Part Two: Alex Karp: How Palantir's CEO Went From Marxist To Anti-Woke Crusader

With Palantir now off the ground, Alex Karp turns himself into the spokesman and salesman for Palantir, a company that threatens to destroy everything he pretends to believe in. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back once again to Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the worst people in all of history. And our subject for this week is one of the worst people today, too. Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir. And here to talk about this one of the worst people is one of the best people, our friends, Zaren Burnett of Ridiculous Crime and very special episodes. Zaren, welcome back to the show.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Thank you guys for having me. I love being here. And even though we're talking about Alex Karp, this has been fantastic. So.

• 0:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, old Alex. Yeah, that's, that's what Jürgen Habermas said, something along those lines. Aside from Alex, it was great. No, it is interesting, the two of them, because we finished in the last episode, how he's seeking the kind of approval and endorsement of this legendary academic, Habermas, and kinda doesn't really get it. Jürgen's very polite to him, but Alex goes back home without that. And he's not immediately quitting academia. He's actually finishing his dissertation while he, after he moves back to San Francisco for a while. And he still kind of has ambitions of maybe becoming an academic in Germany. But I think ultimately, this clash kind of kills those, or at least makes it a lot less

• 1:16Robert Evans?

  attractive when some other offers come by. And one of the things that's really interesting to me about that is, he and Habermas have kind of the exact opposite journeys in life. So we've just talked about Alex, who grows up in this very left wing home, in a very left wing neighborhood, and is raised very left wing, and has turned out to be on the side of all these reactionaries providing like spy software. Jürgen grows up in Germany in the Nazi era. He's in the Hitler Youth. He's in, he achieves a high level in the Hitler Youth, and he's running anti aircraft guns at the end of the war. He all, he very narrowly escapes getting drafted into the Wehrmacht before the Americans take him and his town. And obviously, he was a kid during, like, it's not really his fault that he happened to grow up, be like one when the Nazis took over. And the rest of his life, he fought

• 2:01Robert Evans?

  against fascism. But they have very opposite journeys in a lot of ways. And I do find that kind of interesting.

• 2:10Speaker 02

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• 2:15Robert Evans?

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• 3:14Speaker 04

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 3:29Speaker 05

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• 3:34Speaker 04

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• 3:56Speaker 06

  Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools.

• 4:12Speaker 03

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• 4:16Speaker 07

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• 4:20Speaker 03

  Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 4:27Robert Evans?

  So when we last left, our Definitely Not a Hero, Alex had run into a stumbling block and returned home to the West Coast. Well, it was not home to the West Coast, but returned to the West Coast. He seems to have liked that more than the place he had grown up. So he moves back to the Bay Area. He takes a job with the Jewish Philanthropy Partnership, and he shares an apartment in the Bay with his brother Ben, while he puts the finishing touches on his dissertation. And so you can see, he's, you know, not certainly not rich at this point. You don't generally wind up living with your brother if you've got a lot of spare cash. And he's working a job that's gotta give him like a pretty, probably a comfortable working class life, but nothing crazy. And he's still really thinking he might want to return to Berlin and continue having anonymous sex, right? That still seems pretty good to Alex at this point in time.

• 5:12Speaker 07

  Do we know, do we know what Ben Karp ended up doing with his life?

• 5:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he becomes a novelist. He lives in Tokyo. He's a successful author. Yeah.

• 5:21Speaker 07

  So.

• 5:21Robert Evans?

  They're both successful.

• 5:23Speaker 07

  But, but not a weird little, not a weird little guy.

• 5:26Robert Evans?

  Not running Palantir. No, yeah.

• 5:29Speaker 07

  Yeah. It's always interesting when that happens. Yeah. Like, what, what happened here? Where was the disconnect from one brother to another?

• 5:39Robert Evans?

  It's about to really hit. So at this point, yeah, he and his brother are together still, too, right? They're living in the same place. And what changes this ultimately is Peter Thiel. Peter obviously has started PayPal, or is in the process. He's like getting PayPal off the ground. He's become rich, and he comes back into Alex's life, because he's coming back in and out of the Bay. I assume he has several houses, but he at least keeps one home in the area. And he and Alex get together and start talking again. And they start doing like, you know, talking about politics and their lives and their opinions like they always had. Now, at the same time as Peter's kind of reconnecting with his buddy Alex, he's also starting to experience something with PayPal, which is that they're, they're trying to deal with fraud, right? PayPal's got like a shitload

• 6:21Robert Evans?

  of fraud problems happening. And they develop a fraud detection system called Igor, which is like an acronym for something that works really well. I've told this story before over the years on the podcast and the Peter Thiel episodes. And Igor works so well that not only does it help PayPal deal with their fraud program, but it provides information that leads federal prosecutors to take down a number of like scammers who are part of organized criminal groups. And so Peter starts thinking, oh, should I be like selling software to law enforcement and like federal spy agencies and shit? Is there like a market in that? Because it seems like we may have stumbled upon something like this machine learning stuff that we're using could also help with these other problems. So Peter and some of his top guys, it's not just Peter, he's got some, some coders he really trusts

• 7:04Robert Evans?

  that are also kind of brainstorming all this. And they start to wonder, like, maybe there's a way to make purpose-built systems that can help law enforcement or whoever carry out similar kinds of investigation to spot criminal activity, or even maybe just inefficiencies in a business. And I'm, I'm yada yada-ing a lot of the mental development process here. But this train of thought initially leads Thiel to provide some funding to get a company called Palantir off the ground. And at the very first days of Palantir, Alex is not a part of it, right? He's not initially in the group of guys that are trying to start this company. Kind of by that point in time, he had moved on to starting an investment company of his own called the Caidmont Group, with $12,000 he inherited. And he's good enough at investing that he turns that into a sizable business. He gets a number of rich

• 7:49Robert Evans?

  people start putting in their assets to have him invest them. And his goal is to personally put together a nest egg of like a quarter of a million dollars, so he can buy a place in Berlin and live a life of, and he generally describes this as debauchery, right? So that's his life goal. He's in his early 30s by this point, you know, he's, he's starting an investment because he doesn't like working in finance. He doesn't want to be doing investment stuff. It's just the easiest way to get the money he needs to live a better lifestyle, right?

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Okay, relatable. I mean, who doesn't want to like, you know, spend just a little bit of time doing something they hate to go live that libertine life of reading in the daytime, sleeping around at night, you know?

• 8:25Robert Evans?

  Right, right. The Berlin lifestyle. Yeah, I've got several friends doing that.

• 8:31Robert Evans?

