined with the government business a trillion dollar company in the next two to three years. And I think Pallentere continues to be one where I think investors continue to underestimate just how big they're going to be in this AI

revolution. Yeah. I remember reading the Airbus case study a while back. Have you talked to anyone today doing anything particularly interesting in the commercial sector with Pallentier? Who sticks out? 90% of customers here weren't here two years ago. Oh, yeah. So I think it just shows, now obviously they've dominated the government, you know, dominated

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

What advice do you have for investors who are seeing geopolitical tensions rise, war, there's chaos in the markets, things are jumping up and down? Like, how do you keep a cool head right now? I mean, look, in 25 years doing this, it's like if you sold because of geopolitical in terms of those issues, that was the wrong move the last few decades. And I think it's one where you take a step back. We are in a fourth industrial revolution. I think tech stocks ultimately make new all-time highs this year. But you have to navigate the volatility in the white knuckles. The haters come out.

The bears maybe win the day. But I think this will be short-lived. And that's why, you know, if you look what we see from Nvidia to Microsoft to sales source, service. service now and to names like Pallentier and some of the cybersecurity, you have to own the winners in these white knuckle moments. Have you been following the latest with NVIDIA? They're going to be training their own open source models. Do you have a thesis of what that means for the company?

Yeah, I think they'll talk about more of GTC next week. Sure. But it's our view, Nvidia. Look, there's only one godfather of AI. It's Jensen, Nvidia. They're now going to own more and more of that end-to-end platform. And I think, look, that's the smartest move. And the reality is that they're years ahead when it comes to chips.

But when it comes to physical AI, the two best plays in physical AI are going to be in Dividea and Tesla in terms of the two physical best physical AI players. I mean cars, humanoid robots, both. What do you think? Look, I think when it comes to autonomous, I mean, and, you know, Jensen talked about this, you know, when we were there at CES, they are looking to go after what's going to be a trillion-dial market opportunity. Now I continue to think Tesla is going to be the ultimate winner when it comes to autonomous. But for Nvidia, the chips are ultimately going to be fueled by Nvidia. Everyone's trying to play catch up. Every OEM is going to need an autonomy stack.

They're going to need the self-driving capability in some degree. Even if people are just driving the car on the weekend for fun, they're still going to want to be able to throw it into autonomous mode to get home at the end of the day. An eight-year-old today? Yeah. Those in the driver's license when they're. 16. And I think going back to your point, it's easy to get in these moods where a geopolitical white knuckle moment. But if you look, I think ultimately Tesla automiss is worth a trillion dollars

going to a Tesla story. And I think in Vida a year from now, we're looking at five, you know, five trillion we talk about, but I think six trillion markup by 2007 still continues to be our call. Yeah. You were at CES? What else did you see that was cool? What was under the radar? What were like the small trends, the little gadgets. I feel like CES is sort of like World's Fair for cool tech. Like what stuck out to you? Not even as an investor just personally. You were like that was fun.

Look, I think robotics, like when you look like serve robotics would be a good example, like autonomous in terms of what we see. The robotics coming out, I think is really going to be really it's also physical AI. I think that is really going to be the game changer. And who are the chip players

that are going to fuel that? Of course it's Nvidia. But then you look down the sort of semi-food chain. I think robotics, we talk about optimists with Tesla. Humanoid robotics, we are still in the early days of where this is all going. I think, well, CS for so many years.

It's like day zero. They don't, they barely exist right now. It's demos. But that's why we're year three into an eight to ten year buildout of the AI revolution. And I think those that are getting embarrassed, they're going to miss what I believe is using next leg of this market. Do you think the

humanoid robots will find more traction in consumer, like every person has one. It's doing their dishes, it's doing their laundry, or are we going to not really see these things because they're going to be in factories first? Well, I think at first it's factories. And that's where we're seeing with tests. I think that's going to be the first key use cases. But then consumer, I think we look out three, four years, humanoid robots are going to be something that will become common. Everybody has a Roomba already. Yeah, people are used to it. It goes back to like, if you go back over the last 10, 20 years. I could go through many

instances where everyone's like, Apple, why do you an iPhone when you have a Blackburn? Yeah, yeah. Why ultimately... Were you following Apple in the 90s? Yeah, and I think that... Do you remember? What was it like? We were just reading about Larry Allison yesterday. And he was thinking about taking over Apple at one point?

Look, what was that like? It goes back to like... And I've followed Ellison from the beginning going back to Lee. It's like, it's trying to explain to investors that these things now look easy and no brainers from Apple, Tesla. But at the point, like when you look in 2007, okay, a year later, financial crisis happens,

investors are like, this is a one-year AT&T phone. Why would anyone leave their Blackberry? There's like $700 at a time when everything. I mean, you could kind of get it subsidized to maybe 400, but that was still like four times the price of most self-ups. And the view was that they were never going to get to 100 million iPhones, and you're at $1.5 billion a day. But it goes back to, I could go through many times in tests.

I go to 2020, Jensen, why are you spending money when it comes to AI? You're essentially a GPU gaming company. The point is, we're going through one of those periods. Sure, sure, sure. But I think it's going to be proven to be, you know, the opportunity to own the tech winners. How did you process Oracle's quarter? I think it was a huge step in the right direction for software. Because right now it's an AI ghost trade.

Anthropic has obviously been a big. But AI ghost trade, explain that term. Because you're fighting a ghost. Okay. When it comes to Anthropic, we're going to gain the cybersecurity. Look what happens to crowd strike, pal out doing others. We're going to get into software. We'll get sales for service now.

It's a ghost trade because the reality is that the data, the stacks, the install base, that's who's going to be the use case. And that's why Pound 2 being won, but I'm a huge believer, Salesforce service now and others. Are resilient. You're a believer in those. I'm a huge believer that this is the most disconnected tech trade that I've seen in my career. Relative to the software, you call it a SaaS apocalypse.

But I'd call it a ghost trade because you're fighting a ghost. Oracle, first step in that direction toward fighting the ghost trade. And I think it speaks to like, look, Ellison, you know, covering, going back to, you know, 25 years. That's someone that understands where they need to get to. Would you take out $50 billion of debt to get to $600,000 to $700 billion of market opportunity? That's what they're doing. I do the same thing. Yeah.

Yeah. The backlog's massive right now. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Great to be here. Great to finally meet you. You stay warm out there. You're not quite dressed for it, but you're not enough energy. It's all about the mindset.

We appreciate it. Well, thank you so much. We're going to take this headset off. Pass it over to our next guest. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. We'll keep you. Quick, we'll keep it short, but thank you so much for joining.

Good to see you again. Please throw on this headset and then introduce yourself. And hopefully the snow starts to melt off your jacket. Yeah, you really have a bunch of it. So please introduce yourself in the company. Yeah, I'll do that. Before I do, thanks for having me. And I got your headphone flipped.

Flip. Oh, okay. This one like. Flip it down there. There you go. Perfect. Yeah, these things. Okay.

So thanks for having me. Yeah. And I'm hopefully going to be in the studio next time. Yeah, we'd love to have you. It'd be great. But no, I'm Eric Brock. I'm the chairman's CEO of Andos. We're a listed company. We're a defense and security technology company. We focus on drones.

We have aerial platforms. We have counter drone platforms, which are particularly valuable. Of course. It is part of the cycle. We've got ground robots. And what we're trying to do is build this portfolio. Systems and systems begin to integrate the air and the ground in those capabilities. And, of course, that's why I'm at this AIP card.

That makes a time of sense. First time on the show, can you give us some history on the company, how you got to this point? Yeah, sure. So, you know, we have, if you look at our chart, it looks like we're an overnight success. But as you know, you talk to guys like me all the time. This is a good, you know, 10 plus years in doing what we do. Love it. And, you know, we're doing God's work to really build the technology. And this is autonomous systems. It's complex.

It's the marriage of hardware and software. You're going to get it in the field, make it work. And it takes time. And this is not just for us. It's the industry. And what we're seeing for us for sure, but the industry more generally is that the technology is maturing. right? We're making it useful with customers. So we're on an adoption curve.

