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

Robert begins his exploration of the early life of Alex Karp, current CEO of Palantir and best friend to Peter Thiel. He traces Alex's journey from left-wing academic to overlord of an "Anti-Woke" defense contractor. Sources: Robert Evans Sun, Aug 16, 7:55 PM (21 hours ago) to me https://translated.turbopages.org/proxy_u/ru-en.en.26d95273-6a62c822-5da570ba-74722d776562/https/www.juedische-allgemeine.de/politik/philosoph-des-cyberkriegs/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/alex-karp-from-dyslexic-outsider-ai-war-ceo-michael-murphy-asslc/ https://archive.is/mITxe#selection-2543.0-2557.72 https://archive.is/aVOyY#selection-1659.0-1671.192 https://kristindemontfort.substack.com/p/alex-karps-aggression-in-the-lebenswelt https://kristindemontfort.substack.com/p/alex-karps-aggression-in-the-lebenswelt https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-what-the-company-does/ https://medium.com/@alfredas/leaving-the-shire-a-farewell-letter-to-my-colleagues-at-palantir-5275b28ce09b https://medium.com/coriers/can-palantir-take-over-the-entire-data-stack-e9a40b842d0c https://www.bobinsun.cn/assets/pdf/Palantir-Redefining-Analytics,%20Augmenting-Intelligence%20&%20Unlocking-Secrets.pdf https://www.bobinsun.cn/assets/pdf/Palantir-Redefining-Analytics,%20Augmenting-Intelligence%20&%20Unlocking-Secrets.pdf https://archive.is/QVBtT#selection-2347.0-2347.346 https://fpif.org/americas-ai-war-has-no-civilian-stop-rule/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/palantir-faces-challenge-remove-anthropic-pentagons-ai-software-2026-03-04/ https://www.wired.com/story/ice-palantir-immigrationos/ https://lieber.westpoint.edu/warification-illusion-precision-ai-targeting-increasing-civilian-harm/ https://www.business-humanrights.org/es/%C3%BAltimas-noticias/palantir-spacex-allegedly-complicit-in-war-crimes-amid-israels-war-in-gaza/ https://en.defence-ua.com/analysis/security_risks_emerge_how_us_based_palantirs_systems_could_endanger_ukraines_defense_data-16804.html 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Robert Evans?

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• 2:21Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history and today. And this is a today episode. We're covering a guy who's not dead yet, so his bastardery is still ongoing. So you should consider these episodes the first two parts of our episodes on Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir. And to talk to me about Alex and Palantir, I have the great Zaren Burnett. Zaren, you work on Ridiculous Crime, a great iHeart podcast and also very special episodes. Thank you for joining us today.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me. Thank you both, Robert and Sophie. I'm really stoked to be here.

• 2:59Robert Evans?

  So what do you know about Palantir and Alex Karp?

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, what do you know? But before we get to that, tell us a little bit about your shows real quick.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  Okay, Ridiculous Crime is a show similar to yours where we tell each other stories and one person, it doesn't know what the story is going to be. So me and my co-host, Elizabeth Dutton, we have a show that the tagline says is 99% murder-free and 100% ridiculous. So it's true crime stories without the murder, and they're always pretty insane.

• 3:27Robert Evans?

  Well, lots of murders today.

• 3:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. Nice change for me, change of pace. And then very special episodes, the other show I do is kind of like a magazine-style audio show. They're like little movies where we kind of do feature stories that often take place in the recent past, sometimes very far a long time ago. And they have hosts, interaction sometimes with the actual people, sometimes it's just participants who are eyewitnesses or experts, authors, you get the idea.

• 3:56Robert Evans?

  Well, awesome, that sounds great. We love another podcast idiot format show, which is, I think, what the term that got developed. Yeah, what do you know about Alex Karp and Palantir, Zaren?

• 4:07Speaker 03

  I know more about Palantir than I know about Alex Karp. Alex Karp, every time I read about him, he pisses me off, so I kind of have like to keep him at arms-length approach, so I'm forced to know about him.

• 4:16Robert Evans?

  He's a real skinny athletic guy with like curly hair. Yeah, curly hair that looks a little bit like in the explosions that he helps to facilitate.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:25Robert Evans?

  And he does Tai Chi a lot while standing around and talking to people. Like, one of his, the thing interviewers and his colleagues will note about him is that, like, if you're just talking with Alex during a meeting, he'll periodically just start doing Tai Chi. That's a way, I think, because he's ADHD, like, I think it's a self-managing method.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  Sure, it's stemming, he needs to move the energy around.