  And his biographer Steinberger even suggests that like this idea that like, oh, if I can just get a little bit of money for a seed, I'll go move to Berlin, was never something Alex would ever have done. It was a form of self-mythologizing, right? Steinberger doubts Alex would have ever settled for anything that approaches a normal life. But it's also not clear that he would have had a choice to, you know, on that if his old pal Peter Thiel hadn't come a calling. So again, they start hanging out, and at one point, he invites Peter to a donor meeting for the Jewish Philanthropy Partnership, which he's also still working at, on the logic that, hey, you know, normally it's me and a bunch of other Jewish guys, and we're always at each other's throats. If we bring a Gentile in, maybe we'll stop fighting, right? And it works really well. And Peter walks away impressed

• 9:13Robert Evans?

  like, oh, Alex is actually like really good with people. He might be a really good manager. So he asks, as kind of like a test gig, he asks Karp to help him raise money for his Clarium Capital Fund. And I guess Alex does well enough at this that a few months later, he offers Alex a job at what's becoming Palantir. Now, this is the early 2000s, 9/11 is not, didn't happen all that long ago, right? It was like 2003, I think, when they're having these talks. And the company is extremely primitive at this point. Palantir does not have clients, and it's kind of a laughing stock of Silicon Valley a little bit, right? Because in this period, we're not quite up to like, social media, but we're starting to hit the early days of social media, right? And apps are a few years away.

• 9:55Robert Evans?

  These are also like internet companies and whatnot that are starting to take off. And so, everything is focused, even though it's, it's, it's kind of still evolving to, you know, the social media and app era. Everything's really focused on like, consumers, right?

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's still very much the dot com era.

• 10:10Robert Evans?

  Right. You don't go to Silicon Valley to make products for like, spy agencies, that are the government, right? That's like, not a normal thing in this period of time. But Karp isn't a Silicon Valley guy. He's not even a tech guy, and that's part of why Peter thinks he might be right for a job at Palantir. He's a philosophy nerd who's obsessed with the Holocaust and really, surprisingly patriotic by this point in his life. Now, Karp is, and Karp is so patriotic, because I guess his ideologically, he's come to conclude at this point, probably not wrongly, that a weirdo like him could only have survived and thrived in a society as good at protecting the rights of minorities as like, Western civilization. And he says minority not just in the racial sense, but in the ideological sense, right?

• 10:55Robert Evans?

  And so, he decides, anything I can do to help these governments use data and machine learning to get a leg up on their enemies, be they terrorists, or China, or whatever, that's fundamentally good. So, he's intrigued by this job offer, and he, what Peter is impressed by is, as soon as Karp learns what Palantir is, he's like a true believer. And he starts spinning all of this ideological shit about how like, this is how we protect, you know, the great achievements of Western civilization from its enemies.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Defender of the Western ideals, yes.

• 11:20Robert Evans?

  Right, right.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  I will be your shield.

• 11:22Robert Evans?

  Exactly. Oh shit, this guy's drinking the same Kool-Aid I am.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 11:27Robert Evans?

  I thought maybe we were more at odds than it turns out we are. And he's even more surprised by how skilled Alex is at evangelizing and selling the Palantir brand, first to his new colleagues. And in short order, those first couple of guys that Peter had started planning Palantir with are like, this guy's a co-founder, he should be the CEO. So, Karp becomes CEO of Palantir in 2004. And whether or not you want to call him a co-founder, because he's not there at the earliest days, most of the company considers him one. He's 34 when he gets the job, and he's not rich. That's really important. He's like, I don't even know, maybe upper-middle class on his own, at this, at the point at which he gets the job. Certainly by the time he gets the job, he is, because he's get paid like 125 grand a year, which is like, a good salary in 2004.

• 12:12Robert Evans?

  But it's not like an insane CEO salary, right?

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:15Robert Evans?

  And he's, he's, he's got to make that much money for like, most of the first 10 years. It takes a while for Palantir to be worth a bunch of money. And so, there's, there's kind of a hunger Alex has, because Palantir is his only chance to get rich, right? And it's also his only chance to be really important. And I think he wants to be rich and important by this point.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Very clearly.

• 12:34Robert Evans?

  Maybe there's some jealousy with his buddy Peter, who started PayPal and got super rich, it is clearly important, and he's like, I want that for me, you know?

• 12:41Speaker 01

  And that lingering resentment at his parents failing to do this, so he could prove them wrong, prove that he, you know, he should have had family like him.

• 12:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And that he could do it, too, where they couldn't, you know? Now, he's old for the startup world, but this likely aided him, given that Palantir's customers aren't a bunch of like, teenagers and 20-somethings on the internet, they're like the CIA, right? And so, if you walk into a meeting with the CIA, and you're Dr. So-and-so, and you're wearing a suit, and you don't look like Mark fucking Zuckerberg in 2005, you know, it probably helps. So, Karp is a strange pick, though, in a number of ways, because he's got no managerial experience, really, when he becomes CEO of, of Palantir. And he also doesn't know how to code. He's not, he doesn't have any real tech background, nor does he have a background in software of any kind. And this is something that his biographer and a lot of his employees seem to think

• 13:32Robert Evans?

  benefits him, right? Palantir's chief software engineers, like a lot of their kind, can be hard to manage. Like, really brilliant coders, not the easiest people to work with always. And Alex doesn't even pretend to try to macro-manage them. He doesn't pretend to try to understand like, the, the directness of like, the actual coding and how that works. So, he's never going to give them like, criticism like that. Instead, he's going to try to more broadly direct them to achieve specific like, operational goals, right? And he's, because he's so good at understanding what motivates people, even like, weird people, and then he's really good at incentivizing them, and getting these genius coders to work a lot harder and longer, and to also deliver a product that maybe is more to spec with

• 14:15Robert Evans?

  what the customer wants, because he also is better at understanding what the customer wants. He's a great middleman between the people who are paying Palantir.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  People's skills distinguish them.

• 14:22Robert Evans?

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Alex recalls one anecdote about his early days at Palantir to Marine Dowd. "I kept telling Palantirians to call me Alex, and they kept calling me Dr. Karp. I realized the only thing they believed in was that I had a PhD." And no one really knows if this company's going to work at this point. And they're all like, well, should I be trying to get a job at like, Facebook that's getting off the ground now, or Google that's, you know, suddenly huge, or Apple? Why am I hanging around this company that may never be worth anything? One early employee, Bob McGrew, said, "We didn't know what to make of him at first," and that in order to help their new boss fit in, several software guys handed Karp a copy of Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near, which was basically the bible for the, this kind of tech guy at that point in time, and it's, anyone who works in AI

• 15:07Robert Evans?

  now was nursed on this book, right? Or at least any of the older people working in AI were nursed on this fucking book. And yeah, it's talking about how we're going to hit the fucking singularity. The title kind of gives you the gist of the book, right?

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Could be a postcard.

• 15:23Robert Evans?

