How are they going to feel when you dedicate the next 10 years of your life to building what you think is valuable? Stay off the meth and you'll do very well. We're a high volatility business basically and um I most people at Palanteer u are kind of like 25 and look 12. So, usually like day begins with some 12-year-old looking person telling me how wrong I am. Uh, and the day ends with a 12-year-old looking person telling me how wrong I am. And in between they tell me how wrong I am. And uh um and it's just like you know lots of problems we have internally. uh we have we have in in tech we have uh we're had a number of innovations but I would say um most of them are uh on the product side but then they're the result of a a culture that is very flat so below me there are three or four direct reports and then everyone else has only a fake title to be used at a company so someone takes them seriously even though they look 18. And so as you've seen and um we we have a global business. It's now mostly in America because America is growing so quickly. And um the we have essentially it's split up into verticals. Government commercial inside and outside of America where commercial and uh government inside America is by far the most important part. And um and so it's like problem solving. Uh what what my most of my time is spent I I hired the first four or 500 people and um I we we believe in managing peak talent. So we want people we hire some of the smartest people in the world and we've been famous for that. But then we really are trying to teach them that they're probably um the way I explain it to them is I I'm the only it was by the way an incredible introduction and I wish my parents were here. Uh uh the one thing that I I'm uh I'm is this I'm incredibly dyslexic and I that's the only thing that you wasn't in there but and I basically tell everybody I've managed now 8,000 people and only one of them actually wasn't dyslexic. It's just everyone else didn't realize they weren't dyslexic. And so I I I try to get I'm spending a lot of my time getting people to work on the the thing they're really the best in the world at and accept that even though they got great grades on everything else, it's just not valuable for us. And that takes a lot of time and energy and therapy. And in between that, I'm I in the beginning I was explaining to them why it was mostly dudes. is like, you know, explaining to them, well, you may, you know, it's like, well, if I'm so smart, why can't I get a date? And uh that was a lot of my day. And uh but uh and um so now we've kind of gravitated to like more, you know, normal industrial problems, but it's we also were we're very opinionated. Um I mean, I we built the company. I believe that western institutions and the west are superior way to to live and we've fought for that and um uh for me that means uh you know meritocracy free markets first second third amendment is not so super relevant unless somebody moves into your house but the fourth amendment um and uh um and um that has often been very unpopular for decade and a half in Silicon Valley. The idea that you would build your company around um helping uh the US government was viewed as kind of stupid which in Silicon Valley is worse than being bad. Um and uh you and so we were uh very controversial and um uh that's changed a lot partly because people realized it was wrong and quite frankly because if somebody makes a lot of money on something then it must be right. So we've changed the world by humiliating people and getting rich. Uh it's the most effective way for social change is humiliate your enemy and make them poor. And uh uh that that's how social change actually happens. And uh um and um and so I think we and then Palunteer alumni really played a huge role in that. Um and uh but but the controversy has been a really big part of what our DNA and being very unpopular uh for 18 17 18 years even in the DoD like we we power in the beginning we started um with our first product was a product to basically reconcile data bases so that you could find terrorists and not violate civil liberties and the central idea was if you just found terrorists but violated civil liberties, what would be the point if the end goal of a better or western society would not be achieved? But if you just were a philanthropy and just did civil liberties, you'd have lots of terror attacks and then of course eventually you'd have no civil liberties. So um that was our core product. That product is still powers most intel clandestine anti-terror organizations in the west um uh broadly defined. And then we uh entered the DoD where jumping forward a lot we built um project Maven. We now we ended up building it because Google decided um that it couldn't support the US military. Google's now changed a lot but um and that that was the first actual use of AI to identify and effectively target our enemies on the battlefield and um has played a very very big role. Uh and then in between we developed commercial products probably less interesting um but they are driving at least half our market cap. Um but consistent all the way through was um being unpopular for supporting special operators, being unpopular for supporting the DoD, being unpopular for stopping terror attacks as crazy as it seems. Um and uh and we have whole governments like the Communist Party in France has it in their has it has has it in their uh commanding doctrine that if they ever win the first thing they'll do is fire Palunteer which is I'm very proud of. So I send that to our shareholders please. Um, so I I want to come back to this notion that you guys were unpopular across so many years and how that drove your business, but many of our members know what Palunteer does. Some, I'm