Ex-Palantir defense chief Doug Philippone on the Ukraine drone strike, 17 years fighting Pentagon bureaucracy, and what the modern defense tech landscape actually looks like

about yesterday. Um but uh there's a lot more that we can dig into there. So Doug, how are you doing today? Great. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for joining. Um, I'd love to kick it off with just a little bit of your background first and then we can go into the the the the latest news uh in Ukraine. Yeah.

No, that's great. Um, yeah. So, what Well, I've been on a life journey. I'm uh I've done a lot. It everything has been hard. I think just about everything that I've done in my life, people have told me I couldn't do it. Uh, and I sort of thrive in that world. That's awesome. That's always the case, right? Yeah.

Well, look, nothing nothing worth doing is, you know, is easy. Um, yeah. No, I think when I was a young man, I was just um I went to college for just a minute and then I was like, "This is stupid. I'm in the hamster wheel. " Uh, and I said I wanted to join the army.

I went into the Rangers as a guy and then, you know, got into West Point a little bit later. Um, while I was there, I studied math. All my friends made fun of me. They're like, "What are you going to do with math? " And, uh, uh, I definitely got the last laugh there. That's amazing.

Were they just saying like like computer nerd type jokes or? No, it was just like I mean basically you got to remember I'm a little bit older, but I u in the 90s it was like it was before the modern internet era and so forth. And so um you know computer science was like a hobby more than a real thing.

You know the internet, you know, was just coming out while I was in school. And so it was um it was just like the idea of like you're going to be a high school math teacher and that's like the that's the end of what math is for. And so look at my focus was I'm going to go be an army officer.

I'm going to go back in the Rangers and that's going to be my career. But you know I did six tours in the war and got hurt. Wow. And so um you know at that point I went back to grad school and then found a job in the very early days of Palunteer.

And literally like the only reason I got hired was they were trying to start their defense business and um they sort of thought that like a a terrace hunter mathematician was a really cool thing. Yeah. Uh, I sort of found like the the perfect first job. Um, yeah.

How did uh walk me through how you actually met the Palunteer folks? What was the first day on the job like? Who was around the table? Was Sean Sangar there? Who else? Yeah. No, it was fascinating.

So, um, so back in the day, it used to be carp, you know, it's like maybe 50 people there, you know, they really had a product. But the interesting thing, so one of my very best childhood friends, uh, Dan Cervelli, he was one of the best engineers at Palunteer, period. Um he was like a alternative student.

I say alternative he's like older getting his bachelors when he was like 32 or something. Yeah. Um, and he was he was interviewing at Facebook and Palunteer and he's like, "Doug, you got to see this. Uh, you got to come over and uh and then he had just joined.

" And so when I saw like the first demo, even though it was all intel-based, um, it was very clear. I just went back to my time as a commander in the Rangers, it was just I was just I was convinced that if I had this, I could have done everything better.

And I and I really was, you know, a lot of my friends were still going back to the war and getting wounded or killed.

And so it was just for me it was about purpose you know I think you probably you probably know a lot of palenture people but we're all like in this you know strange family that is Palunteer um everyone is uniquely driven for a sense of purpose and for me it was like I wanted to do something where I could give back and if I you know if I'm honest if I would have stayed in versus obviously I was hurt so it didn't matter but like I have easily contributed a thousand times what I would have if I just stayed in towards the you know towards towards the mission.

So I feel quite proud of that. So so while you were in the service and you see what Palunteer can do, could you give us a more concrete example of like what you're thinking? I mean I I often give there there's a little bit of a meme online like what does Palanteer actually do?

And the and the and the example that I often give is like uh think about if there's IEDs all over the place. Some of those IEDs are going to have C4, some of them are going to have nails. And if you put those all on a map, you can decide you can start to see clusters of trends just on a map.

And then you can decide, okay, there's a bomb maker in this town. We should go and investigate that. Um, that's the most concrete example I've been able to come up with that I've read just from the literature. But as someone who was there, what what was I mean, that's definitely like the that would be the 2010 version.

Sure. You know, just sort of like, you know, at the core, it's like um they make a software architecture that helps combine a myriad of data systems.

So like all these legacy systems, if you think of the defense world, all these different uh areas, whether it's commercial uh businesses or the military, uh the larger they are, the more that they all look the same.

The military might be the most like complex, but it's all similar in the sense that you have a myriad of legacy technology that's uh built and modeled around information capabilities at a certain time. And over the course of history, it's like hard to get rid of those old systems.

