You're surrounded by journals. Hold your position.
Overnight success.
Double leg, right?
That's misinformation.
Clearing order inbound. Let's just roll.
We are surrounded by journals. Hold your position. Come, get up. Trust the experts.
Five. We are founder.
Five good. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
UAV online. Blaze. Double blaze. Triple blaze. Double kill.
Cook is team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blades. Let's just roll. Right.
Mark clearing order inbound. Get up.
We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Strike one. Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode.
Mark clearing order inbound. Five good.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. Founder.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Thursday, June 4th, 2026. We are live from Palantir AIPCON. The Temple of Technology is back in Fortress of Finance. We will return to it, but it is also a state of mind. That's right. We are also sponsored by RAMP. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Big news from RAMP today. Massive fundraising a little bit. But first, we got to talk...
Oh, is it still going? I like it. The Ramp song's back.
This was early days. We really talked about RAMP so much. Turned it into a song. Anyway, the topic of conversation in DC has, it's still in AI world, but instead of talking about approving models before they're released today, it's about the bio threat. Brandon Guerell wrote in the TBPN newsletter today, the great houses of AI have united behind the bio threat. There's actually a lot more to that because it was a big long list of signatories from AI, but also from the bio world and biotech and even startups. We've seen former guests of the show sign on. I'm excited to bring some of those folks back on the show in the coming weeks and hear more about this because I have this belief that as AI advanced, we got cyber because it was such a tight feedback loop, such a tight verifiable reward. Reinforcement learning works really well in that context. Bio has some similar characteristics.
And it was a very tangible Y2K style moment. Exactly. Where there was, it was a let's just say powerful business strategy.
Yeah. Is it, yeah. It was like is it over? You start thinking about the consequence of this and you don't need to get to AGI super intelligence god. You can just have a really powerful tool that creates a new problem and that creates full employment for Nikesh Arora over at Palo Alto Networks who we had a chance to talk to yesterday and he's been very fortunate in implementing the solutions to the cyber security threats posed by new AI systems some of the new AI capabilities they're rolling out. But bio might be next. And so it's exciting to see that the great houses of AI are uniting behind the bio threats. So let's take you through this. First I'm going to tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. So in 1981 a group of researchers published the primary structure of the polio virus genome in the journal Nature. So they're basically open sourcing the sequence for making polio which just a few years earlier polio I think was on the decline by 1981 but a very very problematic virus. It's an RNA virus meaning that its nucleobases or building blocks are ACGU if you're familiar with RNA adenine, cytosine, guanine, and uracil. Put more plainly, thanks Brandon Guerell, he says when the researchers published the primary structure of the polio virus, they gave the world the literal sequence of polio virus building blocks in order from start to finish. By the mid-20th century, before mass vaccination, polio was paralyzing and killing more than half a million people per year worldwide. So you have this pretty deadly virus killing more than half a million people per year worldwide. And you have just open sourced it. What happens? So in 2002, researchers synthesized infectious polio virus from its publicly available sequence data. So they didn't actually need any of the polio virus RNA to start. They didn't need it on hand. They didn't need to. It's not like they took a little sample and they just cloned it up and made it bigger. They just took the data and they made the actual virus. So this is the shape of the threat. If there's a new virus or an existing virus or a forgotten about virus and you have the code to it, you can potentially print that RNA and then have the virus in your hands. Even if you don't have a sample, you weren't able to kill a sample. So instead, these researchers in 2002, they were able to take the published sequence, chemically synthesize short DNA fragments, assemble them into a full length DNA copy of the polio virus genome, and then use the DNA to make the viral RNA to fully recover the infectious virus. So in 2005, researchers used these same technologies to reconstruct the Spanish flu, a virus in 1918 that killed 675,000 Americans and had a 2 to 3% mortality rate among those infected. Very, very dangerous stuff. So basically, these two reconstructed viruses showed that having a physical virus on hand was no longer necessary as source material to create viruses. All you needed was the blueprints. As long as you have the code literally just like texted in a text file a bunch of ACGU, you can go and make this as long as you have the equipment on hand but that is getting democratized as well and that's what this AI letter is all about. So that's a situation that we're still in today except now that we have AI there are easier ways to potentially reconstruct DNA sequences that could create new viruses. So yesterday, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Alex Wang, and dozens of other high-profile leaders across AI, tech policy, nucleic acid synthesis, and biotech signed an open letter called in support of mandatory nucleic acid synthesis screening, and recordkeeping. You might have seen it on the timeline. And at first glance, Brandon here assumed, and I assumed the same thing, assumed it was another press release from a Frontier Lab claiming it had just discovered new capabilities in one of its internal models that would ultimately lead to catastrophe. A lot of this doom fear-based marketing has been happening. So, that was sort of the natural reaction. And that's what Brandon...
