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Intelligence Squared
Is Alex Karp the Philosopher of Silicon Valley? With Michael Steinberger
00:51:13
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- [00:04]
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- [02:29]
Michael Steinberger
Indeed, you're about to make a trade which you do you listen to. Is it get optioning those options.
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Or.
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Intelligence Squared Producer/Announcer
Let'S do a little research? Learn more@finra.org TradeSmart welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. On today's episode, author and New York Times Magazine journalist Michael Steinberger joins us to examine Alex Karp Palantir and the rise of the modern surveillance state. Founded in 2003, Palantir is widely regarded as the most interesting company in Silicon Valley, as well as its most controversial. It aided the US Government in the war on terrorism and is now used by the CIA, the NHS, the US military, and corporate giants like Airbus and BP. But its billionaire CEO, Alex Karp, is not like other CEOs in conversation with Carl Miller, Michael Steinberger joins us to discuss his new biography of Karp, the Philosopher in the Valley. Drawing on his unprecedented access to the CEO, Steinberger offers a detailed account of Karp's singular approach to leadership and how he is preparing Palantir and the world for a future dominated by technological power. Let's join our host, Carl Miller, now with more.
- [03:50]
Carl Miller
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, everyone. I'm Carl Miller and our guest today is Michael Steinberger. He was a wine columnist for Slate magazine for many years. He's a contributing writer now to the New York Times Magazine. And his latest book is the Philosopher in the Valley. Alex Karp, Palantir and the Rise of the Surveillance State. Michael, very welcome to Intelligence Squared.
- [04:11]
Michael Steinberger
Pleasure to be with you.
- [04:12]
Carl Miller
So, Alex Karp, let's. Michael, could you paint a picture of a kind of pre Palantir Karp for us? Because, I mean, of all the many biographies I've read, he has to be one of the most chameleon esque subjects that I've ever seen a writer really try and detail on a page.
- [04:30]
Michael Steinberger
He is a very complicated figure. So pre Palantir, if you want to go back to his childhood, he was raised in Philadelphia, his father a Jewish pediatrician, his mother's black, an artist. It was a very left wing household. Much of his childhood was spent going to anti war protests, anti nuclear protests. So this is the political milieu in which he grew up. He then goes to college locally at Haverford College, your alma mater as well. My alma mater as well. We were classmates at Haverford, which is a very tiny school outside of Philadelphia. No one can really believe that we both spent four years on that campus and never managed to exchange a word. It seems almost impossible. You know, he kind of plays down how hard he worked at Haverford, but I do suspect the library saw more of him than it did of me, which may go some way to explaining how he ended up a billionaire and I did not. But, but Haverford was a very progressive institution and he was someone who fit in there, not just because it's a place where people work very hard. It's a very studious place, a very academically driven place. And he fit in in that sense, but he also fit in quite well politically. He was very active in black student affairs. During our senior year in college, he helped organize and anti racism conference At Yale University, the focus was on racism on college campuses. And he gave an interview sometime thereafter to the Detroit Free Press in which he talked about how pervasive racism was on American college campuses. He blamed college administrators for tolerating this, and he also blamed then President Ronald Reagan for setting a tone in which open expressions of bigotry were permitted. Interestingly, in our senior yearbook, he was wearing a keffiyeh, so it just kind of signaled a commitment to. A broader commitment to social justice. So this is the world that he emerged from. And obviously, had anyone said no one, certainly no one, would have thought at Haverford that he would end up running a company that's at the nexus of technology in the national security state, a very unlikely, very unlikely path to Silicon Valley, shall we say?
- [06:51]
Carl Miller
Indeed. And it seems to some degree an embarrassment for Haverford. I mean, one of the kind of funnier themes in the book is, despite his ridiculous amount of wealth and prominence and political power, Haverford never invites him back today to give a commencement speech. And that seems to kind of actually genuinely irk Karp. It seems to be something that he can never quite park.
- [07:15]
Michael Steinberger
He's very annoyed by that. He's also very annoyed that the school. School hasn't made a better effort to cultivate him as a donor, which even people who even have for grads who don't share his politics, who don't like the way his politics have evolved, who don't look approvingly on Palantir even, they are like, well, it's kind of crazy that the school would not do more of an effort to cultivate him as a donor. He's the wealthiest alum and obviously a very powerful figure. You know, the school could use the money. I mean, most schools could. Why wouldn't you, you know, try to do. Cultivate him, you know, to try to get him to sign over a big check? And so, you know, that is, you know, I think. You know, there's that. I think certainly the fact that he hasn't been invited to speak on campus, though, as he also acknowledges.
