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Speaker A: Good morning, everybody.

Speaker B: Alex Karp is here and we are going to get into it. Alex, thank you for being here.

Speaker C: When I sat down with journalist Jacob Silverman, I wanted to ask him about an interview with Palantir CEO Alex Karp, an interview from the New York Times Dealbook Summit in December.

Speaker A: Yeah, it is quite athletic. He’s moving constantly.

Speaker C: Jacob recently wrote about Karp, and I wanted to talk about this clip together where Karp is being interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin. Karp is wiggling around in his chair. He is frenetic and braggadocious.

Speaker B: Every decision Palantir made, FDA’s going public, building products, enterprise, large data sets, going to government, acknowledging American superiority, being pro meritocracy, launching an AI platform, calling into question that AI models would actually be able to perform without orchestration. Every single one, every single orontology, every single one of those was viewed as stupid. You know what I actually have grown to appreciate about capitalism? All the people who made the right decisions, went broke, are going out of business, or now have to copy us. Microsoft launched Ontology. Everyone wants to do FTEs. Everyone basically copies me and Palantir.

Speaker C: When you watch Alex Karp in that moment, Jacob, what do you see?

Speaker A: It’s hard not to see a certain amount of megalomania because he is saying that he’s right about everything and that everyone has copied him. The one thing that you might credit a little bit to him in Palantir, when he says fds, I believe he’s referring to Forward Deployed Engineers, which is one of the company innovations, arguably, that they send out company software engineers to the clients, whether that’s a bank or the US army in Afghanistan. And they have software engineers there to work on stuff and troubleshoot and even code new features. I don’t know necessarily Palantir invented this idea, but they certainly helped popularize it. Everything else, I’m a little doubtful that he should receive credit as some visionary about any of those other things, but I think that’s kind of the position he’s paying himself into and to sort of justify his almost his own sense of victimization, which is that I actually am right about everything. And now that we’re a public company making tons of money, people are copying me.

Speaker C: One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is that you’re a journalist, but you also, I think, have spent a lot of time zooming out and thinking about cultural influences in Silicon Valley, in crypto, in money, in tech. The piece you wrote for Business Insider is called Keyboard. Alex Karp, Palantirism and the tech industry’s embrace of total war. Tell me about this reporting project a little bit. What were you trying to find out?

Speaker A: Well, I was trying to think about how Palantir seems to be the chief representative of a new philosophy in Silicon Valley. And even in a business sense, it’s been very key to the rise of what’s called defense tech. I recently wrote a book called Gilded Rage, which is about, about kind of the rise of right wing politics and tech and why all these guys end up supporting Trump in the last election. And while I was working on that book, and even since I keep hearing that Palantir is key to the defense tech boom, that it was the first tech startup really tailor made, at least in the modern era, for military purposes. They were founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp and some others with the express purpose of kind of joining up in the war on terror and in their words, helping to defend the West.

Speaker C: And then since then we’ve had other companies come in their wake, most notably Onderil, but still Palantir has taken off and it’s sort of become very successful on its own, but also credited as this ideological and financial forebearer of all these other defense startups that are now really popular in Silicon Valley today. On the show Alex Karp and war.com how Silicon Valley went all in on defense and surveillance. I’m Lizzie o’ Leary and you’re listening to what Next tbd, a show about technology, power and how the future will be determined. Stick around. I think it might be really helpful to explain what Palantir does. Does because it is this like ideological boogeyman for the left, but a lot of people don’t understand what it does.

Speaker A: Yeah, and I think that’s important too. Palantir essentially creates software, kind of a software platform through which clients can suck up tons of data and organize data and then kind of make decisions based on that. That is really the simple version. And when we say clients, we mean, we mean mostly the US Military, intelligence agencies, but also they go after large corporations, banks. They do. We have a lot of work with nhs in the UK and the US government used them during COVID to try to map out how to distribute Covid vaccines. So there are potentially less sinister use cases for this kind of stuff. It’s really about organizing large amounts of information in a visually pleasing way, in a very actionable way for data analysts and people like that, and then to make decisions based on that. One of the early uses of Palantir was in Afghanistan, where basically they’re actually going in the field to try to solicit business from individual army units. Sometimes they’re giving out the software for free and they were showing them, basically you can map where improvised explosive devices have been found or exploded in your area and try to better map and decide where that bomb maker might be or where the next IED might go off. And this ended up being popular with some sections of the military and specifically like JSOC and the more secretive units.

