FULL INTERVIEW: Alex Karp on AI, Job Loss, and the Future of Work

0:00Well, we are joined by Alex Karp. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time. Whatever is comfortable for you, you can do. It's cold out here. Keep your hat on. I feel like this is an average day for you. You're always out skiing. You're cold. We're close to getting skis. Look. It's starting to stick. It's starting to stick.

0:22Alex Karp:Oh, I like this. Now I feel like a newscaster. I feel important. Oh, yeah. This is good. You're like eight feet tall. People don't realize that. He's not standing up because it would be like, he's like counter-aculate for all of us. It's like eight feet. Last time we talked to you, I think you were doing four minutes on the dead hang. What's it up to now? 505. 505. What about in the cold, though? That's going to affect it, right? No, no, sorry. We need to have a special minute for that. 505. For those of you who haven't done a dead hang, first of all, go do it. Why is it important? Well, there are very few things that are proxy indicators that are accurate for health.

0:57Alex Karp:It's like dead hang, farmer's walk, body weight, and VO2 are the three ones that count. I don't think anyone really... What about one rep match bench press? That's all I focus on. Okay, well, you know what's like... I feel like as long as I have a really impressive bench press, I'll live a short but glorious life. Yeah, I don't know. Didn't they say something about that? Yeah. Who wants to live a long, glorious life when you can live a glorious, short life? Yeah, I think that's what they tell you before they give you a bad salary. I think it's like, yeah, it's like, yeah, my social life is so great.

1:29Alex Karp:I only have a bot, but I enjoy it. Yes, the kind of logic. No, but no, it's dead hang is important. Dead hang is crucial. Okay. And you really need to go work on it, especially anyone watching your podcast. Yes. Is likely to outperform. Yeah. You want to have some, you know, you want to be able to do something with that outperformance. Yeah, like dead hang. like yeah well the dead hang may be a proxy indicator for other things you could do with your performance yes you know but not everyone is yeah not everyone is like six foot nine and like you may not need a dead hang but the rest of us well i can cheat because most of the pull-up bars i just stand on the floor that's right yeah i can hold forever forever that's right that's right um but but when you're not dead hanging uh what should people be doing with the new coding agents How important is it to learn to code?

2:15How important is it to?

2:17Alex Karp:Look, there are two that everybody's worried about like their future, but there are basically two ways to know you have a future. One, you have some vocational training. Okay. So it's like, or two, you're neurodivergent. And when I say neurodivergent, I mean broadly defined. Like, you guys are sitting here. You could have had a corporate tool job. Yeah. You could have been like, I don't want to pick on Goldman, but like, just say, you know, like a job. I applied there. They turned me down. Well, yeah. I did work at Citadel for a little bit. anyways you could have you could have a job where you're like he tried he failed no actually maybe they didn't know the right way to test yeah like it's like yeah they were like like you know and whatever i'm not picking on one or the other i'm just saying you you you know they're like you are probably here you think you're here because but it's actually you probably wouldn't be able to do that because there's like it's the same thing as sit down in class and learn some like and you just regurgitate it, that's not a valuable thing.

3:13Alex Karp:If you actually have insights into anything, and you have real technical expertise, like you can look at a company, but you actually can look at it because you know something about how these things work or something about how clients work, then all the other stuff that used to be precious, like being able to do low-end coding, being able to do low-end lowering, being able to do low-end reading and writing, I mean, this is like, I feel like Odin came down and was like, I'm going to make the world just right for a dyslexic. It's like, yeah, Odin has come down from, or Lockheed has come down and said, you know what, Karp, you suffered so much as a kid.

3:49Alex Karp:I'm just going to make the whole world so everyone else can suffer. I don't want that. It's like now, but it's really an inversion. Like, everybody with, like, the normal shape skills are dyslexics. Because, like, meaning the thing they can do that used to be valuable is not so valuable. The thing that they need to learn to do is like be more of an artist, look at things from a different direction, be able to build something unique. And you see this on the battlefield, like one of the most underappreciated things about fighting a war, which is the I mean, there are basic core things civilizations do like build technology for war is every society fights differently.