sure, don't. Hopefully they're shareholders, some I'm sure don't. For those who don't, how would you describe what you guys do, what what you bring to your customer? The most important thing we've done for you is help establish dominance on the battlefield with the DoD and stop hundreds of terror attacks. Um and so that's um now uh uh uh it we have a a thriving commercial business. It grew 71% last quarter. So and we're at a very pretty significant scale and there's that it's we make we make money on our money which is unusual in software. People have growth but no profitability. We have a lot of both. But um the reason for that is a little more technical. There's lots of hundreds of use cases we're doing commercial in the commercial space. But the basic we were years ahead for lots of reasons of anticipating uh what operational AI would mean meaning AI where you make more money or your revenue goes up and your costs go down. Um and we our platforms are built to uh use large language models and machine learning in a way that is actually operationally effective. And um we had a relatively privileged insight or we into how you would do that and built this thing called an ontology which manages large language models in a way where they become crazily useful both commercially and actually on the battlefield. Um and um you know and so use typical use cases are underwriting, managing, acquisition of soft of of of uh of real estate at scale, construction at scale, supply chain management anywhere where you have volatility. Uh understanding the true cost of your of inputs into your into your enterprise, which is super hard to do at scale, especially if things are shifting or they're disruptions. um reimagining your business into a digital as opposed to a non-digital business. Um and um and then our claim to fame really is we absorb uh we absorb the risk of creating value which is the typical way you build software that the the vulgar version I won't use the way you're taught to build a software company is uh you know your customer thinks they're getting laid but they're getting effed and uh uh and uh we we uh are we used to internally say no we're in the mutual pleasuring business both sides to be happy and uh and so um we are you know we absorb we absorb the risk of value creation so like you will make more money your enterprise will work better that's been a bonanza and we're pretty much alone in doing that in the world but the truth is we're also riding the back of the fact that this is just an American revolution um and um and you know we were we had a very unique and have a very unique idea of how to use the technologies and the classic Silicon Valley way up until recently was just buy some large language model and you know have a nice chat with it and that that really doesn't create any actual enterprise value. So that that's that part of our business is is very very strong. uh in America it's actually harder in continental Europe but I think eventually they'll come around to um seeing that the most enterprises that are successful will become hardware software enterprises. So when you guys showed up in the early days with the DoD and you were offering your services I take it you were not the prototypical company offering your services. How how were you how did you show up differently? What kind of reaction did you get? And how did you convince the skeptics to give you a shot? Well, there were two parts of the many of you know this, but there there's there's the special operations part of our of the war fighting. And there the reception was actually pretty much we don't care how freaky you are. If the thing works, we'll use it. And that's where we got off the ground. Um and uh our our product was used to identify basically do predictive analytics on where improvised explosives were going to be placed and that saved a lot of lives and and also even you know brought people home with less injuries and that the adoption in special operations was very different than in other places. So I would say operational components of intel and operational components of of the special operations command are are flatter and because they're flatter like the leadership and the people who are de facto risking their lives uh are more in dialogue and and so uh even though they have a lot less money they have t tend to have more flexibility in procurement and they're less likely to buy some BS thing that takes 80 years to build that's never going to work and then that that that that went with with huge ups and downs that went reasonably well. Um although it was very hard and up until recently no one else succeeded at even that. Now they have a lot of defense tech startups that are uh the big army the DoD was spending I think it was like $26 billion 26 by the way when they their accounting doesn't include things like employees buildings flights normal things that you have to account for uh salaries um it's like 26 billion of pure just like cash but um it's Um, so, uh, rebuilding a product we wanted to sell to them for, I think, I don't know, a couple million a month. And like we, and then, uh, we couldn't get them. Uh, eventually we had to sue them. And uh, and by the way, you're the golden rule of working with the US government is thou shalt not never sue the US government. So, uh, I, uh, and then the most famous, I won't mention their names, but literally the most famous people in government came into my office and they were like, "If you sue the US government, everyone will find out you're an and you'll never have you'll never you'll never work there again." And and then and first of all, I didn't really view myself that way, but that's nice to see how I was viewed. And um uh and uh and then I I told them, "But but if we don't