The Ledger, every show

“Well, they came up now because as I started to look at the contracts that had been written during the last administration for the use of AI. I had a whole, holy cow moment because there were things not well beyond what you've been hearing in the press in the l…”

“Anthropic has its own constitution. It has its own soul. It's not the U S constitution.”

“And Throbic's not going to be one of them if they continue sort of with their sort of posture.”

“You called president Trump and your 5000 word essay on Friday, a wannabe dictator. You're gonna have to apologize to more people than just me.”

“They were the first of the big frontier AI companies to say, we want to work at Department of Defense. They were easy to work with on the contract. We're paying 47 cents For the whole year for all of this. So they're like taking, taking a loss to make sure tha…”

“I think we, instead of buying Kareem in the Middle East, Postmates, Jump Bike I think all of those will be a hundred percent write downs. Those are some of the worst acquisitions done in tech. Maybe Postmates may be the worst acquisition done tech in the last …”

“We just did a RFI for space-based interceptors, which is how do you put something in space that could take something down in space.”

“And one of the examples I use Palantir and Roland, SpaceX, all had to sue the government for their first big contract, because the primes were sophisticated at selling, sophisticated at protecting their interests.”

“The provisions that were in the contracts that ultimately serve the Department of War said you can't use it for planning kinetic actions, you can't use it to develop weapon systems, so all the science, engineering, aerodynamics, all...”

“Google didn't want to bid on the contract. Now Google is a great partner, you know, and so I'd hope some of the newer companies would learn from what Google did, which is, you know, they didn't want to serve the government because that employee mob issues, but…”

“And so they've learned a lot of lessons and you compare that to the Chinese military. They don't have a lot of experience. In fact, the decapitation they did in the Chinese military, the one guy they took out was the one guy who had experience in Vietnam. So t…”

“So then that culminated in the Tuesday kind of dramatic meeting with Hexeth and Secretary Hexeth and me and Dario with the Friday deadline that, that got blown.”

“Yeah, so they put their model in AWS GovCloud. And then Palantir serves it from there. And they refresh it. They held the control plane for the model.”

“These, the leaders of these companies say they're going to cause 50% white collar unemployment.”

“Grok's all in. For all lawful use cases across all classified and unclassified networks”

“SpaceX and Anderil and Palantir all had to sue the Department of War for their first contract.”

“A brushless motor goes into a drone. We're dependent on China for brushless motors.”

“I mean, you know, fiber optic cable, we don't make fiber optic cables in this country. Fiber optic, you know, basic fiber, which they're using in the Ukraine and Russia war to do drones because they're jamming and all that, and we use for telecom and all that.”

“Which is why in two months of owning, being the chief AI, having the chief AI office run in my world, which was a new move, we were able to launch gen AI, which is Google's Gemini for four million, every, every employee, military and civilian in the department…”

“Palantir and Roland, SpaceX, all had to sue the government for the first big contract, because the primes were sophisticated at selling, sophisticated protecting their interests.”

“Uber over time has probably paid a hundred billion dollars to drivers. A hundred billion dollars.”

“I'd say that the deal that Was under my watch. I didn't like it at the time, but I, you know, it got done was Uber acquiring auto, which was the autonomous car division that that gets started out of Google guys. It was, and I didn't like it for different reaso…”

“I think we're at the end of the beginning, though, not the end of the end. The next phase is structured rounds, down rounds, like true down rounds and then sales were, unfortunately, companies sort of not making it, and I think that'll happen in Q one, you kno…”

“The company's valuation Is lower today than it was when Dara took over. And even if you account for the macro environment, the Nasdaq's still up 50%, he's down 50%.”

“We grew faster than any company in the world, both geographically And revenue wise, including Google.”

“18 months, you're going to see dead spat. Literally, they're going to disband and give the money back to investors. Maybe 90% of them.”

“It's not like, it's not a Skynet thing, like, no. It is a tool like any other tool that you might have on your computer, or in your war room, or with your team, except it's on your computer, visualized where, but you still have Checks and balances. You still h…”

“We got them down to six and there were the places where I thought we had the greatest opportunity for change and for growth and impact on our combat power and for our industrial base. And that was a starting point. An applied AI was number one”

“So, and they, these things, these war games have been on the on the shelf for a long time. Every, every scenario has been planned for years ahead of time. Midnight hammer and Iran was planned years ahead of time in terms of how would you do it if you were goin…”

“70% of the casualties are for drone, but because of drones.”

“They have drone swarms because they can force the companies that make them, not just DGI, to interoperate.”

“We have Google for all lawful use cases on, on classified networks, and we're trying to move them to classified networks. They're just, They have to build out infrastructure because this stuff's complicated.”

“There's more defense tech venture capital than ever by, you know, three X more than last year.”

“I had some like Databricks engineers, former Databricks engineers, former Meta engineers, former AWS people, Tiger team, 60 days good, great collaboration from Gemini from Google's Gemini, who already works at Department of Warsets, some familiarity with our a…”

“I have the Office of Strategic Capital, which has two hundred billion dollars in lending authority low cost loans, and that both sends a demand signal to these companies that other private capital crowds around it, equity capital often, and it's, Low cost loan…”

“The three I'm most proud of, ah, in a very recent term, is we've done three deals for critical minerals, ah, to reduce our dependency on China in like, 45 days.”

“And I was on Jieda, which is the joint IED on, you know, task force. So we would do crazy things like sprinkle markers into the fertilizer plants in Pakistan that were used to make the IEDs so we could Track them.”

“We had a female general manager in Milan, and they posted her face all over the city saying, kill this woman. They snuck into her apartment at night and hung a sign from her apartment to the apartment across the road, Saying she, you know, she has a relationsh…”

“We lost half a million customers.”

“And we were spending A hundred million dollars a month competing there.”

“Bill Gurley was on our board, lost her nerve. And the reality is there's another economic principle called loss aversion, right? If you invest thirty three million dollars in Uber and it looks like ten billion four years later, ten billion on a thirty three mi…”

“There are going to be fewer tech acquisitions in this antitrust environment. Fewer, much fewer. So your outcomes for mid, middle companies like tell me are going to be farther, you know, fewer and farther between.”

“Biological organisms can create TNT, gunpowder, you know, energetics, if you will.”

“Not maneuverable, but they're not going at hypersonic speeds also.”

“I think the genesis of what Palantir does is an orchestration layer on top of data streams that we, data that we put in it and say, here's the data we would normally use for any battlefield operation, plus an AI to help you synthesize it. So all those things a…”

“And we've written that there's a 35 page directive at the DoD that talks about Human oversight and how we manage these systems, and we're constantly updating that and making sure we have the right controls on it.”

“So that is one of the requirements is that the drones that we use at the Drone Dominance Program don't have a dependency on, on adversaries.”

“There's defense, the greatest VC boom in defense tech, In a country's history.”