So, you know, the history of the company is we've been developing technology for a number of years. That's the core. So, yeah, what was the first product? Was it actually, like, you build a product, you sell it to the government? Was that what that was? Yeah, essentially. So we've got, you know, our first product was a drone in a box. So this is a drone infrastructure.

Sure. It lives in a docking station. And then it takes off. Yeah, it's got a robotic arm because of quaff batteries and payloads. Sure. And that's used for, say, drone is first. responder, right? The Dubai police are deploying this. You know, drones everywhere, they fly.

So very useful, but what's particularly important about that, it was really helpful for us to start to break out, is it works, right? These technologies, it works. But, you know, as we've evolved, you know, in terms of history, I'll fast forward. You know, once we were able to sort of demonstrate that we can take these to the end zone and start to build markets and build customers, you know, we really began to become aware of the bigger opportunity. There's many, many players, I say drones, but it's on the ground, they're in the air, they're in the water,

and all the critical components around these systems. We've built a lot of companies, and they're maturing. However, we've built technology platforms. Now we have to build businesses, and that's what Audis is about. So we've begun to consolidate and bring these capabilities into a portfolio, but it's not just separate. We're going to integrate them. You get scale going to market. You get supply chain scale.

And that's the whole thesis around our financial model. So there's part of it that's more private equity roll up. There's also an investing arm. You take minority stakes as well. When you make an investment, are you always looking to build a position over time to where you could own the full company? Or are you also looking at those like venture capital bets where they will just perform financially? Yeah. So the answer is yes.

Okay. So it's all of that. Perfect. And really what we believe is that there's a couple things. So most of our capital is deployed in control investments because we want to get that leverage. We want to focus on mature technologies. At the same time, the ecosystem is really important. And I think particularly when we're coming into the public markets,

because we're transitioning from venture-funded companies to now they're maturing. We need growth capital. It's a different business model. It's a different cost of capital. And that's where you're deploying. So one of the things we've been trying to do is the public markets are not as familiar with a lot of these technologies and systems as compared to the private markets.

That's where they were born. So as a leader, and the leader we want to be we think the market needs, is we're trying to shine lights and support some of the ecosystem players because we need the ecosystem to grow up around us to get scale. So even places where you might say, hey, they're competing. Not really. Leaders have to come together because the supply chain needs us. We can't be a cottage industry of hundreds of drone players.

The leaders have to come. And if I can help identify that for the public markets, that's important. And we get value from it. And of course, we can make money. Yeah. So tell me more about the disconnect between the business and the market. I'm interested in know. There's a lot of investors out there that they don't even need to know the product, use the product,

but they know if it's SaaS, it's going to recur, it's going to be revenue, there's going to be some high gross margins, some costs, low capax, etc. Like, how is your business in the business lines that you have? How are they different from other companies that are in the market? Is it you're doing deals with the government, so you're working on programs record, the money comes later, but the contract values get deployed earlier? How financially is it different? There's a lot of that, but maybe Leo started at the most simple level,

which is where you started, which is the drone. The drone in and of itself, by and large, is a commodity. It's not hard to build a quadcopter, even a fixed-wing drone. What is hard is to make them autonomous, right? It's another layer of development and sophistication. So that's one. And then the second layer here is bringing the systems together, right? Air and ground, putting the command and control around it.

And, of course, that's where Pallentier is really going to help us at massive scale. But that's where you start to differentiate, and that's where you can capture margin. That's where you can capture recurring program business. And the thing about the markets are a lot of what we're doing is infrastructure. So think about counterdrone. There's a massive number of locations across the world that need to be protected. And this is not going to be just, hey, this year we're going to protect from drone threats. It's 10 years to build this cycle.

They're just too big. So it's recurring that way. The last two weeks have taught us anything, is that it's any. any targets on the table, commercial or military. Particularly, yeah, I mean, you know, they attack the economy, right? And I think this is a threat that we're seeing today. The public safety, the homeless security officials, the Department of War, they've been preparing for this for a long, long time, but it's hard.

So you're seeing a lot of technologies, including ours, that were under a faster pace of maturation. But we're here. It's going to happen, but it's going to take some time, and it is urgent. And so then the other question, as I get a lot, is, okay, what happens? if peace breaks out. Well, I don't know that anyone's expecting that soon, but eventually we hope that that does happen. We still have to have this protection because you can't be vulnerable. The lower skies, as they say, you know, technology has now made them, you know, is a different threat than we've ever had, particularly

U.S. soil. Sure. So again, this is, you asked about the business model. You can think about this as an infrastructure built for a decade or longer. So, and then, of course, when you're installing infrastructure, you have to service it, you have to upgrade it. So there's a lot of recurring elements here in our financial model. That makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much for taking this time. Hopefully we'll see you in the studio, much warmer next time. I love it.

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

Let's throw this headphone set on. Can you do it over the hat? Can you do it over the hat? I don't know what we do. You can put the head over the... Oh, there you go. That works. See if I can make a work.

You can throw it back on. That works great, actually. Can you hear me okay? I can't. Perfect. Can you hear me okay. We can hear you just fine. First time in the show, please introduce yourself in the company.

My name's Casey Lane, and I work for a Western sports entertainment and media company called Teton Ridge. We do a number of things across sports media and entertainment. All focused around Western lifestyle and Western sports. That's great. What are the most popular sports that you're? covering. So we have a television network and a subscription-based streaming company called Cowboy Channel and Cowboy Plus. So we have a linear channel. And then we have a subscription

app that covers all of professional rodeo on the PRCA, which is the primary sanctioning body of professional rodeo. And then we also have a bull riding team in the TKO PBR-owned PBR Teams league. So those are the two biggest, two of the biggest. We also, produce a massive rodeo, Memorial Day weekend at Global Life Field in Arlington, and do a variety of other things in Western sports. We have a Hollywood division that produces scripted, unscripted movies, all kinds of stuff around Western sports and Western lifestyle. A few years ago, I followed J.B. Moni a little bit.

Who are the big stars these days? So the big stars of bull riding right now, you know, they vary from sort of team to team space to space. On our team, we have a couple of guys that are like, you know, chiseled old veterans, a couple of Brazilian guys. And then we have a sort of middle-aged bull rider. He'd love to hear me calling that. Named Kishon Whitehorse. Okay.

That's a good name for a ball rider. Yeah, he's a good name for a. He's awesome. But then, like, there's some emerging talent. There's a kid out of North Carolina named Clay Guyton. There's a kid that's on Florida's team, but grew up in Texas named John Crimber. So always new talent coming in. We, Colby, who's my head coach, just spent four days in Brazil at a combine that PBR puts on down in Brazil to try to find new and emerging talent down there as well.

Very cool. How is the business growing overall? There's a lot of turmoil and media, a lot of consolidation. But I imagine with the internet, there's more people just becoming aware of bull riding of Western lifestyle sports broadly. But what's it been like the last couple of years? Yeah, I mean, it's no secret in the market that Western. has, you know, had a renaissance, right? Totally. A combination of COVID and the Taylor shared in yellow.

I was back to say, there's so many different funnels into this world. And I look at like, I will give Taylor all the credit in the world, but also I look at it as like, you know, that's a little bit of the canary and the coal mine. Okay. I think, you know, people particularly in the U.S. have grown up farther and farther away from farming and ranching. Yeah, people are moving to the cities. But it's always part of our ethos. right, as Americans. There's this thing right here is the most iconic American symbol that there is.

It really is. You know what John wears one on the weekends. I'll say that. I do. I do. So the weekdays. Yeah. And so that sort of cultural, you know, phenomenon of what sort of Yellowstone brought and what COVID brought getting people back outdoors, you know, they couldn't go on vacation.