change procurement, we're going to be selling like 1940s technology to the DoD for the next 50 years, and we're going to that's just America's going to be in a terrible place." Uh and uh so then um you know, we sued the US government and uh which and you you you of course you never win, but we won. And uh then uh yeah we uh and then uh we appe they the US government like it was such like the the discovery literally was we know their product is the best. We know our product will never work and we hate them therefore we're not going to buy it. This is literally what they were writing. And uh and um and so then then they appealed and we sued them again and then uh uh we won. And then for about 10 years we were um of course we were like uh well the French you know like Eskimos have a thousand words for snow the French have a thousand words for a mister or a mistress. We were like the mistress of the mistress of the m like we were allowed to be met. We would have these meetings where they were like, "We're buying your product, but could you meet us in the parking lot in the right corner behind the truck and like and then we'd always have to promise to rename the product so that like no one would ever find out it was us." And this went on for like like really like six, seven, eight years until about two years ago. Um and yeah, now it's um now basically partly because it was used in Ukraine effectively in ways that are well known and many ways that are not well known uh in the Middle East both known and unknown and it's now demand for it is more than we can satiate. So that that's uh and and arguably more importantly there are a lot of probably people in this room who are investors or or or involved in doing defense tech startups. That whole ecosystem really got because we didn't sue the government to buy our product. We sued the government um for a different kind of procurement system so that they you could prove the merit of your product and they would have to buy the product that works. I mean it seems obvious but before that you would deliver and still do sometimes a 30,000page like complete BS document that in a software that's just not how it works like you know I could tell you how the software works but you have to see it in action um and uh so that the fact that you know essentially we brought helped bring metocracy to the DoD and now there's I don't know hundreds of billions of dollars investment including people who compete with us who you know, bringing innovation to uh America and and our allies and and you see the difference between like what we can do and what other parts of the world can do on the battlefield. And then last not least, you know, uh in in my area, especially in in defense, it's not really how much you spend, it's on whom you do you spend it. So it's just crucial to get uh these kind of uh more competent at tech newer and by the way the legacy uh uh companies also do really important things but you kind of need because they have scale like you can't really build uh you know certain kinds of things without massive scale but but then you know over time I imagine half the budget will be people who are whose companies are newer So I I think you got the gist by now that Palunteer hasn't gotten where the company is today by following the crowd and doing things this the predictable way. And so I I know that the Palunteer culture is something you're very proud of. I'm very curious. Is it something that just happened organically over the years? Is it something that you curated from the beginning? And if the latter, were you as focused on what you did not want to become culturally as you were on what you wanted to become? Well, there is a lot of that, but you know, in the beginning, um, first of all, the beginning was five of us. So, it was, uh, you know, Peter Teal, who's, um, was a buddy of mine, very famous now. Um, uh, uh, Joe Londale, Stefan Cohen, Nathan Gettings, and I, and that, um, we we these are exceedingly talented, I think most people would say, brilliant people. Um and we had a culture of pretty deep intellectual rigor. Uh which so one of the things we do at Palunteer that like isn't you know first of all you know I think like we found the best of the best of the best. Um the Silicon Valley used to hate us because they were like you're stealing the best people for your clown show. Like why aren't you building cockroach.com uh with these talented people? And so, you know, we were we were uh we got the very very very best people we could find. Um and uh and then got them to get their friends and we made every make a list of their five smartest friends and then we would recruit them and uh and that that we did this for you know we're still doing this and then we had we have this thing called five wise which is like essentially um you know Peter and I are you know very Peter was born in Germany. I u my father's side family were German Jews and so and I speak did a PhD in German and so like this kind of you know uh you know why you know why why is there a cockroach on the table there's a cockroach on the table because we need got to clean the table why did we clean neglect clean table because the person is drunk why is the person drunk because they're unh you know you go on and on and on and on and that roots out a lot of dysfunction and lies Nice. Uh, and you need that to build very deep products that are painful to build. Um, uh, I would say a couple of the things I was super into was essentially this flat non- hierarchical cultural peer culture, which is hugely frustrating to sometimes, but that also allows you to have a lot of honesty in the culture. Um, meritocracy. Uh we don't we we retest everyone. It doesn't matter what school you went to, what grade you have or what school