Alex Karp on Why AI Will Hurt the Middle Class: You Can’t Have Billionaires Becoming 100x Wealthier

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I'm Walter Isaacs, and welcome to The Builders, my series of conversations with the most consequential minds shaping our future. In the years after September 11th, Peter Thiel began thinking about a new problem. At PayPal, he and his colleagues had developed software that could identify fraud by finding patterns hidden across enormous amounts of information. Could a similar system help intelligence agencies discover threats before another attack? The idea became Palantir. Palantir is a leader in analyzing data, a skill that's at the heart of the economy and surveillance. Demonstrators are accusing the data analysis firm, Palantir, of working with ICE. To lead the company, Thiel turned to an old friend from Stanford Law School, Alex Karp. Palantir's leader, Alex Karp, is an intellectual known for his big hair and bigger personality. Having Karp, a self-described socialist, running this company, gave people some assurance that the company could be trusted. Karp was an unusual choice to run a technology company. While others were building code, he spent his 20s studying neoclassical social theory and philosophy in Frankfurt. Karp had no background in computer science or business when he joined Palantir in the early 2000s. And yet, 20 plus years later, he has turned this company into a $400 billion colossus. Alex Karp occupies an unusual intersection. Philosophy and warfare. Silicon Valley innovation and national security. So I wanted to ask him, who should be trusted with systems this powerful? Can artificial intelligence make governments and militaries more effective without making them less accountable? How do we defend an open society without building the machinery of a surveillance state? Here's my conversation with Alex Karp. Alex Karp, welcome to The Builders. Very nice to be here. Huge honor. You know, one of my theories in biography is that it's all about dad. So tell me first about your father. Well, my dad, he's a very smart person. Very shaped by the combination of his German-Jewish mother passing away very early and I think my parents were very much in love. But it was not a coincidence that my dad married a jarringly talented, excruciatingly talented, somewhat difficult black woman. I think he loved the fact that it poked his stepmother, who was more status conscious, in the eye. But my mom is enormously capturing in her level of talent, artistic talent. But the thing about my parents, they hate it when I say this, but both my parents should be, it's kind of weird that I'm the most famous one. Put it this way, had they been more what I think they could have been, they would have not have birthed me. And I had this discomfort about the fact that, you know, this family that exploded in a messy divorce and with parents that are complicated created an artifact that is ideally morphed for building, essentially, Palantir. You know, it's like if you take someone like me and you put it in this chaotic environment where you had the feeling you're on your own subconsciously or partially consciously misaligned with your parents. You get a deeper trust in your own ability to survive, but maybe a latent mistrust of structures. Tell me about dyslexia. How did being dyslexic give you wings to fly? You always have to walk back from where you are to see where it got you. Like, I viewed it as a... I mean, I was in the closet about being dyslexic until like six years ago. And then I just got tired. Honestly, I got frustrated. And then I kind of told a buddy of mine, and then from there I just kind of... But, you know, it's interesting for me to watch how people like derided everything we did, derided everything I said, and now basically copy it, like verbatim. Now, why does that happen? It happens because they're looking for a playbook. If you're dyslexic, the way I define it at least, because it's a broad term, is having a non-one-to-one relationship with the taxonomy of a language, written taxonomy. So even now, if you read and I read, there's more of a translation function, even though I did a PhD, and I still do a lot of the writing at Palantir. But why is that important? Because language, of course, you prefer not to be dyslexic, but the truth is, if you are dyslexic, you're not colonized by the broader culture. So when I'm interacting with the broader culture or with a tech problem or with any problem, I'm interacting with the problem as it is. So how were we able to build the anti-terror product? Okay, that product changed the history of Europe. We've stopped hundreds of terror attacks, some of which would have happened in other places, but many of which would have happened in Europe. Think of the Europe you would have if that had happened. The anti-terror product is fundamental to the defense of Ukraine. Wait, explain to me how that comes from being either not colonized... First of all, if you go to school and had to learn software, build a software company, you would have learned, build a product that's not very valuable to the client or they're addicted to it, then hire lots of salespeople and get lots of people to buy it against their will. And that's how you build a software company. And then the derivative of that So it doesn't really create value, but it's hard to get rid of. It's like a venereal disease. Easy to get, maybe hard to get rid of. And what you had to avoid at all cost is anything that looked like labor. We spent three years building a product that was valuable. Okay, so then you get to what is value. We said value is both that you stop the terror attacks and you protect civil liberties. That already you had two factions, one that wanted to stop terror attacks and one that wanted to protect civil liberties. So the problem was to build that product you had to violate every single norm of how you build software. And then the biggest norm we violated is it took three years really roughly without