Some people's reaction would be, were we not doing recordkeeping here already?
That's a great question and Brandon actually did answer that. But, it's not just a PR stunt and it's not a new capability. They're not saying that the models can just create a novel virus, you know, one shot like that that is solved yet. It's not there, but they see it as something that's coming down the pipe. And this letter is not this dangerous new capability. It's more asking the US government to force nucleic acid synthesis companies to screen orders for sequences of concern. So, hey, somebody just ordered this. Looks a lot like a virus. Like, what are we doing here? You said that you were trying to treat cancer or you said that you were, you know, trying to make a new peptide and all of a sudden you're asking for polio virus or something that looks like polio virus. Like let's dig into this. That's where they're going with that. And so they also need to verify the legitimacy of the customer and to keep a record of what they're sending and to whom. That's a crazy one that I'm sure you're like, wait, they weren't keeping records. They were a little bit. He gets into this. So he says the reason the letter is coming out now is that the threat of nucleic acid synthesis sequencing getting into the wrong hands has been enhanced by AI. So anyone with an AI tool in the future could in theory if the models don't have safeguards on them could synthesize, could create a sequence that then they go to a nucleic acid sequence company get printed send it to them mix it up boom they got a virus not good. So most of the global nucleic acid synthesis industry has already signed up to do some of this. They did they started this in 2009 with what's called the international gene synthesis consortium and roughly 80% of commercial synthesis capacity worldwide is on board but membership...
20% still just hanging out we're good.
80% of nuclear weapons are safely stored. Don't ask about the other 20%. That's kind of what this letter is getting at because 80% it was a good first effort 2009 it's been 16 17 years. We haven't had...
Yeah. But there's a new reason to go further. Let's get that last 20%. That's what they're asking for. So membership is not a strong guarantee that they're actually screening or keeping records of their customers because it's voluntary. The 80% number is also self-reported, for example, and a bunch of other factors contribute to the relative flimsiness of the agreement.
You can opt into this program by just saying that you're opting into it, but then even the reporting once you're opted in is voluntary. So I think the way this works is the international gene synthesis consortium is probably a nonprofit NGO, non-governmental organization and all the companies they volunteer 80% of commercial synthesis volume has opted into this and then this organization the international gene synthesis consortium they say hey we've looked at the market and we're covering about 80% has opted into this we're on board with 80% and the government isn't coming in and checking the records. They're not actually saying, 'Okay, well, we have a different number because we're the government and you have your this number. Let's verify this number.' It's self-reported by that organization, but there's no reason not to trust that organization necessarily. So what else?
Bunch of other factors contribute to the relative flimsiness of this agreement. HHS also has guidance in place around the issue, but again, it's voluntary, meaning that the possibility of bad actors getting their hands on dangerous nucleic acid sequences, at least from American companies, still cannot be ruled out. Overall, it's good to see industry leaders signing this letter and doubly refreshing that the letter is not yet another warning of apocalyptic AI doom, which I think the public has unfortunately come to expect from announcements like this. Hopefully, the relevant legislators are paying attention and can make this happen in short order. So, I thought that was a good breakdown and I agree with a lot of that. Andrew Curran also has some deep dive on this with some more of the signatories. He shares screenshots of all of these and it really is everyone. Yeah, Y Combinator, DeepMind, Microsoft, Interconnect AI, Harvard, tons of stuff. And then over in the nucleic acid synthesis industry, you have Twist Bioscience, ANZA, Emerald Cloud Lab, and Kathleen McMahon from Boss is on here, former guest of the show.
So, good news, but obviously and just an early step. This is just an open letter to the government saying hey we think you should we want to support this we think that the government should start thinking about this. The other news in the bio world...
Yeah, I mean the news is just that there's incredible momentum in biotech, early stage biotech. After...
Momentum, but not like volume, not scale yet because you're looking at $3 trillion IPOs going out this year potentially. So much news in AI, Micron's out of trillion. Every chip stock is, you know, in the hundreds of billions, trillions. This is much smaller, but...
But it's notable because biotech had been left for dead in some ways. We had a biotech investor on probably 14 months ago at this point who said I don't even know I mean just looking at the returns so far I don't know why you would invest in this asset class. But of course every asset class kind of goes through that kind of phase and clearly there's a lot of momentum...
And they should be, you would expect that biotech would be similarly power law driven maybe not as extreme but if you pull out SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic from capital...
Yes but I feel like the biotech community has a little bit more of like a culture of like base hits, doubles, triples where they flip companies pretty frequently in the...
Yeah we had that didn't we have a guy on that had sold like three companies. We didn't have when we were billion dollar exits.
Yep. And then he joined another company and sold it for three billion like the next day. And so...
So anyways, you have Isomorphic Labs spun out of DeepMind, Coinbase or not Coinbase, but Brian spun out or like founded New Limit. You have Retro...
