Well, we are joined by Alex Karp. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time with or without hat.
Whatever is comfortable for you. You can do that.
I feel like this is an average day for you. You're always out skiing.
We should have done it. Yeah, we need to get—we're close to getting skis. Look, we could—well, you know, we were supposed to do something physical.
It's starting to stick. Oh, I like this. But now I feel like a newscaster. I feel important.
This is good. You're like 8 feet tall. People don't realize that he's not standing up because it would be like he's like compensating for all of us.
Last time we talked to you, I think you were doing four minutes on the dead hang. What's it up to now?
50, 55. What about in the cold though? That's going to—
We need to have a special minute for that. 50. For those of you who haven't done a dead hang, first of all, go do it.
Well, there are very few things that are proxy indicators that are accurate for health. Yeah, it's like dead hang, farmer's walk, body weight, and VO2 are the three ones that count.
I don't think anyone really—one rep max 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. I don't know.
Did they say something about that? Why want 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 salary or something like that. I think it's like, yeah, or it's like, 'Yeah, my social life is so great. I only have a bot, but I enjoy it' kind of logic. No. But no, it's—dead hang is important.
Dead hanging is crucial. Okay. And you really need to go work on it. Especially anyone watching your podcast is likely to outperform.
Yeah. You want to have some, you know, you want to be able to do something with that outperformance.
Like, yeah. Well, the dead hang may be a proxy indicator for other things you could do with your outperformance, you know, but you know, not everyone is—yeah. Not everyone is like 6'6" like you. You may not need a dead hang, but the rest of us—
Well, I can cheat because most of the pull I just stand on the floor.
That's right. And I can hold forever as long as I can. 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 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 mean broadly defined. Like you guys are sitting here, you could have had a corporate tool job. You could have been like—I don't want to pick on Goldman, but like just say, you know, like a job—
I applied there, they turned me down.
Well, yeah, I did work at a little bit. You could—you at a job where you're like—it's like, yeah, no, actually maybe they didn't know the right way to test. Like it's like, yeah, they were like, you know, whatever. I'm not picking on one or the other. I'm just saying you know the—you are probably here, you think you're here because duh, but it's actually you probably wouldn't have been able to do that because there's like—it's the same thing as sit down in class and learn some—like and you just regurgitate it. That's not a valuable thing. If you 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 learning, being able to do low-end reading and writing. I mean, God, 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—or Loki has come down and said, you know what, Karp, 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. It's like now, but it's really an inversion. Like everybody with like the normal shape skills are dyslexics because like the meaning—the thing they can do that used to be valuable is not so valuable. The thing that they need to learn to do is like be more of an artist, look at things from a different direction, be able to build something unique. And you see this on the battlefield. Like one of the most underappreciated things about fighting a war—which is the—I mean there are basic core things civilizations do like build technology for war—is every society fights differently. Every component of the society fights differently. And when like American allies, we do not even approach these problems in the same way. What 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, what not, what worked in a manual, like what worked in reality. Also even selection, if you look at the selection of 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 this big and like, you know, it's like because we have—we have specialized ways of doing that. All that is crazy valuable as a proxy indicator. People who are getting their news from you are just likely to massively outperform. People are getting their news from something that's a regurgitation of you got to vote for one party or the other. And then the real problem we have in society is not your listeners or Founders' customers or our partners. It's 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 again. 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 out you have no job? And 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 SaaS apocalypse 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 replatformed.