• 4:45Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. We all have a thing that we do. You know, for some of us, I would say honorable, God-fearing, decent people, we just pick drugs, Alex, just take drugs, you know? But he's got to do his fucking Tai Chi or whatever, keep his heart rate low, I don't know. Anyway.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  I chose gardening.

• 5:02Speaker 03

  Oh, that's a good one. Yeah, gardening and drugs is a fantastic one.

• 5:05Robert Evans?

  It's very easy to mix your gardening and your drugs if you know what you're doing.

• 5:10Robert Evans?

  So this week, we are going to be talking about Alex as one of the more immediately dangerous subjects we have ever covered. I've talked about periodically, I'll have one of these modern bastards. There's a lot of guys that I think are awful and dangerous. There's not a lot of them that I think are like really formidable. And Alex is really formidable. He is not a stupid man. He is not a foolish person. He is a planner and a thinker, and unfortunately, he's quite good at what he does. I've said similar things about Peter Thiel. Thiel is also kind of losing his mind lately. Like, if you think back to our episodes on the Antichrist stuff, I'm hearing a lot more disordered thinking from Peter than I, than I previously had. I think Alex is still kind of got a gimlet eye on the straight and narrow. He knows exactly what he's going for and what he's building, and I think that makes

• 5:55Robert Evans?

  him very frightening.

• 5:57Speaker 03

  He's got that Kissinger-level focus.

• 5:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, he kind of does. And obviously, Karp is best known for his work as the CEO of Palantir. Most people don't really know much about what Palantir does. It's usually described as a data broker that works for a bunch of different, like, intelligence agencies and also, like, large corporations. That's not truly accurate. Palantir, like, data broker isn't exactly the right thing to call them. What they really do is provide methods for large organizations to analyze and draw conclusions from data that they already have and are gathering. But because of the agencies they work for, a lot of that data is used to, for example, plan a series of airstrikes on Iran, right? Like, that's, that's kind of what Palantir does. We'll talk more about that in part two.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  So they're the new Rand Corporation?

• 6:39Robert Evans?

  Well, it's more, what they're doing is newer than that, right?

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 6:43Robert Evans?

  They're trying to provide, what you have in the modern era, in the 21st century, is you have both, like, intelligence agencies and governments and also corporations are taking in so much more data than had ever existed in the entire world before. Palantir is one of a number of companies that helps them organize it, and at least in terms of what they do, a lot of people say that they're the best at it. There's arguments about that, but that's the gist of what Palantir is. And so it's, it's not really, a company like Palantir couldn't have existed until the 21st century, really.

• 7:12Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 7:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So, for years, you'd basically only read or hear about Alex Karp, described as like Peter Thiel's sidekick, almost an Igor-like figure, right? If Peter Thiel is Dr. Frankenstein, he's this Igor guy in the background, right? This caretaker he puts in charge of his techno-spy corporation, right? And when Alex was described in any detail at all, and I think if you go back even to my Peter Thiel episodes, I think I described him quoting another article as a neo-Marxist, right? A lot of people would call him that. He was noted as being Peter's weird, left-wing friend who's running Palantir.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 7:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's not quite accurate to how he is today, but it's certainly like a part of his journey. And depending on how you encounter Alex in the wild these days, when you run into quotes from him, he does still sometimes seem like the sanest man in the room, if Silicon Valley tech CEOs could be considered a room. Just this July, The Wall Street Journal described him as, quote, "saying what every angry CEO was thinking about AI." Quote, "He declared that something has gone completely wrong in the relationship between AI labs and their customers. Speaking at a frenetic pace, the tech company boss rattled on about AI labs hyping their capabilities, overcharging for tokens or units of AI use, all while insisting that he wasn't throwing shade at rivals while doing just that. Karp, who counts some of the largest US companies as well as the government as clients, added, 'At every single enterprise I deal with, these people are livid.

• 8:34Robert Evans?

  They're like, I am paying for tokens that create no value.'" And so when you hear stuff like that from Alex, it's like, oh, well, maybe he's like one of the people who hasn't completely lost his mind, you know? But at other times, he sounds increasingly authoritarian and even monomaniacal. After donating to support Kamala Harris's presidential campaign in 2024, he has pivoted in the last couple of years towards pro-MAGA messaging. In November of 2025, he quoted W. B. Yeats in a letter to shareholders. You all know the line, "Things fall apart the center cannot hold." Politico described the letter to shareholders as "a peculiar part of an even more peculiar letter, where he proceeded to warn against the dangers of proclaiming the equality of all cultures and cultural values."

• 9:14Robert Evans?