So, you know, I'm going to buy a, I'm going to buy an RV and a side by side and go see the West and all those types of things. Are you guys trying to manufacture? some type of drive to survive moment because I think what that obviously Drive to Survive introduced the sport more broadly to Americans, but it also drilled down into the individual talent, which that's something that

Taylor shared in, like the Taylor shared in industrial content complex is not yeah, I think it's definitely on the roadmap of projects that we're looking at. We've done some stuff. PBR has done some stuff. There was a show on Amazon a couple years ago around the first

year of the teams league that we participate. paid in. But you know, what we are really my belief is that we have this, we have the attention of the country. And to some extent, the world, right, that's looking at Western.

The place where people attach passion is sports. So how do we take that interest in Western and drive it towards sport? Because that's a place where we're heavily invested, right? Like I said, we have a whole television network and streaming app and Cowboy

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

That makes sense. What's the next country outside of Brazil that's pipeline for talent? Bull riding in particular is very popular in Canada, Australia, Brazil, U.S., obviously, Mexico, Argentina is sort of a new frontier. A lot of it has to do with the level of bull talent that those countries have access to. Interesting. There's two wires, basically. Yeah, because if a guy is really good in Argentina right now, he probably needs to go to Brazil

and get on a little bit better bull and then come here to get on like the highest cal If you took a kid straight from Argentina and put them on our bulls, it would be like, you know, going from the pony rides to, you know, riding thoroughbreds. You know what I mean? Just because they don't have that level, not that they're, not that the talent's not as good. They just don't have access to the kind of bull power that we do here. Are there any science or technology stories that the industry is grappling with? I'm thinking about cloning prize bulls or genetic engineering. engineering or performance enhancing drugs.

Are there any areas where the community has sort of grappled with and found like a, you know, happy medium on these new tech? Well, there's a lot of, there's a lot of those scenarios over the years that, that have been relevant. Genetics is a huge part of the bucking bull and bucking animal business. You know, it's like, it's like anything else. You know, race horses run fast. Exactly.

Yeah. Labrador's chase tennis balls and buck and bulls buck. You bring bulls that buck to daughters of other bulls that buck and you get more bulls that buck. There you go. But there's a ton to the genetics and there has been some cloning projects and things like that. Okay. You know, really the revolution, the next revolution, I think, in technology in Western sports is what we're doing right now with TWGII and Palantir. And we're bringing, we're building a video analytics platform that basically tracks, the animal, the rider to provide data. It's money ball. It's money ball. Yeah. And we pair that with the actual data from, you know,

scoring and timing. Yeah. And we're building to the best of our ability to predict. Yeah. You know, predicted outcome models of this type of bull with this particular rider, this, you know, these sort of different scenarios. We're using it on the broadcast side to really dive deep. for the fan base into, you know, why is this, why was that ride scored that way?

You know, well, we can go back to this, you know, analytics platform and show you, you know, with graphics and with the data, you know, why this bull bucked harder than that bull, essentially. So those are the kinds of things that we're working on right now. Yeah. To do two things. One, on the bull riding team side to make us better and give us competitive advantage and then sell the viewership pieces and parts of it.

maybe to some of our competitors as the analytics platform. And then on the viewership side, it really is about informing the fans. I mean, look, you watch an NFL game now. You know when a guy does a punt return. Oh, wow, that guy ran 23 miles an hour or whatever the number is. We don't have that stuff in rodeo yet, but we're building that right now. How do you think about these must-see events, like creating like the Super Bowl moment, amplifying all the energy in the entire broader industry into like one singular day,

minute, hour. What is the strategy there currently? Where do you want to see it going? So that manifests itself in each of the different sports verticals differently. Like in professional bull riding, that moment is the team championships in November at Team Mobile Arena in Vegas. In traditional rodeo, in the PRCA, that's 10 days in line. Las Vegas in December during the NFR. But just like you say, that, you know, sports are about moments in time.

Our rodeo that we do, the American, is like the U.S. Open, right? It's the top five in each discipline against a group of, you know, five and every, you know, five per discipline from every, you know, every other part of the world that have competed on a track through a series of qualifiers and regionals to get the chance to compete against the best. in the world, and if they beat the best in the world, they win a million bucks. Actually, this year they win two million bucks. Two million. Because last year nobody won it and it rolled over. So that's kind of, you know, those are sort of like the big moments in time right now in Western sports. Yeah.

How do you think about the creator economy broadly, the personal Instagrams was following, like, saw someone who does F1 racer and he's on Twitch in the simulator. and you just have this like ability to go to the actual event, but then also open up your phone and continue that experience. How important is the continuation of the experience across the Internet these days? It's hugely important. And we've done a number of events. We've got a guy in our company who runs our fantasy gaming business,

who's a former contestant who's a really energetic sort of, you know, personality. and he has done several hosted events where we take the live rodeo feed from our Cowboy Plus product and push it through alternate platforms like Twitch and bring in people to host on their own channels that have never watched it before and interact with him asking questions like what's, you know, what the hell are these guys doing? What's going on there? You know, so that's a space we're just sort of trying to figure out, I think, right now. But in terms of like, you know, the influencer community, you know, our athletes have found sort of their own voice there, right? Because in rodeo, you know, until these, until teams came along in bull riding, rodeo, everybody's like an independent contractor, right?

So my ability as a contestant to monetize my very short career is, you know, can I put a logo on my shirt that's going to get caught on TV? Yeah. Well, now with the emergence of social media, those guys have their own voice. own place, their own, you know, incentive to get more followers so they can go to these bigger brands and say, hey, Harriet, you know, you got to pay me X because I've got this many followers and I'm talking about your brand every week and that kind of stuff. That makes a time of sense. What's your most memorable bull ride for yourself? So I was never a bull rider. But you have to have taken one out at some point.

Never. Really? Never. So dangerous. It's one of those. Look, so I did the time events in traditional rodeo growing up. My dad was a bull rider. and I think as much my dad, but more so my mom, having been married to a bull rider,

made sure that I never even looked in that direction. But I'm pretty convinced I don't have the thing. There's a thing there. The thing is the ability to suspend fear. Yeah. It really is. And every active bull rider will tell you that they're not scared. And every retired bull rider, five years later, when he looks back on it, says,

no, it's not about not being scared. it's about being able to convince yourself that you're not scared. There you go. For that moment that, because when you, you know, I'd love for you guys to come to an event, right? Yeah, that's amazing. When the whole thing is, when the whole, you know, 25,000 pounds of steel around you is shaking because a bull's moving. And he's 1,800 pounds. Yeah.

And 140-pound guy is about to climb over the shoot and get on him. Like, there's, I just don't have it. It just doesn't exist in my brain, the ability to. to just shut that switch off and say, I think you have it. I would love to say, just, I have full faith, you do it, you're good. I'll be watching, I'll be rooting for you. And look, I mean, with, you know, I compare it, you know, there's a lot of comparables, right? You think about, you know, indie car drivers that are going, you know, 240 miles an hour down the backstretch at Indianapolis.

Or you think about, you know, motorcycle racers or UFC guys. The UFC guys compare a lot to that, I think. But to a person, when you bring those guys, 180 pounds. To a person, when you bring those guys to a PBR event and they watch it live, they're like, I can't believe that this is a thing. We were just in Pittsburgh a couple weeks ago, and we had Ben Rafflesberger with us on the back of the shoots, and he was just going crazy because he's not, you know, been up that close and personal with it. Well, thank you so much for taking it. Thank you, guys. I appreciate him on the show.

I look forward to coming to a event at some point. headphones from you and have a great rest of your day we'll do you thank you guys we'll talk to you soon welcome back to the show hey it's been a little over a year right did we talk to you last year good to see you Ted good to see you Ted for those who aren't familiar please introduce yourself tell us how long have you been working at Palantir I've been here 16 years 16 years there we go there we go is this the coldest AIP con you're freezing I got married down the street no way and an outdoor wedding with no agency plan for weather was great.