- [08:06]
Some of the work that Palantir has been involved with is very controversial. And if he were invited to speak at Haverford, there would be a lot of protesters. So you. And he's fine with that. But the school might not be as thrilled to have a riot breakout. So, no, the Haverford thing is a through line. And then, of course, it becomes a little more serious because Haverford was. There was a lot of protest on campus over the war in Gaza, and he is very unhappy Karp with how administrators at the school handled it. One thing that has happened since the book was published is it was just about a week ago the president of Haverford announced that she was stepping down. Cause and effect, I don't know. But, you know, the book is out and he has a lot of things to say about have Ford, including the fact at one point he says, I will never, I will never give the school a dime. That's not great for Haverford. I don't know if that's had anything to do with what the president's decision to stop down. I can't imagine it would. But, you know, it's. Yeah, he has much to say about our alma mater.
- [09:13]
Carl Miller
And we're, of course, interested in Alex Kart because of this company, Palantir, that he co founded. Aren't we a company that's kind of as deliciously full of contradictions and tensions and obscurities as the man himself? So tell us a bit about the kind of founding moment, Michael of Palantir, because I think it brings into our story probably the other key relationship that we're going to have to try and evince here, and that is with Peter Thiel.
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Michael Steinberger
Well, that's really foundational to Palantir, of course. And this goes back to a company that Peter Thiel had co founded in the late 1990s called PayPal. Everyone knows PayPal now, the online payment service, but PayPal in its early days ran to a big problem. There was a lot of fraud being perpetrated via PayPal and it was costing the company huge amounts of money to the point that the company was in some danger of going under if it couldn't solve the fraud problem. And so solving the problem was very difficult because, because PayPal had about 8 million users and there just weren't enough hours of their day or eyeballs for the human analysts that PayPal employed to kind of find patterns of suspicious behavior, to find the people who were behind a lot of this fraud. And so Thiel and some of the software engineers of PayPal came up with what they hoped would be a solution. They said there has to be a technological fix to this or we're not going to be able to, you know, we may not be able to survive as a company. And so essentially what happened is some of the software engineers devised anti fraud software, basically pattern recognition software that could sift through all the data that PayPal was collecting and find suspicious patterns of behavior that human analysts could then look at. And in a more exacting way. So yeah, it was, it was. The machine was doing the heavy lifting, if you, you will, you know, going through just mountains of data and finding those needles in the haystack. And so it's PayPal's business. In 2002, PayPal was acquired by ebay. Thiel walks away with a lot of money and he becomes a venture capitalist, slash angel investor. He bankrolled a restaurant in San Francisco that didn't last very long. He bankrolled a magazine devoted to NASCAR racing. It was called American Throw Thunder. That also didn't last very long.
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More fruitfully, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. And sometime around 2003 he had the idea, because if you remember, this was right after 9 11. The war on terrorism is now underway. And it occurred to Thiel sometime thereafter that perhaps those same anti fraud algorithms that PayPal had developed to save its own business could perhaps be used to help the American government fight terrorism. Thiel understood, and you have to give credit to him for this. I mean, he understood even before many people did, that 9 11, among other things, was a data integration failure. The CIA had a lot of information suggesting that something was coming. The FBI had a lot of information suggesting that there was a plot afoot. But that information wasn't pooled, it wasn't shared. And had it been, it's possible 911 might have been prevented. The 911 Commission, in its final report that was issued in 2004 said that there had been a failure to connect the dots. And so Thiel had this idea that maybe those same anti fraud algorithms that had connected the dots for PayPal could help the government connect the dots to prevent future terrorist attacks. And this gave rise to Palantir.
- [12:49]
Carl Miller
And why on earth does Peter Thiel at this time bring in Alex Karl Karp to run it? Because they seem like an extremely odd couple. Michael. Peter Thiel, I guess, at this point in his ideological journey is a very trenchant libertarian. Alex Karp at this point in his journey is a kind of progressive academic. Is he still in Germany and with no business experience?
- [13:15]
Michael Steinberger
No, he's not in Germany at this point. So he had gone. So the two of them met at Stanford Law School. They both went to Stanford Law after college, after Carp had graduated Haverford and after Thiel had earned an undergraduate degree from Stanford. They both end up at Stanford Law and they both quickly come to regret their decision to go to law school. They just didn't find it very intellectually satisfying. And so, you know what made it bearable for both of them, particularly Karp was the friendship they struck up. They spent a lot of time arguing with each other, arguing about politics. They had very different views. Karp was a man on the left. Thiel was, as you said, an arch libertarian and already a figure of some notoriety. As an undergraduate at Stanford, he had started a student newspaper called the Stanford Review, which.
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The aim of that was to combat what he saw as this, this overbearing left wing political correctness at Stanford. And there's a newspaper that delighted in provoking people. It was. They published a lot of inflammatory stuff. So Thiel was already a figure of some notoriety. And he and Karp at Stanford Law, they bond over their shared unhappiness at law school and their love of political debate. As Karp put it to me, they would debate like, quote, unquote, feral animals. So.
