Palantir CEO Alex Karp: Why the West is Destroying Itself, Data Empire, Skeptics, How to Win

0:01Sometimes traditional stock analysis just let you down. That's how I feel about the stock of poundier. A billion dollars in quarterly revenue for the first time ever. The stock has just ripped. They have delivered here beyond the expectation and the expectations were obviously remarkably high. Carp's the kind of guy who kicks you know what and then he gets in your face afterwards and he tells you that he just did that. As usual, I've been cautioned to be a little modest about our bombastic numbers. If you work for Palantir, everyone knows you're good. And to all supporters of Palantir, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

0:35And to all people who paid it on us, enjoy your call. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Palantir's CEO, Alex Carp.

1:01Thanks for coming out. By the way, thank you all for coming out. Great crowd. You have the best people. You have a lot of fans here. Yesterday we also had a number of protesters. Hopefully enough. Why are they protesting? They're protesting Alex Carp being here. Categorize for me what's going on. Who are the protesters? Why do they protest? Who are the fans? Why do they love you? What can you see? Good taste. Good taste. Well, there is an issue of taste. and I think actually, you know, like you always have to kind of try to steal man the other side. And so like probably the people protesting me just have heard that they should protest me, but, you know, if you ask why could they have an argument or why should you like me, love me, in some cases?

2:03is honestly, some of you guys like and love me more than I like myself, which takes a little work. But I think this audience as an example, though, is almost unfair because builders basically learn from watching highly, highly talented people basically put a discount rate on everything I think anyone says, and measure accomplishment based on out performance against that discount rate. And you'll find if you're managing future builders, anyone who's palatarian in shape, that de facto you get street cred by outperforming against expectations where expectations are kind of multiplied against a high discount rate.

2:55So I think what you'd find in this audience is two things converging. One, you know, the journey of Palantir is completely counterintuitive. And especially technical experts, you know, the FDA thing was viewed as like, you weren't going to get a multiple. I was viewed as like this magical wizard who could get the smartest people in the world to work on something that was de facto stupid. We were, quote unquote, terrible at public relations. and we stood up for the US government even when it was really, really unpopular. And then there are a lot of people in the audience who agree with that, but I think as importantly, look at the results, look at the fruits we bore, look at the people we have on our side, and then you get to the other side.

3:38And again, it would be easy just to dismiss the other side as I don't know. Stupid, they don't know what's going on. Let's just take the intellectually rigorous version of why you would be against what we're doing. There's a misconception that AI and tech is going to exclude everyone who's not in this room. And so a lot of people who are protesting, actually what they're protesting is there's no way to get in this room. And in fact, the way aptitude and the way the implementation of things that's worked they're just wrong. And because they've assumed that they then go into what I would call super -aggressive, non -working, philosophical, or empirical models where they assume the losers are noble.

4:24But actually what they're really assuming is they can't win. And then you get to more subtle things. I do think there's an issue with our lead institutions that have taken the best and brightest and most valuable things you could teach someone and have turned it into some kind of Stalinistic bullshit that is anti -correlated with everything that works in the West, which is like individual accomplishment. And if you had to say, what is the central value, what is the central thing we do in America better than anyone else? It's like allowing people to express their individual artistry in a way where you fucking win, like with no apologies.

5:09And then because they think they're on the loser side of this, they assume morality can't be against them. And then they are trained to believe that and understand it. Of course, if you're a professor of Berkeley teaching about Heidegger, you think losing is good because you lost. That's, that's of course the whole reason you think that. You think that because you are the noble loser and this but again where it gets super super dangerous and where I do Think we have to do a better job is you can't just assume there's no truth in what they believe Which is like we have not done a Even adequate job of helping people at the bottom Yeah, some part of their criticism about the situation in Gaza oh So that I'm getting now you can get to know well first of all I get yelled out about you know What I get yelled at most about is actually enforcing the border That's number one.

6:08So like I get our southern border our southern border like so again I'll go through all three is I get yelled at about first of all for decades I got yelled so there legitimate issues to go over but I just went for those of you don't know the history I've been yelled at for 20 years and protested primarily for supporting special operations in America. And you just got to imagine that. I'm being protested for bringing soldiers home alive and killing our enemies. And these are people who serve our country and get been largely screwed by both parties. Like, both parties have totally screwed them.

6:43And so, I've been yelled, so that's, that's what I got yelled at. And then I got yelled at about that every single day. Then I got yelled at under Biden, under Obama, Biden, and especially obviously if Trump's doing it, you're definitely getting yelled at for enforcing the border. Now, I want to say, I don't understand how in the world of AI you cannot be for somewhat of a constrained border because we can make it work for every single person who's actually American and we can make laborers more valuable. We need extra labor that's not in either completely the most talented in the world like many people in this room or who are bringing skills.

