You're watching TV. Today is Thursday, March 12th, 2026.
We are in the middle of a blizzard.
We're 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. I would not give this a, you know, a 10 out of 10 blizzard. It's barely snow. The snow's not high winds.
Just say you've never been to the East Coast before.
True. Once a few times, you got jacket on. We're having a fun time.
We're a long way from the TBP and Ultra Dome. 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. Uh, Dark Cash Patel dropped a response to the Department of War's moves to designate Anthropic supply chain risk. There's a whole bunch of interesting nuance conversation. We're going to get into some of that today. Uh, 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 Anthropic with Copilot Health, and OpenAI plans to fold Sora into GPT as the sort of productization of consumer LLMs continues. So, we'll be covering those stories tomorrow. Uh, we want to say thank you to all of our sponsors that make the show possible. Uh, 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. Wait, welcome to the show, Dan Ives. How you doing?
Thank you so much for taking the time. And on this very, very cold day to hop on with us. Uh, first, introduce yourself. Tell us what you do, why you're here.
Yeah, Dan Ives. I've covered tech stocks going back to late 90s, you know, on Wall Street. And look, for me, I mean, being here at Palantir, it's been 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 you know, 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 you know, my view the last few years is Palantir has been what I view as 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 AI on their domain, versus it showing up in the financials, it's showing up in the metrics?
There's only one Karp and one Palantir, and I think if you look at the numbers, the numbers speak for themselves. And I think the commercial business has really been what's been the jaw-dropper for Wall Street because I think that alone, you know, could really ultimately be combined with the government business, a trillion-dollar company.
In the next two to three years. And I think Palantir continues to be one where I think investors continue to underestimate just how big they're going to be in this AI revolution.
Yeah. Uh, 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 Palantir? Like, who sticks out?
90% of customers here weren't here two years ago.
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 factored into the stock in terms of how big the commercial business could be for Palantir. Because when you look at the AI revolution, of course Nvidia, Microsoft, you know, you have the semi plays, you have software, but I think Palantir is going to, when we look out in the 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 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 and 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 at what we see from Nvidia to Microsoft to Salesforce, ServiceNow, and you know, to names like Palantir 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 at GTC next week, 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 Nvidia and Tesla in terms of the two best physical AI plays.
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-dollar 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, every OEM is going to need an autonomy stack. They're going to need the self-driving capability in some degree. Even if, you know, 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 8-year-old today doesn't need a driver's license when they're 16. And I think going back to your point, it's easy to get in these moods where geopolitical white-knuckle moments. But if you look, I think ultimately Tesla autonomous is worth a trillion dollars going to a Tesla story. And I think Nvidia a year from now, we're looking at a five, you know, five trillion we talk about, but I think six trillion market cap by 2027 still continues to be our call.
Yeah. Um, 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 a 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, 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 related to 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 Optimus with Tesla, humanoid robotics, we are still in the early days of where this is all going. And I think, look, CES for so many years, day zero, like they barely exist right now, it's demos. But that's why we're year three into an 8 to 10-year buildout of the AI revolution. And I think those that are getting embarrassed, they're going to miss what I view as the next leg.
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, that's what we're seeing with Tesla. 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.
Look, 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 would you, why do you do an iPhone when you have a Blackberry?
Were you following Apple in the '90s?
Yeah. And I think that...
Do you remember what it was like? We were just reading about Larry Ellison yesterday and he was thinking about buying 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 late night. It's like, it's trying to explain to investors that these things now look easy and no-brainers from Apple, Tesla. But at the point, like when you look in 2007, okay, a year later, financial crisis happens. Investors were like, 'This is a one-year AT&T phone. Why would anyone leave their Blackberry?' $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 cell phones. And the view was that they were never going to get to 100 million iPhones and you're at 1.5 billion today. But it goes back to, I could go through many times, and Tesla, I go 2022, 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.
But I think it's going to be proven to be, you know, the opportunity to own the tech winners and Palantir being one.
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 part...
AI ghost trade. Explain that term.
Because you're fighting a ghost.
When it comes to Anthropic, we're going to get into cybersecurity. Look what happens to CrowdStrike, Palantir, and others. We're going to get into software. Look at Salesforce, ServiceNow. 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 cases. And that's why Palantir being one, but I'm a huge believer Salesforce, ServiceNow, and others.
Resilient, you're a believer in this.
I'm a huge believer that this is the most disconnected tech trade that I've seen in my career relative to the software. You could 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 to 700 billion of market opportunity? That's what they're doing. I'd do the same thing.
