Davos 2023: A conversation with Palantir's Alex Karp

This transcript, generated from speech recognition technology, has been edited for web readers, condensed for clarity, and may differ slightly from the audio.

David Rubenstein: Alex Karp is the CEO of Palantir. Palantir is a very interesting, unusual company. We'll go through it, but let's go through your own background, how you came to be the CEO of this very successful company. Where did you grow up?

Alex Karp: I was born in New York. I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, which meant I went to the local magnet school at central.

David Rubenstein: And you went to college where?

Alex Karp: I went to Haverford, which is not very far away. And then I went to Stanford Law and then I went to the University of Frankfurt for a Ph.D.

David Rubenstein: And after law school most people practice law or do something like that. How come you wanted to get a Ph.D in philosophy?

Alex Karp: Well, I had I was very happy as an undergrad, at least on the study side and I thought I would change the world. And that one kind of way to do that might be to be an advocate. And then I got to Stanford and I owe Stanford a lot, but I kind of hated it and I hated every aspect of law school. But it gave me a lot of time to read philosophy and talk to random people on the campus, including my buddy Peter, and and then I realised this is not something I want to do. And because I kind of conceived of it as okay, well, I've spent three years doing something I hate. I'll do something I thought I would love. And then I went and got a PhD

David Rubenstein: Did you ever take the bar exam?

Alex Karp: No.

David Rubenstein: So, three years and you're not a lawyer? Well, okay.

Alex Karp: You know, I never was a lawyer, by the way I'm proud of that.

David Rubenstein: So you get a Ph.D. in philosophy and at the University of Frankfurt, it helps to speak German. Do you speak German?

Alex Karp: I do.

David Rubenstein: And how did you happen to learn?

Alex Karp: Well, actually, of course, is the short version I learned it because I had a very tough girlfriend. Very tough. But the longer version was on my father's side, they were from a part of Germany or not part Bavaria, Switzerland, West Austria for about 1000 years. And so, my grandmother was her first language, was German, didn't teach my dad a lot of German, but, you know, I kind of think assimilation takes many generations. And so, I kind of got to Germany with already pre-German vibes. As an example, when I got to Germany, I was like, oh wow, I don't have to tell someone I love them to go on a date. I don't have to have 50 friends. I can tell people that I don't agree with what they said. It was very comforting.

David Rubenstein: So a very, very smart German, Albert Einstein, had a hairdo not unlike yours.

Alex Karp: By the way, Albert Einstein's family was apparently my family's apparently his neighbours.

David Rubenstein: So you do comb that or it just goes that way?

Alex Karp: It just goes that way. Although another funny story is when I was in Germany, I because they think American litigation stuff is so crazy. People ask, how do you afford to live here? And honestly, I was really poor, so I wasn't really affording it. And I told my German colleagues that, look, I bought this shampoo, it was too strong and I ended up with this hair and I sued them. And then but the funny thing is, everyone in my whole university believed that. I'm like, no, that's not true. I have this hair, naturally.

David Rubenstein: Now your parents are alive, right? My mother would call you and say, comb your hair if she doesn't do that?

Alex Karp: Well, yes, my mom calls. Well, first of all, you have to understand, my parents wanted an academic. There's a saying in Silicon Valley, ask for money, get advice, ask for advice, get money. And I think my parents are like, 'ask for a cultured journalist or academic, get a business person' so they're already unhappy.

David Rubenstein: So tell us about the beginning of Palantir. Whose idea was it?

Alex Karp: Was Peter's idea, Peter Thiel. Very famous, long-term friend of mine who’s much better known for being arguably the best investor in venture in the world, a co-founder of Palantir, he called me and I'm very grateful to Peter because honestly, I think there's exactly one person in the world that would have called me to co-found Palantir, and that was Peter. And he was like, hey, I've got this great idea. We're going to take the back end that we used at PayPal to stop cyber criminals, and we're going to turn it into a product and we're going to sell it to the intelligence services because obviously they could use the best software in the world. And do you want to co-found this?

David Rubenstein: That's 20 years ago?

Alex Karp: Yeah, that was roughly- almost exactly 20 years ago because we co-founded it a year later.

David Rubenstein: And did you say, I'm not qualified to be the CEO of a company?