you didn't go to. We do not care. There's we we have no form of bigotry. Uh we we just don't care. Even in peak wokeness where we had these absurd things we were supposed to fill out. Uh we got sued by the the government for discriminating against Asian people, which like no one in Silicon Valley is discriminating against Asian people. It's ridiculous. And uh like we we we have we we have just like uh extremely we hire very opinionated, difficult, free thinking fanatics. Those are the people that do the best uh at Palunteer. Um and um uh and and we you need to be able to absorb a lot of pain if you're going to stay for more than a couple years because the pain of dealing with an enterprise that's not your own is pretty significant if your enterprise is is single purpose focused on building software platforms which is just not the way you're going to be able to normal enterprises work. Um and uh um there there was a little bit of focusing on um we're we are pretty anti-experience. So we we've where we've really struggled was like lateral hires. We've been very bad at that. Um we only recently we've made a couple pretty strong uh lateral like in the government. We hired this pretty well-known congressman Mike Gallagher and um uh one or two other people very talented. But but and it that seems to be going very well. But we our our initial foray into hiring anyone who had any experience was like complete road show disaster like to leave our building screaming. And uh um uh I actually became CEO because we couldn't figure out why we needed a CEO and we didn't want anyone telling us what to do. So that's uh um I do I do think serving a higher purpose um like the US government or the west uh really has been an integrating principle for us and then I would say on the negative side I yeah I like some of the people who don't like us we really don't like either. So that's, you know, um that that's been pretty motivating for me. And I think the people who stay at Palier, you know, it's it's the positive of you get to do really cool things and the negative of, you know, the people who are hating on us were pretty happy to hate back with success. Well, I definitely want to come back to the the criticism piece because you guys have had uh no shortage of praise and I'm sure you've got your your crit you've had your critics as well. But I but I am curious about I know you're obsessed with meritocracy. Uh you are a person who has who's well educated. You have multiple degrees. You've got a law degree. You've got a PhD degree. Um, but interestingly, you've also launched the meritocracy fellow fellowship, hiring young talent right out of high school and skipping college. Tell us about your thinking there. Um, well, um, yeah. Well, first of all, um I mean I don't I I I really believe in elite educational institutions and you know I benefited um from well I I think I learned the most actually at my magnet school at Central. Then I went to Havford which you know is and then Stanford and then University of Frankfurt uh appears to be a city school but at the time it was where the intellectual elite of a certain kind of philosophy were kind of gathered. So it was in practice very elite. Um and in a classic sense I'm I am a progressive and so I could not be more frustrated at our elite universities. I I I I just think like the damage they've done uh by by being t of course I'm super in favor of free expression but you know allowing the universities to be captured what by what amounts to a pagan religion is beyond belief to me and I'm going to do everything in my power which largely means not giving ascent and allowing people who otherwise would go to those institutions to come to Palunteer which currently has some more valuable degree and encouraging everyone else to do this uh uh that I can and uh um and you know whatever side of the spectrum you know you're on politically ineptitude does not serve the enlightenment at all ever and you know the these like I think when you look at like you know the college presidents defending uh whatever they were defending people. I actually think the single most depressing thing is who made these guys president? Like what is this? Like I'd rather have them come out and say I have a weird way of thinking and it's just how I think but this is how I think as opposed to some like g intellectual girration. Um now again I I'm very much on the fro pro free speech side. Uh but I I do think having institutions in the west that are intellectually captured is a is a very big problem. Uh and and I I don't think the answer is to restrict what people can say. But one way to defeat an adversary is just to make them less important. And so, you know, um I also think there's a lot of my views and by the way, some of these are just, you know, there's just a there's a lot of unfairness in the system. I I hear story after story of people who have indisputably ex excellent credentials and get turned down from every school and that pisses me off. So then now if you steal manet I do think we have we have a general problem with testing aptitude um and that what we need from people in kind of a more AI driven world um we don't know how to test for that and so one of the things I want to do like so the people who have applied have been crazy you know you know qualified but now I'm trying to also figure out well how can we do testing for people who, you know, might be valuable because they're creative and maybe, you know, maybe maybe they don't they're not they don't look like the classic person that applies to Harvard when Harvard was Harvard. Over the last several years, the word inclusivity has been huge in academia and in corporate America. Are you suggesting that for the elite universities to become elite once