MAGA AI Billionaires Infiltrating College Campuses? Insider Exposes All

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0:26Alex Bronzini-Vender:Today on iHip, we are joined by Alex Bronzini-Vendor, who is a writer from New York. He is part of the Harvard Crimson, correct? Yes. And he just wrote the most fascinating article for New York Magazine, Palantir comes to campus at a quiet conference at Yale. The company and its allies sketched a vision for AI, state power, and how to mix the two. And so as I was telling Alex before we got on here, my view of Peter Thiel and Alex Karp and Palantir is that they are maniacal net jobs that want to take over the world. Peter Thiel has been outspoken how he does not believe democracy can coexist with the future.

1:07Alex Bronzini-Vender:And this just rampant elitism that the smart people should control everybody else, which I interpret that as rich people should control poor people. That's where I come to this article. So what I thought was fascinating about this whole deal were the contradictions in it. And the fact that Alex Karp and Peter Thiel are so outspoken about how they view what AI should do. They should do weapons. They should be involved in ice. They should do the draft. They've made all this money under Trump, I think, a 93 % increase in revenue. Yet they go in on campus on the down low. So I thought that was an interesting thought.

1:51Alex Bronzini-Vender:How did you perceive that? I mean, it was a highly low-profile conference. There was no signage in the lobby. I only found out about it through a flyer that was sent by my editor. There was nothing promoted about this publicly. The students who I spoke to at this event were all, they told me that they believed that they had been there and that they had had the invitation extended to them by the organizers because they were, quote, not going to protest. And some of this, it makes sense. Yale recently voted, the student government there recently voted to divest from Palantir. They're not popular on college campuses.

2:33So it made sense to me that they would choose to do this so secretly. What maybe made less sense to me is the fact that would choose to do it at Yale at all. You may know that Alex Karp and Palantir and this whole sort of intellectual scene, if we can call it that, have the Palantir co-founder, Joe Lonsdale, is one of the trustees of the University of Austin, which is the school that was co-founded by Barry Weiss. And so why are they doing it at Yale instead of at the University of Austin? That That was a question that I didn't fully have answered. And my guess there, if you'll allow me to kind of rant here, is that the purpose of these kinds of institutions that are meant to challenge the big institutions, University of Austin and also the Barry Weiss's Free Press, is not for them to exist as an end unto themselves.

3:27The point of the Free Press is to take over CBS News in the same sense that the point of the University of Austin is to eventually provide a staging ground from which you can take over or at least exercise immense influence at Yale.

3:43Alex Bronzini-Vender:I thought the same thing because the student body did divest that you pointed that in your article. But I also thought it was because my first thought when I saw the headline, Palantir comes to campus, I thought, oh, God, now Palantir is going to be turning point. And it became very clear from the article where Turning Point goes after low education, lack critical thinking. They are looking for the intellectual elites. So it kind of made sense to me they would go to an Ivy League school to do that because they are after this aristocracy of intellect. And I think you even said that in the piece.

4:19Alex Bronzini-Vender:Am I right? Yeah, one of the speakers, Rusty Reno, used the phrase aristocracy of the intellect to describe what he believes AI will do to society. It's going to make, you know, it's going to have this sort of underclass of people who just kind of get all their ideas from the models. And then the rest of us, all of us who go to elite schools and who go to the Palantir conference are the people who give it the information on – give the chatbots the information on politics and on society that's sort of fed to this underclass. So they were trying to address questions. And I thought a very pointed question that came out of the students for obvious reasons is they want our is our education to become obsolete?

5:07Alex Bronzini-Vender:And is AI going to take over what jobs would be ours? And I thought the response from the people on the what do you call it, committee or whatever, the speakers, I thought they had a very bizarre answer. If you'll explain that for us. Yeah. So Maya Salkin, who is a writer at Barry Weiss's Free Press, had a question for two of the panelists, Roger Kimball and Russ Ureno, who are both the editors, the conservative editors of First Things, New Criterion, respectively, which was about what happens if AI takes jobs. And Kimball's answer was, quote, a rising tide lifts all boats. sort of the idea, well, this is going to be, you know, this is going to increase productivity, and that will benefit everyone.