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They became really good friends. After law school, Karp has no intention of pursuing a career in law, so he moves to Germany to pursue a doctorate from Goethe University Frankfurt. Thiel goes on to try to pursue a career in law, but he gives up on that pretty quickly and ends up back in the Bay area and founds PayPal. Anyway, so after PayPal, when Thiel has this idea for this company called Palantir, at that time, Karp had returned to San Francisco. He had taken a job, he had earned his doctorate. He had taken a job as a development officer for a Jewish philanthropy based in San Francisco. They reconnect. Thiel discovers that his law school friend is actually really good at getting people to write big checks. He's a very convincing salesperson. So they talk until begins to have Karp on the side. Karp has a day job, but Karp begins to moonlight as a fundraiser for Palantir. Eventually, Thiel asked him if he wants to join the company. Thiel had the idea originally that the CEO should be someone with a military background, someone very well connected in Washington. But both Thiel and some of the other co founders are underwhelmed by the people they meet. And at some point it occurs to them, hey, Alex is really. He's really dynamic. He's an amazing salesperson. He understands our mission, our purpose in a way that a lot of these people don't. Let's make him CEO. And so that's how this very unlikely figure ends up at the helm of a startup in Silicon Valley.
- [16:06]
Carl Miller
And you've called the book the philosopher in the Valley, Michael, because of course, Alex is a kind of man of ideas in a way that not many CEOs are. Let's talk a bit about those Ideas that Karp has at this beginning with Palantir, because it seems to me anyway that he's kind of actually often clearest when he's articulating what he is against really, rather, I mean, he clearly does have some positive attachments about what he stands for. But one of the things that he's very clear about is animus to Silicon Valley, isn't it?
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Michael Steinberger
I mean, this was a company from the start. The early days were tough. I mean, it's a company that had a very clear mission from the start. It wanted to work with the U.S. government. And that was sort of, that was unusual in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s. That was when the consumer Internet, the commercial Internet was really just taking off. People want to put their money in things like social networks and so forth. The idea of working with the government where contracts are still slow to materialize, which doesn't pay that well, it was, it was something that, that, you know, just didn't register with a lot of potential investors. At some, at one point, you know, Carp goes out to try tila put up the early money. And at one point, you know, Carp goes out and tries to raise money from some major silicon venture, Silicon Valley venture capital firms. And they all say, no, some are nicer about it than others. One Karp tells the story that one very famous venture capitalist spent the entire pitch meeting doodling absentmindedly in his notebook. He just, you know, really went out of his way, it seems, to register his disinterest, you know, the ones who are nicer about it said, look it, we admire your patriotism. It's wonderful you want to work with the government. It's wonderful you want to help the United States government combat terrorism. But we don't really see this as an appealing business option opportunity. And so everyone says, no, no one wants to invest money in Palantir. Eventually one venture capital, one venture capitalist took pity on Karp and the Palantirians and said, look, if you want to work with the government and you want to work in counterterrorism, the CIA has a venture capital arm called In Q Tel named after, it's a playful name named after Q in the Bond movies. Talk to them. And, and actually that's how, you know, the CIA ended up as an early investor in Palantir. But this, this sort of the, the very ice cold reception that Carp had received from, you know, the Silicon Valley venture capital community kind of gave and gave him and his colleagues a kind of animus towards Silicon Valley that has endured to this day. They really saw themselves as. As a part, standing apart from the rest of the Valley and didn't feel particularly welcome in the Valley, even though the company was based there. So.
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This is kind of why even now, even though the firm is no longer based in Silicon Valley, it's now based in Denver. This is why you still hear him taking shots at the Valley.
- [19:10]
Carl Miller
And his kind of grand world view, which I think of all of it as ideas, seem to stand. An absolutely astonishingly clear vindication, is that the west is under attack, the liberal democratic values are being compromised, and the technology companies based in the west need to stand up for the West. That's what he is basically saying.
- [19:31]
Michael Steinberger
Well, it is. And this is really rooted in his childhood to a large degree. So as he tells it, you realize at an early age that, okay, he's biracial, he's Jewish, he's also severely dyslexic. So he realizes at an early age that he has what he regards as some struggles, strikes against him, and it gives them a sense of vulnerability that he carries into adulthood and carries right to Palantir. So the idea had originated with Peter Thiel, but Karp really embraced the mission. The idea, okay, we're going to defend the United States, and we're here to defend the west more broadly. We want Palantir to be a sword and a shield for the West. And his view at the time and for many years thereafter was that defending the west ipso facto meant defending liberal democracy. And then he put it in very personal terms. He was like, look at. Someone like me needs to live in a society where you have the rule of law, where you have robust protection of minority rights, that only in a society like that could someone with his background, with his, you know, with his background, with what he saw as these strikes against him, only there could someone like him survive and possibly prosper. So Palantir, he took the company's mission very personally. I mean, I think it's. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that in some sense, Palantir exists to make the world safer for Alex Karp. He would say that it's also making the world safer for millions of other people. But it was a very deeply personal mission for him, and it remains so now. Of course, his politics may have evolved, and we can get to that, but.