4:24Alex Karp:Every component of the society fights differently. And when like American as allies, we do not even approach these problems in the same way. What makes America lethal, more so than any currently country, is like a combination of obviously the technology, which we're super interested in and believe are paying a huge part in. But it's like 20 years of like operators figuring out what worked, not what worked in a manual, like what worked in reality. Also, even selection. If you look at the selection of people, like you meet like tier one operators. They don't look anything like what people would think.

5:00Alex Karp:It's not like the movies. They're like this big and like, you know, it's like because we have specialized ways of doing that. All of that is crazy valuable. As a proxy indicator, people who are getting their news from you are just likely to massively outperform. People are getting their news from something that's a regurgitation of you've got to vote for one party or the other. And then the real problem we have in society is not your listeners or Palantir's customers or our partners. It's like, well, what happens to everyone else? Are they going to lynch us? Because, like, that's the real problem.

5:36Alex Karp:Like, these products, like what we're building, like our agents, mean that, like, the most, I mean, the most powerful people in the Democratic Party are highly educated female voters. And these technologies, like, they love, I mean, like, yeah, I actually get along with all these people in private. and there's a public dispute, but largely I've talked to Daria over and over again. It's like, yeah, you love one company because they're not pro-Trump. That company's taking your job. How are you going to feel about that company when you find that you have no job? What do you think the Republican Party is going to do to products that do not support our military?

6:11Alex Karp:What do you think the Democratic Party is going to do to products, even if you're voting for them, that are taking away the jobs of every one of your constituents and saying, oh, people are going to love you so much and you're going to be poor. By the way, we love you so much, we're going to give you a little handout once a month. Yeah. So apply that to the SaaSpocalypse narrative, the enterprise SaaS. There's an idea that the first jobs that will be taken might be the enterprise software products that exist, haven't really innovated, have locked in, and they're going to be replatformed. If you, the thing that these technologies do is they also make it harder to lie about, this is part of the political problem.

6:48Alex Karp:if something's not creating value or something's not working or there's corruption you can't lie about it and nobody believes that all software companies actually create value i mean the famous thing that we all learned it was that we rejected that you were learned and people taught you is like your software company is supposed to give the client the feeling they're getting laid while they're getting fucked yeah now if that's how your products actually are you are now you are gonna get fucked. Like and this is gonna happen so quickly and the simple test for people who are looking this is does this product or in our case we were never pure software we're actually like a hybrid of like humans FDs, augmented humans so AI FDs, and then orchestration and then in essentially what we would call primitives like you're taking the tribal knowledge of institution coding it into logic and then using that to be extended in LMS okay but we don't have to explain that to our clients.

7:49So there was always this, oh, is Palantir a consulting firm? Is it all just people? Is there any real software? I feel like that narrative went away. Oh, no, no. They couldn't invest in us because we were a services company. Yes, exactly.

8:01Alex Karp:And now it's like... But is actually having that service capability better in the future? No, no, it's not better. It's crucial. Underrated. It's crucial. All these places that made fun of us, they're running around and trying to get FDs. Of course, getting an FTE is like, yeah, it's not as easy as it sounds because you have to know how to manage it, where to put the person, how to extract value. And then you need all these products that augment the FTE. What are those products? Ontology, Foundry, FTE, AI things that we've built. So the value of the business is not a monolithic code base that never changes.

8:39It is the people. It is the deployment. It is the relationships. Is that how you're thinking about the business these days?

8:44Alex Karp:Well, actually, the way I'm telling you, like when you walk around here, they only care, they don't care about any of that. What they care about is you transform my business in three months, it would have taken three years and IE would never have happened. That's what they care about. Now, then there's a question of how do you do that? And that is a concatenation artistry. It's like select client, select where you would start, select ways in which, innovate in ways they would not accept. Innovate in places they do not understand you should innovate. Learn to manage these very complex, by the way, it's not just culturally complex, it's tribal knowledge.