more, they need to embrace argument inclusivity and the ability to have rigorous debate on campus? Well, I mean I the obvious thing that should happen is there should be merit based things and yes, you know, intellectual inclusivity includes hearing an opinion of somebody who might be conservative. gets crazy like you know I'm always asking if you're so certain of your opinion why don't you want to hear the other opinion it's like it's like so and you can look but I I do I I I think I think the the um it we are going to have to refactor what what we mean by talent uh because I do think we don't quite understand if you take if you took the highest testing people in the world I don't think they would be the most performant in business inherently and so like there is a question of how do we test how do we understand what business acu as an example how would you test for business acumen business acumen is crazy valuable not just in business but in building a foundation building publishing house that might be philanthropic or not building you know uh building a career I don't think we know how you test for that except for somebody who has business acumen and says that person has business acumen and they promote you. So like apprenticing people um more vocational plus AI training plus uh slotting people very talent we slot people very quickly if we see that or if I see that someone is crazy talented at X they move the next day and I think that's how all inter that's how all institutions are going to have to work. The other thing is I think um you know we it was hugely valuable to be um well-rounded and I think there are real values to being well-rounded but in in in the kind of AI software context we're in being single value creative like the AI is commoditizing things that are not unique. So being unique and creative at something is more important than being B minus at it. So um uh uh and those things are very hard to replicate like um I was playing around like with the chat box and I was asking uh you know um you know a mathematical formula for measuring uh uh fluidity in a pipe with certain kinds of blockages and the answers are mathematical. They're all the same. And then I went back and asked um well tell me um uh uh you know explain Haidiger's concept of of phenomenology and explain and to compare that to Schutz and there the answer is garbbleygook because you'd have to be an expert to understand who's an expert and I think all the value is in the latter and the same so you see this in business context like a someone who's talented at business can pick out someone who's talented at business, but someone who's not can't. Um, and or if you can do that and you're not talented, that's a very special skill. So figuring out how to rebuild society and America is in the exact right position to do this because like as opposed to Germany, we're very plastic and very flexible and and not super ideological. We we're very pragmatic. We just want it to work. We don't actually have an idea of how it has to work. We just want it to work. And work is defined by the inputs are smaller than the outputs. Uh and then we have you know there's lots of ways to capture that but that's what we when we're and and and so we're not we're not stuck in oified structures to do that. But I would so I think if you if you if you kind of not that I would want to be overly fair to our elite universities because they're not being fair to us with the quality of dialogue they're producing but I would say uh there is a much harder problem there than than than one might realize because what is going to be in the end what they're promising to do is to produce people that are more successful and more thoughtful and happier. But to do that, you're going to need a different way of studying and doing and slotting people than what we've had in the past. And you're going to have to you're going to have to have very different ways of testing people. Uh and um and and so that that's a super hard problem. And maybe a overly fair version of it is they just decide to put their head in the sand because it's a hard problem. And if you only have people that think one way, you can't solve it. No doubt. Well, you you mentioned AI, so let's keep pulling on the AI thread. You you were into AI before AI was cool. And you know, what do you think businesses and societies today are are getting wrong about AI? And what are they getting right? Well, it's interesting. For most of for most of American history, tech was built on the battlefield and then dualpurposed into civil life. And that was one of the reasons America had a certain kind of cohesion um and was able to then expand socially on the back of that economic growth innovation power. Uh and then with the rise of kind of consumer internet you had single-purpose commercial uh u products and we intuitively believe most of us that the innovation will be singlepurpose commercial but in reality I think the it's interesting if you got classified briefings on AI from our adversaries or from our allies what you would mind is the revolution has really begun and we're in an arms race to see who can harness it and how quickly and that will determine who controls the order of the world and uh so I think most people either don't believe that's true or don't know it's true uh they don't believe it's true because typically in the last you know 20 years that's not been the case and then we kind of forget that for the rest of humanity it was the case and we're more in a historical period where the rules that applied for most of history apply again and the rules that we thought were abregated are not abregated. Um, and so I think that that I would say I think that's demonstrabably true. And many people don't believe it's true