Alex Karp: Well, I wasn't being asked to be CEO. I was asked to be co-founder. I tell people this all the time: when someone gives you a really interesting offer that sounds incredibly good, you just say yes. Now I've hired thousands of people and sometimes I feel like they're getting a chance to change the world and they're like, well, what am I going to get paid? What are the benefits of that? I think, you know, when Peter asked me to co-found the company, I just said yes. So "yes," period. It wasn't like, what am I getting paid? What's my equity plan? What's it like? I was like, yes, I'm starting. So, period.

David Rubenstein: It was designed to be a software company?

Alex Karp: The central idea really was there's a methodology. So basically PayPal, the margins were them. It's very hard to stop adaptive adversaries, algorithms were slower than the actual adversary. They used visualisation to find the adversary. Now, that concept was the concept we in contact with the client. Like I had never been to a clandestine service. We, meaning my other co-founders and I, discovered that idea while it was necessary, but it was not sufficient. You had to actually focus on the back end. And the back end was integrating data. And then my idea -- in all modesty -- was to integrate the data with data protection norms. And that became the engine that powers a lot of the countries in this room. On the anti-terrorism side.

David Rubenstein: In Silicon Valley, it's often the case that people who run these technology companies have a technology background or an engineering background. You don't have either.

Alex Karp: This is true. However, for reasons I could try to explain, but I've never been able to understand myself. I've been like very, very reliable in picking out the best technical talent in the world. And in fact, one of the ways that, in the Valley no one believed me in the beginning, they would send in random engineers and I was, you know, then they would occasionally send in the village idiot. I'm like, you sent in the village idiot. They're like, well, how do you know? The simplest explanation is technical philosophy involves irrelevant, but it's distinctions that are very important to you emotionally. Coding involves very small but important distinctions that are important to the world. And if you have a proclivity, emotional proclivity, for managing one, you can manage the other.

And then as a second addendum almost, you know, you know this on the side of course all your investments are successful, but most investments fail. And one of the big reasons that things fail in enterprise is the products are not societally relevant. If you build a non-society relevant product, you're going to have to compete with a company that is really good at sales, already owns distribution. Mostly they own distribution and they're great at sales. So to build a product that can breakthrough that product has to be so relevant to the society that actually people buy it despite not quite understanding it. An engineer on their own will build a product for other engineers. And that's why, that's one of the big reasons, almost all enterprise software companies fail.

David Rubenstein: So originally your clients were the US government and the CIA?

Alex Karp: So we got this investment from In-Q-Tel, which has always been a really small investment, now they're no longer with the DPO, they exited, but it's always been very, you know, if you Google Palantir, you'll see. And if it's a left wing newspaper, by the way, I am progressive and I think the left is wrong to hate on us sometimes, because without Palantir, the far right would have would be in a position of dominance, because Palantir, single handedly with the police forces, stopped major terror attacks. But in any case, you'll read Palantir or CIA-driven data. In German, it's data octopus, which is my favourite, because I guess if we're hovering and none of which is true.

David Rubenstein: Where did the name Palantir come from?

Alex Karp: In The Lord of the Rings? There's a there's a there's a globe which allows the forces of good to see what's going on and organise. And that's a Palantir. And the plural of Palantir Palantiri.

David Rubenstein: So when you started the company you got some software and it was sold to the Pentagon and or CIA?

Alex Karp: It was sold. In-Q-Tel gave us three pilots, one with the FBI, one with the agency, and one with a more classified part of the DOD (Department of Defense). Interestingly, it was that part of the DOD that really got us off the ground because they were struggling with finding out where terrorists were putting improvised explosives. And we figured that out in our product.

David Rubenstein: The employees who work at companies like Google or Facebook tend to be more left of centre than right of centre, I think it's fair to say. And sometimes like Google, they say we don't want to work for the Pentagon. So how do you get employees and how many do you have 3,300 now or something?

Alex Karp: 4000. If you include the people, you have 4000.

David Rubenstein: How do you get employees who say, I want to work for the CIA, I want to do software for the Pentagon? Is that hard to do?

Alex Karp: By the way, now it’s not just American clandestine services, probably the clandestine service of almost every -- if you're in a Western country, it's your country as well, whether they tell you that or not, for very important technical reasons. Look, the fundamental basis of Palantir, both for clients externally and people internally is -- and we're very open about this -- is like we are not everyone's cup of tea, We may not be your cup of tea by the way. We don't like people who are like, you know, coming in and saying we want to kill terrorists just without data protection.