7:22Also, So we have enough transparency. You can't say you don't know who's in your country. It's completely B .S. It's completely anti -correlated, by the way, with being progressive. I grew up in the most progressive family ever. And every Friday night at Shabbat, there was a lecture on how the Republicans are screwing our country by undermining the worker and bringing in cheap labor. So I got yelled at about that. And then I fought about that, actually, mostly, and then commercially got yelled at about how could you have these FDEs is going to blow up your multiple. Now everybody wants to be an FDE.

7:51But okay, so now you get now I'm getting yelled at primarily about ice What's going on? How's it going on? Who's is the treatment just the one thing I would say and I can we can go through each one of these Indoor old things the weird the obvious fact is if you care about not being surveilled illegally if you care about the treatment of people who come into the country illegally but deserve adiquat treatment. If you care about lives in Gaza, in Ukraine, and all over the world where our parents here is used, you're going to want the best software in the world because it's the only way you can reduce and more precisely target the people and justify the...

8:29and actually the only way where you can say this person did this and they deserve to go. And so, you know, and in each one of these things has to be steel manned and then... Let's do that for the second one, the border. Tucker said yesterday when he spoke to President Trump, there was no way to know, are there 30 million people here illegally, 40, 50, whatever it happens to be? You say you call BS on that, we could easily do it. I just say we could easily do it, and I'm not calling BS on that. I'm actually saying it's a very, very hard problem, but in the world of AI and software, you can't say it can't be done.

9:06It could very easily be done if we put cameras everywhere, and we just did facial recognition. Well, again, yes. want to live in that. They could be very easily done if you eviscerate our civil liberties. Yeah, that's not being done. Right. So I can grow your revenue as 400%, but I'll lose money in perpetuity is not a business. Yeah, of course. And so let's talk about what the solution to that would be. The the border issue is actually a bit overstated. You have 80 90 % of the country believes the border should be orderly. That is actually something that most people can. Okay, sorry. I just got interrupt you.

9:3780 90 % of people believing in it, it happening are completely just non -connected. Of course. Whatever the reason the Biden administration didn't do it, that's over and now we're here and it's closed. But what would your solution be to identifying the people who are in the world? Well, again, I think you're jumping over a lot of things.

9:57Like, what's interesting about political parties in America is that they're anti -correlated with what they claim. Democrats claim to be progressive, like me, having a border is not progressive. President Trump is conservative, having a border is progressive. And unfortunately, until we change our polity to the people actually get to say on the border. By the way, the single best example of this is in Europe. So how do you explain the complete dysfunction in Europe? Most Europeans, Germans, or many Germans in the audience, hello. How many of you guys are happy with the immigration situation you have in Germany?

10:33None. How many will talk about it publicly? how many will do anything. And then you get to these issues. The polity will frame the issue so that there is no solution. The only solution is to accept a solution no one wants. And that's what we had. And part of the problem, the reason the border is such an interesting thing is, the reason you get an open border is politicians do not want to address the real problems of the society, which would mean the workers of today have more value tomorrow than they have today. Because they have no earthly clue how to do that. They're like, we'll just open the border and we'll get free labor And if you're on the left, we'll get people who vote for us and that it's like and the reason the way in which if you kind of steal Man your questions, Gaza, Ukraine border, you have to raise the moral standard So it's it's not again the way you led this is like if we just put up a camera.

11:24Yes, you can stop terrorism or you can have Civil liberties is a little bit like you can have growth without revenue or you can have revenue without growth If you want to solve the problem, you have to increase civil liberties and stop people from being your country illegally. And the reason it doesn't happen is because there's slippage in the execution which is absolutely purposeful. And if we don't want this country to be what Europe is now, and I lived in Europe most of my life, my grandmother, if German law was made any sense would be German and I would be have a German passport. If we don't want that, you have to close the border, you have to make sure that people who have a right to be here get to stay.

12:06People don't have a right to stay, get treated fairly. By the way, both sides have to step up. It's not enough to say, I'm against the border or whatever, but I have no solution for what's going to happen for people. Which is unfortunately what my heart is. What's your solution for your personal solution for what to do with 30 million people who are here illegally? What would you do? Well, first of all, I mean, my personal solution would be you divide the pie. Everybody who's criminal, criminal, adjacent, or has anything to do with crime is going to leave. And I'm going to make it so that they self -deport because I'm going to come tomorrow in a way you don't like it.

12:43That's number one. And there's 90 % of the... That's easy. You have a lot of... That's easy to agree on. Okay. Nobody wants felons here. It's easy to agree on. Yeah, but the paradigm is like it's easy because again you're like civil, in any case, these things are much, much harder than they look as an example. How do you do that without eviscerating our civil liberties? How do we make sure the criminals, how do you know someone's criminal? What standard of, what standard of practice to use to define if someone's criminal are all criminals the same? Because de facto if you go broad brush the way you basically are, it's like yes, but being in the country illegally is a foul.