9:20Alex Karp:And much of that tribal knowledge is in rules that they have to apply because there are all sorts of rules about manufacturing, hospitals, war, rules that are applied that they're not saying they apply, laws, like all sorts of regulatory things on top of all that. All that has to happen very rapidly so you would need and like without going into details like I'm in the middle of like every single one of these discussions in almost every breakdown it's like people do not understand how institutions work they don't understand how the software would work they don't have the LLM would work they don't have the product that would actually work in that environment and they still at the end of the day are not saying we're gonna charge on value okay how do institutions work why is it that we get these genius models that are a 160 IQ, they can solve incredible math, and they're not just like everywhere all the time.

10:11What is slowing down adoption?

10:11Alex Karp:Well, I mean, the simple version is they're 160 against a test, but the test isn't, it's a concatenation. The simple math would be it's 160 on one test, but you've got to pass differentiated tests over a long period of time, so it's 1 ,000 tests. So de facto, by the 50th step, it's zero IQ. But then there's also, yeah, I mean, it's insane. Like no I love when I hear about all this is gonna replace and I go to our clients and they're like could we have more? We don't even have the capacity Real thing like would you guys like to be FDs?

10:48Alex Karp:Completely seriously and you're aligned broadly speaking with America is a great country You don't have to agree about anything else and you're out there and you're technical or just smart apply we need you Okay, America is a great country put aside Democrat, put aside Republican, is democracy the correct formulation to decide the future of AI? Should the American people be voting to decide or should that be handled by private companies? No, American, well, it depends. Explain it. Yeah, great. So, in the war fighting context, the Department of War has to be the arbiter of what gets deployed. But, as a citizen, I vote for the Department of War, correct?

11:30Exactly, yeah.

11:30Alex Karp:Okay, but I'm just saying, so I want to split domestic and foreign, because like, we in this country have God-given rights, literally given to us by a higher being. There's a right of free expression, which we're exercising all the time, and it's very important to us. There's a Second Amendment, which I exercise. I shoot very well. I would encourage you guys and other people listening to avail yourself of the Second Amendment. It was not...it It is there to protect ourselves in case the First Amendment fails. That's the reason it's there. There's a Fourth Amendment, which is essentially we have a right to privacy.

12:07Alex Karp:We have those rights. Adversaries trying to kill us in Iran do not have those rights. And I don't believe, I've never believed in extending our rights to foreign countries that are adversarial to us. I don't even really believe. I don't like, you know, Germany, where I lived half my life, they don't have a First Amendment. They don't believe it. And by the way, they've never believed in the First Amendment. They have other rights. That's great. I'm not going to dispute that, but I want our rights here. In this country, if you're going to tell the American people you're building what is clearly a dangerous technology, it's dangerous because it will likely take your job, especially if you're white-collar.

12:46Alex Karp:So if you're voting, you're a highly educated person. Have you flipped on that in the last six months or so? because I think the last time we talked, your general mindset was like high agency, highly productive people will be able to continue to leverage the tools to deliver value within organizations. Yeah, I think if you're neurodivergent and high agency and you're highly educated, that's great. But if you're not neurodivergent and you're like lawyer 14506, that's a problem. Okay, but let me get to this, and they're linked, but it's okay. On domestic stuff, we have rights that are not subject to majority rule.

13:31Alex Karp:The majority can vote against us having Fourth Amendment rights. I want that litigated at the Supreme Court, because our Constitution is not about majority. It's actually about the rights of the minority, and it's our right. I bet you the three of us have opinions that are very much in the minority that we want to be able to say, at least in the privacy of our own home. And so there are real issues. I'm super sympathetic with restrictions around the use of these products in a domestic context, even though it's funny. People out there, every conspiracy theorist thinks, yeah, it's insane. I'm the only one.