To make society work, there are basic functions that have to work, one of which is the reduction of terrorism, pushing back on, in my view, human rights abuses largely done by adversaries to the West. You may not agree with that and bless you, don't work here. And what you'll find is two thirds of the people in the Valley don't want to work for your company. However, one third only wants to work for your company. And yeah, we don't get it. By the way, one of the concerns investors had in the beginning is like, you know, because not everyone at Palantir has a clearance in the beginning of the US government. Now it's almost every government depending on where we are.

But that's also helpful because you say, well, you don't want a clearance — why? And like, yeah, I don't care if someone's smoked pot or they have a relationship to their hamster as long as they acknowledge it, we don't care. But if somebody is like, hey, you know, so it's basically is a filter now. And by the way, we've been very critical (as you may know, people in this room know) of the valley. And that also helps. Look, bless your soul if you want to distribute carcinogens with your great intellect in the form of consumer Internet, that's your decision. And if you want to get wealthy and give your money to philanthropy or not, that's your decision. We want people who want to be on the side of the West, making the West a better society, more able to defend themselves, protect data protection. And that's not for everyone.

David Rubenstein: Let's go through that as an example. The war in Ukraine is one that your company has been involved with. Can you briefly describe what was described in a Washington Post article recently about what you're doing to help the war in Ukraine?

Alex Karp: Well, so the genesis was, our products are very well known. We build we, have a counter-intel product. It's called PG, which are very well known. We have a commercial product called Foundry is very well known. We have a product that is not well known called MetaConstellation, and that product allows you to use algorithms on large data sets to hone in on adversaries over, say, for example, a whole country and the infusion of data from satellite telephones, other sources, classified sources, and then disambiguation of that. So, people only see what they are allowed to see on the battlefield is something that took us 15 years to build in various forms.

The Ukrainians, without going into all details. They,of course, went to the most important services in the world and said, okay, what should we use? And I'm very proud to hear they had one answer: Palantir. And then we were asked if we were willing to supply our product philanthropically basically for free. And I was very in favour of this because our primary mission is in fact to set a global standard for the world for behaviour.

The product then allowed them, according to this article, to do targeting with like a factor of 20 better, which basically- of course the primary heroes here are the actual heroes of the Ukraine. And I have to say one of the caveats is they're very, very technical. The people that have used our product are world-class engineers, but they were also able to train normal engineers and, in their hands, they were able to change the targeting ratio, which, according to David Ignatius, played a big role in changing the course of the war.

David Rubenstein: Okay, so the can the US government get the same kind of software? Does it does it have it? Can you say that?

Alex Karp: The US government has our software.

David Rubenstein: Okay.

Alex Karp: And uses it very aggressively. I mean, look, the role of the US government and the British government others is somewhat sensitive. Some of it is in this article, by David Ignatius, some of it is not. But I would be remiss not to mention that these governments have played an enormous, effective and crucial role.

David Rubenstein: So where do you want to take the company in the future? You're already built a company. It's pretty large, pretty successful. What is your future direction?

Alex Karp: Well, on the government side, some of this is not directly Palantir related, but we in America, Western countries, we should learn also from the Ukrainians what actually worked on the battlefield. You know, I'm very in favour of a robust posture in America. We should look what percentage of our budget is being spent on things that actually turn the tide. So not all that's going to go to me, or but we need to invest where the West has an advantage. Now, what do we want to do as a company? Of course we are going to grow and continue to grow that suite of products. Of course, at this point a lot of our growth is commercial. So without going to Q4 results, the US has taken a real liking to our commercial product. Growing that part of our business is obviously important, but the fundamental, my fundamental view, of what Palantir should be is an instrument, a technical digital software instrument, which is again, what we, I think are the best at in America, that strengthens institutions both commercial and economic and political in Western countries.

David Rubenstein: So today your company is based in what city?

Alex Karp: Denver.

David Rubenstein: But you as the CEO live in?

Alex Karp: I live in the back woods in basically a shack in New Hampshire.

David Rubenstein: And the reason that's so convenient and helpful to the company is?