revenue. Three years, no revenue. So you would have to be completely basically insane to do that. And I do think it took a neurodivergent person at the helm to fight for that. People are always like, I often get these comments in private from business executives can you teach me how to be unpopular? We're oddly kind of popular right now, but I don't think it's possible because what they're really asking me to teach them is to be dyslexic. To look at the material, digest it, but it's not inside me. You clearly grew up feeling a bit of an outsider. Another theory I have about biography And being an outsider can be a superpower in some ways in the sense that you aren't trying to fit in. Or maybe you've tried to fit in, but it's failed. Did you try? No, but I think human beings as a species want to fit in. And I think most of us who are not trying subconsciously realize it would have failed to try. To what extent does that help you? Say as opposed to somebody like me You always fit in. You want to get along. Jewish guy in New Orleans. I'm not sure that's true because you would not be able to write the things you've written if you were purely an insider. But in any case, it's not me interviewing you but if I were interviewing you I'd push back on that statement. No, I don't think you get Palantir or My Life Story it's very unlikely you're going to get as an insider. And I think the inside track is overworn and not working. And then I think if you link it to what we've built at Palantir the culture, the aesthetics the products, there's not a single thing we've done that an insider would ever do. And most outsiders are pretending to be outsiders. Since there's so much value in being an outsider, you have lots of people who are like fake outsiders. But that's not you. I think people like me I'd love to go on an insider vacation give me like the 8 weeks a year where I can be an insider and again, I know it would be totally stupid but I want to be reborn as like a my reborn fantasy is Catholic Bavarian Veterinarian. Well, getting to Bavaria and to a related concept which is a collaborationist instinct that's in the human species you wrote about the Nazis when you were in graduate school, was it? I wrote about it was a critique of Heidegger for better or worse, it'd be hard to say Heidegger was not one of the 2 or 3 most important philosophers in the last couple hundred years along with other people maybe Wittgenstein Heidegger developed a form of phenomenology which is a fancy way of explaining how things in the world could impute value onto the world in many different forms Heidegger became an ardent supporter of Hitler even though his mistress Hannah Arendt was Jewish and his advisor was Jewish and I think Heideggerian philosophy is the most important political philosophy I think for worse in the West now because most political movements that I would call regressive, far right meaning they want to regress to something that obviously has never worked on the far right and on the far left pretend to be Marxist certainly on the left but are actually Heideggerian and that's why I've been very early and for years saying like I'm still an unhappy democrat I've been warning the democrats that a faction of their party is actually not progressive they call themselves progressive but then they want a form of communitarian economy that looks futile it's not even actually socialist and they pretend to be isolationist when they're actually just focused on the groups they're uncomfortable with that's a right wing party so in any case, I wrote about Heidegger, now the truth is also I wanted to get out of jail like I realized halfway through my dissertation this is not for me, I need to go and build something to your thing, I'm a builder the interesting thing about builders is it's elliptical so the people you've written about Steve Jobs, Elon Musk I think you will find in every case it's a combination of an outsider with an aesthetic proclivity that is as much humanities as tech I think objectively, although most people in tech would disagree it's more aesthetic world importance and business acumen than tech which is why the tech companies are built here and not unfortunately in Germany or France because it's not that we're smarter but we are producing that shape person and part of it is most of the people building things here their great grandparents or parents or they themselves opted to come here that's already a big step why did you found Palantir? what was the point of it? I knew Peter in law school Peter Thiel we had this I was doing no work Peter I think was doing much more work than I we were in the same section and in the same dorm which was like the dorm you were at if you didn't have a lot of money and then we were both intellectually very curious he came to me and was like we have this idea to bring a methodology that was used at PayPal to the Intel space because basically it had worked to cut down cyber fraud and they obviously aren't good at this kind of tech and I thought this is wildly interesting and Peter is wildly compelling and then I just said yes. I joined because I thought the idea, look, you can take a jingoistic version of America like everything. Of course we've made mistakes and some of those mistakes are hard to understand in retrospect. Mistakes around integration, obviously slavery, I think not paying enough attention to class and not having the national project be stronger. There's a lot of lists but in my view and the view of I think most Americans, there's no project at scale so you can't really compare America to like Sweden of the 70s, right? This is like a completely different, the time, completely homogeneous culture. So you're saying the diversity of America makes it harder to scale? Well, the size and grandeur of our project and the fact that we have this constitution that is still, it's still fresh. Like you know the first, in my view, the second amendment and the fourth amendment. So write a free speech which basically also is a stand in for