Speaker C: Well, I think it’s really interesting to pick at the military aspect a little bit. We can use the war in Ukraine as an example. Palantir offering their tech to help Ukraine fight. And in exchange, they were able to use data from the battlefield to keep iterating their own work. How much did the Ukraine experience shape Palantir as a company?

Speaker A: I think enormously. I mean, one, it’s been a point of pride for the company and Alex Karp, actually this is in one of the. I read three books about the company, so sometimes I don’t remember which books something came from. But after Russia fully invaded Ukraine, after this sort of gray war happening in the east for several years, he wrote a piece that was published on, I believe on the Palantir company blog about how Palantir’s in the fight and he actually had to be advised from inside the company, not to mention Ukraine. Since then, he’s talked about Ukraine a lot. He went and visited Zelensky. This has been deeply important, both representationally, ideologically for the company and for their business, because they have engineers deployed there. Their software is being used. What I should say is that now, today, Palantir software is sort of like an operating system for militaries potentially, and other software can sit on top of it. Like there’s been reporting about how anthropic is at odds with the Defense Department. Their Claude Chatbot does sit on top of some Palantir software, which is called Project Maven. Sorry for throwing out all these names.

Speaker C: That’s okay.

Speaker A: This is used by the Department of Defense to generate lists of targets in Iran, for example. And so you can imagine something similar happening in Ukraine, which is that, you know, you have these four deployed Palantir engineers who are iterating on their software and using data gathered through also drones and other AI systems to train their own software. One important distinction I think is that people rightly in some sense see Palantir as this boogeyman of the surveillance state era. But I think a fine distinction that does matter is they don’t really collect data on their own. They’re making use of data from, say, the Department of Defense or the NSA or whoever it might be or the Ukrainian intelligence services. They’re not necessarily holding onto that. It does empower them, make their stuff better. But they’re not the ones spying directly on you.

Speaker C: It’s much more like the connective tissue of the surveillance state.

Speaker A: Yeah, they’re enabling mass surveillance. They’re making it more efficient. They’re part of this process, and they may even be influencing policy in some ways. But they’re also, I think, you know, the government goes to them because they want them to help execute that policy, and they’re not necessarily directly spying on you or me.

Speaker C: Okay, so if you are an average American, that’s a very squishy term. But whatever, you’re walking down the street. Where does Palantir touch your life? Does it actually.

Speaker A: One way in which it might touch its life is Palantir is in the S&P 500. I mean, this may sound a little silly, but I think they’re one of the first defense companies added in a few decades, and this was really important to the company that they become sort of a legitimate, publicly traded company. And so they may be in your retirement portfolio, and they might be making a deal with your local police department. They were earlier in their life working more with, like, the New Orleans Police Department, other police department, police departments, very controversially at the time, and they pulled back from some of that work. But I would say probably whatever form of domestic surveillance you might be subject to, whether that’s through the dragnet that kind of consumes us all, or a local police department, they might be touching your life that way. They might also be working with a local hospital or healthcare system. That is another practical way in which Palantir is working with a lot of companies, and a lot of people have raised dissent or protested about that.

Speaker C: And they are working with ice.

Speaker A: Yes, I’m sorry, that should certainly be clarified. And that’s something that they’re very proud of. I mean, there had been even some internal dissent within Palantir, but they are working with ice. And Palantir is a company that’s kind of moved with the policies of the administrations of the time, and they have been unafraid to support most Trump policies. And Alex Karp has his own sometimes baroque or elaborate explanations of why this makes sense. But the company hasn’t really hesitated to snap up any government contracts, especially with ice.

Speaker C: After the break, you think, you know Palantir, but Do you know Alex Karp? So let’s talk more about Alex Karp. He is kind of endlessly fascinating and I want to pick apart how much of that is cultivated and curated and how much of that is authentic. How would you describe him to someone who had never heard of him?

Speaker A: Well, this isn’t sort of a funny phrase. He calls himself a fluorescent praying mantis.