  "Over time, Alex added some of his favorite books to the list of books that new Palantirians would get. This included Improv, which is a guide to improvisational theater, that I guess he felt is like, a good guide to creativity, and The Looming Tower, which is a book about how 9/11 happened by Lawrence Wright's." "Palantir's early years were slow, and it was an open question for years as to whether or not the company would succeed. Karp led from the front, taking a salary of 125,000 and telling his employees, 'I only make money when you make money.'" "Displays of wealth like fancy new cars were discouraged among executives in the early days, although Alex is said to have liked to show off his black Amex card." This passage, from The Philosopher in the Valley, gives you an idea of what working for Alex was like at this time.

• 16:07Robert Evans?

  "While Karp was approachable and entertaining, then as now, he enjoyed regaling colleagues with stories about German women and their attraction to him. Conversations with him could be difficult. He spit out thoughts and observations in a nonlinear fashion that sometimes left his colleagues befuddled. 'I don't know that anyone would say he's easy to talk to,' says Brian Schimpf, who was hired by Palantir in 2007, and eventually became its Director of Engineering. Joshua Goldenberg, who was Palantir's Head of Design, recalls the discussions with Karp were unstructured and sometimes seemed a little bit incoherent. After all-hands meetings with Karp, staffers would congregate to try to make sense of what they'd heard. 'We would debrief and tell, and see if anyone could divine the signal in the chaos of Karp's speech patterns,' says one former employee. But he says they all recognized that Karp has a kind of crazy charisma and was exceptionally intelligent."

• 16:49Speaker 01

  So, then what we see in his interviews these days has always been true of his speech pattern. He's just kind of ping-ponging around.

• 16:56Robert Evans?

  He's darting back and forth as fast as he can. He gets bored easily, and he's not really interested in usually like, delivering a specific point to you. He's interested in like, a shotgun of points, you know?

• 17:08Speaker 01

  With conviction, with great conviction.

• 17:10Robert Evans?

  And he wants to tell you that German women really wanted to fucking...

• 17:13Speaker 07

  I really like to bring that up.

• 17:16Robert Evans?

  Really important, mission-critical, load-bearing for the Karp story. "Alex framed Palantir's mission in grand civilizational terms that sometimes bordered on apocalyptic. Palantir existed to defend the West and democracy, just like Tolkien's Palantiri didn't. The name has never made a lot of sense, and I've never read a good explanation. Like, I know what the Palantiri were, but if your whole thing is to defend the West, that's not what they do in the books."

• 17:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 17:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, okay. "The way Alex saw it, 9/11 had been a wake-up call that the ideals of liberal democracy were under attack, and the whole rest of the tech industry was obsessing over useless or outright toxic bullshit, while the underpinning of our collective security was in danger. Karp hated, and still hates, Facebook, as he felt selling people's personal data was unethical. He distrusted Google, too, as much for their supposed high-minded ideals as for their data policies, and he avoided hiring from either company. Alex expressed disgust for the 'move fast and break things' Silicon Valley ethos, which he felt was incompatible with security, because it is. For his part, the Valley didn't take an immediate shine to Palantir. It was a weird company with a weird CEO who constantly trash-talked all of the companies

• 18:28Robert Evans?

  that were actually making money. Today, Alex likes to hype up their unpopularity. Quote, 'We were like pariahs. We couldn't get meetings. If they did, it was a favor to Peter.' During one pitch meeting with Sequoia Capital, Alex pitched his heart out and watched a major Sequoia partner, Michael Moritz, draw on a napkin because he was bored. Years later, Alex still feels rage about this, telling an interviewer, 'I should have told him to go fuck himself,' but he didn't."

• 18:56Speaker 07

  He's like a billionaire venture capitalist, so it's like, I don't like him by default, but very funny.

• 19:01Robert Evans?

  It's really funny, it's really funny that Moritz is just like, alright, man, okay? Drawing dicks on a paper, on a note pad.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Totally, I was just thinking that.

• 19:11Speaker 07

  That's really funny.

• 19:13Robert Evans?

  So, eventually, Palantir finds an investment partner, Inqtel. You guys know who Inqtel is?

• 19:20Speaker 01

  No.

• 19:20Speaker 07

  No, I'm afraid.

• 19:21Robert Evans?

  It's the CIA's venture capital firm.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Oh, there you go.

• 19:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 19:27Speaker 07

  Well, well, well done, well done, Alex.

• 19:30Robert Evans?

  Yes, Palantir, a CIA partnership, yes. It had been founded in 1999, and it just so happened the agency was in the market for what Palantir was selling. Their current data analytics program was named Analyst's Notebook, and it was aging and lacked modern capabilities. Basically, it was good for a previous time, but it would not scale up to the internet age. That's kind of the issue, so they know they need something new. Alex has to rush out and buy suits for him and his engineering team before the meeting in DC, because they're Silicon Valley coders, they don't have suits.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Probably one between the seven of them.

• 20:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, NQtel CEO Gilman Louis shows up at this meeting only because he knows Peter Thiel, and so he wants to see Karp's pitch, right? So it's the only reason the boss is in the room. Karp is able to sell Palantir to Louis, both its technology and its mission. When Louis explained what the CIA needed from its software, the Palantir team immediately breaks out and starts sketching out a new program and like, like designing it in the room. And that really impresses him. The fact that like, oh, they're working to build this in the room with us to our specs. Ultimately, NQtel invests 1.25 million, which convinces Peter Thiel to put in almost another $3 million. And the rest is kind of history, right? There's more I could say, but this is not a detailed history of Palantir. And so I'm going to have to skim a lot of their early years.

• 20:48Robert Evans?

  What you need to know is that this investment not only brings them money, it gives them their first access to the federal government, which starts a long history of collaboration. And they're going to sell to a bunch of other federal agencies as well as local agencies. Karp turns out to be really fucking good at sales, so good that for most of its life, Palantir doesn't hire salespeople because it's got Alex, right? That's really his skill as CEO. He's very good at this. In an interview with Maureen Dowd, Peter Thiel gave his opinion on what made Alex so effective. Quote, "In some ways, Alex doesn't look like a salesperson from Central Casting you would send to the CIA. The formulation I always have is that if you're trying to sell something to somebody, the basic paradox is you have to be just like them so they can trust you. But you have to be very different from them so they think you have something

• 21:33Robert Evans?

  they don't have, which is smart." Palantir, again, not a normal organization. And from its first integration, Karp develops a habit of embedding his engineers in client agencies and organizations so they can build new software from within the entity that needed it. Because all this is happening in the early years of the global war on terror, and most of Palantir's work circles around organizing data about terrorists and insurgencies, a distinctly military strain of thought becomes embedded in the organization from its early days. Per an article in Wired by Carolyn Haskins, "Palantir sends its employees to work inside client organizations essentially as consultants, helping to customize their data pipelines, troubleshoot problems and fix bugs. It calls these workers 'forward-deployed software engineers,' a term that appears

• 22:18Robert Evans?

  to be inspired by the concept of forward-deployed troops who are stationed in adversarial regions to deter nearby enemies from attacking. A former Palantir employee tells Wired that the company has also, also has code words for certain job titles, like Delta for a forward-deployed engineer, and Echo for Palantir's version of a product manager, which they say are sourced from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's phonetic alphabet of code words meant for use over military radio." So you've got this really weird mishmash of like Silicon Valley dudes who are now getting like increasingly familiar with the military and working alongside former CIA guys and special operations guys.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Kind of cosplaying as them, using their language and their jargon.