free to decide your own religion which is very radical. The second amendment, okay, I don't believe we should allow plastic 50 cal guns roaming through the streets, okay, but I do believe that it's crucial to allow citizens the right to bear arms because it's often reframed as self-defense which I'm also in favor of. But it's really about putting the government on its back heel about mandating what official policies would be. The fourth amendment pushes you back a bit. I know and I'm going to get to that but I just want to say, I just want to underscore and again I actually think, I've never been a neocon. I never thought it made sense to make, like the Muslim world, we have many Muslim country partners. It runs very well and I'm not, of course I want a different kind of government. I actually, as much as I'm on the other side of the CCP, I want America to win more than I'm interested in how they run their world. It seems to, they believe, I've never been of that school. But we have an ability, I can say whatever I want here and there is no government sanction to what I say. Okay, the second amendment does not exist to my knowledge anywhere else in the world. So first and second is still enormously radical but all of that as necessary as it would be first and second is not sufficient if you don't protect people's rights to privacy. And you could say, okay, well, the fourth amendment, you don't need the fourth, I mean I think people would say this abroad, in many countries. You don't need the fourth amendment to protect your right of thought. Okay, but it's not true because we're language-driven beings. If you can't articulate your thought in some form, even as a dyslexic, is it a thought? What is a thought that can't be articulated? Can a thought be extended, manipulated, changed productively or non-productively without its articulation in the thing, formative thing that makes us human and has allowed us to advance? Spoken like somebody who's read a lot of Heidegger and Wittgenstein. And where it's true. And this is why the fourth amendment, the ability is so crucial. One of the most vile and stupid attacks on Palantir has been that we're somehow anti-fourth amendment. No, our products are actually built around the protection and the only way you could use AI now is with one of our products where you protect these rights. And so, but they're vital to us as what makes us human, which is exactly why regressive political movements go after the fourth amendment. They want to eviscerate these things because they're a fourth amendment for you is their retrograde ideology that will force you, everyone to be standard cutout, same thing, non-neurodivergent, non-sovereign, non-individual. And that's why they cannot stand America or the way it's set up because our principles are set up to build builders. One of the major reasons we have a tech scene, unlike any other country, is because our constitution is built for builders. Don't go anywhere. There's a lot more right after this break. Morning, Carmen. Good morning. Quick question. Just one second. Sorry. Carmen's worked at this office for 20 years. She knows everything, which is why Carmen has to help with, well, everything. Hey, Carmen. What did Faye pitch in 2023? Who owns the Nordic account? Oh, where's the printer? But Carmen's revenue report is due in five minutes, so she shows them work IQ. Hey, Copilot. Who owns the Nordic account? And what did we pitch them in 2023? Get the context you need with Microsoft Copilot. Work lives on. You remember the first time. One look across the holiday table left you powerless. The next year, you slipped away to the basement for privacy. Last year, a secret rendezvous in the kitchen. And now she waits again. That irresistible pecan pie. Before Holiday Temptation hits, stock up on Tums for fast and powerful relief. And try limited edition Chewy Bites vanilla and mint, available at Walmart. So you can host the holidays, not the heartburn. Tum, ta-tum, tum, Tums. This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem? Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload. Odoo is the all-in-one platform that replaces them all. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR. Fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business. Thousands have already made the switch. Why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. So we're talking about the Fourth Amendment, right to privacy. So many people would be talking about Palantir, the cameras, gathering information on us. Doesn't that impinge on our right to privacy or do we over-index on privacy? No, well, first of all, one of the things I think Europe got right was – basically the European constitutional order focuses on privacy both in the commercial and in the government context. In America, our constitution protects against government overreach. And I would say culturally, I think we're not sensitive enough to commercial overreach. All my students say they don't mind Google knowing everything about them. But they don't want the government to know everything about them, which is odd. Yeah, no. I'm in favor of them not wanting government to know everything about them. They're underestimating – basically what they're often imputing is I don't care what commercial companies know about me because that's my choice, which by the way, it is obviously. But they're thinking of their opinions as being wholly their own. And at best, your opinions are a dialogue between your ideas and the outside consensus view. They're underestimating how much their thoughts are being influenced by the tech products they're interacting with. And because they underestimate that, they don't understand the way in which they should be more concerned about privacy. In fact, where I'm sympathetic with some of our critics of Palantir is they've got the Palantir part wrong. But you'll see like Palantir surveillance state, blah, blah, blah, blah. The Palantir stuff is technically and in practice the inverse of what they think by the most