So if you look at the IT infrastructure of the Department of Defense, it's like you have old mainframes on one end that's modeled certain things, you know, on the edge and then you have like the most exquisite AI sensor that's doing real-time data and computer vision on the other end.

And as a commander, what you're trying to do is um assimilate the real world in real time. So, it's like you're you're looking at a map.

You're looking at all of your feeds from either videos or satellite footage to understand what's going on, what's changing, and then if you're ever going to go um like to understand what's going on in the real world.

So, you're understanding things and you're making decisions based off that data that you might have to go without Palunteer, you have to go 100 different places.

So that was like the existing paradigm that we were replacing is how do you um if if you an old school analyst or an operator would have to literally go individually search 100 different systems and use an individual tool for each one of those systems that may or may not be good and then they would put all that stuff in their mind and they would write it back on PowerPoint and then that's how and you'd have no legacy search and discovery.

you would be violating all of the like handling of the data. You lose all this the security of it and it's just like on a flat file and you're emailing around. I can't tell you like how long that was the paradigm of the military and most corporations. Can you can you talk about the practical challenges of that?

There's this concept of the fog of war and I imagine you experienced this on your different tours where you have a bunch of data but parsing through it and fully understanding and I can imagine in many ways Palunteer I if you can more quickly and accurately process information from more sources.

you can reduce that sense of of sort of unknowing that that seems to be historically, you know, uh common across every different type of battlefield. Yeah. No, I mean the short answer is like it will save your life and you can have a successful mission or not.

I mean the the uh historic vignettes that are like pretty powerful for regular people to understand is like um as the military would plan a mission to go in and out like forget about the real-time stuff that is obviously very relevant of just like knowing what's going on and how strategic things are moving around and if someone's attacking you like you have to have that side of it which Paler does a lot of but like from a historic perspective once you're planning a mission to be able to understand the full history if you're staring at a piece of dirt or you have like, hey, we we think the bad guys are at this compound or there's a military a legitimate military target that you're going to strike to understand the whole corpus of data that you may know about that for the last 10 years.

So to give an example of like you know the failures of um the Afghan war or Iraq for that matter just using the American experience you can do this just about any war is that you know as units would go in and out of a region you would have these like learning experiences that would last 3 to six to 12 months and then they would at best they would put all the information that they learned whether it's like say so say I went on a mission I interviewed somebody and I I I took fingerprints I took pictures.

I would write a little note that say here's the here's the human terrain of this area. This is what the people care about. Here are the projects. Y um here's where we did a mission. You know, they usually do an affforction mission report about it. Yeah.

And you would put on a hard drive and then the new commander would come in and you hand it to them and then they would probably look at it for two seconds and then I mean that's literally how it was done for 20 years. Yeah.

and you're just you want you're like how can this with with all of our might and all of our superiority in every way and the money that we're throwing at this why does it suck so bad anyway so that was you know Palanteer's mission was to like how do we change that paradigm so that you know the interesting thing if I give a one of the compelling things so we did this with the British um you know with with u I don't even know if I'm allowed to say this but think of their most sexy unit the Brits and they were they were going into um a specific area.

And what they didn't realize over the past five years, they had every time they flew a helicopter into a region, you know, they have this host of analysts that are like they work with the helicopter pilots and they do menstruated graphics so they understand the exact perfect helicopter landing zone for the mission. Mhm.

And what they didn't realize was that each new team would come in and they would always do their expert analysis and they'd always pick the same exact place.

And so then all of a sudden when we integrated all this data for them, they saw for the first time, holy cow, every single time for the last 5 years that we've gone into this valley, we always landed in the same place.

So it ends up being like a very easy low tech thing for the enemy to put a bomb at the middle of the HLZ. And they're like, "Anytime Americans come, just blow up the bomb.

" Um, but that's like uh they call that knowledge management which is like that's a little bit old school but it's like that was a very unsolved problem forever. And then now if you get to like real time what we're doing now it's like okay well now you're taking real time signals intelligence.

You're taking real-time video feeds where you're overlaying what the video of the surveillance aircraft would be looking at and then with the entire corpus of information you would know about the area. So as soon as you're looking at a piece of ground, you're like 10 10 reports pop up of everything you know about us.

So you immediately have situational awareness that'll help say help you stay alive. That's really important. Can you tell us the story of uh DIGs and the distributed common ground system like how that played out and like the law to any at any level of detail that you think is appropriate? Yeah. No, no, no.

