In this Builders interview, Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp talks with Walter Isaacson about his path into technology, from growing up as a self-described outsider to studying philosophy and how dyslexia shaped his approach to building software. The conversation covers the founding of Palantir, the company's work with intelligence and defense agencies, and the tension between surveillance and civil liberties.
Karp argues that Silicon Valley has lost touch with national purpose, and he proposes ways to address wealth inequality. Listeners will hear his views on AI, data ownership and the trade-offs he believes democracies must accept, along with critics' concerns about government power.
In this episode Walter Isaacson, Alex Karp
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The Builders is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeart, presented by Ramp. Ramp is a financial operations platform that helps ambitious companies manage their finances so their teams can spend less time chasing receipts and approvals and more time bringing extraordinary ideas to life. 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.
Hmm. 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, my mom is enormously just capturing in her level of talent, artistic talent. And you know, but the thing about my parents, they hate it when I say this, but they both my parents should be. It's kind of weird that I'm the most famous one. But anyway, 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 and you're subconsciously or partially consciously misaligned with your parents, you get a deeper trust in your own ability to survive than 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, it's because it's a broad term. I define it as 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, end up doing 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. And then later, our product is fundamental to the defense of Ukraine.
Well, wait, explain to me how that comes from being either not colonized.
Okay, so first of all, if you go to school on how 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. And then the derivative of that is it's a simple but addicting product. So it doesn't really create value, but it's hard to get rid of. It's like a veneer disease. Easy to get, maybe hard to get rid of. And what you had to avoid at all costs 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. Okay, 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 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?
Not, 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 who kind of feels, "Oh, I've always fit in."
Oh, yeah.
Good childhood. Want to get along.
Yeah. Jewish guy in New Orleans. Yeah, 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 I would, if I were interviewing you, I'd push back on that statement. No, I think being an outsider, 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 so, and then I think, 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. And like.
But that's not you.
Well, I mean, I think people like me would, I'd love to go on an insider vacation. Give me like the eight weeks a year where I can be an insider. And again, I know it'd be totally stupid, but like 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 two or three 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. There's many different forms. His advisor was Husserl, who was Jewish. Heidegger became a 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 are 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 Marxists, 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 feudal. It's not even actually socialist. And they pretend to be isolationists 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?
Well, I mean, my version of why I founded it was I knew Peter in law school.
Peter Thiel.
Peter Thiel. We had this, we just, I was doing no work. Peter, I think, was doing much more work than I, but 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 was, 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, respect, I mean, you know, it could 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 at the time, completely homogeneous culture.
So you're saying the diversity of America makes it harder to scale.
Well, the size. It's 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 right of 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.
Well, 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 Muslim, 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 work. 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, 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.
Yeah. Well, 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 their Fourth Amendment for you is their retrograde ideology that will force you, everyone to be standard, cut out, 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.
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My name is Josie Duffy Rice. I'm a journalist who covers the criminal legal system. And over my career, I've heard account after account of prosecutorial misconduct, story after story of injustice. But I've never heard a story quite like this.
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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.
Yeah, 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, 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.
Well, of course, you have to get into 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.
That's what I'm asking.
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. And 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 is a warrant and then purges it where the warrant expires.
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 say that's still surveillance. You're surveilling someone the courts decide is a criminal. I think there you get into where I would say, you have people that are so pro, 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."
And where our product is used most effectively is in Europe on criminal gangs, 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% of society supports. And I would say the 10% that doesn't is basically going to get us some form of fascism. If the terrorist attacks in Europe that we had prevented had happened, you would have some form of far left or far right fascism would amount to basically the same thing. You are tracked all the time.
Well, 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 don't push against it. AI, so now we go into 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 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. 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 in building a company or having too much money. If you don't protect the rights of the people, you don't like the unapologetically, unambassadically 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 because those people could be 10, 20, 50 times wealthier. Okay, 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"?
I'm saying, that's what I'm saying. You have to do something. But then.
What do you do?
Well, my version would be you basically say, "You have a 50% 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 25% now. But the government can only collect by doing half as much waste identification. Because the left's legitimate critique I agree with, most people agree with, is you can't have people becoming 100 times wealthier when they're already billionaires and everyone else is becoming 5% wealthier.
Okay? So that's legitimate. The legitimate critique of the people who are economically literate is, "Yes, but this isn't really going to help people. 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 a 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 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 tax.
No, sorry, sorry. Let me just on this one-point pushback. 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. It can impute the things you go by.
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 liquid. 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 a 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 the city. That's a problem that has to be solved too. And 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 services in the world that 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. Okay, and 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, does it 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 the 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, US enterprises are livid and enraged, apoplectic. I don't know what the 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 train the model on your data. What's 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 layer.
Sounds in some ways like the old McKinsey and Company's management consultants.
Yeah, well, yeah, but think times 5 million, and then it actually shows up and your business is theirs. And they're particularly angry at Anthropic. It's funny, I spend half, 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, you know 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 derived, that now everybody talks about.
But you can think of an ontology as a contextual framework where that contextual framework is just 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 an 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-à-vis consumer or vis-à-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 that"?
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 super majority of Americans think is indisputably noble in this country is the US military.
And the valley was born out of the US military.