extreme amount of any other tech company. The part that they're actually right about is that if you have companies controlling all data, they will control what you think or heavily influence what you think. But isn't Palantir part of a surveillance culture and there's an upside to that but also maybe a loss of autonomy? Of course, you have to get into the definition of what we mean by surveillance. If you are an enemy of the US shooting at the US or planning to shoot at the US or trying to stop people who are coming into your country to dismantle something you're doing that's nefarious and bad. Okay. There are a lot of people who don't agree but okay. Yes. Granted. Our products are used to make – But what about when I'm walking down the streets in New Orleans and you have a system there that says, okay, here's where Walter was. I mean the domestic surveillance is where the issue comes in. In a weird way, Palantir is used heavily in France and in other places in Europe where we're contractually not allowed to mention. There's a difference between surveillance under the context of a legal mandate and surveillance where there's no legal mandate. This distinction is actually both politically, morally, and technically important. So I think the political morality, most people get that. But it's very hard to build a product that, for example, in the European context can only keep data where there's a warrant and then purchase it where the warrant isn't – expires or – the hard part is you have warrant. Warrant disappears. What happens to the data? Our products allow you to work in conformity with that. Some people would say that's still surveillance. You're surveilling a – someone the courts have decided is a criminal. I think there you get into where I would say you have people that are so – you have the right version caricatured where they're like just kill the terrorists and criminals. Okay, that's not a society most of us want to live in. You have the left version that I think just brings the right, which is no, we're not going to surveil known, hardened criminals. Where our product is used most effectively is in Europe on criminal gains, professional criminals, meaning they're organized and trained. I imagine on border enforcement because it's all done by professional criminals to get people in and on anti-terror, like on terrorism cases. And there you have – in the case of domestic intel, you have essentially something like a probable cause and a construct that allows you to legally do it. So in practice is a form of law enforcement I think 90 percent of society supports. And I would say the 10 percent that doesn't is basically going to get us some form of fascism. Like if the terrorist attacks in Europe that we had prevented had happened, you would have some form of far left or far right fascism when it amounts to basically the same thing. You are tracked all the time. Let me broaden it a bit more philosophical, not just to Palantir. But the technology we have today has enormous amounts of sort of data gathering capabilities, cameras and visuals and facial recognition. It also has now with AI an enormous ability to draw things from that data. Do you think this whole explosion of data collection combined with AI in some ways impinges on personal autonomy? Well, look, obviously it can and it will if you're not – if you don't push against it. AI – so now we're going to AI debate. AI is in my view best conceived as a raw material that can be processed for good or bad broadly speaking. So one of the most negative ways you could use these – harness these powers is for surveillance. I would argue that most of that is going to happen in the commercial context, not in the government context. But it could happen in the government context and I'm very in favor of actual – like I think we should restrict some of these technologies. Like for example, if you just take AI that we use on the battlefield, we should have legislation that prevents that technology from being used domestically. We need it on the battlefield. We have no choice because our adversaries are building stuff and if we don't build it, we're going to be just demolished. And I would say if you're anti-war, in my humble opinion, looking at any part of history, you have to have a strong military. So the idea you're going to weaken the military and have more peace is a fantasy of people who are half idiots or actually who want war. But then the domestic part that you're flagging is a very real issue. What are the technologies we're going to unleash? Like again, the famous fascist countries have no crime. No crime. When the Nazis had power, the only crimes that were committed were by them. That's how it works. There is only one criminal band. It's the government and there will be no other criminal band and they will take people out and shoot them and lo and behold, there's no crime. And in order to do that, they shoot a lot of innocent people too. Criminals are rational actors and probably they're the people who get shot the least. The people who get shot the most are people with political views like me honestly. If you tie this back to my outsider thing, I always thought from the time I can remember thinking I will be the first person on the wall. And I believe I will be the first or second person on the wall if we have no crime. Because the first thing that they do is define you as the people with an actual view. I'm talking about things that – kind of things I say that are outside the norm and are transgressive and building a company or having too much money or – if you don't protect the rights of the people you don't like, the unapologetically, unabashedly opinionated people that also have money. You're going to end up with a country run – heavily influenced by the extremes. Like take wealth tax. There are class inequities in the society that have to be addressed. And AI is going to exacerbate them. I mean I believe AI will create more jobs or higher quality jobs especially for working class vocational people. And