13:19killing someone or potentially kill someone in a different kind. How do you deal with the people that are around them? How do you deal with law enforcement people databases that are not made public to you? How do you deal with imputed data? How do you deal with data? How do you do, do you do, predict? That's the question. So you're restating the question. I'm asking you to answer. Well, I'm restating the question. So it's a question. That's the thing. Let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me flesh this out a bit. So look, everyone on the right at least agrees that we should have a strong border.

13:51One of the criticisms or concerns that I hear on the right, or from civil libertarians, is that Palantir has a large -scale data collection program on American citizens, so not foreign terrorists, not illegal but American citizens. Can you just clear that up and say that either Palantir is not doing that or under what circumstances you do? Yeah, so first of all, I just want to like, palencheer, like, there's a technical version, which I'm going to give you, but we had a Democratic Administration come to us and basically ask us to do a Muslim database. Now you would think, given the way I'm kind of besmirched as like some kind of, I don't know, it's like a Jewish conspiracy, that would be the first thing according to them I would do.

14:38We've never done anything like this. I've never done anything like this. To actually understand the answer, and I love these questions about the skeptic, because like, I actually love skeptics. Like I tend to divide the world into, you have a parent -year arrangement system, syndrome, which I don't spend a lot of time on, and I think they're anti -builder. You have a parent -year skeptic, and you have people who don't like a parent -year skeptic, or you don't like us, I want to engage. Any technology that works can be abused. We are the single worst technology to use to abuse civil liberties, which is by the way, the reason why we could never get the NSA or the FBI to actually buy our product.

15:20And until recently, like, SIGINT institutions would never buy our product. Yeah, you left, because it's like obvious. If you want to do data analytics in a way that eviscerates our civil liberties, you don't want ACLs, you don't want branching, you don't want pipelining. You don't want logs. You don't want logs. and like, hey, you don't want serialization and deserialization in your product. If you have serialization and deserialization in your product that's intelligible, you are basically creating a product that's gonna be really, really hard to abuse. And the logs are immutable and poundier.

15:51So, like, and by the way, the single most civil liberties heavy place in the world is hating on us every day. And you know what, they're buying every day? Poundier, it's called Europe. And you know what, sorry, I wanna get to this because this is important. Because I get basically attacked by skeptics and anti -pound -tier people that deserve any, and by the way, do not, this is a lesson for you. Do not believe anything I'm saying. And if you're online watching, I don't know, Nick Fuentes, call me the Jewish conspiracy. Do yourself a favor and say, yeah, that could be really interesting. Spend 20 minutes looking at the product.

16:2420 minutes looking at the product and say, is this not the hardest product to abuse in the world? Is it not built to be, and by the way, and then I'll get to direct answers of your questions. And by the way, that's made me very rich. because the civil liberties protections we built into PGA are the same things that we use to orchestrate large language models. The same way we orchestrate internally and the same things you will need to make any enterprise in the world work because every enterprise in the world, public or private, needs deserialization, Some kind of scaffolding to make the LLEMS work, which means the LLEMS have an ability to do a taxonomy on your business, but without touching the business that you can control where they're deployed, that they don't have access to your data, that you have immutable logs, and that you can measure the output against high fidelity data sets that can be viewed in any permissible and that you the permissions are enforced.

17:20So hardest product in the world to abuse, I'm telling you we've never done anything like this. Please verify, do not trust me, certainly do not trust the people. By the way, as a rule, the one thing I would say critical on the outside. Do not trust anyone who's never built anything. It's so easy to have all these opinions. You have all these fucking opinions about how the world works, how data works, how businesses work, how we got off the ground. I'm a conspiracy somehow they gave it to me, but not you, even though I'd be the least likely person to get. To sue the US government twice, we had to hire the most important engineers in the world and be laughed and shat upon by the whole world for 20 years before anyone took it seriously because we were a conspiracy.

18:01And you know why people believe it? Because they've never had a job, they've never built anything. And anyone who has, no, that's just not the way the world works. For me to succeed, just like for you to succeed, you're going to have to be 10X better than anyone else in the room or you will fail. And that's true for me, that's true for you. that's true for every American. And it's always been true. It's always been true. Sorry, I got to get to this. And anyone who tells you, anyone, anyone, anyone who tells you that's not true is you are the mark. You are the mark. If you're being taught, and that's what I would tell the protesters or the college, you're the mark.

18:36They're telling you, I'm succeeding because I just got it handed to me, and somehow it's unfair. No, no one handed anything to anyone at Palantir. PG is still the best product on the market. No one even tries to compete it foundry go ahead go try to build it try to organize a team of people as good as Poundarians go ahead try try try to do it for 20 years try to build a reasoning game I would like to try to ask a question sorry one second Well, I want to say is I'm glad you're on our side. So then my lord try to try to try to try to try to try to try to try to try to build in the old anthology and FDA's five, six years before anyone thought it was trying to raise the capital, try to be left it.

