In Alex Karp’s World, Palantir Is the Underdog

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2:09Schedule your free inspection at eriehome.com slash podcast to receive up to 50 % off installation, up to$1 ,200. That's E-R-I-E home.com slash podcast. Minimum purchase required. Restrictions apply. See rep for warranty or promotional details. Hey, Caroline. How are you doing? Doing all right, thanks. I'm filling in for Lauren today. I know she's on vacation. I do not know where, but hope she's having a nice time. How are you doing? I'm doing well, thanks. She's leaving on a plane right now, hopefully, given the circumstances. Her plane actually took off on time. Yeah, I guess to be determined on how that goes.

2:48Well, we also have a special guest with us today, Wired's editor-at-large, Stephen Levy. Hello, Stephen. I'm Michael, and hello, Carolyn. I'm delighted to be back on the show. Yes, thanks for joining us again. We have you on this week because you recently sat down with Palantir's CEO, Alex Karp, and we're excited to hear more about it on today's show. But if you had to summarize the vibe of the conversation that you had with him, how would you summarize it? It was a little electric. He was very hyped up. You know, we do these interviews in two parts. First, there's a camera on, and we show that segment on YouTube.

3:26Listeners can check that out on our Wired channel on YouTube now. And then we continue talking with the cameras off. And when the cameras were on, he was very hyper and talked really fast. And it went almost like a stream of consciousness in some ways. You could see for yourself. When the cameras went off, we still had the same kind of conversation, but it was a little less hyper. And we butted heads a little. We did it in, I'd say, not a rancorous way, but he told me afterwards, he said, I really like the way you did this because you were honest about it. I didn't pretend that we were on the same side politically or anything like that.

4:10And I really wasn't asking questions to try to win him over or anything, just to learn the answers to the questions that concern me and I think a lot of our readers. But I really wanted to know the answer to some of these hot button questions about Palantir. This is Wired's Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley. Today, we're getting to know Alex Karp, who is best known as the CEO of Palantir Technologies. Karp's profile has become increasingly public as Palantir's contracts with partners like ICE, the CIA, and the Israeli government have come under scrutiny.

4:48But Karp has long been known in Silicon Valley circles, particularly because of his beliefs around where the tech industry should sharpen its focus. In his book, The Technological Republic, Karp and his co-author, Nicholas Zamiska, argue that tech should work in service of a state and not for individual purposes. The company also embraces a code of conduct that supposedly binds the company to, among other things, protect privacy and civil liberties and preserve and promote democracy. Whether that's actually happening is in the eye of the beholder. In an open letter last May, 13 former workers accused Palantir's leadership of having abandoned its founding values and being complicit in normalizing authoritarianism under, quote, the guise of a revolution led by oligarchs, unquote.

5:34Wired's editor-at-large Stephen Levy recently sat down with Karp to talk about his background, his views, and the criticism towards Palantir. We'll dive into their conversation and what Karp's answers reveal about the larger beliefs driving the tech industry today. I'm Michael Kalori, director of consumer tech and culture. I am Caroline Hoskins, staff writer. I'm Stephen Levy, editor at large at Wired.

6:01so steven it's no secret that some of the tech leaders in silicon valley are not our biggest fans we publish critical reporting at wire that often does not make them look good and you mentioned that perhaps one of the reasons that carp might have agreed to sit down with you is because of something that you and he have in common you both went to the same high school in Philadelphia. Tell us about Karp's background. Sure. So as you indicated, we're both from the Philadelphia area, somewhat different backgrounds. My parents didn't go to college, but his father was a pediatrician, Jewish American.

6:35His mother was an artist, still is an artist, and she's African American. So he has Black and Jewish parentage. He is dyslexic, and that's a big part of his identity. And when we talked about going to Central High School, which is kind of a magnet school, it's all academic and it draws from all over the city. We didn't go together. We're not the same age, but some teachers probably were still there, who I experienced. And it was at Central, he told me, that someone took an interest in him, saw he had a very high IQ, but was struggling because of his dyslexia and encouraged him to be a little more ambitious.