or know it's true, but I would venture to say everybody who's has a stake in the game and the leadership a leadership role in the world knows this to be true and is very very focused on this and focused if there are adversaries on catching up and surpassing America, which is possible and could happen. So given how fast things are moving on this front, is it safe to assume that AI is already in the hands of bad actors? Uh how worried about that should we be and what can the US do to mitigate that risk? Well, I mean, you know, I would it it all bad actors is a broad term. Um uh and uh but you know we are in a primarily in a race with you know China as our most important peer adversary and Russia as an adversary. I think people underestimate uh in America and then to some extent with Iran but Iran is much more like uh light hardware production um and you know uh meaning drones um and um and then there's you know uh but then there's obviously all sorts of cyber ways that you know that would be under the rubric of bad actors. uh Korea and there one of the things that though is often underestimated is you have professional bad and non-professional bad in a gray zone and most of the really bad stuff happens where you have professional actors and even the non-professional people um it they're doing it with some kind of sanctioning with professionals and so um we're in a full-on arms countries and the the the thing about AI that is it's like a plethora of riches for America because all the relevant companies basically are here but um AI is not an egalitarian uh technology and so you know and even though I believe it will raise the GDP of America and and help uh poorer people. It's going to take severe interventions to help it help poor people anywhere near as much as it will help wealthier people. And so we have a problem in the west of relative deprivation in America where we might, I think, will be the leaders of the world. we are. But then how do we bring along the rest of society who's also doing better? But if you get 10 times wealthier and I get, you know, 20% wealthier, I might not be happy with you. Even if people in, you know, I don't know, Brazil are, you know, 10% poorer. Is it it really does matter in social change, it's the relative impact more than the absolute impact. Um and then it it is a technology that I think will be more easy for that reason to adapt adapt in more like tribal culture. So I think the Middle East is going to adopt uh AI very very effectively because like a a country run by a tribe can really deal with these issues very easily. Uh and um and then the and then on the commercial and military front especially military front we will we we another like again where we have a long list of advantages but on the disadvantage side um you know software AI software hardware AI systems uh employ less people than largecale uh hardware uh implementation. So if you're China or you're a society run by one person, it's easier to say, well, we're shifting our economy from here to here, that's a slower function in a democracy. And it will be a particularly big issue in Europe because a lot of these programs are are set up so that they are for defense, but they also supply a lot of jobs. So you you want to go to the local p local governor of a province and say but we'd be more effective buying Palanteer than having 5,000 jobs. That's a kind of a loser argument. uh and so like there's going to be some attenuation in our in the west even though we have these you know essentially but I would say it's it's the advantage of be essentially being able to purchase indigenous technology meaning from our country is just invaluable and no other country in the world really has that at this scale. Um and it's going to be very hard to to to catch up because um we have all these kind of micro networks of who does what and how they do it and capital structures that that are the result of success in my view. But um that give us a lot of advantage. But again on the disadvantage side is how do we mitigate um uh the social disruptive side of it that's negative. How do we um how do we make sure that people have skills so that they could participate in this in some way? Um uh and then how do we transition on the military side to a more accurate well that that's actually going very well currently in this much better in the US than any other western country by far. um and uh for lots and lots of reasons but that certainly on a comparative basis there there's no country in the west that is moving as quickly as we are to adopt uh at scale things that work but on the business front as this momentum continues with AI and adoption continues is the implication to the worker that there has to be reskilling there has to be upskilling because the jobs they've known will will be harder to come by Um I think that and I also think we are going to find out that you have workers who have aptitude at this that are unaware of it. So I think there's going to be a whole testing component. So I think like testing is going to be but yes figuring out ways to train people to work with uh essentially AI driven uh products. Um now there is a the the kind of positive side of that is um you know for example in manufacturing a lot of manufacturing is actually culturally specific. So if you want to, we work with a um as an example a company that builds a very complicated Japanese product and it it really was hard to manufacture here because you know we have wonderfully you know wonderful wonderfully ego workers here and they're not Japanese. And so now you can actually provide an ability for them to interact with the Japanese product in a way that a Japanese engineer would without them having to be a Japanese engineer. And and part of being a