5:57Now, of course, what I found kind of strange about that response, and I told him this after, is that if you are someone who's a Trumpist, like him, you can recognize that globalization, and you know, the opening of free trade to the rest of the world, while it created a lot of growth in the United States, did not generate equal growth, and left a lot of people worse off, even though it left the United States on balance better off. So why can't you realize that about AI? Like, what's the intellectual block there where you can't extend that same scenario that you oppose so vocally in globalization, hence how they want tariffs and all that.

6:40Why can't they think the same thing of AI? And they just didn't really seem to have an answer there?

6:47Alex Bronzini-Vender:Well, it was kind of like from my, when I was your age, the same motto was trickle down economics, wealth, growing wealth, it will trickle down to other people. And as we have seen with the complete gap in income and assets, that did not happen. Nor do I think AI is going to rise, you know, rising tides. What is it? Rising tide lifts all boats. lifts all boats, it's not going to lift ship because in the same article at the same forum, they're talking about being the elitist and everybody else are going to be the consumers. And it just struck me that the questions that they were being asked, it felt like that the students there got poo-pooed on.

7:32Alex Bronzini-Vender:They even compared it to climate change flippantly, like, oh, we've solved climate change. That's no longer an issue. And they even went so far as to call it nihilism to not accept their form of thought. And I wonder how that hit you as a young person. Well, I mean, I spoke to some of the young people in the room about how they felt about the comparison of AI to climate. Some were like, well, you are this sort of long-tenured editor of this conservative magazine. You have absolute job security. Why are you telling me this? I think that other people, especially at elite colleges, feel quite secure.

8:07I don't know if that's a reasonable assumption, you know, just because you have a degree from Yale that you will be protected in perpetuity from AI job loss if it happens. The other thing that I was thinking about is that even if you listen to what people like Dario Amadei at Anthropic say, they're intensely afraid of AI job loss. Like this isn't even a concern that's like a radical lefty thing. This is an incredibly mainstream thing to fear in the world of AI development. So I found it incredibly striking that that was not a fear that people in that room seemed to share.

8:57Alex Bronzini-Vender:you're right it's so mainstream that my maga fox news watching parents are concerned about ai taking over jobs yeah you're not like a pinko if you think that you know ai poses a serious risk of dislocating the labor market yeah i just thought the whole thing was arrogance on steroids okay one thing that i wanted to this just i was like what google's motto used to be don't be evil and And they were just thought that was the dumbest thing they've ever heard, if you could expound on that. Yeah, so Palantir's sort of mythology, if you read Alex Karp, who's the CEO, and Nicholas Simiska, who's the director of corporate affairs and the general counsel, they co-wrote a book last year titled The Technological Republic, which kind of lays out their vision of the tech sector and U.S.

9:49society and what it – what both should look like. And they, as a company, have long taken issue with Google's motto, don't be evil. Google's former model, don't be evil, which they say is kind of – emphasizes the individual and their obligation to have moral clarity. and assumes that it's this – they charge it with being this kind of techno-libertarian idea that allows the tech sector to say we're not of the state. We have no responsibility to the state. And on one hand, they are, I think, narrowly correct in their observation that, like, well, actually, big tech didn't – is not this, like, thing that emerged from nowhere.

10:39You know, the government funded the internet, the government funded all the technology that then became the smartphone. It was big tech that commercialized them. It was not big tech that invented many of these technologies. So I think they're narrowly right in this observation. But I think they have this idea of what it means. So they're like, tech should serve the nation. Okay. But then their idea of service to the nation is tech should, you know, help the US military detect targets to kill. tech should help ICE decide who to deport. Tech should do all these things that engineers at Google protested over and resigned over.

11:21Something that I think is maybe the most flawed assumption about their whole idea that this can be a new legitimating myth for the tech sector, that the idea that we're newly willing to do the things that the US government wants us to do, and that will make us make people like us is that well actually i don't think that providing the technology for the war in iran which is a loathed war like people don't like this at all i don't think that being the tech company that says we are the ones willing to power this war is at all going to make them popular with the american people i think even on the american right there's a deep suspicion of mass surveillance and of right big data in that sense so i think that they have miscalculated there.