many people are going to get retrained. But even if their salaries go up twice inflation, they're unlikely to stay at pace with people who are in tech and in AI. people can be a ten, twenty, fifty times wealthier. Then the reaction to this is to impose something that just hurts the wealthy, it doesn't help the poor. And by the way, it's going to hurt the middle class for lots of reasons. Well, wait a minute, if you agree that AI is going to lead to greater disparities of wealth, then you go back in history, 1890s, we had just as big of a tech boom, led to great disparities of wealth. Isn't there some reason to say, let's put more in the commons, let's reduce the disparity of wealth? That's what I'm saying. You have to do something. What do you do? Well, my version would be you go to, you basically say, you have a fifty percent death tax. I would go to people and say, okay, for every point you pay in, you can have some point, so you could basically, you pay twenty five percent now. But the government can only collect by doing half as much waste identification. The less legitimate critique I agree with, most people agree with, is you can't have people becoming a hundred times wealthier when they're already billionaires, and everyone else is becoming five percent wealthier, okay? So that's legitimate. The legitimate critique of the people who are economically literate is, yes, this isn't really going to help people, this is, half of it is being wasted. So, the way I would propose it is, great, you have to tackle both. And it's the same thing as you have to protect civil liberties and fight terrorists. The other problem with the wealth tax, by the way, that, for some reason, people haven't talked about, is to enforce a wealth tax, you're going to need surveillance. Because I'm going to need to know that, you know, what is the bench in your house in New Orleans worth? Let's leave aside the practicalities, which seem very impractical at assessing each person's wealth and taxing it. No, no, sorry, let me just, on this one point, push back. They're not impractical with AI. It's exactly the point you were making. They're not impractical with AI. AI could impute every single thing you own. Especially with all the data about, it can impute the things you're going to buy. Well, then what's wrong with then taxing people's wealth? Because it does not, A, it doesn't help the poor. It breaks consensus in the society. It breaks the tech culture because people are illiquid. So, all those have been talked about. And the logical consequence of it is surveillance into your personal life. So, give me a good Palantir way to say we have too much economic disparity. We want to have more common ground in our society. How do you do it besides maybe more government efficiency being the trade-off? You basically do a trade-off where taxation goes up. I gave you my version, but any other version besides a wealth tax, it goes up under the condition that for every unit of tax you raise, a half of unit of waste is identified. And that transfers a lot more to the government because the problem, you're trying to solve two problems. The inequity, which is a problem, and the inequity, which is also a problem, which is how do you make the life of a poor person better? They're not the same problem. So you have one problem, which is it's not fair for me to become 20, 50 times wealthier and for you to become 5% wealthier. That's not fair. Okay, that's one problem. It's not at all correlated to the other problem inherently, which is neither you nor I are a working class person in this city. That's a problem that has to be solved too. The interesting thing about the proposals, mostly from the left here, but also honestly from the far right, is it only cares about problem one. When a proposal is only focused on one side, whether it's civil liberties or anti-terror or surveillance and AI without the good and the bad, the problem is it's always both. AI is both a force for good and bad. The reason why we have to do it is because we have adversaries and our adversaries are going to do this and if they own this technology, they will change how the world works. That's not good for humanity. It's not good for us. It's the same thing on surveillance. It's like, does anti-surveillance mean we can't have a border? Does anti-surveillance mean we can't stop trained, hardened terrorist networks? Does it mean we can't identify spies who are stealing our IP, who are trained adversaries who've gone to school and are at the best spy service in the world and are stealing our stuff? Can we not stop them? Because I can tell you that isn't going to work without ... You're going to need technology and you're going to need to know how to do this. Then you have the same thing with wealth. How do you do this where you actually have a fair society because wealthy people are not becoming 100 times wealthier where the delta is so large? How do you do it as an addendum, which is not talked about enough, where you don't expand their surveillance state? And then how do you do it last, but I think most importantly, which somehow no one seems to care about, is taking wealth from the wealthy. Does it actually end up in any material way that helps the poor, which somehow no one cares about? But again, these things are very much linked. I'm in favor of people like me paying a greater share under the condition that it doesn't destroy American tech, which a wealth tax would do, does not expand the surveillance state, which it absolutely would do, and it lands in a way that helps working class and upper middle class and below. If you pick one, you just divide society, and the people who pay for that division are the people who have no voice, and de facto, you have no voice in this society if you're actually poor because the people repping you are interested in killing the wealthy. They're not interested in helping the poor structurally. Let's talk more about digital training on information surveillance. In some ways, you've been talking very