- [21:06]
Carl Miller
Yeah, and get to that. We will. But before we do, I think we've reached a question which I've been slightly dreading, but I don't think we can go any further. Without dealing with it, Michael. And that is, we're going to, there are going to be lots of people listening to this that will not really have any idea what Palantir actually does.
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I mean, it is, it is not straightforward or obvious. Is it what the actual software that they build really does? Everyone stay with us. We're about to talk about the Osama bin Laden raid. We're going to talk about all kinds of, you know, kinetic, dramatic things. But, but I think we're gonna have to talk about the actual products that they build, Michael, for a second, because it's, you know, what would you describe it? It's kind of like enterprise scale data fusion, ontology work. It's a lot of actual plumbing, isn't it?
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Michael Steinberger
And plumbing is a good word. They often describe it as kind of high end plumbing. They. It's not glamorous work. Even though the company has a certain glamour, which owes much to Carp, owes much to its client base. It's got some very interesting clients and does a lot of really interesting work. But even palantirans will admit that the work itself is fundamentally not that sexy. It is, you know, it's again, high end plumbing work. Palantir. Palantir is a company that specializes in data analytics. It builds software platforms that enable organizations to make better, faster use of their own data. It's important to recognize because there are, there are a lot of misconceptions about Palantir. It is important to recognize that they don't collect the data, they don't store the data, and they definitely don't sell the data. It is simply they are building technology that enables organizations to make better use of their own data. And we're talking about large organizations. Typically the U.S. army is a client, Airbus is a client. You have around 50,000 Airbus employees who use Palantir on a daily basis. So you're talking about large organizations that collect massive amounts of data. And Palantir's technology helps them make sense of the data. It merges data. You know, one of the issues that they discovered early on is that particularly with large organizations, data is off. It's all over the place. It's siloed. I mean, this gets back to the 911 problem. You have siloed data, siloed databases. I mean, where stuff is not, you know, not merged, people can't access the information they need. And so Palantir software, it essentially builds virtual pipelines that allows all this data to be integrated and forms a composite view, what they like to call a single pane of Glass that allows essentially an organization to essentially build a digital twin of itself.
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And the software then finds patterns, trends, connections, correlations in the data. Stuff that would take human analysts hours, days, weeks, possibly forever to do. So it's very powerful technology.
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The metaphor I use is I kind of liken it to a wood chipper and its ability to pull in lots of data, massive quantities of data. And it's also very flexible, if that makes sense. Palantir's technology can be used for just an astonishing array of purposes. I mean, the company, it only has around 4,000 employees, it's not that big, but its reach is just incredible. And the number of areas in which it works, the different purposes that it serves, is just pretty astonishing.
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Carl Miller
So you've got 500 databases, PDFs, slide, you know, slideshare presentations, people entering stuff in messily.
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Michael Steinberger
You've got structured data, spreadsheets, you've got unstructured data, video photos, you've got dirty data. People have fat fingered a name or added an extra digit or two to a number that shouldn't be there. All this sort of stuff, data. We often say we live in the age of big data, and that is unquestionably true. And it's been said before as well, to invoke the other cliche, that data is the new oil. And I think that's also true. I mean, much of decision making now, whether in the boardroom, on the battlefield, on the factory floor, is data driven. But data is not easy to work with.
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It can be very messy within an organization and particularly a large organization. It's scattered all over the place, siloed in different places. Palantir helps organizations may find order in this chaos and find answers in the data.
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Carl Miller
And throughout the book, you do talk to a lot of people who use Palantir, don't you? And I guess one of the things that I certainly read into it is that there are always going to be some skeptics and detractors and companies that think they build their own analytic technologies to do the same things. But it seems like quite consistently it is true that Palantir moves in and, well, you describe it, I think in the military anyway, as a string of Moneyball moments. So they kind of move in and you can actually really see the Palantir begins to deliver some benefits. So let's go to those. So they hint its use during the Islam bin Laden raid, don't they? We don't really know.
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Michael Steinberger
Well, the bin Laden raid is kind of, is a very important part of Palantir's. History. You know, this really just came out of a book that was written about a year after the raid by Paul, prominent American journalist who wrote a book about the mission that they killed bin Laden and includes a passage in there where he talks about, you know.
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Military, battlefield.
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Counterterrorism, intelligence, and then finding technology that will enable counterterrorism analysts, counterterrorism experts, to better track down the people they're hunting. And he mentions Palantir as an example of. And it was a young company then, so this book came out in, like, you know, I think 2012, maybe. It's still a pretty young company and not widely known. But he mentions Palantir as a company producing the kind of technology that could be useful on the battlefield. And to intelligence analysts, doesn't say that Palantir played a part in the bin Laden raid. But people immediately infer that this means that Palantir was somehow involved. I mean, if you read the passage, that's not what he's saying. And then.