Yeah, yeah, the backlog's massive right now. Uh, well, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. Great to finally meet you. Stay warm out... You're not quite dressed for it, but you know how you do 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. Please throw on this headset and then introduce yourself.
Starts to melt the jacket. You really have a bunch here. Let's go. Uh, so please introduce yourself and the company.
Yeah, I'll do that. Before I do, thanks for having me. Your headphone flipped.
Okay, this one like... flip it down there.
Okay. So, thanks for having me. And I'm hopefully going to be in the studio next time.
Yeah, we'd love to have you. Great.
But no, I'm Eric Brock. I'm the chairman and CEO of Anduril, a listed company. Uh, we're a defense and security technology company. We focus on drones. So, we have aerial platforms, we have counter-drone platforms which are particularly valuable as part of this cycle. We've got ground robots, and what we're trying to do is build this portfolio of systems of systems to begin to integrate the air and the ground and those capabilities. And of course, that's why I'm at this AIP.
That makes a ton 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. Um, and you know, we're doing God's work to really build the technology. And this is, autonomous systems is complex. It's a marriage of hardware and software. You got to get in the field, make it work. Uh, 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 tech is maturing, right? And 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. Um...
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 drone infrastructure. It lives in a, it's a docking station...
Yeah. It's got a robotic arm. We can swap batteries and payloads. Sure. And that's used for, say, drone as first responder, right? The Dubai police are deploying this, drones everywhere, they fly. So, uh, very useful. Uh, but what's particularly important about that and was really helpful for us to start to break out is it works, right? These technologies are helpful. It works. So, um, but you know, as we've evolved that, you know, in terms of history, I'll fast forward. Um, 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, or they're in the water, and all the critical components around these systems. Uh, we've built a lot of companies and they're maturing. However, we built technology platforms. Now we have to build businesses, and that's what this 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, you know, perform financially?
Yeah. So, the answer is yes. Okay. So, it's all of that. And really what we believe is that, um, 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, you know, we need growth capital. It's a different business model. It's a different cost of capital, and that's where we'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, right? So even places where you might say, 'Hey, they're competing,' it's 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 together. 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 to know, there's a lot of investors out there that they don't even need to know the product, use the product, but they know if it's SaaS, it's going to recur, it's going to be revenue, there's going to be some high gross margins, low capex, etc. Like, how is your business and the business lines that you have, how are they different from other companies that are in the market? Is it you're doing deals with the government so you're working on programs of record, the money comes later but the contract values get deployed earlier? Like how financially is it different?
There's a lot of that, but maybe I'll start at the most simple level, which is where you started, which is the drone, right? The drone in and of itself, by and large, is a commodity, right? It's not hard to build a quadcopter, even a fixed-wing drone. What is hard is to make them autonomous, right? That's another layer of development and sophistication. Uh, 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 Palantir is really going to help us at massive scale. Uh, 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 is a lot of what we're doing is infrastructure. So think about counter-drone. 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. This is too big.
If anything, the last two weeks have taught us anything, is that any target's 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 homeland security officials, the Department of War, they've been preparing for this for a long, long time, but it's hard. Yeah. Uh, so you're seeing a lot of technologies, including ours, that were under a faster pace of maturation. And, uh, 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 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. Um, we still have to have this protection because you can't be vulnerable. The lower skies, as they say, um, you know, technology has now made them, you know, a different threat than we've ever had, particularly on US soil. Sure. So again, this is, you ask about the business model, you can think about this as an infrastructure bill 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 the time. Hopefully we'll see you in the studio much warmer next time. Let's pop off those headphones and we will bring over our next guest. Um, thank you so much for hopping on, and we will continue our coverage today. Good to meet you.
How you doing? Good to see you. Let's throw this headphone set on. And 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 got throw back on. That works great. Actually, can you hear me? Okay, we can hear you just fine. First time on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company.
Uh, my name is Casey Lane and I work for a Western sports, entertainment, and media company called Teton Ridge. We do a number of things across the sports, media, and entertainment, um, 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, um, on the PRCA, which is the primary sanctioning body of professional rodeo. And then we also have a bull riding team, uh, in the PBR-owned PBR Teams league. So those are the two biggest, two of the biggest. We also produce a massive rodeo, uh, Memorial Day weekend at Globe Life Field in Arlington, and, uh, do a variety of other things in Western sports. We have a Hollywood division that produces scripted, unscripted, movies, all kinds of stuff, uh, around Western sports lifestyle.