strongly about digital sovereignty now, that the big LLM companies are not only sucking up all our data and training, they're doing it without our permission. They're building on the back of us. Well, the US enterprises are livid, enraged, apoplectic, because what they've discovered is they're paying a lot of money for a product that has not created a lot of value. You're talking about LLMs at the moment? Yeah, LLMs. And then, lo and behold, you find that while you're paying them a lot of money, you're actually paying for them training the model. How are they training the model? They're training the model on your data, what data is most valuable, data that's proprietary. De facto, this is what happens if you use any of these products without essentially a protective law. It sounds in some ways like the old McKinsey and Company's management consultants. Yeah, well, yeah, but think times five million, and then it actually shows up and your business is theirs, and they're particularly angry at Anthropic. It's funny. I feel like I spend 10% of my day explaining to enterprises, Dario is not the caricature that you think. He's not Lord Vader. And they ask, well, if they're so ethical, how can they take my data and turn it into a product that's competing against me while I'm paying for it? So how does Palantir fight against that? Well, first of all, the secret of Palantir that is most obvious and most hard to replicate is we actually are aligned with the interests of our partners. So mostly, we're educating, people are asking us, well, how do we do this? What do the contracts look like? How do we interact with closed models, open models? We're publishing document after document after document, not just for our clients and partners. With our clients and partners, they use what's broadly called an ontology now, a concept that we developed that was also derided, that now everybody talks about, but you can think of an ontology as a contextual framework where that contextual framework is de facto what you're doing. You're taking random things I'm saying and putting them into a frame where somebody would find this interesting and intelligible. So basically, the ontology is both a alpha creator, meaning it takes these raw products and makes them valuable, and then a protective layer, which means you can interact with it without being burned. But the larger point of the sovereignty thing is we believe in sovereign institutions and sovereign individuals. Then how do you apply that? Well, that's complicated, but in the end, whether it's vis-a-vis consumer or vis-a-vis government, it should still end up being there's an imputed version of a First Amendment and a Fourth Amendment in your life. And then there's a national version, like in the stuff we're doing at the Department of War, which is very powerful, or the stuff that's being used in Ukraine or in Israel. They have ways of doing things and data sets and ways of understanding the data and ways of implementing it on the battlefield that no one else should understand. Do you think, by the way, that more American companies should be willing to enlist in our military and national ambitions? And what do you think of when Anthropic or even Google or people say, no, no, no, we don't want to be a part of this? The Silicon Valley is a wondrous, unique, the world is jealous of place for good reason. It is a highly insulated island. The only institution that a supermajority of Americans think is indisputably noble in this country is the U.S. military. And the Valley was born out of the U.S. military. Well, it's a hypocrisy. It would not even exist without the U.S. military. Thank you for reminding everyone of this. The Valley was built as a hybrid, basically university government capital. A Vannevar Bush model. Yeah, it was mostly Stanford, the government, various departments, and people who came up with the venture model. And so what happened? Well, a lot happened and we made a lot of mistakes where, you know, I do think the government lost its coolness. I think Elon, I believe Palantir and others, Palantir graduates have helped bring that back in the context of defense, defense tech, defense tech adjacent. But I think a wave entered this country that's unfortunate where one of the ways you can signal to your community you're smart is by being craven, meaning you make other people feel smart while you transfer their IP to you. And that model has been very, very successful and the unit economics of it are very good, like unusually good. If you're a venture capitalist or you're involved in this, you can make a hundred, a thousand times your money. And by the way, that leads also to things that are legitimately good. If there was not so much wealth creation in the Valley, the bastard misfits, Palantir being the best example of this, would never be able to raise money. We raise money on the back of the fact that everyone's getting wealthy, but we are the last people to get the money. Go back to this notion of technology engineering being in service of a greater, but by not by, by, by breaking the explicit or definitely tacit covenant between wealth creation and creation of value, you break other tacit covenants in the society. Meaning you get to get wealthy and we'll leave you alone with your vast wealth because you're also creating value in the society. And if you break that, you end up with a fracturing of the society. So show me how we broke it. In other words, was the wealth creation done on frivolous, dumb things that didn't add a lot of value? I think these things do create value. But if you're the average, say you're, you're sitting in Louisiana and you're a carpenter, do you feel like your life is better, materially better than it was 30 years ago? I don't think so. And so I think right or wrong. I think the perception is more right than wrong. Your perception is a small group of people have gotten a hundred, 200 times wealthier and your life hasn't changed that much. And it's based on consumerism and ad consumerism ads. But