Oh, weather was great. So you picked the venue this year. Carlin, you got good luck, this is the bad luck. But anyway. You can only roll the dice so many times. Talk about your role. Talk about how it's changing. I'm very interested to know how the role of the forward

deployed engineer is changing this month because of AI agents. But take me through a little bit of the history and how you think it progresses from here. Yeah. So my role primarily for 16 years, what I've been doing is going on site deploying our software over and over and over again. And I think the this year question is really prescient because having done it for 16 years, I'm pretty good at it.

I kind of know how to do it. And as I go and see what our teams are doing, it looks like a complete alien. I don't recognize it at all. There's actually speaking of timing or actual roles or what people are doing? I think there are two things that are actively changed and then two implications of it that really have. The two things have actually changed is the timing, the pace is rapidly accelerating to zero. You can start and within a day you can have an application that actually matters to a business.

And what's driving that? Is that your guys' internal process or is it the technology getting better? I think it's three things. One is maybe most important is the market is now demanding much more from software than it's ever demanded before. And so that cultural expectation is a huge part of it of like this has to matter. this has to be in the fight. You know, this has to be really relevant. Yeah.

Everyone's used chat GPC. Like, they know what it's capable of, and then they show up to work, and they're like, why am I still filling out? They're like, hey, this thing's magical. My, work sucks. Yeah, work sucks. And it shouldn't.

Yeah, and that demand is huge. Yeah. And it is like a huge accelerant for us. Then the second is, have you been building the infrastructure that presume the models are going to get better? And the, and if you're ahead of the infrastructure

and you're presuming like, hey, what's going to have to be where these things are actually load-bearing in, very highly consequential, regulated decisions that's made a thousand times, which integrate different decision-making processes across system, or across people, across systems. You're going to need infrastructure that's able to do it. That infrastructure has matured a lot over time, and then the models themselves are getting better. And so that means that you can now

have software go from legacy, rigid, defined by its limitations, to immediate, adaptive, and it can be embodied, maybe not like literally embodied, but embodied in the way that you want it to be, such that it works, which is the second thing that I think is just dramatically changing about the process, which is it never made sense for your best people to engage with what the technology is that runs your business. What does that mean? When you think about, like, every organization has this at the edge and they have it in the C-suite.

Okay. They have the thing at the edge, which is like the guy who runs the plant. Yep. And the guy who runs the plant knows why it works. Sure. He knows why it breaks. Sure. Every time something needs to be fixed, like, you know John.

Yep. Right? Like, John makes the plant work. And in some ways, John was like the plant works. least levered person by technology because everything you'd buy with enterprise technology would be to standardize to enable management. Yep. And that person worked around the system.

They had their access databases, their own Excel macros, they had their own way of operating. Sure. Now the technology can be John's Iron Man suit. Yeah. And so that means that it now makes sense for John to spend all their time. And you have to earn this, is what the forward deploy engineer do, is it earn the time of the best people so that they can dictate what the system is that actually runs so that their company can be more differentiated over time.

And then at the top, you can do this with the CEO and a lot of my conversations is, this is what the company that's going to dominate my industry is going to look like in 2030. And then our FTE's job is to say, okay, let's get an MVP of that done by Easter. Do companies, I mean, in this world where companies are demanding more from software, do they understand what Pallenteer does? Do they understand the value prop more now? Is it easier to explain to them? Or is it getting more complicated because the tools are more complicated and the capabilities are more complicated?

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

And show me that it works. And so I want to spend virtually no time explaining why it works and just showing you how it works. And then let's talk about how to make it work 10 times better for you. So put aside like Palantir's hiring plans and just talk to me about the American economy. Do we need more forward deployed engineers as like a society for where we're going? I think the thing that the forward deploy engineers embodies for us and why I always get a little bit stuck. You know, talk to a lot of companies that are like, hey, we're thinking about the FDA model. Does it make sense?

Are we going to do it? And the place where I always get stuck is, well, if you're not building our company, I'm not sure you should do forward. engineers. I don't think it's intrinsically good or it's intrinsically bad. The reason we do forward-deployed engineers is our core philosophy, the core business strategy, is that we're going to build the technology so our customers win. And if that's your core thesis, then of course you need forward-deployed engineers, because if you want to win, you have to be able to deliver and you have to be able to do it. And then you also need to figure out for our customers, and we also have to win. We have to scale our capabilities. We have to be able to invest in R&D. So we have

to figure out how to synthesize those things back into scalable technologies that allow us to deliver for our customers more and more over time. That is a highly tasteful exercise of what gets synthesized, what gets productized. Frankly, I think if you didn't have sham, it would be impossible. I wouldn't do it that way. But the thing that I think forward-deployed engineering does embody, which I would argue we need more of in society, is it's sort of the rejection of the financialization and managerialism that defines what you think a business can look like with software,

versus saying the point of software is to enable creation. It's to enable the end customer door. And by the way, we've proven that you can do that and build a really scalable profitable business at the same time. Where do FDE's fit into the customer lifecycle? Is it kind of a reoccurring engagement? I'm thinking about the last two weeks. We have so many different supply chain disruptions, a lot of companies that are leveraging Pallenteer to run their operations. are they, or I imagine the systems are built to be able to withstand chaos.

That's kind of the point. But at the same time, do you ever redeploy forward deployed engineers during moments like this? Yeah, I would think of it in two ways. One is for us, the forward deployed engineer is a CAPEX investment, right? You're installing the factory, you're building the initial ontology, you're training the existing customer to be able to wield the technology in the way that they want it to. And forward deployed engineering done well is kind of kind of a CAPX investment. And then the place where it's not is, and where you do have re-engagement is our goal is to continue to push the bounds of the ambition of like, what do you want to do?

Not can I deliver the same thing more efficiently to the next customer? But given what you've done today, have you thought about doing this? And have you thought about doing that and pushing the boundaries of the creativity and then having the connected connectivity back with our core platform seem to say, we're going to completely throw away our entire roadmap and focus this around this one singular customer because if we can do this, they can win. And by the way, we're going to build the primitives that allow us to build things that our other customers win with. How much of the discussion between FTEs and Palantir folks and corporations is around just explaining the capabilities of modern AI models versus previously like what a software system could look like. How is that changing? Because it feels like we're in this crazy capability overhang where like the models move so fast, the technology is getting so much better that you can,

take two weeks off and come back and that thing that you were smashing your head against the wall on has just been one shot by the latest model. Yeah, I don't know in my world where we live that isn't true. Like we've seen very little what I call like cannibalization of the existing thing, but we have seen the I get to re-decomp this problem. I can reorganize around what these things are. And so a lot of it is a, are you building an engine that presumes change in the underlying technology or are you building what most enterprise IT art systems, people, organizations are, which are, I need to presume stability and may as risk, cost, and effect. You do need to now build a system that presumes rapid rate of change.

Yeah. So where are you seeing more value in using generative AI models to build deterministic software faster versus actually deploying a stochastic model, a non-deterministic model, into an enterprise workflow because I imagine that a lot of your systems, a lot of your customers are saying, look, I don't care that the latest model is 99.99%. I would rather have a system that's 100% verifiable because at least I know that if I've defined it in a particular way with business logic, I get the same output no matter what. Yeah, I can tell you the antsy pattern and the pattern that's working. So the antsy patterns are called like the pejoratively, the private equity mindset

of how to deploy this software, which is you have now three types of, call it cognition, computation. You have traditional computing, you have human thought, and then you have generative AI. The private equity model is saying, I'm going to take this new form of cognition and try and replace old forms of cognition and do the exact same thing I'm doing before with slightly fewer heads. So then you have the anxiety around job loss, you have the, hey, I'm going to increase margins, but so what. And I think that is a dramatic underuse of the technology. One, it's a lot harder than it looks to do that to turn something that's non-deterministic into something that is deterministic. But more importantly, it's why would you do that? It's so powerful if you put it into white space,

like let it run like a thoroughbred by decomping problems into where it's actually useful versus trying to replace something in the old kind of slurotic enterprise technology estate. Yeah. How have you processed? There's a bunch of AI roll-ups, holding companies, people, you know, venture people that are trying to maybe take something out of the PE playbook, but build some type of advantage by applying AI better. Like, what do you think their prospects are? One of those things that sounds really straightforward, but easier said than done.