I mean look that was my personal Vietnam except for I won so it's like it's okay. It's not. Congratulations. Yeah. Think of a different long war that that somebody won and all and that'll be it. But it was like 10 years of my life. Wow. 10 years. Yeah. No, it was it was wild.

And I will tell you that there was a lot of times when I just didn't think we win. I literally flew up to New York one time and and rode in the car with Dr. Karp and I was like, "Sir, do you still want me to do this?

" you know, because it's like I don't know if there's like any amount of hard work or expertise that is going to allow us to win.

And he had this like great moment of leadership where it was like um if any soldiers are still asking, this is maybe 2012, I forget exactly, but he was like, if any soldiers still want this, it's worth fighting for. It's too important. Mhm. And you know, it was just that moment of leadership that I needed.

So I got out of the car and um you know and then like just a you know a few maybe the next week I had some massive win on Capitol Hill.

Um but it was I mean look I credit that I mean it's the the reason I started Snowpoint and um like the the modern defense tech landscape exists because Palenter was able to break that paradigm. Mh. And you know if you think of the new executive orders kind of like really focusing on acquisition reform.

So, you know, it was like an old '9s thing. Um, the lawsuit was about this, but there's an old '9s, it was called the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act. I think it's '94, but it's during the Clinton days.

Um, I don't know how old you guys are, but it's it was basically um there were these scandals about the $400 toilet seat and the $200 hammers. That sounds cheap by modern standards. I feel like I every day I see we had the soap dispenser. There was a soap dispenser that was like 50,000 or something.

No, but it's the same BS. Yeah. So the interesting thing is so before 1994 and I might be screwing this year up by a year or two but um before then the there was this old term called milspec. Yeah. And the milspec idea was that the preference of the US government was to buy custom things as the priority.

And so all of those scandals turned it on its head and created this idea where you have a commercial item preference. Mhm.

And so, you know, this is sort of like the when I talk about the invention or say the, you know, the start of the modern defense tech era, it was the winning of the lawsuit, which I think was 2016 or so. Um, it was the first time since the law had been passed, it had actually been enforced.

So, our our lawsuit was like the precedent setting thing. And all we were finding out, they have like there's protests all the time, like almost every major contract gets protested. So that part of it wasn't um unique.

What was what part of that was unique about this was uh we weren't it was a called a pre-awward protest and so normally a protest is like somebody else wins and then Loheed gets pissed at Rathon and then they just argue about who is better and then the court decides.

Um our protest was that um we thought we were getting screwed by the army which we were where they specifically wrote the contract where I had put so much pressure on the army to expose all the flaws of D6.

Like D6 was like simultaneously failing while they spent billions of dollars on it while over half of the army's brigade commanders were requesting urgently Palanteer.

So there's this huge battle where, you know, it was like units would request Palanteer, the army would block it, I would go to Congress, expose it, and then there was just this back and forth and and I was like enemy number one for years. And this is where all my war fighting skills came into play.

It was like in many ways fighting bureaucrats was just as hard as fighting terrorists. And so I had that like it was good that I had call you a boardroom general, right? Yeah. I was on the front lines though.

Uh but anyway yeah so so in this particular case so the lawsuit it was interesting because this is another experience of like you know between Peter Teal and and Karp it was like they trusted me and um I couldn't have done it like it's very unique in the Palunteer world that like they would that uh everyone said we were going to lose period and I think like statistically they weren't wrong.

I think the the the chances of winning these cases are like 3%. So it was like clear and then if we won it so basically this is so everybody was like you guys are crazy and they were like let Doug just do this and um but it was like we were uniquely driven in the sense that we had the moral high ground.

We had all the evidence. It was it was the perfect setup. Um but but anyway, long story short is uh we did end up winning and then we won the appeal 3 to zero. Uh and so it sort of set up this thing where you know at the end of the day we when we won the we didn't get any money.

It was like basically we just burned three million three to five million bucks in the hallway on legal bills. Wow. Um but then we had to go compete for the original D6 contract. So it wasn't sure like I was halfway terrified.

We went through all this trouble and then the army would blackball us um which could have happened. But long story short is that was sort of the the real um legitimate beginning where it was no longer a gorilla campaign for Palanteer where we're just winning enterprise contracts. Yeah.

you know, on the run and then on the merits and it's just, you know, the software is 10 times better. I mean, it's just it's so impressive uh to watch. I mean, obviously, I'm officially retired, but it's like I'm in I'm in the mafia for life. Yeah. Yeah.