12:06Alex Bronzini-Vender:I hope you're right. And one thing they said, which they go on, we're not going to, don't worry about your jobs. It's going to be fine. And then they talk about how AI is not going to be running the government. It's going to be the government. So how did that circle square? Yeah. So that was a quote from Dean Ball, who is a former Trump advisor. and he has this kind of very expansive vision about what AI is going to do to human institutions, that it could conceivably replace the Supreme Court. I'm actually, maybe we'd be slightly better if AI replaced the Supreme Court. But in any case, he has this whole idea of around how AI is going to change the nature of the state in the same way that the printing press changed the nature of the state and the telegram changed the nature of the state in that you could now communicate information over long distances and that this new technology is also going to be equally transformative for the way that we do statecraft going forward.

13:13And that may well be the case that AI has these dramatic effects upon how governments work that we'll need to plan for um that said that's kind of obviously contradictory to the view that you know reno and kimball have of ai which is that it's like it is like climate change which is fake and therefore we have no reason to worry about it we have no reason like young people have no reason to be concerned about the the impact of this technology upon labor markets or the impact of this technology upon the world, basically, that that's just nihilism and doomerism.

13:56Alex Bronzini-Vender:But yet it's going to take over everything, basically. It's going to run everything. Okay. One other quick question before we wrap up. I got the impression from your article that they are all chips in on government, like imminently domain and taking land for these AI centers. Like I live in Oklahoma City. We have a law right now. You can't build one of those centers, the AI centers where they generate all the parts. Yeah, data centers. Sorry, gosh, I'm getting old. The data center, you can't do one in Oklahoma City. And I guess they'll do that every year. But they're saying, if we want to do a data center somewhere, and we don't give a shit about your electricity and your grid and your prices, the government can go in and say, this is where we're doing a data center.

14:42Alex Bronzini-Vender:I found that to be really alarming, particularly when you hear about all the problems they're having in places where they're taking all the electricity, the prices are high, it's too big for the grit. What did you think about that? Yeah, well, one of the speakers in attendance was this guy, Elliot Geiser, who's the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, which means that when Trump wants to do something, he's the guy who decides whether it's legal or not. So he was speaking about one of the sort of grave concerns that speakers at this conference had was, you know, quote unquote, nimbyism around data centers and efforts to block data center development in certain communities.

15:28And what can we do about that, given all the data centers we need to build? And one of the answers that he had is he had earlier this year used, I believe, the Defense Production Act to preempt the California environmental law that was blocking a pipeline. And he said, well, actually, we need this for purposes of national defense and therefore the pipeline can be built. and one of the one of the sort of uh i guess novel things that i saw at this conference which the administration had not said this before is that they believe it would be legal in the event of a war um or in the event of of let's say the u.s government decides oh we need huge ai capabilities to you know to defend the country however that's defined um we can use the defense production act to build data centers wherever we wherever we want them um it's like tough shit we're gonna do it

16:26Alex Bronzini-Vender:you don't want it it's kind of like the aliens enemies act with trump like where there's an emergency so now we're gonna be able to take all these people in right it's like that's bullshit but we get what we want so when you left that this is kind of the the end of the article was kind of like but i get it so you talk to people they're like i don't think they're moral it's not a great company, but if it's the only place I can get a job, I'm going to have to work there. And I get that. Like if you're drowning in debt, you cannot get a job. You can't, beggars can't be choosers type thing. So was the, so I just got the impression that they would, people that were at that forum would still go work for Palantir.

17:09Alex Bronzini-Vender:If they couldn't get a job anywhere else, they would still do it. I mean, there were a lot of people there who had serious serious moral reservations about palenger people who told me that you know privately like i think this is a a company that's like kind of evil and you know abuses civil liberties and i'm i'm concerned about you know what they're what they're doing and the products that they're selling um some of whom were like enthusiastic about working there which didn't make a ton of sense to me um i think that there are some people who can kind of convince themselves that, well, this company is doing important things to defend the United States from China or whatever.