• 22:57Robert Evans?

  It becomes a really weird like melange of cultures. Now, at the same time, Karp insisted on calling his employees hobbits and referring to the West that they needed to protect as the Shire. This can be traced as much to he and Thiel's love of the books as it can be to the fact that the Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies was released during the early years of Palantir's rise. To continue with another quote from that piece by Haskins.

• 23:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, but fuck off. Fuck off, bro.

• 23:21Robert Evans?

  I mean, it is annoying. It is annoying.

• 23:25Robert Evans?

  A common internal motto in Palantir's early days was "Save the Shire," a reference to the hobbit homeland, which they say was a rallying cry that reflected the company's ethos at the time. "It was all about save the Shire and do good for the warfighters," the ex-staffer said. "It was all about, really, we are going in and solving hard problems." And again, first off, the Shire saves itself and everybody else.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Right?

• 23:45Robert Evans?

  Let's, let's note that. Like, the warriors actually are the ones that need the Shire.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  The Shire, yeah. They've inverted the relationships, but whatever.

• 23:52Robert Evans?

  I'm just, I'm frustrated by the fact that everything's reversed in their understanding of the Lord of the Rings. Like, that's not how the books worked.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Not at all.

• 24:00Robert Evans?

  Now.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Or even the popular movies.

• 24:01Robert Evans?

  Or even the popular movies. Now, as I said earlier, the inspiration behind Palantir was a tool PayPal had created to track down fraud. But that begs the question, what does Palantir sell? Which most people don't really know. And I said at the opening of these episodes that they're usually described as like a data broker, sometimes a data miner, or some sort of surveillance spy company. In business lingo, Palantir provides B2B SAAS, business-to-business software as a service, right? You could say they sell software, I guess. Like, you just say they sell software, but like, there's not, that's not fun. Most clients, yeah. What are you doing?

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Also, they say kind of the distinction between them and like, say Salesforce. And they're very, very different, so.

• 24:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's certainly not like enough to really understand what Palantir is like bringing to the table. You know who else brings a lot to the table?

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Who's that?

• 24:49Robert Evans?

  The sponsors of this podcast.

• 24:50Speaker 07

  Damn straight.

• 24:51Robert Evans?

  Legally, I have to say that.

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  She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck. Because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

• 26:10Speaker 05

  She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 26:23Speaker 04

  Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 26:30Speaker 07

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 26:33Speaker 03

  Here's what you missed.

• 26:34Speaker 06

  And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power.

• 26:42Speaker 07

  It's real.

• 26:43Speaker 06

  Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interest, and they complain about the very thing they're receiving.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  It's raw.

• 26:49Speaker 06

  I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 26:59Speaker 06

  I went off. I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 27:13Speaker 06

  12 seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground, going hard in the South now.

• 27:23Speaker 07

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

• 27:28Speaker 03

  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 27:33Robert Evans?

  We're back. Um, most Palantir clients use one of two programs that were developed during Karp's early years as CEO, Foundry and Gotham. One employee described Foundry as, quote, "A supercharged filing cabinet." Corporate customers, and Palantir doesn't start to take on corporate customers out until after 2020, I think. I'm getting a little ahead of us here, but these are their two big programs. Corporate customers use Foundry to do stuff like, maybe you've got a factory and you know, like, we have a point at which we're losing us, like, a higher than we should amount of these materials that we need to build, whatever this is. We need to figure out where along the production line the problems are happening. Foundry is supposed to be able to help you with that, right? That's like one thing they could do. They look for points of failure

• 28:14Robert Evans?

  or waste. Credit Suisse and investment bank contracts Palantir to help spot money laundering, while Ferrari uses Palantir's software to help design Formula One cars. A common attitude among Palantirians is that, per The New York Times, "Many problems are data integration problems." And that's true. And there's nothing really wrong with providing data integration services inherently. But once we start talking about Gotham, things get a lot more sinister, which at least is appropriate to the name. Per Wired, quote, "Foundry and Gotham are similar. Both ingest data and give people a neat platform to work with it. The main difference between them is what data they're ingesting. Gotham takes any data that government or law enforcement customers may have, including things like crime reports, booking logs, or information they collected by subpoenaing a local, a social media company.

• 28:59Robert Evans?

  Gotham then extracts every person, place, and detail that might be relevant. Customers need to already have the data they want to work with, and Palantir itself does not provide any." Right?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  So they're really good at data disaggregation, essentially.

• 29:12Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. That's, that's their whole fucking deal. Now, another former Palantir staffer who uses Gotham says that, "In just minutes, a law enforcement official or government analyst can map out who may be in a person's network and see documents that link them together. They can also centralize everything an agency knows about a person in one place, including their eye color from their driver's license, or their license plate from a traffic ticket, making it easy to build a detailed intelligence report. They can also use Gotham to search for a person based on a characteristic, like their immigration status, what state they live in, or whether they have tattoos." So now we're starting to get upsetting, right?

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yes, we are.

• 29:45Robert Evans?

  So this kind of thing is what caused the first backlash against Palantir and gave it the sinister reputation it enjoys today as a company embedded in the growing global surveillance panopticon. But Alex Karp doesn't look at things that way. The way he sees it, Palantir exists to protect the Shire, AKA the West.

• 30:02Speaker 07

  I just, I don't like this freak taking my, taking like, this beautiful hobby of like, all of the greatest people I know and myself, and using it for his fucking weird bullshit company spy software. No.

• 30:21Robert Evans?

  Were the hobbits really spying on people, Alex?

• 30:23Speaker 07

  Absolutely not.

• 30:24Robert Evans?

  Is that how they save the Shire?

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, use something else for your patina respectability.

• 30:28Speaker 07

  It's upsetting.

• 30:30Robert Evans?

  I don't think the hobbits or the Shire were saved by data aggregation and like, spy solutions, right? I don't think they were saved by giving the CIA more methods of like, tracking people to kill. I'm pretty sure the Shire was saved when the hobbits used a volcano to destroy the literal physical embodiment of state political power. Anyway.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  And forming a union of communities, you know?

• 30:54Robert Evans?

  And forming a union of communities that's multiracial and multinational. Yes. Anyway.

• 31:01Robert Evans?