Speaker C: What the h*** does that mean?

Speaker A: What does that even mean? I don’t know, but that’s sort of his way is that he comes up with these kind of literary elocutions that when you actually think about it like, oh, wait, that doesn’t really mean anything. But he is this high energy, eccentric, bouncy guy. People often point to his hair and he has the shock of sort of silver hair. There’s actually a very interesting point in the biography where the head of a bank is kind of needling him about it almost. But what they don’t know is that frankly his hair looks like that because he has a black mother. And it’s something that he didn’t talk about for many years. He only told him Palantir employees in 2019. But this mixed race background and also this identity of being Jewish has always been very important to him. When he was younger, when he was in college and high school, he was much more involved. He had black friends more presented as a black man. And that’s what friends from the time will say. In recent years, he’s actually said some things to his biographer and others that he is hesitant to claim that black identity.

Speaker C: This is a point in your reporting that I found really fascinating that he did present differently when he was younger and whatever. We have all in many ways changed who we are over the years. I am not who I was when I was in college. And yet with Karp, it seems that he was really struggling with his parents marriage and correct me if I’m wrong here, but almost seeing his parents union as virtue signaling yes.

Speaker A: So, you know, his father was a white Jewish guy who was very politically active. And at least as it’s been reported on, as I can tell, he liked that he was marrying a black woman, Leanne I believe was her name. And she was also, you know, they’re both very accomplished and intellectual, politically active people. Even in that recent appearance at the New York Times Deal Summit, he praises his parents intellectually, but they both kind of liked, I think, the parents that their union had a political valence, you might say, and they were genuinely in love by all accounts. But it meant something to them at the time. And that notion bothered Alex Karp. He felt like that he was the product of identity politics, of this sort of. Of this almost something very deliberate that didn’t appeal to him. And he’s been in recent years, especially like a lot of tech elites, really against identity politics as he’s toxic. Very against anything that you might call woke. And that’s only accelerated since the October 7th war started. But that has also included over the years him saying that he’s not really comfortable. He seems to consider himself a black man, but not really holding himself out as one. But he’s obviously been much more forward about calling himself a Jewish man and being fully in defense of Israel. I mentioned earlier that he wrote about that Palantir is in the fight, and that was in reference to Ukraine. But after October 7, Palantir took out a full page ad in the New York Times that said palantir stands in defense of Israel. Yes, and that’s been deeply important to him. And this is someone who styled himself as a free speech guy. But after that war started, he told people at the company, you cannot oppose this policy or you should probably go work somewhere else.

Speaker C: He makes a lot of of his time not in tech, right? In the humanities, in studying in Germany and living in Germany. And at the same time his public statements pretty aggressively denigrate the humanities and not building things. What do you do with that tension?

Speaker A: Well, he’s not a coder. He has great respect for engineers, software engineers, and he calls his company an artist colony. So it’s almost like he imbues his software engineers with humanities like qualities.

Speaker C: But he like made fun of them in that again, this New York Times interview.

Speaker A: Totally. And that just sort of shows how he kind of bounces all over the place. I would also say that there’s ways in which he talks where you can hear kind of the Marxists of his youth. I mean, there’s no way you could really call him that one now, but he used to call himself a Marxist. And even in his book that he wrote or in the biography, he’s talking about what are people getting in return from tech for all this customer surveillance? What are we getting from Google and Facebook and is it enough? And he’s very anti consumerist, actually. He’s not anti capitalist. He likes markets. So there are times where you’re like, oh, he’s sort of using Marxist analysis. But then he’s like, oh, what people should be getting is safety and strength and defense and we should build with the military. Another thing that really struck Me, though, researching him is he shares with, like, yes, he went through the humanities with full force and got a PhD and still is, like, very sort of references the arts. But he shares with a lot of his peers this deep anger towards colleges and campus culture. He talks a lot, at least to his biographer, about Haverford, the college that he went to. And I think this also just shows the lifelong chip he’s had on his shoulder about a number of things. But he is resentful that Haverford hasn’t asked him to speak as an alumni. I believe, along with Howard Lutnick, he might be the most, the richest alum of Haverford. And he doesn’t feel like he’s been sufficiently cultivated as a donor. And he’s.