Alex Karp: Well, I mean, you wouldn’t know it on TV, but I'm an extreme introvert so I hide out. But I travel. I'm back to travelling 250 days a year. And so, I travel from office to office to office to office, tricking Palantir into thinking I’m meeting with clients, when in fact I'm meeting with the most important client: them. What are you building? Why are you building it? What's working? What's not what? How's our senior leadership failing you today? Please tell me how we're failing you today. How did we fail you even worse than you thought today?

David Rubenstein: So you're also a pretty accomplished skier.

Alex Karp: Cross-country skier.

David Rubenstein: So that helps being in New Hampshire.

Alex Karp: Yes, but really I'm a very accomplished introvert. And, you know, in New Hampshire, I have no neighbours. I barely talk. I go into my little introverted cave. I come up with lots of ideas. Look, I we say our clients know sometimes you don't believe us. We build these products five years before anyone believes they're real. A lot of the inspiration for building these products comes from when I'm cross-country skiing. I think I'm the most accomplished Tai Chi practitioner in the Western business world. I do that. I walk around I bounce my head into a log and think, 'oh wow, we need a product that...,' you know, or 'so and so was really good.' And then, you know, a lot of it's also like, you know, when you decide a product needs to be built or somebody like a Palantir and somebody says, hey, this is really interesting product idea. Then you have to say, well, who's going to build it?

Like a lot of the biggest decisions of Palantir come down to, you know, OK, for example, founded the Foundry product, which is, without going to Q4, It's been growing like a weed in the West, a commercial product. I remember someone came to me with the basic architecture of it and we took a person who is by far our biggest client, who was probably worth probably 30% of our revenue, took off the most important engineer and put that engineer on this product that no one believed would work. And that's how we ended up. So figuring out who does what under what conditions. And then there's a prioritisation phase. So, we often build a product. Then it's beta in the market which means we still have to hold it up. Then a whole different team has to get it into prioritisation phase and all those decisions have to be made on the ground, on the factory floor. Basically, it's like cutting leather.

David Rubenstein: For you, don't you need to have the ultimate security clearances?

Alex Karp: To work at Palantir?

David Rubenstein: For you personally.

Alex Karp: Actually, one of the best decisions I ever made was not getting a clearance. And I'll tell you, it's a really good decision, because if I was cleared to know a lot of stuff I know I couldn't sit on the stages.

David Rubenstein: Okay so you don't keep secure documents on your desk?

Alex Karp: I’m not planning to run for office.

David Rubenstein: Okay.

Alex Karp: It's a pretty good joke, you guys are too polite to laugh.

David Rubenstein: I would think that companies that would do what you do, some of them I would think we might be based in Israel and they're pretty good at those kind of things. Is that some of your major competitors?

Alex Karp: Well, again, I don't want to go into who you serve. We proudly have an office in Tel Aviv. We have an office there because Israel knows our product very well. We are proudly part of that ecosystem. I think the great companies in military technology are going to be in Silicon Valley, the Ukraine and Israel. What we've actually found, interestingly, without going into who uses our product in Israel and who doesn't, the more technically accomplished a future client is, the quicker they buy our product. It's kind of very counterintuitive that the client's partners now who would be more able to build our product appreciate how difficult it is to build it.

David Rubenstein: So you sell your product to a company or government agency. Is it a thing where they have to keep getting it updated or you just sell it and they use it however they want, or you have to help them use it and then you update it every so often.

Alex Karp: It's a great question. So, there's a substrate of our product, so let's just say clandestine agency 204, say they buy Foundry and then they buy [inaudible], they'll get a core substrate of the product. If they're sophisticated technically, many of are, we will teach them how to build on top of the product. So a very sophisticated client using our product will build their own software on top of our product because they understand there are certain things would take decades to build. They don't want to build them and then they'll build their own things on top of it. We on our end deliver new features. So, let's just say, for example, in the Ukraine war, we've learned a lot about what you would need to fight in Europe, which by the way, no one understood until now. Fighting in the desert, fighting in Europe, fighting against Russia, fighting against, you know, smaller, less effective, more terrorist organizations, completely different thing. We will then build features. Obviously, that's one of the reasons we only ship these things to allies that will then get shipped across, say, the NATO structure. But for example, sophisticated partners and clients like the Ukrainians and maybe ones you've mentioned will also build things on their own and those things will be built on top or next to our product. And they own those things completely. And that's why it ends up being kind of good for both sides.