  One thing that's really important to Alex, though, is that part of why Palantir needs to defend the West is so that weirdos like him can safely be deviants, right? That's really important to him, is that only, I could only grow up safely as a weirdo in the West. And that's a huge part of it for Alex. As Maureen Dowd wrote for the New York Times, "Palantir does not do business with China, Russia, or other countries that are opposed to the West. Mr. Teal said the company tries to work with more allied and less corrupt governments, noting dryly that aside from their ideological stances, with corrupt countries, you never get paid. 'We have a consistently pro-Western view that the West has a superior way of living and organizing itself, especially if we live up to our aspirations,' Mr. Karp said. It's interesting how radical that is, considering it's not, in my view, that radical."

• 31:44Robert Evans?

  And like, the people, the issue isn't that like, people are angry that the West is good at letting like, weirdos, you know, have civil rights, man. That's actually one of the things that, that we like. The issue is that that's not really what you're helping. You're, you're helping agencies that are carrying out, for example, unprovoked wars that drive up the cost of living massively and like, in, kill huge numbers of people and actually like, make the West a lot weaker? Like, that's what I would say is the kind of the ultimate conclusion of a lot of y'all's work, is that it's, the governments here are more corrupt and weaker than ever and you're part of it? Anyway.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Yep. And also the post-colonial paradigms of power you're maintaining are very much not helping the West.

• 32:25Robert Evans?

  No, no, none of it's helping the West, right? Speaking of radical, as you probably noticed, our supposed neo-Marxist philosopher seems a lot less radical, at least in a left-wing direction, by this point in the story. And some of this is the obvious result of the fact that by the aughts, Alex is starting to become a rich man and Palantir is now contracting with the Pentagon and numerous state and federal agencies, including ICE. I think it's 2011 that, uh, there's a hack by Anonymous that shows that several Palantir employees are involved in a misinformation campaign to discredit WikiLeaks and, I mean, Glenn Greenwald, although, honestly, guys, Glenn did not need help with that part. You know? He, he wound up handing, handling that eventually on his own.

• 33:10Robert Evans?

  There's at least one Palantir employee involved in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal with Facebook data that the Trump campaign uses for the 2016 election. So, I mean, and Alex is always talking about like, "My big thing is stopping the rise of the right and fascism." And it, it sure seems like your company's done the opposite. There's a really fucked up quote from that New York Times piece by Dowd, uh, that I want to read here about like, kind of Palantir and the aughts. "A pro bono contract with the New Orleans Police Department, starting in 2012, was dropped after six years amid criticism that its predictive policing eroded privacy and had a disparate impact on people of color. 'We reduced the rates of black-on-black death in New Orleans,' Mr. Karp said. 'And we have these critics who are like, Palantir is racist. I don't know. The hundreds of people who are now alive don't think that we're racist.'"

• 33:55Robert Evans?

  And again, he makes a lot of claims like this. He'll also say, "We've saved, like, Europe from multiple 9/11-style terrorist attacks that would have fueled the far right." But it's secret stuff, so we can't actually see that through.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  You gotta trust us this happened or didn't happen because of us.

• 34:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Also, I love he's doing predictive policing for free. He's like, "I'm, I'm down. I'll help you."

• 34:15Robert Evans?

  For free, pro bono.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Won't even charge you.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 34:19Robert Evans?

  You can't see the actual, like, proof that you saved all these people and stopped all this stuff. And what's also funny, you should note, Alex doesn't have a, a, a, a security clearance, so he's not privy to that information.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  So he doesn't know.

• 34:33Robert Evans?

  It's super rumored that Palantir was, provided the information that led to Osama bin Laden getting killed, but every time Alex talks about it, he's like, "Well, I don't know. I can't say." Cause like, he doesn't, he literally does not have access to that information legally. He would have committed serious crimes, had he. It's pretty universally believed, it seems, among Palantirians that they did, but I don't have a security clearance and I don't, there's certainly not evidence. Also, it's, you should never forget, it would be really good for Palantir if they did.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  It's great advertising.

• 35:02Robert Evans?

  So maybe that's why people want to believe it.

• 35:05Robert Evans?

  During Trump's first term and Biden's, Palantir worked with ICE to help them track down migrants at the border. This spawned protests in 2019 and led some 200 Palantirians, or hobbits?

• 35:15Speaker 07

  No.

• 35:15Robert Evans?

  To write an open letter to Alex Karp about their moral issues with helping ICE. Karp was unmoved and he lost employees during the first Trump administration. In 2020, Palantir goes public and starts taking on non-governmental clients like IBM and JP Morgan and some of the other corporations we've talked about. Alex becomes a billionaire in September of 2020, which has an impact on his politics as well as his lifestyle. He begins buying up multiple homes around the world, almost always near great Alpine skiing trails. As a bid to keep up with his demanding schedule, he decides he has to be as like, fit as a professional athlete. And so he hires a team of former Norwegian Special Forces skiers to like, make him into an Olympic-level skier. And he spends all of his free time skiing like, these incredibly long distances.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Do we know if they get close? Is he good?

• 36:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, he's supposed to be pretty good.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:04Robert Evans?

  Like, I, I don't know. I can't evaluate that, but like, he, like, he's supposed to be pretty good.

• 36:10Speaker 07

  Has he, does he like, compete or anything, or no?

• 36:13Robert Evans?

  I don't, I don't think he competes in skiing. I think he does occasionally, cause he does competitive long-distance pistol shooting too. He's really into like, super long-distance pistol shooting, which he seems to enjoy as both a hobby and a thing he can do performatively in front of journalists to impress or rattle them, per Maureen Dowd's article. "In New Hampshire, we had a lunch of lobster pasta. He kept his panic button on the table and then went shooting on his property. He expertly hit targets with a 9mm pistol from 264 yards. When an aide suggested that a photographer not shoot Mr. Karp in the act of shooting, he overruled the idea. 'Actually, honestly, guns would be much better regulated if you had someone who knows guns,' he said. 'I'm not a hunter. I'm an artist with a gun.'" And I, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta stop you here. I gotta stop you.

• 36:56Robert Evans?

  Now, look, 264 yards is extremely long-range for a handgun. That's a great shot to be ever able to make. That's a hell of a shot, right? And obviously, he is not using, like, your grandpa's 45. He is using a purpose-built, I've seen a picture of it, distance pistol, long-distance shooting pistol, right?

• 37:14Speaker 01

  With an arm brace, the whole thing.

• 37:15Robert Evans?