14:07Alex Karp:Conspiracy theorists, you may hate this, but there's one person protecting your right to be a conspiracy theorist that actually has a seat at the table. And that person is me. You may not you may not want to hear that truth, but it is fucking true and maybe do a little more reading before you Pontificate on your absurd and obviously ill formed in many times stupid opinions Okay, so cuz like you're attacking the person who's protecting you idiot It's like fucking so stupid do do use one of the bots to correct your opinion It's like I'm being attacked online now He's like, Dr. Karp is anti-progressive, because of my whole life.

14:44Alex Karp:I'm just telling you the truth. These things are going to take your job. Okay, so then, but in the warfighting context, and it's the primary justification for these products has to be, there are two relevant powers now, us and China. This is a have-have-not world. It's going to be either us or them basically deciding the world order. Because, like, these other countries, and maybe India will get involved, maybe the Arab, non-Arab, Middle East, But currently on the trajectory we're on now, there are two places where these things are being developed and deployed. It's us or them. And I'm not particularly, you know, I'm not out to hurt China.

15:18Alex Karp:I'm just out to, I think we should win. I'm not trying to hurt them. And in that context, you can't say we're not going to do X, Y, and Z. I mean, I give you examples, but like there are data sets that are publicly available in the U.S. market that should, I don't think, should be used against you and me. in a law enforcement context more with the help of, say, AI agents and ontology. But if you don't use it on the battlefield, obviously Iran's going to use them. You don't think they can go online and buy those products? And by the way, without going into somewhat classified data, those things are in combination with other things lethal.

15:56Alex Karp:Like a lot of people who want to hurt America on the battlefield end up dead because of our ability to aggregate and then figure out what's going on in the battlefield before they can figure out what we're doing. And so like I'm very much in favor of it for moral reasons, but I'm also in favor of is like I don't know how else you explain this to the American people. We're we're gonna take your job We're gonna take away you're gonna eviscerate your ability to to to have money and power But that we're not gonna defend you on the battlefield just seems like yeah Well, they're gonna you know, it's actually gonna happen that nobody believes me in tech But there's gonna be a movement in this country that gets very strong very quickly to nationalize these things first it's going to be take away our money the billionaires are evil you may not have heard that super evil and if you take away their money it'll help poor people yes that's really important to understand making rich people miserable is the only way to help poor people yeah that's obviously true say once you've learned that the next thing you're going to learn is we have to nationalize the technology they're going to they're going to quote you on that yeah well it's like they've quoted you on well so so i mean it sounds like you're you're closer to dario on you know potentially 50 % of early stage white collar job loss.

17:03Like you're aware that there's a risk, at least some probability. You're aware of it. Well, what do you see as the solution?

17:10Alex Karp:Well, first we just have to, I mean, well, I mean, the obvious thing is, okay, we can't have any migration here. Like how are we going to create more jobs? Like, it's like you have to, what the problem in fairness, not that people want to be in the business of being fair to policy leaders, but we are dealing with technologies that will determine the policy decisions. So you can't just pretend they're not happening. Step one is it's going to be hard but possible to make this society work given that transforming it requires these technologies. I really like the people here. They're not here because they like me.

17:47Alex Karp:Maybe they're here for my jokes. High quality in some cases. But it's like a long trip and we're here and I'm the only one who likes this weather. It's great weather. I brought it for you. It's but they're here because they've seen their business being transformed and this is happening in America more than So we have to win those battles, but the costs are gonna be very high And so you have to work back from okay the costs are gonna be very high We can't put oil on the fire. It's like you know It's like well getting jobs for all Americans is gonna be hard and people maybe who become Americans But it's like you have to different policies around migration.

18:23Alex Karp:You have two different policies around how we train people Like currently if you're a young kid in high school and you're neurodivergent They're literally track chaining into your chair and feeding you medication so you can have skills that are not valuable Yeah, like it's so it's like and then we'll probably over time have to have like a discussion of like yeah If you go into this career You're not gonna have a job like a really honest discussion about that These are the places where you will likely have a job mm-hmm and yeah help what? But, you know, it seems like we, as a country, will probably head down a more European path where it becomes very, very difficult or near impossible to let people go.