7:17And he said that was kind of a turning point in his intellectual career. So we had Central. And, you know, that helped maybe him to say yes, because we've been bugging him for a while to be one of our big interview subjects. I find him kind of fascinating. I read his book, which is surprisingly readable. And, you know, this is a guy who got a PhD in philosophy from the Goethe Institute in Germany, right? And he studied for a while, at least, with Jürgen Habermas, who's sort of the Otani of philosophers in the world. So, you know, it was very straightforward. I didn't agree with the message he had.

8:00He was very anti-Silicon Valley and anti some of the things I loved about Silicon Valley. He thought those are the worst things about Silicon Valley, which is, for instance, the Macintosh and its concentration on satisfying people and being fun to interact with. He thought that's a move away from building patriotic technology to help America establish its primacy throughout the world. So that's the point of contention. But the big things about Palantir, which he probably suspected, and I didn't let him down, that I was curious about was how he felt about how his products are being used by ICE, by the CIA, by the Israeli military, and to a lesser extent in Ukraine, where he boasts that it's been responsible for deadly force.

8:52So we talked about that and other stuff. So let's talk about those products in particular. Karp is one of the co-founders of Palantir, which was founded in the early 2000s. Peter Thiel is another co-founder. Even though the company has been around for a while, it has been gathering more attention, and it is still not completely clear to a lot of people what the company actually does. Now, Caroline, you've reported on this before, and we spoke about it on our Palantir episode that we did with you earlier this year. But for the purposes of this conversation, can you please refresh our memory? What is Palantir and what does it do?

9:26Yeah, definitely. So I guess to start, Palantir does not refer to one product. It actually sells a number of products. The flagship ones are Foundry, which is designed for private corporations, Gotham, which is generally designed for government agencies, and then it also has the AI intelligence platform, which is a newer offering. And I think that there is kind of a misunderstanding among the public about what these products actually do. A lot of people think that Palantir actually buys data from its customers or centralizes data from all of the different customers that pay for its services, meaning that there's just one centralized hub with everybody's information from all around the world, which would make Palantir this surveillance giant.

10:09But I think a better way to put it is that Palantir provides infrastructure, or in some cases, surveillance infrastructure, but Palantir is not a surveillance company. It's more of an infrastructure company. Maybe an easy way to picture it would be if you were to picture kind of an old dinosaur type corporation that's been around for decades. They have a ton of different systems running various operating systems, not necessarily compatible with each other. And then you have a company that's trying to make their operations more efficient. The idea is that Palantir would sit on top of this and allow the company to get the information that it needs without actually having to go in and rewire everything in the guts of its systems from the ground up.

10:52In some ways, it's kind of like a technical bandaid. I think that's how I put it in the article. It's a plumbing company. They come in and they solve the problems. And it's interesting, I looked at the evolution of the company for a long time. They weren't profitable, really. It was almost like a consulting company to begin with, because they would just send engineers embedded into the companies to solve their problems, which are about handling information. and it was kind of waiting around for AI to happen in a big way. And when it did, they were ready and they pounced. So it's much less like a consulting company than it used to be.

11:34It's more like a software company now and they have products and they still have engineers they send to support their customers to help them use the products, but it scales much better. And that's why their financial results have been so much better because in addition to getting more contracts, it scales more effectively. Yeah, that definitely squares with my understanding of the company too. And I guess to get back to your conversation with CARP, I know at one point you directly asked him about his position on how Palantir's products are being used by agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the current Trump administration.

12:11And earlier this year, there was a contract listing showing that Palantir is getting paid$30 million or they got$30 million paid between, I think, spring of this year, and then it ended in September 30th, when the government fiscal year ended, to help the agency essentially build a new tool called Immigration OS that would help the agency gather information about people who are self-deporting, supposedly people doing that in real time, as well as people overseeing visas and things of that nature. And I know you asked him about this expanding relationship and where exactly he would draw the line at democratic activity or just ethical activity.