in the end of the day, these things become micro subcultures and they're very divisionary where everyone in that microculture is in the culture because they are the same. But the differences that keep you get you kicked out of the culture, get smaller and smaller and smaller witness. Many Democrats refuse to accept me as a Democrat because I thought there were part of the party that was going nuts, but we, we, we are struggling to find commonalities. Uh, okay. So that's the backdrop. Then AI comes, you're taking already a fire that's burning and you're dumping gasoline on every part of it because the people who running are running these labs are saying your life is going to suck. Okay. So it's not that by the way, the people doing most damage here, you in a normal political movement, you'd have the people doing the movement saying, Hey, this is going to be good. No, you have the people in the movement, like your house is going to suck. You're going to have no job. And when you have no job, you can rely on me to give you money. Oh, but by the way, I'm going to be worth it. You know, it seems we've lost actually two things. One, your life will be much better that we're not just creating some consumerism, ad driven stuff. And secondly, a national ambition, a national greatness. Both those things seems to have been lost. And they're very linked because if you have a national ambition, you have to talk about things that will actually make your life better today, tomorrow, not about the way how bad your life is going to be building a dream that you don't belong to. And by the way, they're linked because part of the reason the Valley goes so wrong on these things is they're not talking to anyone in America. And they don't care. There's like it's an island on that island. You're cool. We'll be right back after this quick break. So everyone on board? Yeah, I think so. You can't see it. But everyone in this room is nodding. They all agree to launch plans. Perfect. But Julie has an idea how it can be even better. So she has co-pilot co-work to help her overnight. Hey, co-pilot. Gather the past three months of retail sales reports, surface key insights, and build a deck outlining a partner strategy by tomorrow morning. Morning team. I found a way to improve the plan. Check slide four. Get help with complex tasks with co-pilot co-work. Microsoft co-pilot. Work lives on. You remember the first time. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. One look across the holiday table left you powerless. The next year, you slipped away to the basement for privacy. Last year, a secret rendezvous in the kitchen. And now she waits again, that irresistible pecan pie. Before Holiday Temptation hits, stock up on Tums for fast and powerful relief and try limited edition Chewy Bites vanilla and mint available at Walmart, so you can host the holidays, not the heartburn. ♪ Dum da dum dum Tums ♪ This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem? Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload. Odoo is the all-in-one platform that replaces them all. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business. Thousands have already made the switch. Why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. ♪♪ Talk about the anti-government sentiment, especially coming out of the 60s and 70s in Silicon Valley, but there's a strong anti-government sentiment on the right now. Where does that come from, and is that dangerous? Well, again, you know, I, we at Palantir are always interested in what is the legitimate version of maybe a retrograde argument. So let me start with, if you have a rise of a powerful technology that could be used to abuse you, used to undermine the imputed rights that you actually have under our Constitution, directly or indirectly, and you've seen mismanagement of issues, call it COVID, which I think most people would say in some form or another was mismanaged, and you have no national purpose measurement, maybe the lowest I've ever seen. So you have high mistrust in government, you have low national purpose, you feel like people who claim to believe in things are just liars, and you have the people who are doing the best seem to be not so tethered to you. You'd be a little bit weird if you didn't have skepticism of the government. Now, where I think it's very nonproductive, again, on the right and on the left, but again, just for clarity, I think the right you're referring to and the left I'm referring to are not actually right. So I think that right is actually left and the left is actually right. And that's one of the reasons like fascist movements tend to do this. It's somehow very charismatic. Did you learn that in Germany? Well, I spent a lot of time with Nazis, ex-Nazis when I was in Germany, because I wanted to understand like real ex-Nazis. You had to go to the countryside to meet them because in the city, there were no ex-Nazis. Everybody was like, we hated Hitler. Just in the country, people were honest about it. And most of the people who, I actually think that the anti-Semitism was a motivation, but I'm honestly, for the record, I think a lot of the motivation was, that's not our battle, then overt anti-Semitism was the charisma of Hitler to them and the national abuse of a national mandate, which is justified, and abuse of patriotism, which is necessary to humans. And you see this, why is the regressionary left and the regressionary right very different movements? Why are they so charismatic to their peers? It's because if you go to the right, which has been indoctrinated with a capitalism is always good, which is a simplistic thing, that the correct narrative is, it's better than the alternatives. That's very different than it solves all problems. And the classic right of center institutions sell capitalism as it solves all problems, when in fact, that's obviously wrong. It solves problems that other systems don't solve in a way they don't solve them and therefore is better, but it has negative externality, such as egregious wealth