A new round. We're gonna get Jacob on the show as well for that.
Altos Labs from Jeff the Chad from Amazon. Funny as this post puts it. Anthropic obviously acquired Coefficient Bio as well. But Jensen and Larry Ellison at Oracle are also doing stuff so there's a lot of activity it's very fun and I hope we're going to be able to cover this a lot more in the near future.
At what point do the, at what point does like a Pfizer or Johnson & Johnson start joining the press release economy of just coming, I'm not saying it'd be a good thing but coming out and saying, we believe we're, you know, right at the...
Because there are partnerships all the time that happen and they're always just like tucked a little bit deeper in the Wall Street Journal because AI is dominating and even private credit takes the front seat to the bio news, but there's a whole bunch of deal making going on. Anyway, there's other deal making going on in fintech. We're going to talk about RAMP's raise today. But first, I'm going to tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. So, RAMP...
What's going on in RAMP land?
44 billion valuation. Really, really solid traction just, you know, every 12 18 months, sometimes much quicker. Sometimes they do two rounds in two weeks, but really solid progress. They raised $750 million at a $44 billion valuation. Last time we grew this fast, we were 120th of the size. So accelerating.
This is the most notable thing to me. Lots of chatter on the timeline around, you know, other fintech valuations. You compare them...
Apocalypse. Well, yeah. You compare them to, you know, RAMP is now worth more than PayPal.
PayPal has 32 billion of revenue.
But PayPal certainly has, I would say, negative momentum. Yeah.
Whereas RAMP has incredible momentum and this is the standout line. They were 120th the size the last time they were growing this fast and so...
Yeah just really really really impressive execution. Yeah. And incredible opportunity still.
Yeah. So Eric took to the timeline posted an essay about the third pillar comparing the previous eras of value creation. The two pillars people and vendors dating back to 600 BCE. If you're not thinking in millennia, what are you doing here? Tokens emerged as the third pillar in 2026 AD. And he calls it the quadrillion token blind spot. Boil down 500 years of finance. And it's really just three questions. Who spent what? Was it worth it? What's the bill next month? I mean, people get caught up in all these crazy things. I mean, you see this in like marketing, I'm sure, and ad buying where people will do all these crazy analyses and ROI ROAS and all this other stuff and like and it's always useful to zoom out and just be like, okay, we spent a bunch of money. Did the bank balance go up in this company or not?
All personal and business finance at the end eventually comes down to are we making more money than we're spending?
Yeah. And I think yeah, Eric is right to dive super deep into like token optimization and thinking about the tools that they're building, but then at the same time like don't get lost in the sauce and like actually zoom out and try and understand like what is the core value that you're delivering to your customer. It is answering that question. So fantastic news over there. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. You got to do it. It's my number one advice for founders these days. There's some other fundraising news. Sabi, the Beanie BCI company is getting preempted at 35 million at 500 million post. This is a leak from R for Rock. We'll see where it goes.
This is huge for you.
Because you are a beanie guy.
Keeps it together. Yeah, I like a beanie. Very very...
It's interesting. I think that this format...
Of course I'm sure they can adapt it to other types of hats.
But this format certainly maybe makes it harder to build momentum in places like California, at least Southern California, Arizona.
Be big amongst creative directors though.
Yeah. Huge. Huge potentially. Silver Lake. Silver Lake. Yeah. Every...
It's not too hard to change a beanie into a cowboy hat. Like that's just extra leather around it. You could wrap the beanie in the cowboy hat. You can wear...
Here's what's interesting though. So R for Rock. Yeah. Usually it's pretty dialed. Pretty dialed. Pretty dialed. It's almost like he has inside information. It's almost like he somehow got...
Yeah. But I mean, we've talked about the game theory of like does he work at a real like tier one venture capital firm that's like what's the benefit of leaking everything? Is he a lawyer that's seeing all the docs turn around? Zero benefit for a lawyer, right? Um the rush of getting likes on the timeline is pretty universal. You're a lawyer, you're just like, 'Ah, I need a banger.' Out of fund. Okay. For sure. Yeah. And I don't know anything else. But he's always taken the view that it can be helpful to the founder to build because a bunch of people are going to see this. Sure. That this didn't sort of land in their deal flow or land on their desk and they're going to reach out, right? So, it does create momentum. But can certainly be annoying for teams as well. This was notable though. So, 200 million of LOI from B2B customers...
And so very curious what the enterprise play is here.
I don't know but we can work on getting a whole...
Does that mean like through hospital networks or through like the health care system or is it like Mark Zuckerberg wants to go further? He wants to track the brain waves of the employees not just track your screen.