- [27:31]
As a writer, it's a little disturbing to realize that reading comprehension skills may be this lagging because that's not what he says. But anyway, a lot of readers seem to infer that what the writer was saying was that Palantir had actually been involved in the strike that got bin Laden. And look, it's not. It's not, you know, it's not impossible that it was. I mean, it was being used by military special forces of the kind that actually carried out the raid itself was being used by the CIA. So it's very possible that Palantir's technology did play a part in that, but that has never been confirmed. And even people at Palantir say, well, they don't really know. Karp himself has come to believe that it was actually true, but couldn't offer more detail than that. Regardless, that paragraph in that book was just money in the bank for Palantir, because all of a sudden, it gave this fledgling company incredible cachet, gave Palantir a mystique that endures to this day. It's the company that helped get bin Laden.
- [28:36]
Carl Miller
And then to fast forward to another kind of more transparently useful use case, you've got Covid. So you described Covid as the ultimate proof of concept moment. This seems to be a real turning point, Michael, in Palantir's kind of commercial journey, when suddenly it gets rolled out for PPE and vaccines.
- [28:57]
Michael Steinberger
Yeah, this was a big deal. And it was interesting because, I mean, this is a company that was founded to help fight terrorism. Then moves into defense, national security. So you wouldn't have expected that its real breakthrough moment would have been fighting a pandemic. But actually people who were with the company early on had recognized that, yeah, there were going to be all sorts of applications for this technology, and then actually fighting pandemics is one of them. So it didn't come as a surprise to everyone. But Covid becomes, as I say in the book, a true proof of concept moment for Palantir. It's used by the American government to try to get a handle on the virus. It's used by the British government as well and is very effective. You know, as you know, Covid response in the United States certainly was kind of a disaster. And people who were overseeing Covid response during those first weeks and months, they were flying blind. It's once they got Palantir in and began pulling in all the data, began integrating all this data that was being collected all over the country right down to the level of individual hospitals. Once Palantir got involved, they suddenly had a much clearer picture of where the disease was spreading, where supplies were needed. So it made, you know, it was a public health disaster in the United States. I think it's fair to say more than a million people died. But Palantir technology proved invaluable in giving the government some means of getting a handle on the spread of the virus and making sure that supplies got where they got to where they were most urgently needed. And then Palantir software was an integral part of the vaccine rollout. And so, you know, and, you know, so the company did play. I mean, there was a lot of discussion during COVID you know, whether Palantir was benefiting from preferential treatment because Peter Thiel had been a major supporter of Donald Trump. And it was. Palantir was awarded a no big contract by the government, though in Palantir's defense, you were in the middle of a once in a century public health crisis. It didn't seem like it would be really be possible to have the normal procurement process when help was urgently needed. And it was actually a more competitive process. I mean, Palantir was tried on a trial basis. People who were using it found that it was being, it was very effective and that's how it ended up getting this contract to help with COVID response. But, you know, it's, it's. I know people who don't like Palantir and are very concerned about it, you know, don't want to hear it, but it was actually, the company did play a pretty significant and positive role during COVID and then not just in the United States, not just in the uk but it was also played a very important role in the World Food Program's Covid response. And then, in fact, if you recall, the World Food Program was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts during COVID And people with the World Food Program will tell you that Palantir's technology, again.
- [31:51]
As a tool for managing logistics, for getting food to places where it was needed as global supply chains crumbled, Palantir was instrumental, invaluable to their work. And then that work resulted in the organization getting a Nobel Peace Prize. So Palantir is a complicated company. It's done a lot of good, and it's done stuff that also makes people very anxious and should.
- [32:14]
Carl Miller
Do you think the. Because, I mean, if people have heard of Palantir, I would be willing to bet it's likely in the context of either privacy transgressions, government overreach, or human rights concerns. Do you think that the kind of these other ways in which Palantir is being used are often kind of unfairly overlooked by people because they get far less coverage, don't they?
- [32:39]
Michael Steinberger
Well, they do get less coverage.
- [32:40]
Carl Miller
I mean, it's a couple things, maybe rightly. Less coverage.
- [32:42]
Michael Steinberger
Yeah, no, I think it's a couple things. I think one look at, I mean, it's, you know, to the general public, general public, you know, only in recent years has have people, you know, become, you know, even dimly aware of this company. And then, you know, I think, yeah, I love the coverage. I wouldn't say it's sensational. These are legitimate concerns. I mean, it's, you know, yeah, there are some misconceptions. I mean, yeah, Palantir, the name itself is now synonymous with surveillance. But it's important to point out, and I'm also going to plead a little guilty here because you've got surveillance in my. In my subtitle. In the subtitle of my book. But it's not actually surveillance technology. What it is is it's technology that, among other things, can help those who do conduct surveillance. Intelligence services, law enforcement. It can help them make better use of the information they're collecting, including via surveillance technology. So Palantir is one step removed, but an important part of this. So, listen, there are legitimate concerns about Palantir's work, legitimate concerns about some of the people it's working with, some of the organizations it's working with. But I also think that any fair account of the company also has to Recognize that most of what it does is completely benign. It's got a huge commercial business. The work for Airbus, I mean, technology is used for things like preventive maintenance. I don't think anyone would be against that.