  So Alex is going on one, and he's clearly one of these guys who's been sort of seized by this anti-woke mania that swept through Silicon Valley and a lot of, like, particularly the East Coast intelligentsia set. I don't know how much I think Alex believes that as much as he thinks that it's the safest thing to be saying, but we'll come back to that a little later. In February of 2026, Karp shared a pre-recorded video with employees, addressing concerns that some of them had expressed over Palantir working with ICE to deport people. Karp defended supporting ICE, claiming Democrats and Republicans both prioritized the issue and that Palantir, by which he meant himself, had zero issue providing the Trump administration with whatever it needed.

• 9:56Robert Evans?

  Of all the Silicon Valley CEOs then who have bent the knee to Donald Trump, Karp is the one whose own background seems like it shouldn't have led him down that path. But after critiquing Trump's first term, he's become what The New York Times's Michelle Goldberg called "a Trump enabler." So how did he go from being a kid who wore a keffiyeh at protests and spoke out against racist violence by cops to proudly bragging that Palantir was the first completely anti-woke company? That, my friends, is a journey, and we're going to go on it now. This guy's covered some ground in his life, you got to say that at least.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  A lot of times with these, like, modern-day people that are so obviously evil, they're not interesting. They don't have, like, a story.

• 10:35Robert Evans?

  Peter Thiel's always wanted to kill democracy, right?

• 10:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:38Robert Evans?

  Alex took some steps, you know?

• 10:40Speaker 02

  It's usually pretty easy to figure out and, like, it's like, okay, because we get, we get asked all the time to do these, like, Republican politicians or so-and-so, and it's like, they're a brand of guy, they're just not interesting.

• 10:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  But.

• 10:54Robert Evans?

  Alex isn't that.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, how did we get here? Tell us, I'm like.

• 10:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so the number one book about Karp right now is also his only biography, Michael Steinbarger's The Philosopher in the Valley. And I would say Steinbarger's take on Karp, which is a critical one. He's not a guy who, like, drinks this dude's Kool-Aid entirely. He describes him as like a principled and fiercely intelligent young man with a reflexive need for contrarianism, following his own self-interest to a dark destination and never quite letting himself admit that's what's happened, right? I think that's, that's like the short answer to what happened to this guy, and the long answer is everything we're going to talk about here. So. Alex's father is Bob Karp, a German Jewish working-class man whose own father was a guidance counselor and a carpenter and who himself became a pediatrician. So his dad,

• 11:40Robert Evans?

  Bob, is a doctor, right? Now, while in med school, Bob meets Alex's wife, Lea James, who is an inspiring artist from Illinois and the great-granddaughter of a former enslaved person. Both Bob and Lea have their issues as a couple, as all parents do. Bob grew up awash in progressive politics, and he was drawn to Lea because she was black. And per Steinberger, quote, "Dating Lea was a powerful way of signaling his progressivism." This isn't what Bob says. I don't know that it's what Lea says, but it's what both Alex and his brother believe about their dad, that he got with their mom because it was a way of, like, woke signaling, basically.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  Yes, tokenization of the mother. Okay, interesting.

• 12:17Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Yeah. So, we're starting offs! All of us are already like, "Okay." Yeah. So Alex and his younger brother Ben both seem to be in agreement on this point. And while Steinberger notes that a genuine romance eventually developed between Bob and Lea, that doesn't seem to be how his kids kind of interpreted things because of what happens later. But they have Alex on October 2nd, 1967. He's born in New York City. Alex is never going to forgive his parents for getting married and creating him as what he saw as the result of identity politics. Quote from Steinberger, "He felt as if he had been the product of virtue signaling, and it bothered him." And now, what I don't know is how early this bothers him, right? Because there's not

• 13:02Robert Evans?

  a lot of signs that this is upsetting him in his early life. This may be something that, like, he more comes back to later. That's kind of unclear to me. But later in life, Karp will insist that he never personally experienced racism as a biracial man in America. And as a kid, he primarily identified with and was socialized as a black kid, right? Like, that's how he grows up. That's what all of his friends, yeah, that's, all of his friends will say, "That's how we saw him," right?

• 13:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:25Robert Evans?

  And how he acted. Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  Okay. So he's kind of got a Clarence Thomas thing going, where he, like, starts out like a little bit progressive, definitely black, and then moves away from that as fast as he can.

• 13:34Robert Evans?

  And he's, you know, the complication being that he's also biracial, and so he's both black and Jewish. That's a confusing, you know, especially in the 60s, melange of identities, maybe?

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. Being biracial, I relate to that it can be confusing in terms of how the world reacts to you, but your own self-identity shouldn't be as confusing.

• 13:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And it doesn't seem like it is initially, right?

• 13:53Speaker 03

  Okay, good.

• 13:54Robert Evans?