Yeah, I don't know any specifics, so it's hard to me to opine what they're doing, but the first question that I would ask is to understand what the culture of those companies are. And why I think, like, private equity is just culturally not built to do technology. To do this technology right, you have to presume that you're wrong at the outset,

not presume that you're right. That's very hard from my experience with working with folks in private equity. And so if you can build a culture that presumes that you need to create, iterate, and discover what the thing ought to be versus do the deductive kind of management consultant playbook of, you know, I've talked to all of these firms

and like the weird thing is everybody ends up with the exact same target that they're going to go to because they have the exact same deductive framework of like, this is what it looks like. They process a lot of papers. It's like, okay, and then somehow everyone's doing a accounting roll-up, so then where's the alpha? the investment thesis is on.

And then I think the execution is going to be a lot harder than they think it is. Yeah. Well, Ted Mayer, thanks so much for taking the time. Great to have you. Stay warm out there. We will grab those headphones and talk to you soon. Jordy, would you rather have $10 million or access to chat GPT in 2012? This is such a funny question because it reminds me of the like, you know, $10 million or dinner with Jay-Z.

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

If you were the only person with the technology. Yeah, crazy. No, and Ben was saying, you know, like even on the image-gen video side, it's like, I'll generate any asset that you want. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, commercials. I mean, that would be crazy. People would be like, how did you do this in a day? Even just like, even if you don't have codex, but you just have Chachipiti, you can probably, you can probably piece together so much software that then you could go sell as an actual company.

There's a million different ways. Yeah, really, really funny because it sounds, it sounds like such a silly question, but then when you actually think about the capability. It's remarkable. I would build a very, very thin wrapper. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's one. If you just actually go and sell this futuristic technology, everyone will assume your time traveler. We're doing pretty well.

We're doing pretty well. The snow is hitting my feet. The computers are working. The stream is up. This is a miracle. We are, it is so cold that the computers weren't charging at one point. I've heard, you know, if you're in the desert, you need fans for your computer to keep it cool. We probably need to get some of those, but I never thought we'd have to get heat pads.

Oh, they have, the team, the production team has heat pads on the computer. And we should be joined by Alex Carp in just a few minutes. So thank you for tuning in. Thank you to our sponsors for making this possible. More news. Trump administration set to suspend the Jones Act to team oil prices. Was this what Alex Epstein was talking about? Yeah, I mean, a lot of people have wanted this forever.

Yeah. because the Jones Act obviously has had some unnecessary or unintentional consequences. Yeah, it sounds really good on paper. But, so, yeah, we're getting it in not the way that. People would have expected. Gwart says, why don't they just tokenize the oil in the Middle East and transport it across permissionless financial rails, thereby avoiding the straight-of-horn moves altogether?

Here's your oil NFT. Here's your gasoline. Here's something we need to figure out. Helium. Helium exposure. Catars shutdown of liquefied natural gas production has shaken about a third of global helium taken about a third of global helium production offline,

affecting chip makers who rely on helium for semiconductor manufacturing. Helium has no viable substitute in the chip process, and no other source can immediately replace Qatar's supply. With helium, containers already filled before the war, remaining stranded if the disruption persists, helium shortages could force chipmakers to deprioritized lower margin product lines, reinforcing the existing allocation towards AI memory and deepening an already severe memory shortage. So find me the Alex I've seen of helium today. Find me the Scott Nolan of helium. There's got to be someone out there who's been building a startup around

helium. I actually did talk to someone. I don't know that I should share all the details. but they were looking at a startup that was going to buy a pretty significant, like, helium mine or something like that, and they had a whole business plan for it. And I think it, this was years and years ago. But it was a fascinating industry. I dug into it for, like, you know, about an hour with this friend of the show. Lots to learn more about rare elements and minerals and all the different impacts that the recent news cycle has on.

all aspects of the economy. Hopefully an Oddlots episode on helium soon. That would be, that would certainly be welcome. In Philly, 600 tubs of French dip mysteriously showed up at several restaurants. Is this real?

And Brooks says, yeah, it's in the Philly Enquirer. Brooks says it's starting. It's starting. It's starting. Who knows? It's very ominous.

What dip French dip? Is that like sour cream and you dip? No, with the sandwiches, right? French dip? Oh, well, French dip is a sandwich, but is it also a topping? I know, but it's a soup? It's a soup. You dip the sandwich in it, the ajou, au jus.

Okay, okay, I'm getting it. Sue Hale says the run on inference capacity is coming. You have been warned. Inference capacity. I mean, we've seen that with Claude going down. The GPUs are on fire over on, over an open AI with the codex team. Tebow resetting limits. Someone made a button that, a website that just have the code.

Codex limits been reset. And you can just go to this website. It's one of these one-not one-off vibe coded pages. And if Tebow resets them, you can go and check your codex. Sam Hogan says real GPU shortage has never been tried. Yeah, we could be getting close. There's a lot of demand, especially if Nvidia is starting to keep the chips. This is huge news for Tyler.

He's been pitching Jensen on keeping the chips for himself and building an AI model or an open source model. And that was the big news. the total headline figure something, $26 billion over five years investing in open source LLM development, something like that? It was a big number. 26, big number. It was a big number, not the biggest number we've ever heard. Another big number.

Netflix is paying 600 million for Ben Affleck's company. This was reported earlier in the week that they were acquiring it, but there was no number. 600 is a lot bigger than what I imagined. I was looking at it as like, you know, hey, this would be a nice. soft landing for this film company, but pretty significant outcome. Yes, 600's big number. It'll be very interesting to see what Netflix does with that. We tracked a little bit of the, there's a new Calhury market up on which Hollywood studio,

which traditional Hollywood studio, big Hollywood studio, will release a fully AI-generated film or scripted series by 2027. And I think Netflix was in the lead, but just barely. It's so early. We'll see where all of that goes. Redbird is the big backer of Interpositive. Oh, interesting. Which Redbird is also...

Redbird Capital? Yeah, big backer of the Warner Brothers deal. Are they an investment bank or investment firm as well? They do both. They take positions and advisory, right? Yes. Yeah. Exciting. Well, we should be joined by Alex Karp in just a minute.

Anything else in the timeline worth... I thought this was interesting. one of at least Anthropics only marketing growth person did an interview and extremely impressive

what he was able to handle on his own obviously using the tools to their fullest extent but a lot of people thought it was funny because it's like you probably

like growing that fast you could probably add more people well good growth people are hard to find they are it is difficult but yeah it would be interesting gotta talk about Cursor

what's going on with Cursor Cursor is having what sound like early talks to raise more money at somewhere around $50 billion I saw one post that was maybe 60 I mean it's just a massive uprun what was the last round 18 or 20 30 30 okay so nice little step up

a lot of a lot of doom and gloom on the timeline around Curser we were debating this yesterday fascinating just how big the market it is where adoption sits. But the reporting says they're growing at 25% month every month. Incredible. And at that scale, 2 billion ARR or something like that.

Yeah, and I just think we keep getting these data points that show that the world is much bigger than whatever people are saying on X on any given day. Yep, yep, yeah. It's easy to read into Kyle Russell's post about his team, which is truly like the cutting edge most,

you know, most online group of folks shifting over and shifting away from cursor, but there are still probably applications where it makes a ton of sense. A bunch of companies that are happy with the product and continuing to pay and continuing to grow. And then there's also that interesting thesis about maybe there's a world where they act as a model router in some ways and are piping different services in. Who knows what the margins look like in the limit, but, you know, certainly could continue to grow. What else is in the timeline while we wait for Alex Karp to join, TBPN live?