We're also going to track your brain. I mean it could go either way because you imagine like Neuralink has had a bunch of traction and bunch of amazing I saw Nolan the first patient P0 on Rogan talking about playing COD with the Neuralink. Amazing. And you can imagine that at a certain point like some sort of partnership.
They have multiple hat form factors.
There we go. Hats coming. We're good. I was getting really hung up on the beanie. I'm like there's so many different enterprise or B2B contexts. You're in a warehouse in Dallas, Texas in the summer.
Yeah. You don't know. Maybe this $200 million LOI is from REI or Patagonia. You know, you don't know who makes beanies. What's the Carhartt? Carhartt makes a great beanie.
Go. You don't know any of this stuff. You're completely out to lunch. I went through the beanie economy. Beanie economy. Anyway, beanie market map. Work on it. Let me tell you about public.com. Public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously, stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more. All with great customer service.
They just launched a feature today that allows you to connect your favorite chat app to public.
Yes. And more important than ever, because with public, you're going to be able to go and create the S&P 499 if you don't like SpaceX or the S&P 1 if you love SpaceX. You can express your opinion about SpaceX however you want. Can you please help me build an index for one company?
Yes, index for one company or index for everything but one company. SpaceX is very divisive. People are extremely optimistic in certain camps. Extremely pessimistic.
Very optimistic. Goldman expects SpaceX's AI revenue to surge a hundred times by 2030.
Big big number. I looked at this title and I was thinking like, okay, what's Grok's actual revenue today? If you take out X, what is their AI revenue today? Is it just Grok subscriptions plus Grok tokens? Do you include X subscriptions? Do you include cloud vendor and neo cloud contracts? There's a bunch of different ways to measure it. The smaller the number, the easier it is to 100x. But we have seen other AI companies 100x revenues over two years, over three years, four years. Like the 100x has become, it's not a one-of-a-one scenario.
It's happened multiple times. And so we have seen these charts many times and if they execute well there this is entirely possible. It is extremely...
Other notable data points from the road show.
Yeah. They the forecast anticipate SpaceX making about 360 billion of capital expenditures through 2028. Jensen somewhere fist pumping very excited about that number be a new hyperscaler. And anyways very...
Should be unsurprising but very aggressive. Yeah. And yeah the enterprise story is also live too. I saw the new Nvidia foundation model is also live. We'll have to go check it out and look at the model card soon. See how it's benchmarking. But we got to move on to benchmark because there's new news in the benchmark world. First I'm going to tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. So...
Moment of silence. Why is that sense?
The end of an era, the last...
I guess they have been very focused for decades. The last tier one that was a pure venture capital.
What did they get called again? Internet boys or something.
Oh, soft boys. There was some book about them that was very funny. But e boys is a hit piece of a book title.
It's a fantastic book, but the subtitle makes up for it. And it's a fantastic book and it's a very interesting story where they actually let a journalist come in and see how they true story of the six tall men.
He clearly wrote the subtitle and was like, I got to take the edge off of this. It's too glazy. I got to take it down a notch. And so he threw the e boys in there. But anyways, big moves from Benchmark. Tate Clark has a scoop in the journal. Benchmark has raised two billion across two new funds.
And most notably their first ever dedicated growth fund.
Do they hire anyone who has experience growth investing? Who could possibly do growth investing there? Someone who's maybe like a Bond Capital and then Founders Fund then maybe Kleiner. Like someone with that kind of background I think would be fantastic.
Pretty good for growth investing.
Now that you say that though. Yeah. Ev Randall.
Ev Randall. That's right.
They did pick him up. They're almost thinking two steps ahead there. Are they building their fund strategy now? Their entire platform strategy around Ed Randall potentially. Potentially. Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And we are very fortunate to be joined by Alex Karp in just a minute. He's coming in to speak with us at AIPCON here. We're going to bring him in in just a minute.
While we wait, Austin based podcaster Joe Rogan reportedly being considered for 60 Minutes. Looks like they're gonna have to call it 200 minutes because he records long podcasts and 60 minutes isn't enough for him.
Hundreds. It'll just be called...
Barry, if you're listening, put us in. Put us in the ring. We're ready to go. You need tech, business correspondent, someone who can just chop it up for 60 minutes. We do 60 minutes three times a day. We're ready to go. This is going to be light work for us. Barry...
I'm ready. I'm ready. You could do 60 minutes right now. You could do 60 minutes tomorrow. You could do 60 minutes. You could do an extra 60 minutes easily when you're putting up. We're putting up a thousand minutes a week. It's no problem.
We did consider that at one point early on. We thought, should we do basically a morning show? Oh, yeah. Take a two-hour break and come back and do another show. Late night show. Yeah, late night show, maybe. Anyway, we have Alex Karp here with us.
Welcome to the show. Welcome back. Thank you so much for taking the time. We're going to have you grab these headphones, right? Not these.