  At least we don't get a lot of a hint of that. Alex grows up in Philadelphia, and Philadelphia in the 60s obviously is awash in racial violence. There is a lot of particularly, like, racist white cops really fucking with black people in Philadelphia. Frank Rizzo is the police commissioner.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  Frank Rizzo, yeah.

• 14:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Right. Alex, though, is gonna grow up insulated from this, because his home is a neighborhood called Mount Airy. And Mount Airy is a really abnormally progressive place. And here again, Alex encounters loud and public identity politics, because the Mount Airy neighborhood had been founded initially by Dutch Mennonites. And if you know anything about the Mennonites and the United States, you know the Mennonites have been correct about 80% of the time when they've disagreed with the rest of the country. Usually correct the Mennonites. In an article for Philadelphia Federal Bank, Keith Rowland and Kyle Di Maria write of Mount Airy, quote, "In the 1950s and 1960s, African-Americans faced widespread hostility and resistance from white residents, real estate agents, and city officials when they tried to buy homes in white neighborhoods in northeastern

• 14:53Robert Evans?

  and midwestern cities. In contrast, in Mount Airy, as well as in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and Oak Park, Illinois, middle-class white homeowners and some renters, motivated by the goals of racial justice following World War II, tried to intentionally integrate their communities, welcome African-Americans, and allay the fears of white residents." And that article cites a book called Making Good Neighbors, written by Abigail Perkins. Abigail grew up in Mount Airy and became a professor of history. And she writes, "Around the country, small groups of homeowners opted not to give into the belief that racial transition necessarily brought about neighborhood decline. Instead of meeting would-be black buyers with antagonism or acquiescing to the efforts of blockbusting realtors, these residents, largely white and middle-class, decided to welcome their new neighbors. Beginning

• 15:34Robert Evans?

  with a coordinated pledge in the mid-1950s, homeowners in Mount Airy waged a community-wide battle towards intentional integration. Through innovative real estate efforts, creative marketing techniques, religious activism, and institutional partnerships, residents worked to preserve the viability of their community. By replacing residential segregation with residential integration, they sought to disrupt a system of separation, and thus infuse their daily lives with the experience of interracial living." So, he grows up in, like, this really, like, not unique, because there are a few neighborhoods like this, but he gets extraordinarily fortunate, this place that is really making an effort to integrate and doing so in a ground-up way, rather than like a way where this National Guard's coming in, you know?

• 16:15Speaker 03

  Totally. It's a good faith effort. It's actually community-based, yeah.

• 16:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. And I don't want to leave you with the impression it was just Mennonites driving this, right? There's an interfaith alliance that participates in the effort, including the Germantown Jewish Center. Great efforts are taken to balance admission to local public schools, and citizens would even pressure their local banks, like the one that hosted the article I quoted from, and threaten to take their money elsewhere if prejudicial lending policies weren't addressed. So there's like, this is a really cool chapter of US history.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 16:40Robert Evans?

  And while there were some problems along the way, the efforts of the Mount Airy community represent one of the most successful long-term examples of racial integration in a neighborhood in a major US city, and in large part because it was enthusiastically embraced and carried out by people who believed in the cause. Now, obviously, there is a, you could call it performative nature to this, too, not in the shallow sense that that word normally connotates, but in the sense that the people who lived there wanted to make an example for the rest of the country, right? They wanted to be an example.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  It's strategic performativeness, as opposed to, like, you know, kind of mirroring back on the self. It's more like, "I want the community to see these new standards."

• 17:15Robert Evans?

  Yes. "I want people to see that this works, and that this can create a better community than the one that existed before." And young Alex undeniably benefits from their efforts. We can see this in the fact that he insisted his whole life that racial prejudice was not a factor in his childhood. And that simply wasn't the case for a lot of black and biracial kids in Philadelphia in those days, and probably now, right?

• 17:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. Home of the push-bombing? Yes, definitely.

• 17:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Home of the push-bombing, yes. Or move-bomb, what is it? Yeah.

• 17:42Speaker 03

  Move-bombing, yeah. Sorry, not push, the move-bombing.