12:49So can you tell us a bit about that? To me, that was the central question I brought to the interview. You know, if the CIA was one of his first customers, he did work for the Department of Defense where Palantir claims that they were responsible for saving many lives by effectively identifying where IEDs, where bombs were in Afghanistan to help soldiers not get blown up by these devices. But they had long-term contracts, I think, going back maybe even to Obama in terms of ICE. And what's happening now at ICE is what was happening before. So whereas, as Carolyn correctly points out, Palantir doesn't take the data.

13:34They help their customers make use of their data and be effective with it. And if you're helping an agency like ICE identify where to go and what happens when they get there is something that may not be legal, it may not be humane. What does Palantir do about that? They have a very explicit code of conduct which says we can't violate human rights. We don't do that here. And we don't engage in discrimination. And this is a very idealistic code of conduct. And it seems to me that you can make a case, as those employees did, Michael mentioned, that Palantir wasn't following its own code of conduct.

14:16So I wanted to know, what is it going to take, Alex, for you to say, you know what? We can no longer work with ICE. Look what they're doing. And his answer basically was, I don't think they're over that line. You know, I don't disagree with what's happening. Are you monitoring sort of what's happening with this government and democracy in this country and saying, maybe at some point I have to look at? I would say the more important question is, have I ever worked against our commercial interests because it violated our norms? Yes. Have I done this in governments? Yes. Have I refused? We get no credit for this, but we almost went out of business because we were not working in Russia, China or anywhere else.

14:59So, yes. Have we refused to give our product to foreign governments because we didn't agree with them? Yes. Do I agree with your implicit assertion that what's going on in immigration, as you formulate it, has never been done before? No. I think actually that's completely crazy. And I asked him the same line of questioning about Israel. And he talked about how Israel was a persecuted country, etc. et cetera. And, you know, it's tough to stand up for every tiny aggression that happens with Israel. And I even said, well, this isn't a small thing we're talking about, Gaza, right? But he wasn't backing down from that.

15:36So essentially, the answer I got was, these places I'm supporting, they haven't gone over the line. And he wasn't specific of what they would have to do for him to pull Palantir from the companies. He did say, look, in the past, I have gone against our business interests by refusing, this is under, I guess, the first Trump administration, to make a Muslim database. He made a public announcement that we will not do that. So he used that to bolster his claim that they do follow a code of conduct. From reading the interview, I got the impression that he was framing his understanding of work that's ethical versus not ethical purely in terms of just nation-state alliances.

16:24He did mention the Muslim database, but that's obviously just one example. I mean, did you get the impression that he had maybe additional examples that he didn't feel comfortable talking about? Or did you get the impression that his primary framework for thinking about this issue is which countries that he considers Palantir to be aligned with versus is not aligned with. Yeah, he had a frustrating habit of saying, can I go off the record here? And I actually said to him, this is a Q &A, Alex. It's not helpful to me if you go off the record. That's a blank spot in our transcript. So he likes to do that, to go off the record and say, well, here's what's really happening, Stephen.

17:03But I said, maybe later you could tell me all this great stuff off the record, but you have to limit yourself to what you know you'll be quoted on because there's a camera on here and there's a digital tape recorder. So please say what you want to say and answer my question on the record. So one thing that happened recently is that Palantir had its earnings call. And I think sort of consistent with what you observed, Alex Karp seemed really exuberant during that earnings call. I think he said that it was the best earnings for a software company in history, but the company is doing reportedly almost$1 billion in revenue for the first time.

17:41It's a top performer in the S &P 500. And yet one thing that Alex Karp always insists on, at least rhetorically, is that Palantir, or at least Palantirians, employees culturally are outsiders, underdogs, et cetera. I was wondering how you sort of saw that in the context of the interview or what you thought about the way that Alex Karp described that. Yeah, I asked about that. It's my impression that this is something that he cultivates, the outsider mentality. And I even tied that back to our shared origins in Philadelphia, quoting Jason Kelsey, the Philadelphia Eagle, after they won their first Super Bowl, where he got up there and said, like, nobody likes us and we don't care.

18:26You know, and I thought that could be a Palantir motto. He said, look, it's not fun to be so unpopular, but it's actually useful for us. So he conceded that this outsider mentality works for him because he says four out of five people, they come and they say, gee, I don't want to be unpopular and work for Palantir. But the fifth person will say, you know what, this is kind of interesting. At one point, he said that that I'm kind of the sacrifice. So he sees himself, even though he's a billionaire, he's got multiple homes. He lives in this 500-acre compound in rural New Hampshire, but he feels that he is an outsider.