- [34:02]
So a lot of this is just plain vanilla enterprise software work. And then there's stuff that, that does raise concerns, but it's a complex company, and I think you have to.
- [34:15]
Any fair account of what it does would have to recognize that there is stuff that should make us nervous, but also recognize that there's stuff that they've done that is actually pretty good and laudable. And there has to be recognition of both these things.
- [34:40]
Carl Miller
Then we get to 2022, and the invasion of Ukraine seems to be two massive vindications for, for Alex Karp bundled into one. On the one hand, his worldview has suddenly come to pass. He's never worked with Russia. He's never had planning to have anything to do Russia. And that suddenly looks like the best corporate decision that any CEO could have ever made. But then also, it seems that the actual product that they've built and had so much experience in deploying over the war on terror suddenly seems to be extremely useful in the context of the battlefield of Ukraine, doesn't it? So, I mean, I think he says, who knows? With Alex Karp, it seems like he's always got an eye for the sales pitch, but he says that Palantir was responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine. I mean, even if that is half true, Michael, that is a crazy kind of prominence and importance for a company to have.
- [35:31]
Michael Steinberger
Well, first, first of all, he does feel vindication after Russia invades Ukraine. And vindication because he's got this, he's always had this very dark worldview. He thinks humanity is just naturally prone to violence and chaos. Disorder is the normal state of affairs for mankind. And this is the view that has always informed Palantir's work. It's, it's. There's never been with Palantir any. This sort of techno optimism you hear from other. You would hear from other tech companies in Silicon Valley. Palantir's sales pitch was, look at. We live in a. In a violent, chaotic world. Our technology can perhaps make the world marginally less dangerous. So that was kind of always their view. And, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is, in Karp's mind, affirmation that their worldview was actually spot on and that this is the.
- [36:21]
After the Cold War, all this talk of a peace dividend and the end of history. And Karpisky.
- [36:28]
It was all wrong. It was going to be proven wrong. And we are reverting to a normal state of affairs, which is chaos, disorder. And so.
- [36:42]
The invasion of Ukraine is, is a big deal for Palantir. And of course, the company is very involved.
- [36:48]
It was involved chiefly through something called Project Maven, which is the Pentagon's artificial intelligence program. And then Palantir had become involved in that during Trump's first presidency, after Google had dropped out. There were a lot of internal dissent at Google over its work on Project Maven. A lot of people at Google objected to helping the US Military essentially weaponize artificial intelligence. So Google dropped out and Palantir ends up replacing them on their work. And Palantir's main software platform essentially becomes the backbone for Project Maven, which is then used in 2022 to help the Ukrainians try to ward off the Russian attack through, among other things, targeting again, pulling in all this sort of information, satellite imagery, telephone records, all this sort of stuff. And then the Ukrainians, as you recall, mounted much better resistance than anyone had anticipated. I mean, when Russia invaded, there was the expectation that Kyiv would fall in a matter of days, and that obviously did not happen. And Palantir's technology, it would appear, played a very important role in this.
- [37:56]
Carl Miller
Well, much else happens, everyone. So Palantir becomes a meme stock Redditors nickname, Carp Daddy Carp. He becomes a billionaire and he still doesn't get a chance to speak at Haverford's. But I think we need to fast forward a little bit to the current predicament that Palantir and Ounce Carp find themselves in. So over this time, obviously there's a kind of ideological transformation happening, isn't there, across both the landscape of American politics and Peter Thiel and Alex Karp himself. So Peter Thiel goes from, I think you call him from a unhappy libertarian to an enthusiastic fascist.
- [38:34]
Michael Steinberger
Yes, that's one former Palantir employee had said of him.
- [38:38]
Carl Miller
Yes, yes, one former Palantir employee. Sorry, yes, you're quoting someone. And obviously now Palantir is deeply enmeshed in a government headed by a president who has totalitarian impulses, arguably, and who is willing to use the kind of powers of the executive in ways that no president has been willing to, at least for a very long time. How does Alex Kott square the circle of a company that's kind of been created to defend Western values, now being on the kind of forefront of perhaps the greatest threat to Western values? And that not coming from an external country, but from an elected leader?
- [39:19]
Michael Steinberger
Well, that's a great question. And to kind of unpack his journey, you have to go back to the first Trump presidency. Thiel had been.