A few years ago I followed J.B. Mauney a little bit. Who are the big stars these days?
So, the big stars of bull riding right now, um, you know, they vary from sort of team to team, space to space. Um, 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, I would call him. He'd love to hear me call him that, named Keyshawn White, who's like our team...
Yeah, he's a good name for it. He's awesome.
But then like there's some emerging talent. Um, there's a kid out of North Carolina named Klay Gayton. There's a kid that's on Florida's team but grew up in Texas, uh, named John Crimber. So, uh, always new talent coming in. We, uh, 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. So...
Very cool. Uh, how's the business growing overall? There's a lot of turmoil in media, a lot of consolidation, but I imagine with the internet, there's more people just becoming aware of bull riding, of Western lifestyle sports broadly, but what's it been like the last couple years?
Yeah, I mean, it's no secret in the market that Western has, you know, had a renaissance, right? Um, a combination of COVID and, uh, and the Taylor Sheridan Yellowstone, 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 in the coal mine. Um, I think, you know, people particularly in the US have grown up farther and farther away from farming and ranching. 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, really. No, one on the weekends, I'll say that.
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 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 Drive to Survive obviously introduced the sport more broadly to Americans, but it also drilled down into the individual talent, which that's something that the Taylor Sheridan industrial content complex is not getting into, the talent that you guys cover.
Yeah, I think, um, it's definitely on the roadmap of projects that we're looking at. Uh, we've done some stuff, PBR has done some stuff. There was a show on Amazon a couple years ago around the first year of our teams league that we participate in. But, um, you know, what we are really, what, you know, my belief is that we have the attention of the country, um, 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 in 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 produce in Arlington, The American, is actually on Fox. Yeah, 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.
What's the next country outside of Brazil that's a pipeline for talent?
Uh, bull riding in particular is very popular in Canada, Australia...
Brazil, US obviously, Mexico, um, Argentina is a sort of 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 layers 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 caliber of bull, right? Like if you took a kid straight from Argentina and put him on our bulls, it would be like, uh, 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 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 or performance-enhancing drugs. Like, are there any areas where the community has sort of grappled with and found, like, a happy medium on these new tech?
Um, well, there's a lot of those scenarios over the years that have been relevant. Genetics is a huge part of the bucking bull and bucking animal business. Um, you know, it's like anything else. You know, racehorses run fast.
Labradors chase tennis balls and bucking bulls buck. You bring bulls that buck to daughters of other bulls that buck and you get more bulls that buck.
But there's a ton to the genetics and there has been some cloning projects and things like that.
You know, really the revolution, the next revolution I think in technology in Western sports is what we're doing right now with Teton Ridge and Palantir. Um, and we're building a video analytics platform that, um, basically tracks the animal, the rider, um, to provide data.
It's Moneyball, and we pair that with the actual data from, you know, scoring and timing.
And we're building, um, to the best of our ability, to predict, um, you know, predicted outcome models of this type of bull with this particular rider, these sort of different scenarios. We're using it on the broadcast side to really dive deeper, uh, for the fan base into, you know, why was that ride scored that way? You know, well, we can go back to this 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, um, to do two things. One, on the bull riding team side, to make us better and give us a competitive advantage, uh, 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, you know, 23 miles an hour or whatever the number is. We don't have that stuff in rodeo yet, but we're building that right now.
Yeah. How do you think about these like must-see events, like creating like the Super Bowl moment, amplifying all the energy in the entire broader industry into like one singular day, minute, hour? What is the strategy there currently? Where do you 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 T-Mobile Arena in Vegas.
In traditional rodeo, in the PRCA, that's 10 days in 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 US Open, right? It's the top five in each discipline against a group of, you know, five in 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 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, following like, saw someone who does F1 racing 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. 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, you know, 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.
So they can go to these bigger and, 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.
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. Dangerous. So dangerous. It's one of those, look, so I did the timed 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. The thing is the ability to suspend fear.
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.'
For that moment, because when you, you know, I'd love for you guys to come to an event, right? Get behind the chutes when the whole thing is, when the whole, you know, 25,000 lbs of steel around you is shaking because a bull's moving and he's 1,800 lb.
And a 140-pound guy is about to climb over the chute and get on him. Like there's, I just don't have it. It just doesn't exist in my brain. The ability to just shut that switch off and say, I don't blame you.
Sounds like you have it. I would love to see 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, we, you know, I compare it. You know, there's a lot of comparables, right? You think about, you know, IndyCar drivers that are going, you know, 240 mph down the backstretch at Indianapolis, or you think about, you know, motorcycle racers or UFC guys, and UFC guys compare a lot to that, I think.