I mean, the big news is Taco Bell is adding a skincare item to its menu. Mountain Dew Baja blast under eye patches are going to be infused with caffeine and citrus. That's essential if you're in a code red. If you're in a code red, get the Baja blast under eye shadow. I don't even know what that is.

but you can get it at Taco Bell on the menu at any Taco Bell. Is this like some limited drop? Is this some viral stunt? Is this real? I don't know. I'll check it out. Dean Ball is going back and forth with Emil Michael. That's right.

They're trading blows about, what does it mean to have a constitution? Who should write that? Who should give the models their personality? And I mean, we'll talk more about this tomorrow, but Dwar Kesheh Patel has a great point. post summarizing a lot of his thoughts working through all the different philosophies of when the government should be in charge, when different public companies should be in charge.

Dean Ball's main point is that, you know, maybe Constitution wasn't the right term, or maybe it's a charge term or a loaded term that people read into. But Dean Ball's point is that there is no way to train an LLM that doesn't have a personality, even if it's the most robotic personality, that's still a personality. Well, we are joined by Alex Carp. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time. You guys want with or without hat?

Whatever is comfortable for you. You can do. It's cold. Keep your hat on. I feel like this is an average day for you. You're always out skiing. We should have done that. Yeah, we need to get, we're close to getting skis.

Look. We let you know we're supposed to do something physical. It's starting to stick. It's starting to stick. Oh, I like this. Now I feel like a newscaster. I feel like a newscaster. Yeah.

This is good. You're like eight feet tall. People don't realize that. Yeah. He's not standing. up because it would be like he's like counteractual for all of us. It's like eight foot. Last time we talked to you, I think you were doing four minutes on the dead hang.

What's it up to now? 505. 505. 505. What about in the cold, though? That's going to affect it, right? Sorry, we need to have a special minute for that. 5.05. For those of you who haven't done a dead hang, first of all, go do it.

Why is it important? Well, there are very few things that are proxy indicators that are accurate for health. Yeah. It's like dead hang, farmers walk body weight, and V-O2, or the 3-1, I count. I don't think anyone really... What about one rep match bench press? That's all I focus on.

Okay, well, you know, it's like... I feel like as long as I have a really impressive bench press, I'll live a short but glorious life. Yeah, I don't know. Didn't they say something about that? Yeah. Who wants to live a long, glorious life when you can live a glorious short life. Yeah, I think that's what they tell you before they give you a bad soury. I think it's like, I think it's like, yeah, it's like, yeah, my social life is so great.

I only have a bot, but I enjoy it. A kind of logic. No. But, no, it's... Dead hang is important. Dead hang is crucial. Okay. And you really need to go work on it,

especially anyone watching your podcast. Yes. Is likely to outperform. Yeah. You want to have something, you know, you want to be able to do something with that outperformance. Yeah, like dead hang.

Like, yeah, well, the dead hang may be a proxy indicator for other things you could do with your outperformance. Yes. You know, but not everyone is... Yeah, not everyone is like six foot nine. You may not need a dead hang,

but the rest of it. of us, well, I can cheat because most of the pull-up bars, I just stand on the floor. That's right, yeah. And I can hold forever. You can't forever. That's right, that's right. But when you're not dead hanging, what should people be doing with the new coding agents? How important is it to learn to code?

How important is it to? Look, there are two, everybody's worried about, like, their future. But there are basically two ways to know you have a future. One, you have some vocational training. Okay. So it's like, or two, you're neurodivergent. And when I say neurodivergent, I, I mean, broadly defined.

Like, your guys are sitting here. You could have had a corporate tool job. Yeah. You could have been like, I don't want to pick on Goldman, but like just say, you know, like a job. I replied there. They turned me down. Well, yeah.

I did work at sit at a little bit. You could have a job where you're like a cut. Each other failed. No, actually, maybe they didn't know the right way to test. Yeah. Like it's like, yeah, they were like, like, you know. And whatever, I'm not picking on one or the other. I'm just saying you, you know, like, you are probably here.

you think you're here because, but it's actually, you probably wouldn't be able to do that shit because it's like, it's the same thing as sit down in class and learn some bullshit. Like, and you just regurgitate it. Like, that's not a valuable thing.

If you are actually have insights into anything, and you have real technical expertise. Yeah. Like, you know, you can look at a company, but you actually can look at it because you know something about how these things work or something about how clients work. You know, then all the other stuff

that used to be precious, like being able to do low end, coding, being able to do low-end lowering, being able to do low-end reading and writing. I mean, this is like, I feel like Odin came down and was like, I'm going to make the world just right for a dyslexic. It's like, yeah, Odin has come down from our, or Lockhe has come down and said, you know what, carp, you suffered so much as a kid. I'm just going to make the whole world.

So everyone else can suffer. I don't want that. And it's like now, but it's really an inversion. Like, everybody with like the normal shape skills are dyslexics. Because, like, meaning the thing they can do that used to be valuable is not so valuable. The thing that they need to learn to do is, like, be more of an artist, look at things from a different direction, be able to build something unique. And you see this on the battlefield, like, one of the most underappreciated things about fighting war, which is the, I mean, there are basic core things civilizations do, like build technology for war, is every society fights differently, every component of the society fights differently. and when like American as allies

we do not even approach these problems in the same way what it makes America lethal more so than any currently country is like a combination of obviously the technology which we're super interested in and believe are paying a huge part in but it's like 20 years of like operators figuring out what worked

not what worked in a manual like what work in reality also even selection if you look at the selection that people like you meet like tier one operators, they don't look anything like what people would think. It's not like the movies. They're like these, like this big and like, you know, it's like

because we have, we have, we have specialized ways of doing that. All of that is crazy valuable. As a proxy indicator, people who are getting their news from you are just likely to massively outperform. People are getting their news from something that's a regurgitation of you've got to vote for one

party or the other. And then the The real problem we have in society is not your listeners or Palantir's customers or our partners is like, well, what happens to everyone else? Are they going to lynch us? Because, like, that's the real problem. Like, these products, like what we're building, like our agents, mean that, like, the most, I mean, the most powerful people in the Democratic Party are highly educated female voters. And these technologies, like, they love, they, I mean, like, yeah, I actually get along with all these people in private. And there's a public dispute, but, like, largely I've talked to Dario.

over and over and it's like, yeah, you love one company because they're not pro-Trump. That company's taking your job. How are you going to feel about that company when you find it? You have no job. What do you think the Republican Party is going to do to products that do not support our military? What do you think the Democratic Party is going to do to products, even if you're voting for them, that are taking away the jobs of every one of your constituents and saying, oh, people are going to love you so much and you're going to be poor. By the way, we love you so much.

We're going to give you a little handout once a month. Yeah. So apply that to the SaaSpocalypse narrative, the enterprise SaaS. There's an idea that the first jobs that will be taken might be the enterprise software products that exist, haven't really innovated, have lock in, and they're going to be repletform. If you, the thing that these technologies do is they also make it harder to lie about, is part of the political problem. If something's not creating value or something's not working or there's corruption, you can't

lie about it. And nobody believes that all software companies actually create value. I mean, the famous thing that we all learned was that we rejected that you were learned and people taught you. It's like, your software company is supposed to give the client the feeling they're getting laid while they're getting fucked. Now, if that's how your products actually are, you are going to get fucked. And this is going to happen so quickly. And the simple test for people who are looking at is does this product, or in our case, we were never pure software. We're actually like a hybrid of like humans, FDEs, augmented humans, so AI FDEs, and then orchestration, and then essentially what we would call primitives, like taking the tribal

knowledge of institution, coding it into logic, and then using that to be extended in LMs. Okay. But we don't have to explain that to our clients. So there was always this always Palantir consulting firm. Is it all just people? Is there any real software? I feel like that narrative went away. Oh, no, no.

They couldn't invest in us because we were a service service company. Exactly. And now it's like... But is actually having that service... Oh, no, of course. Better in the future. No, no, it's not better. It's crucial.