  That probably costs more than most people's, it doesn't have an arm brace, cause I don't think that's part of the, but it, I, I'm, I doubt it costs any less than $20,000 or $30,000. I'd be shocked if it's much less than that. It's gotta be at least like, in the $6,000 to $10,000 range for a gun like that. So he's very good and he, I mean, he's, he's using the right equipment, but artist is a little much, because 264 yards, again, great distance. The current world record shot from a 9mm pistol is set by, was set recently by a former ICE agent named Viktor Avila and he had a steel target 2,010 yards away. So I'm not quite gonna call you an artist with a gun yet, Alex. There's a pretty big discrepancy between you and world-class there. Again, great shot, really good. I don't, I couldn't do, I don't think I could do 264 with my nine.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Better than the average man, or average woman, anybody with a gun.

• 37:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, for sure, sure. Not saying that, but let's, maybe not artist yet, I don't know. So, Karp also continues to live a non-monogamous life, although he, he tends to describe himself as being geographically monogamous, which means like, he has a couple of different ladies on different continents that he visits from time to time. But I think he's been with at least one for like, well over 10 years, so these are pretty long-term relationships and, you know, he seems to be, I, I don't have a problem with that, like, that's, that's, that's up to you. It's more the whole evil federal government spy agency shit, that's, that's a problem.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  His morality's really tested there, not so much the whole, "I've got different hoes and area codes," so.

• 38:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. That's, that's, that's whatever.

• 38:41Speaker 07

  I just like, I just like, really don't like him.

• 38:44Robert Evans?

  He really wants to tell you about it, though. He really wants you to know. He, it's really important to him that you know what he's doing.

• 38:52Speaker 07

  The, the girly pops don't like you. We think you're a weird dude. You need to stop telling us about that.

• 38:58Robert Evans?

  Probably helps that you're a billionaire. So, he is also one of a number of Palantir employees who refuse to get clearances to view class, as I said, to get classified, top-secret information. Employees with clearance thus have to talk with him and some of their other bosses in like, vague generalities or like, euphemistic terms when they need guidance on an issue they can't discuss directly. And Alex justifies not getting a clearance by saying he wants to be able to speak freely in interviews. And there's a lot of speculation that he and a number of other Palantirians like smoking weed and probably doing other drugs that they, they don't want to have to give up in order to get a security clearance.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  That makes a lot of sense.

• 39:34Robert Evans?

  That makes a lot, I wouldn't either, man.

• 39:37Robert Evans?

  Karp, in fact, takes no small amount of pride in being a deviant. In a 2013 Forbes profile, he complained about his security detail. "It puts a massive cramp on your life. There's nothing worse for reducing your ability to flirt with someone." Alex went on to reminisce about Germany, where he'd go into skanky places in Berlin all night. "I'd talk to whoever would talk to me, occasionally go home with people as often as I could. I went to places where people were doing things, smoking things. I just loved it." And like, bro, we have all done drugs and had casual sex in Berlin, okay? It's not special. Berlin kind of encourages that behavior.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of, they're known for it.

• 40:12Robert Evans?

  Who amongst us hasn't had a beautiful night with a Scotsman five floors below in a fucking used Civil War or World War II bunker, right? Like, it's Berlin, we've all done that shit. You're not special, man. Every single interview with him talks about this stuff. Like, I, I, I think I've quoted him five times on it now. Like, he, he brings this up constantly.

• 40:37Robert Evans?

  So there's another fun quote from that article. This, again, this is from 2013, because they're talking about like, well, it seems weird that you're so, you find privacy so important and being able to be a weirdo so important. You're helping all these agencies that like crack down on people who are weirdos. And told Forbes, well, we have to find places where we, that we protect away from government so that we can all be unique and interesting. And in my case, the somewhat deviant people we'd like to be. It's like, so how have you, and he'll say like, well, because Palantir has robust privacy protocols and stuff. And it's like, I don't know that I believe that matters in the way you think it does. That like, you have the potential to enable privacy settings on spy software for the CIA. I don't know that I care about that, man.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  It's the smallest of wins.

• 41:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, your privacy settings didn't help the girls in that school in Iran who got blown up, like, which we'll talk about. So the one thing that's become clear to me through this research is that Karp either never really believed all this, or that as soon as he decided the rise of fascism, his greatest fear was inevitable, his first priority became ensuring his own safety and ability to continue living the way he wanted, no matter what happened to the rest of us. In public, at least, this seems to have been a gradual process, and he still described himself and was described as a progressive or even a neo-Marxist into the 2020s. You could find articles calling him that up through the Biden years, and he remained a consistent Democratic donor. Karp attempted to explain this evident cognitive dissonance by arguing that terrorist attacks

• 42:07Robert Evans?

  and a failure to secure borders fueled the growth of the far right. I see it as pretty simple. You have an open border, you get the far right. And once you get them, you can't get rid of them. We saw it in Brexit, we saw it with Le Pen in France, you see it across Europe, now you see it in Germany. They should be much stricter. That is, he said, the only reason we have the rise of the right, the only reason. When people tell you we need an open border, they also tell you they're electing right-wing politicians, because they are. The biggest mistake, and it's not one politician, it's a generation, was believing that there was something bigoted about having a border, and there are just a lot of people who believe that, he said. And that's, that's very much reductive in terms of like,

• 42:41Speaker 01

  That use of "only" is really doing a lot of work, a lot of heavy lifting. I mean, the fact that a border is the only thing that leads to the far right is like so specious, but you know.

• 42:52Robert Evans?

  What made people really pissed about, was it like years of news and media propaganda? Like, was it that? I don't know. Weird stuff. So these quotes come from a very compelling profile on Karp that I've quoted from several times by Maureen Dowd. This is from 2024, and during that interview, he told Dowd, "I didn't enjoy it, working with the Trump administration. There's a lot of reasons I cut Biden a check. I do not enjoy being protested every day. It was completely ludicrous and ridiculous. It was actually the opposite, because Peter had supported Mr. Trump. It was harder to get things done." Right? That like, actually, the fact that Peter Thiel was in with Trump made it hard for Palantir. You know, it didn't help us at all. That said, his attitude has done a complete 180 in the most recent Trump term.

• 43:36Robert Evans?

  And the inciting incident above everything else seems to have been October 7th, right? He reacted with particular venom to student protesters like he'd once been, who started protesting the Israeli government's response. He offered 180 jobs to students who were fearful of staying in school due to their support for Israel, and he urged his fellow business leaders to "grow a spine and stand up to those dastardly student protesters. If we do not win the battle of ideas and reassert basic norms and the basic, obvious idea that America is a noble, great, wonderful aspiration of a dream that we are blessed to be a part of, we will have a much, much worse world for all of us." And it's interesting, he thinks this battle is being lost because students are angry that we're providing like arms to a government that's doing fucked up stuff.

• 44:17Robert Evans?

  And I think the battle is being lost because people like him continue to empower our government and other governments to massacre civilians.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 44:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  It's not the imagined stuff that's the problem, it's the real stuff that's the problem. It's the lies lost, not the like, this could happen one day.