Speaker C: Wait, sorry, I gotta stop this for a second. Because this is a man who’s 58 years old. He is a CEO. He’s worth, gosh, I don’t know, billions. Is that fair?

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker C: He’s mad that his college didn’t ask him to come back and speak.

Speaker A: Yes. This is the thing that is sort of stunning. Like, you know, this is also a guy. One other little quirk we can throw in is he’s obsessed with cross country skiing. He has a few Norwegian commando bodyguards that go skiing with him. He’s sort of always out in the mountains near one of his many mansions. But apparently he’s often thinking about how his alma mater hasn’t shown him enough respect. And it’s the kind of sentiment that I think to most people is just inexplicable. Why is this occupying space in your mind?

Speaker C: Karp has also been vocal about what he thinks AI will do to the world he grew up in. He said this technology disrupts humanity’s trained, largely Democratic voters and makes their economic power less. He also said it increases the power, economic power of vocationally trained working class, often male voters. I wanted to know how Jacob understood that point of view and how it meshes with who Karp is now.

Speaker A: Well, he used to call himself a progressive and a Democratic Party supporter. I believe he claimed he voted for Kamala Harris. But he sort of evolved into that role where he’s like, I’m reluctantly on the right now, but if Democrats want to win people like me back, they should do xyz.

Speaker C: But why is he positioning himself as a champion of the working class? This is a guy who went to Haverford, Stanford Law. He is a billionaire. What’s up with that?

Speaker A: I think this is the kind of false populism that you first heard on the maga Right. In recent years. And now a lot of the tech guys are doing it, which is like Dems lost the working class by not working on their behalf, which has some truth to it. And then he’s sort of mixing or giving an AI gloss on that. This industry is all about bold predictions. So no one’s going to ding him later for maybe being wrong about how AI might disrupt the economy or even voting demographics. But it’s a way in which they talk like this. AI disruption is inevitable. But of course it’s not his responsibility to do anything about it. It’s the feckless Democrats. So, you know, you can see maybe some kernel of political truth in there, but it comes out filtered through kind of right wing jingoism and a little bit of misogyny, it seems.

Speaker C: You know, you have written about a lot of billionaires and their rightward turns, certainly in Silicon Valley. Is Karp a believer? Is he capitalizing on a moment? What’s going on there?

Speaker A: You know, a lot of these guys, I end up saying it doesn’t always matter if they truly believe it. It matters what their actions are. And I mean, there are people like Mark Zuckerberg who I think is the consummate opportunist and if there’s ever a Democrat back in office, he’ll be very friendly to them. But I do think he’s a believer. I mean, he told his biographer that his only he’s a single issue voter and that’s national security. And he’s always talking about safety. He seems to think that there’s no end. I mean, he obviously fears for his personal safety with how he’s surrounded by bodyguards. And he seems to think there’s no end to what you can do towards making Americans safer, whether it’s Palantir partnering with local police departments or working on behalf of the American military. One thing I do think is really important is that this is not someone who sees peace as achievable really through diplomacy or through kind of conventional means.

Speaker C: No, he talks about moral violence. Yeah.

Speaker A: He sees a world of perpetual conflict. And the way you hold that at bay in his worldview, and it’s one he shares with some of his peers, is by scaring the other guy by building weapons that are so terrifying. I mean, this is sort of early age nuclear weapons thinking, but is by building weapons that are so terrifying and overwhelming that China or Russia or whoever else won’t dare to attack you.

Speaker C: Right. If you say the scariest thing out there is happening and we better do it before China does People believe you.

Speaker A: And his colleague, the CTO of Palantir, Shyam Sankar, just published a book called Mobilize, which is about how to stop World War III against China, which is supposed to start next year apparently. And the way to stop it is by doing a massive military buildup led by Silicon Valley.

Speaker C: This brings me to this question that I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last six months or so. If we zoom out a little bit and look at Silicon Valley over the last decade, maybe 15 years, these companies have in many ways pivoted away from consumer products, right? Like there’s only so much money you can make selling stuff to people. You can make a lot more money selling stuff to businesses and more importantly governments. So is this pivot toward defense technology and this sort of like embrace of the military, is it philosophical or is it just about making money?