17:52And therefore, I want to work there. And I think that working there is good. I think that that's sort of one school of thought among people who are in the room. There were other people who were just like, I think this company is evil and like irredeemable. But the job market is so terrible that like, I will work there anyway, or would if it had to come to that. And people told me stories. One girl told me a story about how she had a sister who had graduated either from Columbia or from Harvard, she didn't remember, who had like applied everywhere in tech and the only, she had gotten, you know, two calls back basically, one from a company she didn't name and the other from Palantir.

18:29Right.

18:29Alex Bronzini-Vender:And so you are in a catch-22. I mean, it really is. And that's why when you see all the moral carve-outs that people make for Trump and his behavior and his actions, like it kind of tracks, like people are willing to make the moral carve out for their personal success. And I can't say that I'm judging it because I've been fresh out of college, fresh out of law school. You've got money, you have to pay back, you have to support yourself. Like I get it. So when you left, did you think Palantir and its ideals are going to catch on like wildfire at these campuses with the youth? Or did you get more of a sense that, oh, they're bad.

19:09The sense that I got is that they don't really need to convince anyone. Like, I think that they believe these things. I don't think that this is just like a marketing pitch. I think that they really do hold certain ideas about how U.S. society should be organized. And they're not just saying this so they could sell software. But on the other hand, do they really need to convince anyone? I mean, on one hand, they're kind of the only firm that does the things that they do. Um, and so, so, so they don't really need to convince the government. I mean, even left-leaning governments like the UK government, um, buys products from Palantir because they are the only, you know, the only company that does these things at scale.

19:52So they don't need to convince governments. Do they need to convince students? Well, maybe even, maybe, maybe not, because again, the jobs pay very highly. Um, they're prestigious. They – so I think the question of almost does anyone believe in this stuff is a little – in some sense besides the point was my conclusion.

20:13Alex Bronzini-Vender:Fair. I mean that's a great point because they really do have the edge on the market. And I was reading an article after we saw how they've been getting military contracts, they're involved in ICE. And I read an article or maybe somebody, I can't remember where I got it, but they said, if you removed Palantir from U.S. government, it would be like removing a body central nervous system. So, I mean, it's fucking deep in there. And we know that all of our private information is in the hands of this company. And at this point, it's like, what are our options? Yeah, I mean, I've heard from people who work in defense and in defense tech that Palantir has what's called a vendor lock-in effect, which is to say once you've integrated its software in your workplace and into your institution, it becomes basically impossible to remove it because there's just so much institutional memory that gets built up in the software.

21:08um i think that one thing that i think concerns a lot of the company's critics is that this is a company that has expressed opinions on like how the u.s should conduct foreign policy right um they took out a full page ad i believe in the new york times or the wall street journal that palantir stands with israel um so clearly they have opinions about like about and they wrote an entire book on the CEO and one of his deputies wrote an entire book about sort of how the U.S. government should function in some sense. I'm kind of oversimplifying here. But so they are clearly very opinionated company.

21:50They did a tweet, and they also talk about this in the book, where they were like, we should bring back the draft. Yes. So they have all these ideas. um meanwhile they are this whole system that that um you know is is so deeply integrated into into the government and into decision making processes so i think that it would it's fair to wonder like on what level is is are are they trying to exercise influence through those systems like are these systems just kind of neutral pathways to organize information? Or are they a means to an end? Because again, this is a company that has lots of opinions, that is extremely forthcoming about how it believes the US should run its military, how it believes the US should, you know, what countries it believes should be US allies.

22:44Yeah.

22:45Alex Bronzini-Vender:And Peter Thiel's very outspoken against It's democracy. I mean, so you can't help but think that it shit rolls downhill, as they say in Oklahoma. Alex, thank you so much for being on. I loved your article. I am so impressed that at your very young age, I thought your piece was fascinating. I really enjoyed it. I'm going to keep watching for your stuff. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me.

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