David Rubenstein: A lot of CEOs of technology companies obsess over their share price. And the last year or so, share prices in tech companies have come down. Are you obsessed with your share price or you don't care that much?

Alex Karp: I guess I'm supposed to say I do care. I do.

David Rubenstein: You’re one of the biggest shareholders, aren't you?

Alex Karp: Yeah. Well, look, the answer that, I care because the people work much. I do actually care about shareholders. I actually especially care about the retail shareholders, the small shareholders. But I've been at this 20 years. I know that, like, you know, when we DPOd (Direct Public Offering) with 700, I think, and 40 million in revenue. And roughly in that phase next year we ended up with $100 billion valuation. And as I recently said, luckily I come from a family where I'm at the small table because I'm not an academic. I never thought I was that good at 45. I don't think I'm that bad at 60. I know how well the company's doing. It's funny, as someone who's been somewhat sceptical of the free market in many ways as a progressive and believes that we need to ameliorate the free market by having world class education and helping people who've been underprivileged, medium- long- term I have enormous faith in our clients, in this case our shareholders, to figure out if it's working or not. I know we built the product. I built our company as a product that will do very well under these conditions. So I'm obsessed about our company. Do I obsess about the share price every day? No, of course not.

David Rubenstein: So many CEOs these days are being bombarded with needs to worry about DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) ESG (Environmental, Social Governance) and so forth. Is this something that you focus on that much?

Alex Karp: Well, our clients use our product. I mean, the funny thing is one of the things people are going to find out is we do very well, one of the reasons that we power European clandestine efforts, intel anti-terror efforts with in my view success, is proven by the fact that there have been very few terror attacks. Luckily, and therefore the political ramifications are we still are run by kind of bourgeoisie parties and political parties in the middle is that the Europeans have regulated counter intel to the point where it's nearly impossible to do it and there's only one product that works and works very effectively that's ours. ESG is a bonanza for us because regulators are requiring tracking of data down to the absolute miniature, most minuscule molecule, and that is very similar, it’s isomorphic to counter-intel because, for example, in counter-intel before you shut down an airport or authorise someone being taken out, you've got to look at every single data set. And so that's going to be very good for us precisely because, honestly, regulators don't understand how difficult the technical challenge is and you've got a lot of purveyors of PowerPoints, fake software companies and moderately useful software they're just going to massively fail against these use cases. And we'll, you're going to buy Palantir.

David Rubenstein: So do you know how to write code? Are you a code writer?

Alex Karp: When I co-founded Palantir, I took the introductory class to writing code at Stanford. We have a Stanford rep here don't tell them it was, you know, somewhat on the side. But yes, I mean, up to a point. But again, you know, I wouldn't over estimate my role at Palantir, I wouldn't underestimate it. Bringing societally relevant things like -- PG ended up dominating counter-intel, Foundry ended up being the crucial product during the pandemic, the MetaConstellation is the crucial war product in the world. These are societally relevant products built years before we needed them. There are software engineers who will do that, but I feel in all modesty, the fact that I work well with software engineers but have never aspired to write code like they do is a pretty important symbiotic relationship that it's worked.

David Rubenstein: Now a software company in Israel developed a product that could tap into anybody's cell phone, and it was said by the Israeli government you can only sell this to certain entities. And if you sold it to somebody else, that would be against the law. Do you have that problem? Can you sell your product to anybody you want to sell to?

Alex Karp: Well, again, there are limitations on certain of our products, but we've never even gotten there. We self-regulate to the point. I mean, this was a huge issue with early investors. They were very unhappy when I started telling them, look, it's not a joke. We're not going to sell to China, we're not going to sell to Russia, we're not going to sell to affiliate countries. And they're like, well, what about ABC country? And like, yeah, look, you know, without going to every detail, there were people inside Palantir who didn't think we should work with certain countries and we decided to. But then there's a long list of countries we have not worked with.

David Rubenstein: And in your case, the average person you hire, is he or she a Ph.D. in some kind of technology product or technology skill, are they coders are they PhDs?

Alex Karp: The typical person we hire has a college, maybe a master’s degree in computer science. I would say 70% of our company is technical, meaning they can write code, but then another 10%, it would be technical at any other company, they don't write code at the standard we need, but they could do graduate level math. So, if you take the graduate level math people plus the people who can write code, it's like historically been 80, 85% of our company.