Speaker A: Well, I think it’s mostly about making money, but I think it’s also about desire to dispense with philosophy and morality. They just want to be doing business and you know, there are.

Speaker C: Why are they talking about philosophy?

Speaker A: Like Jason will go on and on and on and on. I suppose then the new philosophy is that, you know, doing business with the American government is good and great. But I would say some of the incumbents like Google or Microsoft, you know, the monopolies, the trillion dollar companies, they would like to dispense with the moral aspect of things. Like one thing I talk about is that in 2018 Google was working on that project maven I mentioned earlier and they dropped the contract after employees protested.

Speaker C: Yes, they were furious.

Speaker A: Palantir and Amazon and others picked it up and Palantir really made a lot out of it. Now Google has fired in recent years, has fired employees for protesting its work with the Israeli government. So I think at those trillion dollar companies they want to limit the role of politics in their work. They spent some years paying lip service to MeToo and Black Lives Matter and these other movements. And now that we’re in the post woke Trump era, they don’t feel as much of a need to listen to their rank and file employees. But there is a philosophical wellspring here, of course, and that is the palantirianism that I’m writing about and is what Karp and some of the so called or self styled right wing intellectuals of tech like Andreessen want to put out there. But these contracts are potentially very big and it does dovetail with their general bias towards violence and patriotism. So they are glad to pursue this for as Long as the money keeps flowing.

Speaker C: How would you define palantirism? Palantirian. I can’t even make this a word. How would you define it?

Speaker A: I tried to coin a very awkward term. I think it’s a business and financial philosophy that working for the government and for the defense and intelligence industries is one of the highest callings you could do as an American businessman. It’s a form of patriotism. You have to be ready to do violence to defend. And Silicon Valley has a prime role to play in that, even a leading role. And with it, and this is something that Alex Karp does talk about regularly, you’re choosing a side. You are choosing to defend the west, which means the United States, its European allies, NATO and Israel, and perhaps some of the more palatable Gulf monarchies.

Speaker C: Man, somebody should tell Dwight Eisenhower this.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, that’s the other idea. I mean, in that book Mobilize that I mentioned, a lot of them think like, oh, there is a military industrial complex. Complex. But actually it’s good and we want to be a part of it. And you know, one thing that people used to talk about was like, hey, actually Silicon Valley came out of the Defense Department. Totally true. And sometimes people say, well, did you know this seems like a little untoward or something like that. People in Silicon Valley brag about that. Now. They say, actually this is a return towards our sort of glorious patriotic history. So it’s not. None of this is something to be shy about anymore. It’s something to re embrace for them.

Speaker C: So let’s spin forward. Let’s say a Democrat gets elected and a lot of these contracts, you know, become fodder for congressional hearings and what have you. Does any of this get unwound or is it here to stay?

Speaker A: I think a lot of it is here to stay because for one thing, the procurement process, as I’ve learned through some of my research, is very difficult and complicated. I mean, that’s. Palantir actually sued the US army army to have it consider its product. And they won. And then because there is a regulation saying that the US Government is supposed to consider off the shelf products, and this is what Silicon Valleys really want and say, hey, we have stuff waiting for you. There may be some upheavals. I think there’ll be investigations into some of the tech companies perhaps, but people. I think Democrats will be reluctant to touch things on the defense intelligence side.

Speaker C: Well, and they’ve worked with Palantir themselves.

Speaker A: Yes. And. Well, what I’m talking about is to some degree a bipartisan consensus certainly this race with China, this military buildup against China, there are bipartisan elements of that. So I think if there are investigations into tech companies or how tech CEOs performed under the Trump administration, I think some of that may sit outside the Pentagon and intelligence agency work.

Speaker C: Jacob Silverman, thank you so much for coming on.

Speaker A: It’s a pleasure. Thank you.

Speaker C: Jacob Silverman is a reporter and the author of Gilded Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. All right. That is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Patrick Fort. Our show is edited by Evan Campbell. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer for what Next and what Next tbd. And Mia Lobel is the executive producer here at Slate. TBD is part of the larger what Next family. We’ll be back next week with more episodes. I’m Lizzie o’. Leary. Thanks for listening.