- [39:29]
Probably Trump's biggest supporter of the business community. In 2016, Karp, both publicly and privately, made clear that he was not a Trump supporter. He was still identifying as a Democrat, as a progressive. He called himself a progressive. And he made very clear that he was not a Trump enthusiast. He made clear during Trump's first presidency, when Palantir was caught up in controversy over its work with ice, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which was implementing what was then Trump's very harsh crackdown in immigration, Karp made clear that he had real differences with Trump over a range of issues. And he told me after Trump was defeated in 2020 that, you know, it was. It was a. You know, he basically, at one point, he says to me that, yeah, he's very. He's given to dramatic pronouncements, and he said that Biden and Ukraine, meaning the Biden Ukraine, he says, saved my life. So he's being a little dramatic. But what he means is, you know, the. Palantir had been under a huge amount of pressure that had been a lightning rod for critics of Trump's first presidency. And with Biden's election in 2020 and then Ukraine, the. The Ukraine invasion, 2022, which in which Palantir seemed unambiguously to be on the side of good, those are much better days for Palantir. But then what happens, of course, is Trump gets elected president again in 2024, and, you know, Karp is on board with Trump this time. You know.
- [41:01]
It'S a complicated explanation for how he ended up on board. And if you want me to get into. I'm happy to walk you through that. I mean, but, you know, I think a lot of it has to do with. I mean, he's, you know, certainly during the Biden years, he made very clear he was unhappy with the Democrats about a lot of issues, not least the border. You know, he said, you know, and he had said this even during Trump's first presidency. He said, look it, if Democrats and progressives don't take people's legitimate concerns about chaos at the border and about illegal immigration seriously, they're going to turn to people who do. And he felt certainly vindicated when Trump was elected in 2016, and he felt vindicated again when Trump was elected again in 2024. So what happened is. And so he's increasingly unhappy with the Democrats. October 7th is a big deal in his Evolution. Palantir works with Israel. Karp is a very strong supporter of Israel. He identifies very strongly with his Jewish heritage, identifies very strongly with Israel. And he is furious about the protests on American college campuses that break out after Israel attacks Gaza. And he sees it not just as, in his mind, it's not the protests have erased any distinction between anti Zionism and anti Semitism, but he also thinks it reflects just a deeper rot of the left. So he's very alienated from the left by the time Trump wins election again in 2024. And then he got on board with Trump in a lot of, one might say, you know, he. There are issues, there are things that he support that Trump is doing that he supports. And, and, you know, part of this is, you know, you. Palantir is a major government contractor, so, you know, you have to make nice with Donald Trump. I mean, the first rule of doing business in Donald Trump's Washington is don't tick off Donald Trump. The second rule is do everything you can to ingratiate yourself with Donald Trump. And so he's doing that. I think he also sees the second Trump presidency as a major business opportunity for Palantir, and that's proving to be the case. I mean, the company's gotten a lot of. A lot of contracts over the last year from the government. But I also think he has found ideological reasons to get on board with Trump this time around. He says the issue, that of the issues that are of paramount concern to him now, national security and combating anti Semitism, he thinks Trump is the right guy. And so, you know, with some of these other tech bros who've gotten on board with Trump this time around, the cravenness kind of drips off them like sweat. With Karp, he's actually found some policy reasons, some, quote unquote, intellectual reasons to get on board here with Trump. Part of this, and probably the most interesting dimension is because, as you said, and as we talked about earlier, this notion of Palantir as a sword and shield for the west, defending the west, defending Western values that always, for most of Palantir's history, meant defending liberal democracy. And Karp's tune has changed about that. You don't hear him talking about liberal democracy now. You don't hear him talking about the west as a political project any longer. Now it's as a cultural entity, as a superior culture. So his way of talking about the west has changed. And I guess one simple explanation for that is that look at liberal democracy's under assault in the United States. And elsewhere in the west. And he's a savvy CEO and just kind of shifting with the prevailing winds is one way of looking at it.
- [44:33]
Carl Miller
So, Michael, we're almost at the end, and what I normally like to do at the end is to riff on some of the bigger themes and bigger questions that arise. But. But what I thought would be fun to do here is to fire a few car pisms at you for you to reflect on, because the man is nothing if not quotable.
- [44:52]
He is a very, very quotable subject, isn't he? So I'm going to. I'm going to lift. I've listed some of my. My favorite car PSMs from, from the book. And I just wonder whether you want to wonder, reflect on some of them. So the first one, which I think is absolutely four square to what you just said, is bad times are good for Palantir.
- [45:13]
Michael Steinberger
That is what he thinks it is. A company with a very dark worldview. Karp.
- [45:19]
It'S interesting.