19:15But to your questions, no, we are not surveilling US citizens, no, our data is not being used to aggregate and to create imputed weight because you could say do you do it directly, do it indirectly. This is a fair question, no. Would I do this? Don't have to believe me, but I've never done it in 20 years. I've told every single important, I do a lot of constructive engagement internally. like with countries because you know people know I'm kind of on their side in the West. I've told every single major leader that's ever that I would not do something and it's cost and by the way it's cost -pallantry are a lot of money.

19:52We never worked with China, we never worked with Russia, we never worked with adversarial, we got laughed at the same room. Okay.

20:02This morning there was a report that there was some sort of an attack that is real affected inside of Qatar against the terrorists of Hamas. I just want to give you a chance to talk about Israel Gaza, that whole conflict. You've talked about it a lot. You have a lot of opinions. People have tried to obviously attack you and mischaracterize some of the things you said. Well, actually, they've often characterized what I've said correctly. Oh. But, okay. Yeah, I see. Look, the Israel, they're for me just fun. before he gets as big, they're fundamental issues. Does Israel have a claim to the land?

20:42Yes. Does Israel have a right to defend itself? Yes. Has Israel done something America would not have done under the same circumstances? I think America would have been a lot more brutal. And again, now, then you get to the humanitarian thing. And I'll say, abstracting from there, I believe progressives in this country are working day and night to hurt poor people in this country. I don't believe they're progressive. And I would say, I do not, I believe, through direct and indirect engagement, I'm clearly not in favor of Palestinian and innocent people being killed. I am not in favor of that. And I'll tell you, so then the question is, are you allowed to fight war?

21:30And then the other point is if you want to minimize human life, innocent human life being killed You're going to have to use software and this is gonna have to be better in the future than it is now But it's true Israel's ratio of like casualty Innocent to non -innocent is better than anyone else ever had in the history of humanity And it's gonna have to be better than the truth. Is your software help send aid to the refugees or can it? You have to be very careful. I want to avoid, I can't go and do exactly, I'm not allowed to say where we're used, where we're not used. But then there's some times a trick people do.

22:07I'm not used for this and I'm not used for that. It would in fact, we are used in Israel. And I would say, as a generalization, where we're used in Israel, most people in this audience would be very supportive of. And it actually has been very precise and deadly. And I support that. Alex, yesterday we had Tucker here and he made some references to opening borders, declining fertility rates, and actual programs for assisted suicide in Canada, all of which may speak to the West's intention of committing suicide. Do you think the West generally is committing suicide if so why what gets us here? I mean, you have to disembark, disembiguate America, like I walked around your audience.

22:57This isn't not an audience committing suicide. This audience is fighting to win.

23:04And before I get to this question, and the one thing I would tell you guys is you're going to have to fight to win because currently I'm one of the few people, other people on the stage who speak up. You're going to have to speak up and explain to people why you have the right to win, or it may be taken from you. And so you're going to have to fight. And by the way, here I mean, I don't mean left right here. Both parties need a little bit of kick in the ass here. Like it's like, we have a right to win, we need to win. And you have an individual right to fight to win in this country. And it should not be taken away from you.

23:34And it could be if you don't stand up and tell people, know your ideas ridiculous. And that's what me explain to you how this works. Then I mean, for those of you who don't know, I spent half my life and I wrote this PhD in Germany. And so it's a country I know France reasonably well, actually, but when I'm talking about Europe, Europe is obviously not Europe. You have East and West Europe and Eastern European countries are very, very different than Western European countries. Denmark is very different and the Nordics are very different. But generally when people in this country are in general talking about committing suicide, they're really thinking in their minds eye Germany.

24:09It's like you have a country with arguably you know, had pre -software AI, the best industrial base in the world, the best schools in the world, they have vocational schools. So like, you know, Germany, unlike, you know, they never neglected their working class. Like you have two different kinds of vocational schools in Germany, you have for like lower level and high level vocational training in Germany, puts you on the factory floor doing important things and you earn a real salary with real benefits your whole life and have rights. It has best health care, best life, and for those of you who embrace a list -siveous lifestyle, by far the best.

24:44Think about it. And so really the highest level of data protection, highest level integrity, best position to win. Okay, and suddenly you got, you know, the energy, they basically blew up the energy market, they blew up immigration, and they blew up essentially, you know, their texting. And it's like, and now it's like very hard to ask and answer the question, what is the future? And as a kind of sideline diagnostic, and like Peter and I, who they should be calling every day on Speeddale, like they spend every day talking about us, for those of you who are German, you'll know, like every single day, three times a day is Peter's Darth Vader and I'm Lord Sith.