But 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 just had, we were just in Pittsburgh a couple weeks ago and we had Ben Roethlisberger with us on the back of the chutes and he was just going crazy because he'd not, you know, been up that close and personal with us.
Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
I look forward to coming to an event.
Grab those headphones from you and have a great rest of your day.
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?
Good to see you, Ted. For those who aren't familiar, please introduce yourself. Tell us, how long have you been working at Palantir?
16 years. There we go. There we go.
Is this the coldest AIP Con you've been to yet? You're freezing.
I got married down the street, actually. An outdoor wedding with no contingency plan for weather.
So you picked the venue this year. You got good luck. This is the bad luck. But you 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 year, this month, because of AI agents, but take me through a little bit of the history and how you think it progresses from here.
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. This is, I don't recognize it at all.
Is that a speak of timing or actual roles or what people are doing?
I think there are two things that have actively changed and then two implications of it. The two things that 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, I mean, maybe most important, is the market is now demanding much more from software than it's ever demanded before. And so that cultural expectation is a huge part of it, of like, this has to matter, this has to be in the fight, you know, this has to be really relevant. Everyone's used ChatGPT, like they know what it's capable of, and then they show up to work and they're like, why am I still... there's magical...
And yeah, and that demand is huge and it is like a huge accelerator for us. Then the second is, have you been building the infrastructure that presumes the models are going to get better? 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 have to be made a thousand times, which integrate different decision-making processes across systems 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.
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.
And the guy who runs the plant knows why it works. He knows why it breaks every time something needs to be fixed. Like, you know John, right? Like John makes the plant work. And in some ways, John was like the least levered person by technology because everything you'd buy with enterprise technology would be to standardize, to enable management. And that person worked around the system. They had their access databases, their own Excel macros. They had their own way of operating.
Now the technology can be John's Iron Man suit.
And so that means that it now makes sense for John to spend all their time, and you have to earn this. This is what the forward deployed engineer does, is earn the time of the best people so they can dictate what the system is that actually runs so that their company can be more differentiated over time. Right. And then at the top, you can do this with the CEO in a lot of my conversations, is this is what the company that is going to dominate my industry is going to look like in 2030. And then our FD'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 Palantir does? Do they understand the value prop more now? Is it easier to explain to them or is it getting more complicated because the tools are more complicated and the capabilities are more complicated?
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 made sense for how people procured enterprise technology, analytical process, these things. 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 deployed engineer embodies for us, and why I always get a little bit stuck, you know, I talk to a lot of companies that are like, hey, we're thinking about the FD 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 deployed 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 when 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 like what gets synthesized, what gets productized. Frankly, I think if you didn't have Shyam, it would be impossible. Like 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 to work. And by the way, we've proven that you can do that and build a really scalable, profitable business at the same time.
Yeah.
Where do FDEs fit into the customer lifecycle? Is it 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 Palantir to run their operations. 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 a capex 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 connectivity back with our core platform team 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 FDEs and Palantir folks and corporations is around just explaining the capabilities of modern AI models versus previously like what a software system could look like? Like how is that changing? Because it feels like we're in this crazy capability overhang where like the models move so fast, the technology is getting so much better that you can take two weeks off and come back and that thing that you were smashing your head against the wall on has just been one-shot by the latest model.
Yeah. I don't know in my world where we live that isn't true. Like we've seen very little what I would call like cannibalization of the existing thing, but we have seen the, I get to redeploy this problem, I could reorganize around what these things are. And so a lot of it is, are you building an engine that presumes change in the underlying technology or are you presiding over what most enterprise IT systems people organizations are, which are, I need to presume stability and manage 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 anti-pattern and the pattern that's working. So the anti-patterns are called like, pejoratively, the private equity mindset of how to deploy this type of 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 but 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 decomposing problems into where it's actually useful versus trying to replace something in the old kind of sclerotic enterprise technology estate.
Yeah. How have you processed, there's a bunch of AI rollups, 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 for me to opine on 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 accounting rollups. So then where's the alpha? Like the investment thesis is done and then I think the execution is going to be a lot harder than they think it is.
Yeah. Well, Ted Mabrey, thank you so much for taking the time.
Great to have you. Thanks for having me.
Grab those headphones and talk to you soon.
Jordi, would you rather have $10 million or access to ChatGPT in 2012?
This is such a funny question because it reminds me of the like, you know, $10 million or dinner with Jay-Z or dinner with Drake or something.