You can sit close. Get in here. We got...
We liked it last time. The three of us were sitting here.
No, we can. We can put the giant. Let's put this up here. Right here. I'll sit. You can stand. This always works. Makes me feel... Yeah. Get in here close. This is good. Feel good. Okay. Feel good. How is it going? How is AIPCON this time around? What's changed?
Well, we're in a phase. All each one of these things like marks a time. First of all, you guys are even more baller, more successful.
Some tendies in your pocket.
I think it might have been part two. We got to say thank you. You know, it's like blew us up. You're looking bigger and stronger. So, hey, are you more attractive in your personal life now? Randomly.
Well, here's what we're actually focused on. Dead hangs.
So, you came on last time. You said your dead hangs around like five...
Oh, no. It's, well, it's plateaued in the last couple months at 5:30.
5:30. Okay. So, we... The thing is like people are going to hear that. They're going to think hanging on a bar. How hard could it be? You got to go and do it. The audience has to go try to do it. We've started doing it. We're still in the...
We're still between... somewhere around a minute 30. You feel like your tendons are going to rip.
300 dead hang is respectable.
2 minutes is super elite.
It does feel respectable when you have the five minute number. You're looking at the...
I think strength matters. No. The thing is I don't want to go into rabbit hole in training. The single biggest mistake people make is they try to hang every day. You need recovery. It's like anything else. So if you want to mimic and get progress, you just do what I do, which is once a week you hang as long as you can. Doesn't have to be super macho. And then that's your day. So like just say you can do 130...
No, no, no. One day a week you do your maximum.
So like let's say you could do two minutes. Okay. You try to do at least 1:30. You fight to get to 1:30, but you don't fight to get to two minutes. Got it. That's your dead hang day. And then you can basically [__] around the next day. Do whatever you want. Don't overdo it, but you could do two times one minute with a long break.
Mhm. And then can't you just go around do less and less and less two days before if you two-minute dead hang you do like four times 15 seconds the day before you take off...
And you do that just keep doing that and you're dead. What the mistake people make is they hear my ball or time...
[__] that guy. I mean the mistake you're making is not doing a course. This could be a whole new revenue line. This could be a whole new revenue line of...
Pound. You guys have it more for you guys. Be like, 'Hey, call in.' So, yeah, I mean, the dead hang is a it's like and also some of it's just genetic. Like my other metrics are elite, but this is somehow alien territory.
What about breath hold underwater?
I don't do that. And I'm not sure I have like I grew up swimming. I think I'm weaker at that. Like I bet you I'd be in your guys range.
I'm a dive master. I can hold my breath for three minutes.
And I'm just Yeah. I'm just Yeah. So, I think you would be I think you'd be crushing me on that, honestly. But you have like the lung capacity of a whale. That's true. I mean, like you got like I'm not moving. I'm not using. It's like you're like a whale floating out there under the ocean waiting to surface. True.
So, no, I say I'll tell you the difference. God, they're always minding me out there. But like, okay, when we first met, it was like AI may be real. Okay. Then I would say somehow until about two weeks ago there was like a holy [__] this is real but...
Somehow it's not working but we're not allowed to say it publicly because we'll look stupid. Yeah.
And then there's a lot of investor hype.
There still is like investors printing tendies. So you have the investors on one side. I think people realize it's real but...
You know it's like you know you have the whole token maxing. Yep. And people are on to that and then so there's a whole value lecture there. Y...
Um you have a political situation where you know people who do not understand basic economics are winning the political argument. So you can we could talk about where...
There's a lot here. Let's break it up. Let's start with the token maxing thing. Let's start with what's real. How are you actually thinking about deploying AI? First of all, what is Palantir's philosophy around token consumption?
Well, like we Okay. We have a product that will allow you to ba I mean internally it's called something but externally but really we call it the demastatory like get off masturbation thing internally. Sure. It's like people are just like sitting there all day kind of like a porn addiction and enterprises are like okay we knew this we believe this will create value but we cannot have people just like some people...
Checking the weather with it just like and just rearranging deck chairs on their personal Titanic.
Literally like porn like people are like full on...
Yeah tool-shaped objects tool-shaped objects you're looking at more than you want you hope no one notices you're kind of...
It feels productive to have every email classified with...
Here's what it comes down to like business problems can never be I mean sometimes they can be solved purely with money and just spending more but very often...
Actually I think it's the opposite so just to give you a weird an...
No and I was going to say very very often it's more the opposite where it's about figuring out the right way to do something and then you can use capital to fuel that process but...
Let me give you a thing that's too generous for you guys.
Okay it's taste plus money.