Japanese engineer also is you stay at the company for, you know, you're at the company for two decades. Your parents were there two decades before. That's just not how the American workforce will ever work. So there there there are there's a lot of room for being able to do things we couldn't do before. But but I don't think it's just workers. I think it's like whole companies like our pounder culture of flat hierarchy and moving people around and having direct reports that are annoying on tech. Uh I think that's going to be everyone's future like uh because um it's the all these things look exactly the same on paper and some really don't work but some really do work. So being able to figure that what what can work you know like I mean I I can only talk about publicly revealed examples but I think like AIG was talking about at their earnings I think something was like the math was something 5x the amount of output with half the people and underwriting and that's like that's a very big deal and if you're not doing something similar you're going to have a problem. uh and and and that I think those that's roughly the order of magnitude that's more than possible now and um but again like how do you decipher the marginally useless thing from the thing that is crazy useful that that requires a lot of um uh a lot of lot of change and and and again I think that will happen pretty rapidly in America certainly in relative terms because Um, also we have a lot of people, one of the things that's special that we see is American workers go from company to company. So they're like, well, I did this and it worked. I did that, it didn't work. And uh, and there's so there's just a fair bit of knowledge of what's working and what's not floating around. And I think that will happen, but it's going to be very disruptive. So, Alex, I' I've known you for some time now, and you've never struck me as a person with thin skin. So my question is, is that true? And how do you react, if you react at all, when you read something like the recent Asia Times article that labels you as the most dangerous man in America? Well, I mean, when when the CCP article is attacking you, it feels pretty good. Uh I mean, I like it's uh it's uh you know, I always get this question. I like I get all these um I get a lot of questions. it in private that amount to um hey Alex can you teach me how not to care what people think about you and uh but it's not actually true like I do care what people think and I actually think I I have um again I I I think most of my success is pretty linked to uh strong upbringing and dyslexia and I listen I think very carefully carefully and and I do a lot of what's called steel mailing which you know like what is the argument the person would have made if they had all the facts and if they had all the facts and thought about it from these three different places what would they then think and what should I think and I do a lot of that certainly in my head um and with unfortunate people who have to hang around with me they get a lot of that too um but I still can't make myself believe something I think is not true and that's just you You know, it's like I'm very happy to hear how terrible and how wrong and and and how I mean, especially in the business context, how our business is going to fail. We heard this every day, five times a day for what seemed to be a hundred years, but was only 18 years. Uh and uh and from but uh and I I don't know. I think I think if you talk to people around me, they would tell you I am listening very very closely to their unhappiness. But um it doesn't make what they're saying true. And that like you know one of the things about business that I I really do appreciate like business to me is much more like what academia claims to be. I mean academia claims to be about truth but it's really about difficult people yelling at you because they've had no impact. And it's and they're not being honest. They're unhappy because no one's listening. and no one's listening because nothing makes any sense. And that's whereas you know I if you are involved in in some custodial function of managing someone's assets whether that's the money they invested your time managing the time of people you respect and think are very talented um uh the value production for the most important institutions in the world and institutions you also care about. So government and commercial institutions uh you know at the end of the day the the the thing that will actually ameliate and better the institution i.e. the operational form of productized truth in in our version in software but it could be in anything uh actually matters much more than what someone claims to believe is true. And to me that's what you know academia or should have been and is not. But over time that is what business is. Well our time has been flying by and before we run out of time I've got to ask you this question. If if there is one unsolved problem personal or business that you or Palunteer would like AI to solve more than any other, what would that be? personal u I mean I'd like to go back to my personal life in grad school. I it's not possible to time travel but I had a great time. Uh and uh um look I there are many many many problems healthc care solving you know maladies but the problem I care about is making America the dominant military force on the planet in a way that's so indisputable that our enemies and adversaries wake up in moderate to extreme fear and go to bed in moderate machine here and that's what I care about. All right. So, uh, and you know, the world is actually only safe where your adversaries are afraid and they don't quite know if you'll use what you have and how you use it. And that's just the law of the universe. and you know