dislocations that then obviously impinge on political power and a dislocation of societies and narrative, because you're not living in the same world if you have a billion dollars or if you have a hundred dollars in your account. Capitalism inherently assigns a dollar value to human life. And that dollar value is a derivative of your net worth. If you get hit by a car and you go to court, the driver hits you will pay a different sum, presumably depending on whether it's you or a working class person, unemployed or me. So it inherently does that. Let me end then with a question on what you just talked about, which is what does it mean to be human? And you look at, you know, I'll go to Creech Air Force Base where they now have drones and you've worked with that quite a bit where humans are almost not in the loop anymore. That to me seems a bit of a metaphor of what we're facing with this new technology is to what extent do humans not only have to be in the loop on things like systems, but to what extent when there's intelligence and maybe even consciousness in machines, what is the role of humans? Well, what is special about humans when our core capacity and our claim to superiority has been our cognitive- Intelligence, yeah. Yeah, but what happens when we birth a species that's no longer true? And this is where I, again, think the founding fathers of our country were something beyond genius level wisdom people because you have a different setup in Europe where the constitution is birthed by parliamentarians. Our rights, according to our constitution in this country, are given to us because of a granting and presupposition of a higher figure. That means there is something in the human spirit is protected under law and internalized by Americans. A reason why I'm very skeptical of bringing open migration because it's very special, where we believe deep in our hearts because of what we were given in this country that there is something in us above and beyond just our ability to speak and our cognitive abilities, which at some point will be surpassed, which is called human, which is artistic, individual, particular, special, and more valuable and needs to be protected. And that setup, for lack of a better word, is unique to this country. And we should make sure we fight to keep it. Alex Karp, thank you so much. Thank you. Alex Karp is hard to pin down. In some ways, he's cast with the other tech bros that are on the right or libertarian, but he's not that way. In many ways, his philosophy and his politics are unpredictable, but he has a strong sense that when we build new machinery and new technology, it's gotta be in service of our republic, in service of our nation, in service of our democracy. And that's something that hadn't really been part of the ethos of Silicon Valley for the past 50 years. It's clear to me that Alex Karp is different. And I think he's being sincere. But what I keep coming back to is the trade-off that people like Karp force on us. He's intellectually honest about surveillance, about Palantir, about the government using these tools. But the thing I'm left wondering is whether a man this rational, this comfortable with trade-offs the rest of us might flinch at, fully appreciates the fears people have about the surveillance state. That's it for today's episode. I'm Walter Isaacson. I'll see you next time on The Builders. The Builders is a Kaleidoscope and iHeart production. This series is hosted by Walter Isaacson. It's executive produced for Kaleidoscope by Oz Bulishin, David Weisbord, and Mangesh Hrithikadur. Sheena Ozaki is the producer. Julia Nutter is supervising producer. Eva Zorich is our consulting producer. Fact-checking by Eamon Whalen. Research by Gloria Thiel. Maria Paz Mendez-Hodes is head of video. Marketing by Christy Mirabal and Elle Liu. Production support by Dara Luck Potts. Music for the series was created by Spencer Stevenson, aka Botany, and it was mixed by Steve Boehm. From iHeart, the series is EP'd by Allie Perry and Katrina Norvell. Special thanks to Bob Pittman, Conal Byrne, Will Pearson, John Sykes, Nikki E. Torr, Carrie Lieberman, Binky Urban, Julia Prosser, Jeremy Blum, Allison Goldberger, WYES, and ASL Studios. For more from Walter Isaacson, be sure to check out his newest paperback, The Innovators, how a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution. It's available wherever fine books are sold. And for more videos and podcasts from the frontiers of discovery, be sure to check out kaleidoscope.nyc. So, everyone on board? Yeah, I think so. You can't see it, but everyone in this room is nodding. They all agree the launch plan's perfect, but Julia has an idea how it can be even better. So, she asks Co-Pilot Co-Work to help her overnight. Hey, Co-Pilot, gather the past three months of retail sales reports, surface key insights, and build a deck outlining a partner strategy by tomorrow morning. Morning, team. I found a way to improve the plan. Check slide four. Get help with complex tasks with Co-Pilot Co-Work. Microsoft Co-Pilot, work lives on. What does Clinique moisture surge feel like? Like a tall glass of water. Because Clinique moisture surge absorbs instantly and keeps hydrating for 100 hours. That's thanks to the help of hyaluronic acid and aloe bio-ferment, Clinique's own form of the aloe plant. It's concentrated over 500 times and then fermented through a 10-step process. All that for instant absorption. 100 hours of hydration and plump, glowing skin. It feels like everything a moisturizer should be. It just feels like moisture surge. This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem? Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload. Odoo is the all-in-one platform that replaces them all. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business. Thousands have already made the switch. Why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans, develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule so you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at chatgpt.com.