And there is no like AI like if you look at like pick any issue you want to talk about token mechanism maxing what's going on with deploy codes are other people going to build ontologies why does our political class not understand AI especially in Europe it's like yes because all these things can be scaled in a very valuable but largely going to commodified way but you can't scale the taste of like what is the business problem you want to have to solve and need to solve at the end of the day whether it's in the for whether it's the Ukrainians fighting the Israelis commercial entities it's there's somebody sitting there who's like okay but this problem is valuable this problem isn't and once that value that problem is always has that problem...
Always almost always but not always has attributes so there are some problems you could solve with this like I want to write a report on GDP growth in China right okay but if it's a problem that requires a knowledge store like I want to understand the specialized way I underwrite. We're going to have a guest here. I want to understand the specialized way I drill for oil and gas that's both legal, ethical, and reduces the cost of production. I want to change the supply chain of my industry, whether that's military or whether that's building boxes or whether that's cars. These things require actual precise ongoing processes. They are enhanced by large language models. They are not replaced by large language models. And then you get to security issues like but for us like the whole myth of things is just a boon because like yeah we could take any model their model OpenAI model sure...
Open model we can identify we can now identify vulnerabilities at like 10 100x yeah but then who patches them...
How do you patch them on prem how do you patch them on prem so that your specialized knowledge stays on prem like if you're any business or Intel service a lot of these things are very similar like you're not putting your classified data in a public cloud. Same thing if you're like you have a special way of farming soybeans.
Yeah. Well, you're not. So, it's like how do you have how do you so all these problems are exposed identified and then...
You always have a thing of where's the charisma which people really underestimate and it's not global. There's no global charisma now. Like so right now the large language models are very frontier companies are super charismatic with investors. Mhm.
I'll give you some news. They're super not charismatic with enterprises and the people like in a way.
Because I understand what the people...
No, no. The enterprise people. I have a secret. I have a secret like every company has a secret way of selling. You know what my secret way of selling is? Don't even call. Don't come talk to us. There's a frontier company. Go spend two days with them. And if you're lucky, after you're done, I'll let you in my door. They're like clamoring. They're like, 'Hey, I'll take your bad brand.' We have a great brand in enterprise, but like it's like secret knowledge because the investors love this. They're like, 'Hey, my stocks are all up. Everything's up. I mean, Palantir's done very well. We're like, but it's like and you know, you guys are doing very well, I imagine.' Right? And it's okay. We're you know, we can But I'll tell you what, you go down the street, you talk to a marine, you talk to a bus driver, you talk to the person who owns the bus driving company...
They are not happy. They do not like these people. They're tired of people token maxing. Yeah. That it looks like masturbation at their that's cost them money. They're like And honestly, then you have something we're not allowed to talk about in this country. Likability.
Like a Palantir. We have I think we have like 50 100 million global fans. We have like 5 million people that wake up in the morning literally calling me Satan.
I didn't know I had that kind of warm hand. But you know, it's like that's what they believe.
Yeah. And like and they really believe it. Okay. What people are not allowed to really address is like we have fans and enemies.
Yeah. These people polarizing.
Yeah. We're polarizing which means both sides. Yep. These people have one side.
They're just It is. So it's like you and it's like it's a really big...
Social media companies too have the same problem.
Everyone uses them but no one likes them.
Yeah. But then they also live in a circle and that circle's printing money.
So it's like you know when you look in the mirror and you just printed a lot of money, you look pretty fresh. Is part of it that some element of the technology let's just say LLMs is so magical that the companies involved that the companies that are making and selling frontier intelligence can be bad at a bunch of other things and still grow...
Well no no they are magical at a certain kind of thing allowing you to write for example code now that code doesn't can't be used as a knowledge store so if you look at code in like three different ways like just using Palantir as a model we have code That's basically infrastructure. So what are the Ukrainians using? What is the department of war using? What do a lot of our enterprises? We call that primitives. It's basically hard-coded things that understand the world low way do you do? It would take millions of technical hours and an understanding of all these enterprises to do it. So it's much more like how do you build a steel beam? Then you have like code that is written by FDAs.
Okay. So that's kind of managed. It's the reason why FDAs work. The secret is it's actually managed on something that we as a product. So you're writing to a codebase. We're managing that. We're increasing our product. It's not just random people write. Then you have let's call it free code.
That free code is that's magical. Like you can do it very quickly. It's almost right. It doesn't have to be exact.
Dashboards, dashboards, financial stuff, probabilistic stuff where you just have to get one off analysis.
It was magical. By the way, it's magical. It not only creates and it's magical in a way. I know people don't like the porn thing, but it's also addicting. It's like, you know, it's not good for you, but you know, it may lead to damage.
One more dashboard, one more time. It can't hurt that much. I know my doctor says I shouldn't do it, but it's like that, right? And you just keep go and like and if you're involved in that thing, you're also making money.