and and then then I do believe in like law and order and you know rule of law and it but it's only enforced on the back of that and you know the older I get the less faith I have in any other institution to even pretend to do this. I mean like I it's like it's almost not worth passing the United Nations. It's just what is this? And you know these institutions that should have worked, universities, United Nations, uh basic concepts of how a society should work, they've all failed. And the best and last hope we have is to make America work really, really well. So you've established Yes. You've established the in your eyes the importance of deterrence for peace. Why do you think deterrence over the decades has ebbed and flowed the importance of it the way it has? Because it it it really has ebbed and flowed in in direct proportion to how much the delta between our technology superiority and everyone else's. So you know we built the nuclear bomb. I mean we built it by importing and we imported the smartest, best, most qualified people in the world. Now we partly did that because they, you know, Germany blew itself up, but we then organized them in a way that only America would have been able to do it. I mean the whole way in which we got Los Alamos to work and the general that organized Congress and the way it was built and and uh developed massive military superiority and actually as relevant to this group and economic superiority. So we had significant the delta between us and the rest of the world was dramatic, undeniable, indisputable. And then we were super nice. Like if you like um if you German history I know reasonably well post war. I mean, we set up the whole society so Germany could succeed on its own terms and asked for nothing, you know, and and so the combination of just, you know, military indisputable almost unconscionable military superiority uh which in that form probably had never actually existed. Um and then uh the dominant economy in the world Then I think the I think the lagging indicator was the dominant culture in the world because you know and that's I think it's something the Silicon Valley and Hollywood all forgot which is people were really interested. I I spent a lot of time talking to older Germans when I was there and like they basically adopted American culture because it worked not because they thought it would work and then it worked. Uh and if we want anything like that, you the deterrent has to be real. And when we screw up military things and you know political like or where the deterrent looks like it's not real, you know, people act up there they're there. One of the things I think if you've lived abroad a lot and it's in my book which I'm not sure is did very well but I'm not I'm not advocating reading it but there's a uh um it's you know there's this famous quote you know we we forget but no one else does that you know they're they're paying attention to our values because they're backed up by a really big stick and without that the values look a lot less appealing to to everybody and uh and that and that's it's it's directly proportional and and so that's why we have to reassert you I mean we really have to reassert uh military superiority and the the way we will do that is with off hardware software AIdriven hardware that America specializes in and has an advantage in all right well we're going to conclude with this one Alex and then we'll get you off to your next stop uh but what What advice would you give today's teenagers, young people around the skills they need to develop, uh the things they need to acquire to be successful in this crazy environment that we live in? Um find the thing you're uniquely good at. Uh and um and then actually I think and then make sure your whole life is organized around allowing you to do it. And so what I mean I manage essentially young people uh for the last 20 years and I would say failure failure one is not willing to accept what they're actually good at. It may not be what you want to be good at. Um not organizing your life around that ability. If you I tell the people who come to Palunteer, uh I've never met someone really successful who had a great social life at 20. If that's what you want, that's what you want, that's great, but you're not going to be successful and don't blame anyone else. So, you know, it's like see there's like and you know, the other thing about that is like you have to be somewhat honest with when you're doing your partner selection. Like if your goal is to advance your aptitude, which should be your like it should be focus on your aptitude and focus on your freedom and happiness, which are directly correlated because if you're doing something you're really good at, no one really cares what you wear to work. But uh and then people I ask people all the time, they're like, "Oh, I met someone I really like." They're like, "Well, what do you like about him, her, or they're like the rest?" Oh, they went to this school. And I was like, "Okay, great. What else do you like?" Well, they went to that school and like and what else do you like? Well, their brother's really interesting. Their sister's really interesting. It's like what about the like and like like do you like them? Do do they like you? Is it is your are are how are they going to feel when you dedicate the next 10 years of your life to building what you think is valuable? And if you know like and this is like you you will not succeed and and if you're very talented and most people have something that they're talented at and enjoy. Uh then I'm like focus on that. Uh organize your whole life around that. Don't worry so much about the money. That sounds like hypocrisy now, but I never really did. And uh and stay off the meth and you'll do very well.