It's crucial. Yeah, yeah. Like, all these places that made fun of us, they're running around and trying to get FDEs. Of course, getting an FTE is like, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's not as easy as it sounds because you have to know how to manage it, where to put the person,

how to extract value. Yeah. And then you need all these products that augment the FDE. What are those products? Ontology. Yeah. Foundry. FDI AI things that we've built.

Yeah. What we, being able to... So the value of the business is not a monolithic code base that never changes. It is the people. It is the deployment, is the relationships. Is that how you're thinking about the business these days? Well, actually, the way I'm telling you, like, when you walk around here, they only care, they don't care about any of that.

What they care about is you transform my business and... in three months, it would have taken three years, and I would never have happened. That's what they care about. Now, then there's a question of how do you do that? And that is a concatenate. It's artistry. It's like select client,

select where you would start, select ways in which you'd innovate in ways they would not accept, innovate in places they do not understand, you should innovate. Learn to manage these very complex. By the way, it's not just culturally complex. It's tribal knowledge.

And much of that tribal knowledge is in rules that they have to apply because there are all sorts of rules about manufacturing, hospitals, or rules that are applied that they're not saying they apply, laws, like all sorts of regulatory things on top of all that.

All that has to happen very rapidly. So you would need, and like without going into details, like I'm in the middle of like every single one of these discussions in almost every breakdown. It's like people do not understand how institutions work. They don't understand how the software would work. They don't have the LLM would work. They don't have the product that would actually work in that environment.

And they still, at the end of the day, are not saying we're going to charge on value. Okay. How do institutions work? Why is it that we get these genius models that are 160 IQ? They can solve incredible math, and they're not just like everywhere all of the time. What is slowing down adoption? Well, I mean, the simple version is they're 160 against a test. Yeah.

But the test isn't, it's a concatenation. The simple math would be it's 160 on one test, but you've got to pass differentiated tests over a long period of time so it's a thousand tests so de facto by the 50th step it's zero IQ

but then there's also there's also yeah I mean it's like it's insane like no I love when I hear about all this is going to replace and then I go to our clients and they're like could we have more we don't even have the capacity

it's like it's a surreal thing like would you guys like to be FDs because we need some help if you're in the audience completely seriously and you're aligned broadly speaking with America is a great country. You don't have to agree about anything

else. And you're out there and you're technical or just smart. Apply. We need you. Okay. America is a great country. Put aside Democrat, put aside Republican. Is democracy the correct formulation to decide the future of AI?

Should the American people be voting to decide or should that be handled by private companies? No, America, well, it depends. Like, yeah, great. So in the war fighting context. The Department of War has to be the arbiter of what gets

deployed. But as a citizen, I vote for the Department of War, correct? Exactly, yeah. Okay. But I'm just saying, so I want to split domestic and foreign, because we in this country have God-given rights, literally given to us by a higher being. There's a right of free expression, which

we're exercising all the time, and is very important to us. There's a Second Amendment, which I exercise. I shoot very well. I would encourage you guys and other people to listening to avail yourself of the Second Amendment. Yes. It was not, it is there to protect ourselves in case the First Amendment fails. That's the reason it's there.

There's a Fourth Amendment, which is essentially we have a right to privacy. Okay. We have those rights. Aversary is trying to kill us in Iran do not have those rights. Sure. And I don't believe, I've never believed in extending our rights to foreign countries that are adversarial to us. I don't even really believe. I don't like, you know, in Germany, where I lived half my life, they don't have a First Amendment.

They don't believe it. And by the way, they've never believed in a First Amendment. They have other rights. That's great. I'm not going to dispute that, but I want our rights here. In this country, if you're going to tell the American people you're building what is clearly a dangerous technology, it's dangerous because it will likely take your job, especially if you're white collar. So if you're voting, you know, you're highly educated. Have you flipped on that in the last like six months or so?

Because I think the last time we talked, your general mindset was like high agency, highly productive people will be able to continue to leverage the tools to deliver value within an organization. Yeah, I think if you're neurodivergent in high agency and you're highly educated, that's great. But if you're not neurodivergent and you're like lawyer 14506, that's a problem. Okay, but let me get to this, and they're linked, but it's okay. On domestic stuff,

I, we have rights that are not subject to majority rule. Like I, the majority can vote against us having Fourth Amendment rights. I want that, I want that litigated at the Supreme Court because I, we are not, our constitution is not about majority, it's actually about the rights of the minority. And it's our right. I bet you the three of us have opinions that are very much in the minority. That we want to be able to say, at least in the privacy of our own home. Right? And so there are real issues. I'm super sympathetic with restrictions around the use of these products in a domestic context,

even though it's funny. People out there, every conspiracy theorist thinks, it's insane. I'm the only one. Conspiracy theorists, you may hate this, but there's one person protecting your right to be a conspiracy theorist that actually has a seat at the table. and that person is me. You may not want to hear that truth, but it is fucking true,

and maybe do a little more reading before you pontificate on your absurd, and obviously ill-formed in many times stupid opinions. Okay, so, because, like, you're attacking the person who's protecting you, idiot. It's like fucking so stupid.

Do, do, use one of the bots to correct your opinion. It's like, I'm being attacked online now. He's like, Dr. Carp is anti-progressive person because, of my whole life. I'm just telling you the truth. These things are going to take your job. Okay, so then, but in the warfighting

context, and it's the primary justification for these products has to be, they're two relevant powers now, us and China. This is a have, half, not world. It's going to be either us or them basically deciding the world order. Because, like, these other countries

that maybe India will get involved, maybe the Arab, non-Arab, Middle East, but currently on the trajectory we're on now, there are two places where these things are being developed and deployed as us or them. And I'm not particularly, you know, I'm not out to hurt China. I'm just out to, I think we should win. I'm not trying to hurt them. And in that context, you can't say we're not going to do X, Y, and Z.

I mean, I give you examples, but like, there are data sets that are publicly available in the U.S. market that should, I don't think should be used against you and me in a law enforcement context more than with the help of, say, AI agents and ontology. But if you don't use it on the battlefield, obviously Iran's going to use them. You don't think they can go online and buy those products? And by the way, without going into somewhat classified ideas, those things are in combination with other things, lethal.

Like a lot of people who want to hurt America on the battlefield end up dead because of our ability to aggregate and then figure out what's going on in the battlefield before they can figure out what we're doing. And so, like, I'm very much in favor of it for moral reasons, but I'm also in favor of it. I was like, I don't know how else you explain this to the American people. We're going to take your job.

We're going to take away. You're going to eviscerate your ability to have money and power, but that we're not going to defend you on the battlefield. It just seems like, yeah, well, they're going to, you know what's actually going to happen? That nobody believes me in tech, but there's going to be a movement in this country that gets very strong, very quickly to nationalize these things. First, it's going to be take away all our money. The billionaires are evil.

You may not have heard that. It's super evil. And if you take away their money, it'll help poor people. Yes. That's really important to understand. Making rich people miserable is the only way to help poor people. That's obviously true. Once you've learned that, the next thing you're going to learn is we have to nationalize it.

They're going to quote you on that. Well, it's like it's like you're closer to Dario on, you know, potentially 50% of early stage white color job loss. Like you're aware that there's a risk, at least some probability. You're aware of it. What do you see as the solution? Well, first we just have to, I mean, well, I mean, the obvious thing is, okay, we can't have any migration here. Like, how are we going to create more jobs?

Like, it's like you have to, what the problem in fairness, not that people want to be in the business of being fair to policy leaders, but that we are dealing with technologies that will determine the policy decisions. So you can't just pretend they're not happening. Like step one is like we, it's going to be hard but possible to make this society work, given that. transforming it requires these technologies. Like all the, like, I really like the people here. They're not here because they like me. Like, maybe they're here for my jokes. High quality in some cases.