• 44:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't want to be an American so much when that's going on. It doesn't feel very good. And it's also worth noting that from not quite the beginning, but about a decade ago, Palantir has been heavily involved in the Israeli state and the Israeli military. Palantir established an office in Tel Aviv in 2015, and Karp has maintained a deep sympathy for Israel since his youth. I want to quote from a summary of Palantir's business dealings in Israel by Anis Reis of The Cradle, quote, "This location underscores the company's deep integration into the Israeli tech ecosystem. Karp himself highlighted Palantir's strong ties to Israel in a December 2023 interview on Fox Business, stating, 'We are very well-known in Israel. Israel appreciates our product.' The partnership between Palantir and Israel's military began to solidify with a formal

• 45:16Robert Evans?

  agreement signed on the 12th of January 2024, three months after the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza began, following a visit by company executives to Israel, during which they held their first board meeting of the year in Tel Aviv. The recent carnage in Rafah on the 26th of May, in which Israel bombed a refugee camp, killing dozens of Palestinians and the deaths of seven World Central Kitchen workers in April during airstrikes, highlight the brutal misuse of Palantir's so-called precision technology. The company's Titan system, promoted as a highly accurate AI model designed to enhance targeting precision, epitomizes the problems with Palantir's claimed high-accuracy capabilities. While there is no direct evidence that Titan specifically is used by Israel, the company's tech claims are integral to its broader product offerings, some of which are employed by Tel Aviv."

• 45:59Robert Evans?

  And this is something we really need to talk about, is what do Palantir's products do on the ground? How are they integrated into what has become like killing by several different states of like large numbers of civilians? As Alex has gained wealth and experience, he's come to some questionable conclusions about grand strategy and the history of warfare. He seems to believe that a three-front war with the US and China, Russia and Iran is inevitable. In other words, the US is going to be inevitably be in a war with China, Russia and Iran, all like either allied or at least working together. And he seems to have come to this conclusion at least as far back as the Biden administration. Per Dowd's piece, "He argues we have to keep going full-tilt on autonomous weapons systems because our adversaries will.

• 46:42Robert Evans?

  They don't have the same moral considerations that we do. I think we're in an age when nuclear deterrent is actually less effective because the West is very unlikely to use anything like a nuclear bomb, whereas our adversaries might," he said. "Where you have technological parity but moral disparity, the actual disparity is much greater than people think. In fact, given that we have parity technologically but we don't have parity morally, they have a huge advantage." You know what, you see what he's saying there, right? Is, well, we're not as evil as our enemies, and so we can't beat them yet.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Even though we're the ones who've dropped the bombs, he's saying they're going to drop the nukes eventually, and we all know that. And then also the idea is that by putting them together and calling them your enemies, you're basically forcing them to be together. Like, you not have the possibility of making out of choices.

• 47:23Robert Evans?

  You're kind of inventing your own conflict. Exactly, yes. It's so fucking frustrating, like so much is of this is like really just like disgusting and irrational leaps in logic. For one thing, if you guys remember back on January 6th of 2021, General Mark Milley was like reaching out to his, his colleagues in Russia and China to be like, "Trust me, the nukes are not gonna get fired. We have it under control. No one's had to do that for China recently." I'm not apologizing for their government, but it's not China that I'm most worried about nuking us. It's not Russia I'm most worried about firing off nukes right now, you know?

• 48:03Speaker 01

  We're talking like low-grade tactical nukes. They are not the lead candidates.

• 48:06Robert Evans?

  Mm-mm, mm-mm, no. It's also the idea that, well, we have a disadvantage if we're not as immoral as our enemies is complete horseshit historically. For one thing, history is replete with examples of how utterly immoral war mongers fare in conflict. Look at the Empire of Japan in World War II. Right? Look at Nazi Germany, right? These are not people to imitate. And Karp basically says, "Well, if we want to beat guys like that, we gotta become as bad as they are," which ignores the important reality that this whole three-front war thing only seems really likely now because we elected a fascist who utilized Palantir's software to help make thousands of targeting decisions in a disastrous war of choice with Iran. So let's talk about that. But first,

• 48:50Robert Evans?

  One of Palantir, oh yeah, let's talk about ads, I guess. Sorry.

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• 50:15Speaker 05

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  And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power.

• 50:45Speaker 07

  It's real.

• 50:45Speaker 06

  Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests. And they complain about the very thing they're seeing.

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  Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 51:37Robert Evans?

  We're back. One of Palantir's big jobs for the Pentagon is the creation of the Maven Smart System. This had initially been a Google contract, but employees there had protested leading the company to back away. Palantir responded to this, seeing opportunity, and by publishing a tweet by Alex Karp, he said, quote, "Silicon Valley is telling the average American, I will not support your defense needs, while selling products that are adversarial to America. That is a loser position." Palantir picked up the contract in 2019.

• 52:06Speaker 07

  First of all, well.

• 52:07Robert Evans?

  An opportunist.

• 52:08Speaker 07

  First of all, well done by the, by the Google employees for, for.

• 52:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 52:12Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The last time we'll see stones like that, that actually matter in a tech company, but it was good to see.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Last time they were like, don't be evil. And they're like, okay, we've given that up.

• 52:23Robert Evans?

  We've given that up, we're done now. Palantir isn't the only contractor with Maven, but they are the backbone to the project, which has had, let us say, mixed success. Per an article in Reuters by David Jeans and Mike Stone, "Maven supported almost all of the 13,500 US strikes in Iran. This would include the February 28th strike on that girls' school in Menab, Iran, which killed between 155 and 175 students." Reuters continues, "The question is why a military system designed to move faster from information to action has no equally clear public requirement to slow down after grave civilian harm. In software engineering, an error budget is meant to protect users. When a service exceeds an agreed level of failure, new releases stop until the problem is understood and fixed.

• 53:05Robert Evans?

  War is obviously not software, but in Washington's AI-assisted operations, civilian deaths do not automatically trigger a temporary suspension of the relevant tools, an independent review of the data, or a public account of the decisions that led to the strike. Advocates of military AI argue that better data and faster analysis can make attacks more precise. That is possible in principle, but precision is not something software simply possesses. It depends on the quality and age of the data, what a system treats as suspicious, and whether people have enough time to challenge its output."

• 53:35Speaker 07

  Huh.

• 53:37Robert Evans?

  And.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  They're moving too fast and breaking things.

• 53:39Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 53:40Robert Evans?