And the valley was a hypocrisy. It would not even exist without the US military. Thank you for reminding everyone of this. The valley was built as a hybrid, basically university, government, capital.
A Veneva-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 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's 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 100, 1,000 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.
But go back to this notion of technology engineering being in the service of a greater.
But 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 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 100, 200 times wealthier and your life hasn't changed that much.
And it's based on consumerism and ads.
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 get you kicked out of the culture get smaller and smaller and smaller. Witness, many Democrats refused to accept me as a Democrat because I thought they were part of the party that was going nuts. But we are struggling to find commonalities.
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 are running these labs are saying, "Your life is going to suck." Okay, so it's not by the way, the people doing most damage here, 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.
Well, 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 seem 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. It's an island. On that island, you're cool.
We'll be right back after this quick break.
November is Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month, and I want to tell you about My Brother David, a podcast that documents my brother's journey with this disease.
It's important to let people know what my experience is. I think quite often the experience of pancreatic cancer patients goes under the radar, not to callous about it, but just because we die so fast. I think it's important to share this story and hopefully give some more understanding to what pancreatic cancer patients go through.
My Brother David tells the unflinchingly real story of the last year of my brother's life. Let's change the pancreatic cancer narrative and turn sympathy into survival. Listen to My Brother David on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself. Get Worse with Kyle Pru is not one of those podcasts. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptides, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making you better, getting closure, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. But if you're interested in blackmail, love bombing, cloning yourself, or getting revenge, then we've got a little something-something for a dastardly individual like you. Take a listen to some of the incredible advice we've given so far. Fake a back injury. Get the spray tan.
Up your alcohol consumption. Only women should be allowed to have guns.
Kill them.
Kill them.
Kill them with a gun.
Listen, it's already over. I'm all about lying if it's something that really happened.
The next time a bear is running at you, you just calmly stop what you're doing, you look the bear in the eye, and you say, "This isn't you."
Do not preserve relationships. You don't need them. You only need one thing, and that's the Get Worse podcast.
Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
My name is Josie Duffy Rice. I'm a journalist who covers the criminal legal system. And over my career, I've heard account after account of prosecutorial misconduct, story after story of injustice. But I've never heard a story quite like this.
The more I kept reading this stuff, I thought, "Man, there's more red flags that just kept coming up over and over."
We'll hypnotize him to strengthen that memory. So he went into a good trance.
I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, "Well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job."
Listen to Examined, The Backfire Effect, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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. It would be a little bit weird if you didn't have skepticism of the government. Now, where I think it's very non-productive, 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 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 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 antisemitism was a motivation, but honestly, for the record, I think a lot of the motivation was, "That's not our battle," then overt antisemitism was the charisma of Hitler to them and the 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 externalities.
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 $100 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 I'll go to Creature 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 where 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 that's 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 got to 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 a 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 Volition, David Weissport, and Mungesh Hathigudhon. Shina Ozaki is the producer. Julia Nutter is supervising producer. Eva Zorich is our consulting producer. Fact-checking by Eamon Whalen. Research by Gloria Teal. Maria Paz-Mendez-Hodes is head of video. Marketing by Christy Maribal and Elle Lu. Production support by Dara Look Potts. Music for the series was created by Spencer Stevenson, a.k.a.
Botany, and it was mixed by Steve Bone. From iHeart, the series is EP'd by Ali Perry and Katrina Norval. Special thanks to Bob Pittman, Connell Byrne, Will Pearson, John Sykes, Nikki E Torre, 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.
In October 2021, my brother David was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. A year later, he convinced me to make a podcast with him. This podcast.
My biggest fear is that I am afraid of being forgotten.
My brother David is the story of the last chapter of my brother's life. It's weird and messy and vulnerable, and I'm going to share all of it with you.
Okay, so here we go.
Listen to my brother David on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself. Get Worse with Kyle Pru is not one of those podcasts. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptides, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making you better, getting closure, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. If you're interested in blackmail, love bombing, cloning yourself, or getting revenge, then we've got a little something-something for a dastardly individual like you. Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 1986, a man named Scott Macklem was killed in broad daylight. Police quickly found their suspect. Prosecutors convicted him. But now, almost 40 years later, I'm reexamining this case.
I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, "Well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job."
Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time? Listen to Examined, The Backfire Effect, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
To outsiders, Alex Karp seems an unlikely choice to lead Palantir. A philosopher by training, the billionaire co-founder has built his business at the intersection of intelligence, warfare and AI. To supporters, his software helps defend open societies. To critics, it gives governments troubling power to surveil and control.
In this interview, Karp tells Walter how dyslexia helped him bring together the impossible at Palantir, how Silicon Valley broke its contract with the rest of Americans, and why there needs to be a better way to re-distribute wealth. A conversation about national purpose, the Constitution and the trade-offs Karp is willing to make to keep the world safe.
Interview taped August 6, 2026.
And be sure to pick up Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, wherever fine books are sold.
ABOUT THE HOST
Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Elon Musk, Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane University and previously served as CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair and CEO of CNN, and editor of Time. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023.
ABOUT ALEX KARP
Alex Karp is the co-founder and CEO of Palantir. He co-wrote The Technological Republic and launched the sovereign AI movement.
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Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, xAI)
Peter Thiel (Founders Fund, PayPal, Palantir)
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Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei (Anthropic)
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