Well, how were we able to build the anti-terror product? That product changed the history of Europe. The problem was to build that product, you had to violate every single norm of how you build software. The biggest norm we violated is it took three years, really, roughly, without revenue. Three years, no revenue. You would have to be basically insane to do that. And I do think it took a neurodivergent person at the helm to fight for that.
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 connect data and discover threats before another attack? The idea became Palantir. And to lead the company, Thiel turned to an old friend from Stanford Law School named Alex Karp. Karp was an unusual choice to run a technology company, especially one working with intelligence agencies. He wasn't an engineer. He had studied philosophy in Germany. His politics lean left. He was deeply suspicious of concentrated power and concerned about the threat of authoritarianism.
Then he became the leader of one of the most powerful and controversial data companies in the world. 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? And when Alex Karp talks about defending the West, what exactly does he believe the West is defending? I'm Walter Isaacson, and this is The Builders, my series of conversations with the most consequential minds shaping our future. Here's my conversation with Alex Karp.
Alex Karp, welcome to The Builders.
Very nice to be here. A huge honor.
You know, one of my theories in biography is that it's all about dad. So, tell me first about your father.
My dad, he's a very smart person, very shaped by his German Jewish mother passing away very early, being raised by his father. And I think my parents were very much in love. But please, 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. My mom is enormously, just capturing in her level of talent. And put this way, my parents, had they been more what I think they could have been, they would 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, but maybe a latent mistrust of structures.
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. But you know, it's interesting for me, won't talk about, to watch how people like this 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 an attenuated, a non-standard 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, you know, I did a PhD and I still do a lot, end up doing a lot of the writing at Palantir. But why is that important? Because language, of course, you want to have, 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 the 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? 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.
Oh, wait. Explain to me how that comes from being 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 where 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 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. 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, you'd 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 always, like, I often get these comments in private from business executives: 'How can you teach me how to be unpopular?'
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. You know, in some...
Or maybe you've tried to fit in, but it's failed.
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, ah, I've always fit in. Yeah, good childhood. Want to get along.
Yeah. Jewish guy in New Orleans. I think I love what... 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, if you link it to what we've built at Palantir, the culture, the aesthetics, the products, there is 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...
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 would 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. 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 adviser was Husserl, who was Jewish. Heidegger became an ardent supporter of Hitler, even though his mistress Hannah Arendt was Jewish and his adviser 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 think, 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 and 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 many, 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...
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. 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. And 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, respect. I mean, you know, we could obviously, slavery. I think the class, not paying enough attention to class and not having the national project be stronger. There's a lot of lists, but in my view, in 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 time, completely homogeneous culture.
Well, you're saying the diversity of America makes...
Well, the size, 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, again, like the first, in my view, the Second Amendment and the Fourth Amendment. So right of free, 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 policy would be. Culture.
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 some... 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 that it seems they believe works. So 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, and they're underscoring still enormously radical. And I would say this is another reason I'm very skeptical of the fringe right and not as fringe DSA people, because the first thing they, when they talk, the first thing they want to do is get rid of our Constitution and the right to do that, because our Constitution is the most productive thing. It's still keeping this country working. 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, to use your frame, to rein that in. Then like, what is your right of privacy? So your right of privacy is to conjure up things in your own space that might be completely heretical or offensive.
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 overindex 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. In the process...
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, it's they've got the Palantir part wrong. But you'll see like, Palantir surveillance state, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, the Palantir stuff is technically and in practice the inverse of what they think, or by the most extreme amount of any other tech, of any 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 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.
Our products are used to make...
But what about when I'm walking down the streets of 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. But 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's a warrant and then purge it where the warrant expires. Or is that the hard part, is you have warrant, 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 someone the courts decide is a criminal. I think there you get into where I would say, you know, 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, which is 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, it's a form of law enforcement I think everyone, 90% of society supports. And I would say the 10% 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 left, 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 the Palantir, but the technology we have today has enormous amounts of sort of data gathering capabilities, cameras and visuals and facial recognition. 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. So now we go into the 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. Like, what are the technologies we're going to unleash? Like, again, the famous, you know, 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. You know, criminals are rational actors, and probably they're the people who get shot the least. The people get shot the most are people with political views like me. Honestly, that's, if you go 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. You know, because the first thing that they do is define you as the people with an actual view. I'm talking about things that, like, think kind of things I say that are outside the norm and are transgressive, and a kind of building a company or having too much money or, you know, protect, 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 in a society...
And you think we have an intellectual fragility that hurts us from doing that?
I think that we're, if we're not very careful in this country, we are 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 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 become 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.