But it's like a long trip, and we're here. I'm the only one who likes this weather is great weather. I brought it for you. But they're here because they've seen their business being transformed. And this is happening in America more than it. So we have to win those battles, but the costs are going to be very high. And so you have to work back from,

okay, the costs are going to be very high. We can't put oil on the fire. It's like, you know, it's like, well, getting jobs for all Americans is going to be hard. And people maybe who become Americans. But it's like you have to have different policies around migration. You have to different policies around how we train people. Like currently, if you're a young kid in high school and you're neurodivergent,

they're literally chaining you into your chair and feeding you medication so you can have skills that are not valuable. Yeah. Like, it's so it's like, and then we'll probably over time have to have, Like a discussion of like, yeah, if you go into this career, you're not going to have a job. Like a really honest discussion about that. These are the places where you will likely have a job. And, yeah. Help me.

You know, it seems like we as a country will probably head down a more European path where it becomes very, very difficult or near impossible to let people go. Do you think that's correct? In Germany, it's much harder to lay someone off. And that does impact, I mean, that does impact the growth of companies. But I think many Germans would argue that's probably... Yeah, you know, Germany's, I mean, I'll answer your question. Germany's an interesting place.

I did this thing in German where I basically told the truth, which you're not allowed to do in Germany. It's like, you know, it's kind of really bad situation. And the economy sucks. The migration thing's a complete. disaster and the energy situation is like compounds everything and I got thousands of people literally saying thank God someone told the truth and there are a lot of people like you guys young people building things that feel hampered and and are correct to feel hampered I think the American version if we're not careful is not going to be the German version I think it's going to

be hang the rich I it's like I think it's going to be not protect everybody else is going to like, look, this is too dangerous and we're going to hang the rich but not really help the poor. And in fairness to the German version, like, you know, German, like, health insurance, insurance, all that stuff, it works. Like, I was, I was poor in Germany for, like, a decade. And, like, I had the best life on the planet. Like, it was like, being poor in Germany is, like, being better than being rich here in some days. So basically, policies that lift the floor, reeducation, training.

So if you want to do what we could do here, we, we, the, things we could adopt from Germany are, Germany has three high schools. Yeah. Two are vocational. Sure. One is academic. Better education. Better programmatic, vocational.

Vocational, it also has a bad, like a weird vibe here. Like, vocational training in Germany is very technical. Like the people building the cars at BMW or even in the French version of Airbus, like very complicated jobs. They didn't go to college. Sure. They went to a very, very high end high school. Yeah.

And they come out without any debt. And that stuff is really valuable. Yeah. So if you want to, you have to completely transform our educational system and go very young into like training people to do things. You also need to change our testing system. Like different forms of intelligence. All of our tests are built around things that were valuable in the industrial revolution. It's like you want to pull out all the dyslexics, all the neurodivergence.

Everybody who can't sit or needs to build or wants to build have to go into a separate slot of like, yeah, we should have gotten you before you got turned down at Coleman. And like said, this is like, that's a waste of your time. be building something important. And what else goes to, it would be a part of the good outcome? Well, the most important part of the good outcome is we show our adversaries, you can't fuck with us. And we're the best, we're the best military in the world. I believe we're doing that right now.

On the good outcome side, yeah, we go around. And then on the commercial side, we go to all these high infrastructure, you know, hospitals, manufacturing, all these things, complicated infrastructure. And we AI enhanced all of that. them so the products are legitimately the best in the world. And we rebuild manufacturing in this country. Like a big problem for us, including on the battlefield, is our manufacturing just is not up to where we have to be. And that, by the way, requires re-scaling, scaling humans. And we're doing this all over the place. I mean, the guy writing a lot of the scripts for these people, they're like high school

college grads, the people building batteries and all these things using our products. These are high school college guys. There's a lot of opportunity there. But, you know, one of the things I told the Germans, and I would say to us is, I was like, you know, in Germany you have to call it a crisis. We do need, like, this is a crisis moment. America is tomorrow is not going to look like it looked at all, or we're going to have radicalism on right or left. The problem, the danger is if we don't do these reforms, you are going to get the pitchforks. Because then the only solution people are going to have is, well, you know, let's go after the unlikable rich people in tech, especially AI tech. And then, but then what can work is, yeah, close the borders.

keep them closed, start doing huge vocational efforts, change how we test aptitude. Like, so we have an accurate diagnostic of where you could be slotted. Be ruthless and, like, you know, it's like in certain, find out new ways to test and do ruthless testing and slotting. And then also go around to universities and just, I mean, you know how when you, like, you want to smoke a cigarette. It's like, this cigarette may be harmful to you off. Maybe we should be putting that in universities. This university, this university is harmful for your investor. You know, I'm libertarian.

You want to go to university? This student debt may be harmful to your future money as well. And your personal life. Explain to someone you've got a million dollars in debt. A million dollars in debt. I mean, maybe if you're six, nine, and you can get away with that, but the rest of us have to provide. That's funny.

Help me square this idea. You were talking earlier today about people misunderstanding your business. Yeah, what's it like to read about your business? Oh, I mean, first of all, I mean, the part, I hate it, but then the part I love is, and it's like your value is pretty directly convergent with people's inability to understand what you're doing. Yeah. So it's like all these technologies are potentially commodifying everything. Yeah.

Okay. So if you are a business that is, you know, not services, not product, but both, but also works on tribal knowledge on data. and every single business you make is individual. And so, yeah, that's a crazy valuable business. That's true in a lot of industries where if the broader business community doesn't understand your business, you might have a short report, but you'll have way less competition because people aren't copying you because they don't understand the playbook. It's impossible to copy certain, like, and we neglect this.

Like, you know, almost like you even see it culturally, like luxury, luxury products dominated by the French, watches dominated by the Swiss, currently certain kinds of war fighting dominated by America. It's like it's very hard for people to eviscerate these cultural advantages and our products augment that, which makes it, you know, augments the differentiated specific over the generalizable. And that's where literally all the value is going to go. And it's going to be like a waterfall. And that's the problem with a lot of software companies.

It's like product ABCT. But then when you read it, it's like one of the more depressing thing, that you guys probably confront, but it's like a huge market opportunity for you. It's like, where are the experts? Like, it's like, you know, it's like there's shit, it's like, you know, you hope and pray, like I'll tell you the funniest thing about my life now

and people internally know. Almost every day I'm like, wait a minute, I'm the adult in the room here. It's like, everywhere I go, it's like, wait a minute. And it's like, it's like, it's like, and it's big, so it's surreal when you read about these things, but and it used to really frustrate me, but now I kind of just think, well,

like I can't believe we're still viewed as crazy. It's like everything we're doing is the only thing that's where I mean, like I don't want to like spend a lot of time on our baller, essentially baller numbers from last year. But it's like, you know, clearly our shit works. Clearly nothing is working at that level. And you would think they would take like, I don't know, 10 minutes to think, okay, well, the thing I believed and I thought it would work,

didn't work at all. This thing I thought was insane is as like a rule of 127 when like no one, like 40 is considered like, and like, but they don't. And then and I, yeah, but it's sometimes frustrating, honestly. And the hard part actually is, I kind of view it as a feature. Internally, we get these bright-eyed kids. It's so funny. I mean, they want to get the best people in the world. But you know, just like I was probably at 21, they're very romantic.

It's like, but why does the adult not understand? understand this. It's like, but, but, but the adult expert tells me, it's like, I don't know when you guys had to drop this you moment and you realize that like, like, the adults are like, you know, on crack or something. Like, it's, okay. Last question. Would you rather have $10 million or access to Chachapit in 2012? It's a viral question that's going viral right now. I have to choose one or the other. I mean, okay. I'm just, I don't think it needs. I don't think it's hard to answer. I don't think he needs. I don't think he needs. I have both. Can I have my social life in grad school? There we go. That's a new pick. How about a new pick? We just have to ask you,

you know, it's like, great. I'm going to take something I valued. Oh, okay. Yeah, the most valuable thing for social life and grad school. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you, Mike. It's fantastic.

We'll talk to you soon. Yeah. And that's our show today, folks. Thank you so much for tuning in to TBPN. Today we will be back in the TBPN Ultram tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. You want to sign off with us? Oh, yeah.

Point of the camera. Goodbye. Have a good one. Cheers.