And then last not least in certain circles like if you have you want to be a Rust researcher or you believe essentially it's a religion. So like you know and like one of the things is very charismatic especially to people who've never had a religion because all of a sudden that hole in your heart that was yearning for I don't know I would say you know an established religion Judaism, Christianity, Islam is like being filled.
And all the answers are there but it's very very successful at doing things that a company has to do.
But it is not actually solving the problem that enterprises are. It is now it can solve them. That's the trick. It's not binary. It's not like you can't say they're not valuing. They're totally putting our business on...
Steroids. Like without LM, nobody would be talking about our ontology, about Apollo managing SEC exploits, about our ability to manage an enterprise essentially as turning all these companies into FDES. These deploy codes, we love them because now every company wants a deploy code. You know how you do that? You replatform on Palantir and it actually works. It's not somebody with no taste, who's never done enterprise, who has no earthly clue how these things work, who's done something else, and is just imagining they know how to do it, right?
Yeah. Is part of this moment quite entertaining for you because you guys have been working on understanding businesses at a deep fundamental level, creating... you guys have effectively been doing the work that people are promising AI can do for 20 years now but actually doing it, finding all the really rough edges and being at a point where you don't have to oversell the technology. You can sell both things. But now there's maybe...
Here we go. We got it together. Now there's maybe...
Oh, it's the wrong side. That's why. Flip it around.
There you go. There you go. Living the brand. Living the brand.
We got that. I don't know. All that stuff wasn't recording.
I trailed off. But is part of it entertaining to you that it feels like Palantir has always been in some ways not had competitors because there's nobody with Alex Karp running a company that does what Palantir does besides Palantir. But at the same time, there's been tens of billions of dollars deployed now to effectively do what Palantir does, but just selling the intelligence part, not selling all the underlying kind of infrastructure that you...
Well, they're doing two things. They're trying to sell the intelligence part and they're trying to pretend if you just hire a bunch of people and let them run around their FDS. Now, the very cool thing is when you've been in your basement doing your thing and everyone kind of views it as the freak show, it's really interesting and great to have adoption. The pretty ironic thing is half the people adopting now don't even know they're copying. But now the copying thing helps and hurts. Where it hurts is in the beginning it puts clutter in the market.
And there's no doubt about it. Where it helps, and then we saw this with defense tech honestly. So like in defense tech, we were the only people. We were the first people despite what... I love these honestly other podcasters. They're interviewing people who are parroting things I said 20 years ago. They don't know it and it's like oh that's so insightful. It's like yeah of course it's insightful. Karp said it 25 years ago. But so that part is super weird but what really happens when we see is like it expands the market. So like in defense tech we would not be doing this well just purely in government unless there weren't 50 companies that were doing similar things because then the people are like okay first of all...
You view it as like off-balance sheet sales resources where other people are basically...
Well, they do two things. They increase the size of the market because de facto nobody wants to underwrite a market where there's only one person. So like if you're the one person the percentage of the defense budget you can get is much smaller. And two they set up a comparator. It's like you know you may not like the freak show. Okay, but have you noticed the people who are serious buy it and then it changed. And then three it changes the standard. Now what you're seeing now is like that times 100x.
Yeah. And it does change like recruiting, retention and like how you build a company and we're always... you have to think about how to... being dyslexic huge advantage there because like you don't have a playbook and now that need you need things to shift and we're doing that. The central thing though that is just cannot be developed even if you understood the playbook. A lot of these things appear like it's like you know LM code appears like Palantir code but isn't for a deployed thing, appears like Palantir it isn't ontology. You could theoretically copy parts of it, but they're essentially structures that are built deep into organizations that we own. And by the way, take you three years. And in three years, we're in a completely different world. But there is this magical thing called taste. Like in the end of the day, the reason why you guys have done so well, it's of course there's aptitude and diligence and showing up and all those things. But you have to be able to differentiate between two people who are in business, one of whom is saying something that sounds weird, that is insightful, one of whom is parroting something that sounds weird and that's all they're doing. And a lot of people, very few people can do that. And you have the same thing like the enterprises that succeed, there is a taste arbiter. And at Palantir, we have taste in every product, taste in every deployment, taste in every casting. Who puts the people there? How do you put them there? How do you organize the thing? Our ontology then does that technically. How do you manage the whole org with taste? Who should be in charge? What data set should come in? What are the ways in which you protect? What should you push into the public cloud? What should be on prem? What should... I mean leaving aside the law and like wars or ethics? What do you want to protect? What should you protect? What should you not protect? Because quite frankly, you want that to be out there so you can get more data. All those things are arbitrated by taste. And then you have to have the credibility of having taste. That's a real problem for a lot of these places because they don't have... they're popular with their friends. They really don't understand how unpopular they are in enterprise. Like they think it's like oh yeah like the way I think I have a problem with like professors at Columbia. It's like no it's a real problem. Like they think I'm Satan and you know it's like I think you know we grew up in the same community. Let's talk about Heidegger. They're like they don't want to talk about Heidegger.