David Rubenstein: So you're running the company and you like it. You don't intend to do anything else for the foreseeable future, not going to the US government or anything like that?

Alex Karp: I partner well with many governments and especially US government, maybe partly because no one expects I'm going to ever come be in their role. I don't I don't think anyone's expecting me to run for office. So, no. Look, you go through ups and downs. Currently, I am very motivated. Look, you know, when you play- again, the heroes in the Ukraine are the much more important than us at Palantir, but there's this dialectic. Like in Hegel, your master-slave, like that. There's this dialectic where you do this and it's hugely motivating to us and to me. And right now, I'm very motivated by what we do. Honestly, I like the success and the impact, and I'm not planning to go anywhere. You know, I've been doing Palantir longer than most people at Palantir have been alive. But yeah, I'm not planning to really change that.

David Rubenstein: You're not going to change your lifestyle, you're not married, no kids. You're just going to keep doing what you're doing that way, right?

Alex Karp: Well, I'm trying to meet people. But no, I'm not planning to change. Thank you for this. Look, there's always an up and down in life currently I'm pretty happy and I believe in what we're doing. A lot of people would like me to, you know, make myself more normal-friendly. And I'm trying every day. I have a coach. I think if you saw me I might be kind of slightly more normal in public and it's not working, but I'm doing my best.

David Rubenstein: Do you have a barber or now as well?

Alex Karp: That I've rejected. I tried that route.

David Rubenstein: All right, we have time for one question, maybe right here.

David Rubenstein: Here's somebody coming with another mic. Okay. All right. A simple question, not a statement, just a question.

David Kim, Chairman, Daesung Group: I'm David Kim from Korea. I'm Chairman of Daesung Group, which is the one of the largest energy companies in Korea. As a CEO, I've been dealing with many software companies and consulting companies, and I have always been very disappointed. Not only because of the result, but also compared to the price they charge for me. And I Googled and tried to find the mission and vision of your company. And frankly speaking, it is too good to be true what is said in Google.

Alex Karp: Well, let me tell you, since we have limited time, we have great partners in Korea. You are right to be disappointed by software. Almost all software is either a PowerPoint or something disappointing. We live from people like you.

David Kim: Okay, so the question I have is it how do you price your service?

Alex Karp: And I'll tell you, we're very expensive. You know why we're very expensive? Because someone like you is greatly sceptical and think it'll be not valuable. And when we show you it's very valuable, we expect you to pay us a lot of money.

David Rubenstein: Okay. Right here.

Alex Karp: We are not cheap. And part of the problem is the people that are selling you their software cheaply are selling you a PowerPoint or a steak dinner or, you know, I'm a fan of Korean art and Korean food. They're like, great kimchi-jjigae, and the software sucks.

Audience member: David has a perfect suitor, for you. He has a very nice daughter.

Alex Karp: I'm very happy, by the way, to anyone listening to this.

Audience member: On a serious note, you complimented Israeli and Ukrainian capabilities. How would you rate Russian and Chinese in that space?

Alex Karp: Well, Russia and China, this is the thing. There’s a tendency that's really quite unfortunate, too, because Russia's massively underperformed, to underestimate Russia and maybe slightly overestimate China. But they're starting from the shock factor. Like essentially, they’ve invested 65 billion in hardware every year and the Russians are among the best technical experts in the world, most creative technical experts, best mathematicians, and broadly speaking, in the world. And now it's like they're like, holy, we're investing in the wrong thing.

Now, Russia and to some extent China are going to start investing in the right thing. And that's why we in the West need to really be focused on, yes, we had this advantage because we've been focusing on these things more than anyone else and we have a tech community that's unlike other countries. But that advantage won't stay around if we don't invest, invest, invest, invest in these kind of capabilities, not just pure hardware capabilities.

David Rubenstein: So if somebody wants to learn more about Palantir, you have a little building here somewhere.

Alex Karp: We have a very fine villa here. You can stop by.

David Rubenstein: And they can stop in and buy your products, right?

Alex Karp: No, you can stop in test the products as a sceptic, find out they're transformative and pay us a lot of money. Okay.

David Rubenstein: All right. I think we're out of time. So, thank you very much, Alex, for a great conversation.