  Right, even though Alex says he doesn't like that, right? "In handing over power to utilize a system like this to men like Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, Karp has guaranteed its misuse and proved his critics within the company dreadfully correct. I would not presume to make this episode an end-all-be-all summary of how Palantir works on the modern battlefield, but I do want to end by discussing a paper by Jessica Dorsey and Luke Moffett I read, hosted by the Lieber Institute in West Point's website. They accuse Palantir of being a major driver of "warification." Quote, "As we outline, warification does not mean lawfare, where law is used to further strategic or operational objectives. Instead, by turning war into a verb, 'warify,'

• 54:20Robert Evans?

  we highlight the active process of interpreting the law under pressure from parties to armed conflict, which distorts its original intent or spirit. In essence, warification describes the process through which activities, spaces, and technologies not traditionally associated with armed conflict are reconstituted as legitimate components of warfare. It is both a conceptual expansion and a practical one. The boundaries of war stretch, and with them, the range of actors, tools, and targets that become permissible. Recent developments in the use of artificial intelligence for targeting in Iran and the conflict in the wider Middle East offer a stark illustration of warification in action. See, for example, Palantir's Maven Smart System and reports of large language models developed by Anthropic being deployed in operational contexts.

• 55:02Robert Evans?

  These systems are frequently framed as ushering in an era of unprecedented precision and efficiency in warfare. Yet the empirical reality, including the reported deaths of around 1,700 civilians in recent hostilities in Iran, calls that narrative into serious question. CENTCOM claimed it was generating 1,000 targets per hour. Coupled with the high operational tempo that has come to become a hallmark of modern warfare, largely traceable to the Silicon Valley ethos of move fast and break things, such capabilities are often framed as enhancing precision, but they also introduce new layers of abstraction between decision makers and the consequences of their actions. If anything, the integration of AI into targeting workflows may be accelerating the very dynamics warification seeks to describe, the normalization, diffusion, and expansion of organized violence

• 55:46Robert Evans?

  under the guise of technological refinement." And that, if you want to know an answer, what does Palantir do to somebody? In the most accurate term, they normalize, they diffuse, and they expand organized violence under the guise of technological refinement. That's what they do. They make violence more acceptable to a larger number of people in a wider number of areas, and they make that violence more possible and easier for the state to achieve. And they do this under the guise of making it more refined and precise. That's what Palantir does. Anyway.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  You know, at the street level, Al Capone tried doing the same thing.

• 56:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  I mean, honestly, he sat there, he's like, how do I make my violence more palatable? I'll give out turkeys on Thanksgiving. And then people will be like, all right, he's doing a good thing. I mean, also, there's the point about them trying to expand their idea of what is possible in warfighting.

• 56:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  But they're borrowing, yeah, from like the Soviet Union and the Cold War. And correct me if I'm, if I'm getting this wrong, they, if my understanding, had deep cover agents that were supposed to hit Romstein Air Force Base because it would discombobulate the military response in case there was a reason to go to like, you know, actual, a full-on war, and it no longer a Cold War, but a hot war. So they were supposed to kill the children at schools because that would affect their parents, who were the Romstein Air Force Base commanders. We, from what I understand, did the same thing at Menab with the girls' school because a lot of those girls were the daughters of IRGC commanders. So they're kind of doing exactly the thing that they're accusing the immoral Soviet Union of the past, and now the present Russia, Iran, China coordinated efforts.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  I don't think they have a name, they don't have like an axis of yet.

• 57:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, because they're not.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Technically allies.

• 57:27Robert Evans?

  Literally part of any kind of ally, like organization or whatever. I, you know, I don't know why, because at least the official statement is that it was an accident based on outdated data, that's why the Menab Girls' School was hit. I think it is a perfectly reasonable theory as to like, well, was this part of an attempt to like further discombobulate and fuck up, uh, like the response overall, right? Because that is, I mean, that is something that like happens in warfare planning. So I'm not, I'm not going to say that's not what went down. I certainly, I can't like also say Alex Karp definitely wanted that or like knew.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Totally, it was pure speculation.

• 57:58Robert Evans?

  Top secret clearance.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 58:01Robert Evans?

  And again, it's, that's kind of his job, is to be the salesman, but also like the kind of friendly, like nerdy academic face of this company that he's not even allowed to know a lot of what they're doing as they are part of these vast slaughters that are being carried out for no, in part, when they're talking about like it, Palantir expanding the, like, what is like acceptable targets of violence? What that means is the way in which they identify, who is like an enemy, who do we have to go after? There's all these different, you know, we talked about earlier, you can search by like tattoos. There's all these different things that, you know, the, the software might decide, or like the people building the software might say, this makes someone more likely, you know, to be in this instance, an enemy or involved in the insurgency or whatever.

• 58:43Robert Evans?

  And all these factors are generating targets, which means that it's much wider than like needing to have any actual like on-the-ground intelligence that like someone's doing something, right? Like, that's not what's happening.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  They fit a profile.

• 58:55Robert Evans?

  The number, yes, and the number of things that can make you a military-aged male, so to speak, get broader and broader as AI gets brought into it, rather than it getting more precise.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  They've, they've abstractified humanity even more so because of exactly the benefits to them of AI.

• 59:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. If you can categorize people more simply, then you can kill them more effectively.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 59:15Robert Evans?

  That's the Palantir promise. So, that's all I've really got to say about Alex at this point. You know, he's still alive, still rich, still running Palantir. Someday, none of those things will be true. Just that's the way time works.

• 59:28Speaker 07

  Still has that hair, still talks the way he talks.

• 59:30Robert Evans?

  Still has that hair, still talks the way he talks, still.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Still telling you about the.

• 59:34Robert Evans?

  The German laces?

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:37Speaker 07

  He's a weird, he's a weird, he's a weird guy.

• 59:40Robert Evans?

  You gotta know about how much the Germans like him. Um, I don't know, if you're in Burgayne or something and you see Alex Karp, maybe call him. He doesn't go there still, if he ever did. I don't know why I'd suggest that.

• 59:52Speaker 07

  Run like the wind.

• 59:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they, they wouldn't let him in anymore. Um, okay, I think that probably does it for us here at Behind the Bastards. Zaren, you got anything else you want to throw out at us, anything to plug?

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Um, well, let's see, on The Ridiculous Crime, we have an interesting two-part interview with the author Matthew Campbell about his book, The Man Who Stole the Gods. And it's all about the Cambodian Civil War, Vietnam, and some, some, you know, art collectors who use that chaos to pull statuary out of places like Angkor Wat and then sell it in New York and give it to the Met Museum, not give, but you know, donate to the Met Museum. And it's an interesting crossroads of history that a lot of history people don't know, and a lot of things people will instantly recognize about how rich get away with things because they're rich.

• 1:00:36Robert Evans?

  Cool. Well, check that out, everybody, and check us out next week when we'll be talking about another person I don't like very much.

• 1:00:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, bye-bye.

• 1:00:48Speaker 07

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

• 1:01:22Speaker 04

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 1:01:37Speaker 05

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 1:01:42Speaker 04

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  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

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  People wake up and go, oh damn, wait, hold up, they changed all of that? Yes.

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  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts.

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  If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But soon they'll find it. He acted friendly, he talked friendly, he sounded friendly.

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