- [45:21]
He has a very dark, dystopian worldview. There's a paradox here. Personally, he's a very content, very happy person in contrast to some of these other tech moguls who know, dominate the headlines and who are, you know, I think are very clear, are very unhappy people. And one might even say that they are using their vast wealth to make their misery our misery. Karp is actually a very happy person. He's. He likes the life he's leading. He loves what he does. He loves the work he's doing. He's a very happy person. But he's also got this very dark worldview that, that informs, you know, Palantir's work and always has that. You know, this is. Palantir is, Is building weapons essentially to, you know, to destroy our. To, To. To. To keep our enemies at bay and to, you know, try to bring some order to a chaotic world. You know, his view is very simple. He says, we have enemies who want to kill us. We should. We should kill them before they kill us. That's. That's kind of how he sees the world. And, and it's. It's certainly true that bad times, I mean, a lot of contracts that Palantir has gotten have been in moments of crisis for companies. I mean, you talk about bad times. I mean, so like, you have Airbus with something like Airbus. They're. They're having a production glitch on the A350 airliner. They bring in Palantir for help. The relationship with ICE began in a moment of crisis after an ICE special Agent was assassinated by a Mexican drug cartel. ICE needs help finding the perpetrators. The relationship with French intelligence begins after the tax in Paris in 2003. So, you know, bad times seem to be good for Palantir.
- [46:58]
Carl Miller
Karpism number two. And I'm going to remind people this is a quote directly from Alex Karp is we're an enterprise company with enterprise clients. Do you think it is helpful having a fluorescent praying mantis coming into their office telling them about German philosophy? It is not helpful.
- [47:15]
Michael Steinberger
He is the fluorescent praying mantis. Just to be clear about this. This was back in 2019 when he and I first started talking. And he and I basically have been having an ongoing conversation for now, six years. And this was in 2019. So before Palantir goes public, it's company succeeding, but it hasn't had the, hasn't had that milestone, that landmark achievement of actually going public. And you know, Karp, while he recognizes, well, he knows that he is the right person to lead Palantir internally, he feels that maybe he's not the best person to lead it externally to be the face of this company. First of all, he doesn't look like a standard issue CEO with wild hair and all that and he doesn't talk like one. And he lives a very different sort of life. Not married, no kids. So he didn't, he wasn't entirely sure at the time that he was maybe the best person for the public facing role of the CEO for Palantir. And it was a very key, candid and startling admission to hear this from someone who was the head of a company with a valuation at the time of $20 billion. His view has changed. After successfully taking Palantir public, he changed his mind about that. He began to believe that he actually was the right person. He gets this cult like following among retail investors. So he would not say the same thing now. But he did think that he was, he did have some doubts about whether he was the best person to be sort of the public face of Palantir.
- [48:47]
Carl Miller
And third and final, carpism. The thing about being viewed as bonkers is that people don't want to compete with you.
- [48:54]
Michael Steinberger
You know, I think that was, you know, that was a time when he would always describe himself as batshit crazy. It was sort of a, you know, he was sort of in a way patting himself on the back in a certain sense. Cause he doesn't actually think he's crazy and he sort of likes being perceived as this mad genius. And so, you know, when people call him like crazy, he was just like, you know, he took it as a compliment, like, okay, I'm a mad genius. I would say that, you know, his view was that this was more reflective of a broader view that Palantir doesn't really have competition, that, you know, that it's, it's, it's been doing this work for so long now that it would be very hard for anyone to catch up to, to it. Most of the competition space has been from.
- [49:43]
Internal companies thinking they could do it themselves and they usually can't. And so he's always had this view and it's been borne out by events that Palantir doesn't really have that much competition and certainly the clients who, those who use it seem to swear by it. But this was just all part of that sort of.
- [50:03]
Carp is not averse to self mythologizing.
- [50:07]
Intelligence Squared Producer/Announcer
And.
- [50:10]
Michael Steinberger
This is part of that.
- [50:12]
The idea that being bonkers and no one wanting to compete with you, that's part of his self mythologizing. But it does seem to be true that Palantir is tough to compete with. It really does. There was always this discussion. There were two views before the company went public. One is it was either portrayed as this all powerful technology, scary as hell, or as it was portrayed as sort of pixie dust. And you hear less of the latter. Now most people seem inclined to grant that, okay, the technology actually works and is seems to be quite effective. And that raises a whole nother all sorts of scary questions. But, you know, no one really seems to doubt that it is, it is what they say it is.
- [50:53]
Carl Miller
Well, I have a quiver full of other carisms, but alas, time is against us, Michael, so I'm going to have to put down my bow for now. But thank you so much for joining us. That was utterly fascinating and that was everyone. Michael Steinberger, who is the author of course, of the Philosopher in the Valley, available now online or at bookshop near you. I've been Carl Miller, you've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you so much as ever for joining us.
- [51:19]
Intelligence Squared Producer/Announcer
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Margarita Volpatto and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings, become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership and to join us at future live events, head to intelligencesquared.com attend to see our full live events program. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
- [51:58]
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Michael Steinberger
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Intelligence Squared Producer/Announcer
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