So it's like...
Yeah. And so that's just a weird thing. It's going to be a super... The one thing I would say for anyone listening, if you're listening to this and you're chillaxing and not active, I'm not saying you have to agree with me politically or anything. There... partly because of this dynamic and very self-inflicted because I tell you I can't name names. I called many of the titans of this world and started this six months ago like every couple days...
We're going to be nationalized every couple days.
Like some of them I'm like, 'Yeah, we're going to be...' I mean, you know, it's like honestly they're like the bat. They find me very entertaining. Like I'm not sure. Like so they call cuz Yeah. It's like, 'Oh yeah, this is going to be entertaining. You're going to pick up.' Yeah. So any case, so I've been telling them for 6 months, six. We're going to be nationalized.
Yeah. You talked about...
We're going to be nationalized. And they're like, 'Why would anyone nationalize? Never happened in America. It's never... Why would anyone nationalize us? We're so likable. We're creating so much value.' Like okay I'm not going to debate that I know how likable I am I'm not going to tell you how likable you are but I am telling you and you know the momentum on this is on the side of people nationalizing if we don't get our act together and figure out ways we can say hey look there are problems here we're going to deal with these things are not going to... yes they are going to create opportunities you have to talk openly about how these things are valuable because we have adversaries you can't just say these all that stuff so the primary risk honestly to Palantir and a lot of these other companies is... and it's going to be nationalized before national... it's going to be regulated by people who don't understand this. And now they'll tell you in private I'm working on this. I'm doing this lobbyist. It's like not going to work. So like that's something like if you're listening to this and you're like look you know you don't have to agree with me on all my proclamations. I got a lot of... by the way there's some people who think I'm saying we should have a draft. Too lazy to read. I'm just saying we should like in a world where everything is changing. Everything is changing. Don't we have to find some communal structure to remember we're American? You don't like my idea of like we all do a week in the park? Great. Come up with some other idea. We can have no idea, you know, and then they're like, 'Well, I'm saying I do not want a draft, just to be explicit.' They're like, 'Oh, that's pro-war.' No, honestly, you know what? Most of our wars are fought because no working-class person is making a decision. You start making sure everyone is involved in everything. I'll see you how few wars we fight. It's actually the anti-war position. But any case, disagree with everything. If you're... we have on the right and on the left people who have no earthly clue what they're talking about right and left.
All they're talking about is how much they hate us and those of us who are sensible in the middle.
You know too many of us are chillaxing like oh like nationalization it can't happen. America would never do that.
Sleepwalking into it and you guys have tendies to protect now. You guys should be on the front line of this. Like you got full... Oh, I'm sorry. Hey, I have a full on very impressive corporate leader coming on. So, I got to turn it down.
Last question. Last question if we have time. How are your conversations going with Fortune 500 CEOs around headcount planning? There's been so many layoffs this last year that people were saying, hey, we're getting so much out of AI. We're able to, you know, cut back here or there. People inside tech often know like these maybe there's just a reduction because there needs to be a reduction or got bloated maybe they do need to fund some AI...
Declining business model.
Yeah the business just doesn't have momentum but how are those conversations going what does it look like?
Like... I by the way I talk to Fortune 500 companies I talk to unions I talk to soldiers I talk to fire... if you upskill somebody they're more valuable. And like all these whether it's people working on batteries, people driving trucks, people corporate leaders and again this is where I think we have to be very careful to be more disciplined on the corporate side. Like if you run around saying AI allowed you to fire two-thirds of your workforce and you did it because maybe your competitor's kicking your ass. Yeah, that could... that is a really... like you might as well just go sign up for Bernie Sanders manifest. And part of the thing is they really believe that can't happen. So they're free riding on the fact that it could... like we have and it just cannot work anymore. These things are very very explosive. The American people sense that there is something dangerous here. And when people are playing with that fire, it's like they assume the fire won't burn their hands. That's not the world we're in. That fire is going to consume us. And what we see, again, the war fighting example is just the most neutral, not for everybody, but like the soldiers at the bottom have gotten much more valuable. And I don't even just mean the special operators, which obviously they're in a different league, but like every... the people doing a lot of the operations now are doing our product. They're high school vocationally trained. You see this everywhere. The modern enterprise is going to have like we have a true like very very very smart person coming on and it's like you're going to have a very smart executive. He's much better at hiding it than I would be if I were him. But that's... you can talk to him about that. And then very talented, creative people with taste all up and down the stack. Any case, I think this is time for me to...
Oh, they want me to stay for two minutes or what?
Oh, I'm only going to stay. Look, but just a minute. He's got to be the star.
Put it... Put him... Put you go in here.