19:06Do you think that's correct? You mean fire people? In Germany, it's much harder to lay someone off. And that does impact the growth of companies. But I think many Germans would argue that's probably...

19:21Alex Karp:Yeah, you know, Germany's, I mean, I'll answer your question. Germany's an interesting place. I did this thing in German where I basically told the truth, which you're not allowed to do in Germany. It's like, you know, it's kind of a really bad situation, and the economy sucks, the migration thing's a complete disaster, and the energy situation compounds everything. I got thousands of people literally saying, thank God someone told the truth. And there are a lot of people like you guys, young people building things that feel hampered and and and are correct to feel hampered i i think the american version if we're not careful is not going to be the german version i think it's going to be hang the rich it's like i think it's going to be not protect everybody else gonna be like look this is too dangerous and we're gonna hang the rich but not really help the poor and in fairness to the german version like you know german like health insurance insurance all that stuff it works yeah like I was I was poor in Germany for like a decade and like I had I had the best life on the planet like it was like being poor in Germany is like being better than being rich here and so on some days so basically policies that lift the floor re-education training you want to do what we could do here yeah we the things we could adopt from Germany are Germany has three high schools yeah two are vocational sure one is academic better education better programmatic vocational vocational it also has a bad like a weird vibe here like vocational training in germany is very technical like the people building the cars at bmw or even in the french version airbus like very complicated jobs they didn't go to college they went to a very very high-end high school yeah and they come out without any debt and that stuff is really valuable yeah so if you want to you you have to completely transform our educational system and go very young into training people to do things.

21:12Alex Karp:You also need to change our testing system, like different forms of intelligence. All of our tests are built around things that were valuable in the Industrial Revolution. It's like you want to pull out all the dyslexics, all the neurodivergence. Everybody who can't sit or needs to build or wants to build have to go into a separate slot of like, yeah, we should have gotten you before you got turned down at Coleman. And like I said, that's a waste of your time. You could be building something important. What else would be a part of the good outcome? Well, the most important part of the good outcome is we show our adversaries, you can't fuck with us, and we have the best military in the world.

21:50Alex Karp:I believe we're doing that right now. On the good outcome side, we go around. And then on the commercial side, we go to all these high infrastructure, hospitals, manufacturing, all these things, complicated infrastructure, and we AI enhanced all of them so the products are legitimately the best in the world and we rebuild manufacturing in this country. Like a big problem for us, including on the battlefield, is our manufacturing just is not up to where we have to be. And that, by the way, requires rescaling humans and we're doing this all over the place. I mean, the guy writing a lot of the scripts for these people, they're like high school, college grads, the people building batteries and all these things using our products.

22:29Alex Karp:These are high school, college guys. There's a lot of opportunity there. But you know one of the things I told the Germans and I would say to us is we I was like you know Germany You have to call it a crisis. We do need like this is a crisis moment America isn't tomorrow is not going to look like it looked at all or we're going to have radicalism on right or left The problem the danger is if we don't do these reforms you are going to get the pitchforks Because that then the only solution people are going to have as well You know, let's go after the unlikable rich people in tech especially AI tech and then but But then what can work is, yeah, close the borders, keep them closed, start doing huge vocational efforts, change how we test aptitude, like so we have an accurate diagnostic of where you could be slotted, be ruthless in like, you know, it's like in certain find out new ways to test and do ruthless testing and slotting.

23:20Alex Karp:And then also go around to universities and just, I mean, you know how when you like you want to smoke a cigarette, it's like this cigarette may be harmful to you. Maybe we should be putting that in universities. This university this this year of version is harmful for your investor, you know, I'm libertarian You want to go to university? This student debt may be harmful to your future financial health And your personal life. Explain to someone you got a million dollars in debt A million dollars in debt. I mean maybe if you're 6 '9 You can get away with that, but the rest of us have to provide.