19:07And at one point I even said to him, yeah, you seem to be doing pretty well, Alex. Safe to say. And then he said, well, yeah, we are doing pretty well at Palantir and we're going to do even better. Just watch us. Yeah, of course.

19:23Coming up after the break, we're going to dive into how CARP and Palantir's guiding beliefs are indicative of larger trends in Silicon Valley. Stay with us.

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20:13Get a new metal roof today from Erie Home, America's most trusted roofing company. Schedule your free inspection at eriehome.com slash podcast to receive up to 50 % off installation up to$1 ,200. That's E-R-I-E home.com slash podcast. Minimum purchase required. Restrictions apply. See rep for warranty or promotional details. This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order. Europe caught between two adversarial great powers. That's basically dialing back the clock to not only pre-World War II, but really it's a pre-20th century view of the world. And I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at.

21:02Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on The Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

21:15Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. So, Stephen, as you were telling us, throughout your interview with Alex Karp, he was not shy about expressing his political views. And that is perhaps not surprising, given how we've seen Silicon Valley grow ever more embedded with politics. But some of his responses were still surprising, like when you asked him about his competitors. Yeah, he said he doesn't think he has competitors. Basically, he feels that what Palantir does is uniquely effective and no one can match them for the services that they provide to his customers, whether they're government customers or corporate customers.

21:56As a matter of fact, the event I interviewed him at was some sort of developers conference with corporate customers. And it struck me almost like the giddiness of a multi-level marketing company, right? Like Herbalife or something like that. The customers coming up there saying, Palantir changed our business. And I think maybe he was conscious that that was the place they wanted me to interview him so I could soak in the love that this self-selected group had for Palantir. But I don't think it's impossible that there could be competitors. I think with AI, one would expect competitors to Palantir's.

22:33But we'll have to see. Is there anyone you consider a competitor? Our competition is actually political. The woke left and the woke right wake up every day figuring out how they can hurt Palantir. And if they get into power, they'll hurt Palantir. If they win, if the communists in France win, they will pull us out. If the Madani win of the Democratic Party takes over, I viewed that as my party. But if that's the party, I'm not in it. Or if the right woke wing, which is like everything is a conspiracy, any use of technology is actually going to only be used to eviscerate and attack us. That is actually our competition.

23:06Correct me if I'm wrong, Stephen, but it seems like he was responding to a very different question. It seemed like you were asking who Palantir's actual business competitors are or who was selling a product that's comparable to Foundry or Gotham, which I mean, funny enough, when I talked to former Palantir employees, they actually had a hard time answering this question and they pretty much all named different companies and there wasn't a really consistent through line through that conversation. But it seemed like when Karp was answering this question, he really saw it in terms of personal grievances and or the culture war.

23:38How did you feel when he was saying that? Basically, it reminded me when Reed Hastings of Netflix was asked about his competition, and he says, sleep. So the idea is that there is no one in the traditional competitive sense. You know, he's saying that our competition is our political enemies and almost a sense of paranoia in that. And it actually went on that answer. And my head was spinning. What I said to him was, how did Mondani get in here? I mean, it's like, wait a minute. I asked about competition, and you're talking about Mondani wing of the Democratic Party. And it's interesting that he referred to himself as a Democrat there.

24:20A lot of people would say he's gotten a lot of mileage out of claiming to be a progressive, that if you listen to a lot of what he says, maybe he's not such a progressive. And certainly the folks he hangs out with in the Silicon Valley defense establishment may not be aligned with AOC or our mayor-elect here in New York. Also, a lot of CARP's beliefs about how technology should serve the state's interests instead of private interests has become sort of the norm in Silicon Valley. It's become a lot more of an accepted point of view. You both speak with Silicon Valley insiders all the time. And I'm just curious how this shift towards political action is seen by them, beyond the CEOs who fly to Mar-a-Lago or the White House to dine with Trump, of course.