So, can you can you talk about like the the long-term buildout of the defense business at Palunteer, where it is now, and then where you're seeing opportunities in defense tech, whether on top of Palunteer with their AIP program or just generally outside of the It just seems like the Army is modernizing and the DoD is modernizing generally.

So, uh companies won't need to go through the same 17-year journey necessarily. No, I mean look, that's the whole reason I started Snowpoint was the idea was like, you know, during my journey, say I did a 100 things right and a thousand things wrong.

It's like, how could I help other companies accelerate through that that cycle and and you know, ultimately help help our whole society. It's like having everyone succeed including for the services. Um it's it's a win for everybody.

Long story short, but you know, I think it's like it's interesting um you know because during like early years I was um I got the seed corn in across like SOCOM and JC and then a few initial army units and then that was kind of growing but we were still searching for the elusive program of record and then we went to you know across there's like 17 different countries that we kind of got started in the military business.

I was flying on airplanes everywhere. Um, and we got the C chord done. And then there's like NATO is like it was kind of the inside joke of like that's never going anywhere. And then now, you know, of course, this is 18 years later. It's like we finally, you know, won this huge contract with NATO.

I'm like, you know, it it's taken forever, but it's it's it's been fascinating to watch. And I think that like um what I what I had determined, you know, again, this is rewinding a little bit, was like we have to win in the US.

And then once we won in the US, it was sort of like this the dominoes started falling where and this is a deep history with Palanteer.

uh and I tell a lot of my portfolio companies the same thing is this idea of like exit and crisis is that you know many different companies with a lot of different technology um will they all look similar on paper and so it's like how do you prove it and one of the like defining things that I believe about Palunteer in particular but a lot of my I hold my portfolio companies to the same standard is this idea that um when there is a moment an exigent moment where it really matters and so in military context that means that like a commander is doing something, people are dying.

Um, you have to win. Then at that point, all the goes away and you have to have something that actually works. That's that's real. And um that is something unique in the sense that like Palunteer has never screwed that up.

And um and it was just sort of like knowing that it's like you got to obviously it took us forever, but it's like we're past that.

We were way past that, you know, say by a couple years, but um past that momentum point where um you know, you were always fighting like the biggest barrier to entry was like some loser CIO or CTO inside a corporation or the government saying, "Don't worry about this.

I have this PowerPoint slide and I can build this cheaper, faster, better. " And then all the incentives are wrong and then they would slow roll you and and you wouldn't make anywhere.

And and so the the challenge where we would always say is the the open door was around who cares and are you actually talking to the profit loss owner like where it actually matters where the bottom line matters and in the military that was like the operational commander like if you got buried in the Pentagon where they're talking about programs you can't walk four feet without running into like a $300 million disaster.

They're all in they're all in denial about it and it's like because it like either tests out on paper or they're like it's coming. It's going to be here. It's going to be so awesome. Um just don't buy Palance here. It's too expensive. We're going to do something you know I I mean dude don't even get me started.

We're getting you started. We're getting you started. Uh let let's flip to something much more concrete and timely. Uh what's going on in Ukraine? What's been your reaction? And what is the solution or impact with uh to the defense tech ecosystem? Yeah, you know, it's interesting.

I um I traveled to Ukraine in the very early when when Palanteer was just getting started there in the very early times of the war. I went to Kev just to see what what was true and what wasn't true as we got kind of started.

And you know, it's fascinating to think there's like a there's a deeper political thing and then there's obviously a military and technology thing about this.

Um, and but it also applies to NATO and like what's, you know, the the defense tech market in Europe versus the United States and what the hell is Europe going to do now that like they have to, you know, do something real and stand up their own capabilities.

Um, I think this is like a fascinating time of like uh accountability and uh and I think it's good. I think it's good for the world. Uh I do believe that the world is better when the US is the hedgeimon. I believe that deeply.

It's like we can argue about whether or not we can uh afford it, but I'm like a firm believer in terms of like what I'm doing in the defense tech market, but it's also good for for Palanteer, all the companies.

It's like with less budgets, I mean, I suppose it's it's always good with more budgets, but it's like with less budgets or trimmed budgets, it's like if you need something real and you have like a short timeline, that's the perfect environment. There's no free chicken.

like the the entrepreneurs still have to actually deliver on what they said they're going to do. They have to deliver.

But that's the time when you can really succeed because when it's like you're kind of doing nothing and you're just like talking about these like five-year programs, you the tendency is just to waste money.

So going back to the Ukraine example, um you know, in many ways like Zillinsky single-handedly saved NATO, you know, because it's like Biden's plan was to get him on a helicopter and get out of there.

like it was just on the heels of the failures in Afghanistan and then it was like it was clear like enemies of the United States this is your time screw with America as much do whatever you want Biden's not going to do anything so it was a very so it was a very tricky time the fact that he decided to stay and fight you know was super impressive it definitely saved NATO um and you have to think also initially and this kind of goes to like the deeper problem of like what's how are what's the resolution of this and what can we learn from it and I'll try to go faster here, but um think of this initially is Ukraine stopped Russia by themselves in the beginning.

Yeah, that's something to like really pay attention to. And and there was there was a few scenes early on because I used to model this of like China versus Russia's like the Russia was the real military um and China is like this paper tiger and I kind of like flip-flopped all that in my head now.

But it's like Russia could not have screwed it up more than they did. Mhm.

And um you know there was those scenes of like I was like God if we only had a squadron of A-10s on board we could have like you know I don't know you had this like trail of tears of like it was literally just like the first Iraq war where it was like a you know a 10 or 20 mile convoy of like every military vehicle in Russia was stuck on one road.

I was like please baby Jesus where is an A-10? That's all we need right now. But um look, there's there's a a very deep asymmetry with Russia versus um Ukraine.

I think the truth is, you know, I don't have a good filter here, but it's like the truth is that both armies suck, both militaries suck, and they've devolved into some sort of World War I BS thing.

Um, if you look at the numbers, it's like, you know, in terms of pushing pushing back, yeah, this drone attack seemed extremely sophisticated. This did not seem like it's involved. You're not wrong. You're not wrong. But but but that is that is uh it's a brilliant move.

Will it have any impact on the course of the outcome of the war? Untold. It does it also mess up the the peace um Oh, the peace talks. Yeah. Yeah. strike deep in in Russian territory. It could be seen as aggression. Yeah.

Look, you can you can talk about this like there it is a it is a massive and uh incredibly loudable tactical victory. Mhm. Um it's impressive in every possible way. I I love it, you know, in a lot of way, you know, because you sort of think of the, you know, again, this is a very asymmetric fight.

If you look at like, you know, people, it's like 1. 3 million on the Russian side for active duty, 200,000 on the on the Ukraine side. but they've just kind of devolved into this like frontline thing. And so like is is the deep attack gonna actually change um the front lines or the course of the war?

I'm not convinced of that at all. It definitely the the challenge here is like how do you degrade the ability of of Russia?

Um cuz they they have a huge like production problem like they have they they outnumber if you look at tanks and armor it's like you know 17,000 um but so I you know it's like one of the interesting statistics here is that Russia has like 17,000 tanks but they've lost during the war they've lost 8,000 tanks. Mhm.

The US only has 4,600 tanks just to put it in perspective. But but it hasn't made Ukraine win, you know, like they're still stuck with this sort of like, hey, how do we do? So there's this incredible like um but tactically tactically is this return to World War I style almost trench warfare that we're seeing.

Is that a byproduct of new technology coming onto the battlefield that is asymmetric and you know generally both armies don't fully understand how to deal with yet?

Yeah, the interesting thing is like you know if I say to my you know military colleagues it's like um there's a lot to learn from what's going on but don't learn too much because this is a very unique thing in the sense that um Russia in particular but Ukraine as well um have have completely failed to be able to execute a joint combined arms fight.

Mhm. And so this is this is the thing that the United States is uniquely the best in the world at in a sense where like what does that mean? It means that you integrate space, air, land, sea, artillery all into one like you have a decisive point of the battle.

You have a bunch of shaping efforts to the battle and then you can succeed and you can pour troops into and accomplish something. The US this is the most complicated thing you can do and it's super expensive. That's why we have a 800 plus billion dollar budget.

And that's what the US is like a thousand times better at than anyone else in the world. And what I can tell you is the Russians, the reason that they lost against the Ukrainians by themselves is because they don't know how to do that. They were treating air force as like artillery. None of it was combined.

They totally failed to like in terms of communications, the ability to communicate and command control, like all of that stuff. Total disaster. And here we are four years into it or whatever. It's like what what's the outcome?

Um I'm curious how I'm I'm curious what Russia's early stage defense tech market even looks like. I imagine it's a lot of it is government directed. But how are they adapting? Are there private? Well, you see Yeah.

Like the thing about Russia is like um again they've been very good at um advertising specifically like very low production or one production type things where they're like um exquisite systems or exquisite systems and then they have two of them and then the the the the majority of their uh stockpiles are Soviet era that's horrible And if you think about it like this, um, think of the Soviet Union back in the day, it's like, and they're still not good at this, is that, or even you go back all the way back to World War II, it's like they've never been good at manufacturing.

Like think of how many cars are made in the Soviet Union or Russia, right? How many real planes do they make, right? And so like all that stuff is like they can build one or two off, but they're fully reliant on the West for all this stuff.

They've never been good at what they've been good at is like can we stamp out um thousands of really cheap attraitable systems. Um and and do tanks fit into that category?

Are they Yeah, but but but they're not fighting with them because then you could argue that like because of the tactics, how relevant are they on the modern battlefield, you know? And I think Ukraine with like a ridiculous uh underdog approach has been able to use cheap drone war.

Like to be clear here, I think that Ukraine is probably the best in the world at drones. Uh and they have really at a tactical level. Again, it's not changing the outcome, but they're at least holding the status quo and they're making millions of them. Like they they figure out and and they're legitimately good. Yeah.

I mean, it's that part is fascinating to watch. I just don't know that like um Yeah. the way that we fight. If you were to put the US, if you take away the nuclear component of this, which always makes it tricky, the reason we have nukes is to make it tricky, right? So, you don't do these things.

Um, but I'm just not convinced that we would do it this way at all. And and how quickly would we would we win? Um, that part's fascinating. How do you think about counter UAS technology right now? You have to imagine that Russia is thinking about every and any and every response to make sure this never happens again.

Yeah. And look, I was I was I apologize for being like too bearish about like how much does this matter? The the attack is like stunning. It's it's almost it's not quite as good as the Hezbollah beepers, but it's pretty close. It's up there. Okay. Um Hezbollah beepers.

I did my master's thesis on Hezbollah, so that gave me like, you know, specific joy. But I um you know the the idea that like the uncertainty um and kind of a step back that it would take within Russia. So now basically now they're searching every single truck. You know they're like super heightened security.

This has caused mass chaos across Russia. Now they can't mass those those jets together anymore. So you have to space them out. So this has like serious consequences to their like strategic capability, let alone their ability to just go bomb Ukraine.

Do you think that uh do you think that going forward various militaries, Russia in particular, will seek to place uh strategic bombers and aircraft like that in hangers and provide some type of defensive mechanism because the fact that they were just sitting out in the open.

We had No, I I actually think that there's like there's I don't know specifically this. I'll have to look it up, but there's like there is like it's part of like the um there's a part of a nuclear treaty is that Yeah. So, so it it mostly got rolled back.

Russia rolled it back at the beginning of the war from what I've seen, but you can imag but you can imagine they would say, "Hey, we're not going to participate anymore. " But they wouldn't necessarily build all the structures necessary to actually adapt. Yeah. No, I mean, look, all this stuff takes time, too.

I mean, that's the the biggest thing is like, you know, for the a lot of those pl I mean, first of all, they're going to have to do that. Whether there's a tree that says they have to be in plain sight or not, they're going to have to do that. I mean, so this is like this this attack has caused a strategic impact.

Whether that gets Russia to the uh to the table faster or better or it gets land concessions for Ukraine or it gets them, I'm not convinced of that. But it definitely is like a very successful thing. And we also don't know the ramifications. Like, you know, does this up the Annie? Does this get us towards World War II?

I don't know. That part scares me. I do want the war to end. Um, and it definitely gets in in into the Trump like Trump administration is trying to end the war and neither Putin or Zillinsky are like playing ball. It's like that's kind of the disappointing part of this. Well, I I mean we have to have you back on.

I feel like we could go all over the world and talk about geopolitics for 4 hours. So, expect to get another calendar invite because this is a fantastic conversation. Yeah. Thank you for jumping on. I really appreciate it. Thank you both. We'll talk to you soon, Doug. Thanks so much. Bye.

Uh, and we have our next guest already in the studio, so we'll bring him in. We're going to talk we're going to recap some of the Middle East AI deals, talk about uh, geopolitics in AI, some of the chip stuff. Uh, I still have yet to figure out what the horse means. Why? I just love horses, John. You just love horses.

I grew up I wasn't a horse guy. I I have an extreme respect, admiration. My mom texted me uh after the show last