• 17:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So, the Karp family are comfortable. They're like, middle-class. His dad's a doctor, right? Middle-class to upper-middle-class over the course of Alex's childhood and adolescence. The Karp parents were known as being both strict and enthusiastic leftists. They despised American consumer culture and mass media. Bob would trace the family lineage on the Karp side back to Karl Marx. That's what their family lore says. Like, that's the level of, like, dedicated that Bob is. Lea reportedly cut the cord of the family television after Alex and his brother fought over a TV show, and they wouldn't have one again until they were almost grown. So they are not, they're growing up, like, being encouraged to get into nature, to interact with the world around them, to read, and not to be

• 18:26Robert Evans?

  like normal Americans. Their parents really hate normal Americans, it kind of seems like, right? Or what they see as normal Americans. The family is comfortable enough that they had a lake house in Vermont where they would vacation, but said lake house had no power or running water. So it's not like a fancy lake house, right? But it is a lake house. Alex's parents modeled homes with few possessions and little unnecessary clutter. This is something Karp is going to carry with him his whole life. He has a lot of homes, but he likes to have them be mostly, like, empty and not super cluttered, right? They spent a lot of time in the wilderness developing practical skills, too. For political reasons, the Karp's also insisted that Alex and his brother Ben attend a public school, Henry M. Houston. And Henry M. Houston seems to have provided a decent education, but it

• 19:08Robert Evans?

  had a lot of bullies. Both Alex and Ben recall, quote, "Some really tough kids, who would bully anyone who was different," which obviously included Alex, right? He's a really brainy kid. He's noted as being like the smart kid. He also can't read for a long time. He's dyslexic, right? So obviously, any time you're a kid that's different, that's not always great in public school. And he and his brother are angry about this to the present day. Like, they are pissed that their parents did not take them out of Henry Houston and put them into a private school.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  They remain pissed about this?

• 19:40Robert Evans?

  Yes, decades later.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  As opposed to being like, you know, part of their, like, identity formation of, like, "I transcended this." It's, "Why did you make me suffer through this?" Okay.

• 19:49Robert Evans?

  Right. "Why didn't you pull me out of this? You had the resources to."

• 19:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:53Robert Evans?

  "I didn't have to go through this, and you made me." Because of your politics, because you thought that it was the best for me, right? Alex claims to have had to bring bribe money to class to pay off a bully, and the overwhelming impact of his time there seems to be a deep and lingering anger at his parents that would extend in time to their politics. As time went on, Alex's mother, Lea, became a somewhat prominent artist. She does mixed media work, and Sophie's gonna show you one example here of Lea's art. She's very much still left-wing. Her art is very much inspired by her politics. The piece that you're seeing now, which, I mean, it's mixed media, so there's like, I don't really know, it looks like a, like, writing on a children's notebook alongside with, like, people trying to draw out, like, the letters in cursive and in, like, normal

• 20:36Robert Evans?

  caricatures with, like, flowers superimposed over it. This particular piece is part of her Creation Stories series, which the Gush Fisher Gallery describes this way, "Karp made these collages in the early 1980s in response to local racialized killings known as the Atlanta Child Murders." So, that's an idea of his mom, right? Like, she is very political, and they grow up aware of this, aware of racial violence in their community. It's deeply affecting to their parents. One assumes it's a big part of their childhood, hearing about this, even though they're not experiencing it directly. In a 2018 profile of Alex in Forbes, well before his shift to the right, he was described as, quote, "The son of an artist and a pediatrician who spent many of their weekends taking him to protests for labor rights and against anything Reagan did," he recalls. And every account

• 21:21Robert Evans?

  of his youth repeats that claim. So we should assume it's true, right? That his parents really hated Reagan? And yeah.

• 21:28Robert Evans?

  He grows up kind of inundated in that. As a child, Alex acquires the nickname Professor. This is not apparently an insult. You would kind of like assume it was maybe, but it's a reference to his obvious intellect. And again, he comes to feel like mixed about that, I think, because he still can't read by age eight. You know, he's kind of able, he's smart enough that he's able to develop skills to make his teachers and some of his classmates think that he's able to read, right? Cause he's, you know, that's a thing, especially like a lot of smart kids with dyslexia develop really, really robust coping mechanisms, you know?

• 22:00Speaker 03

  Okay. So it's like more than just avoiding having to read aloud in class, they're actually like doing like whole word sounded out kind of thing?

• 22:05Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. Like that kind of stuff, I think, cause you don't want people to know and you're trying to figure out ways to deal with it, right? And eventually, like when he's eight, I think the school figures out what's going on. He gets properly diagnosed and he's sent to a special school for like two years, right? Where he gets direct, hands-on like help working with his dyslexia and he learns to read, right? And this is another sign that whatever his issues with the school district were, they seem to have been pretty on top of things, right? The fact that they do realize and they send, and it works, right? This special program, he learns how to read and becomes a voracious reader. He returns to Houston after these two years at the special school and he graduates eighth grade and moves into high school.

• 22:46Robert Evans?

  Now Alex is emphatic that learning to read during those two years was the hardest thing he has ever had to do. And I have, again, no reason to doubt that. His dyslexia was a constant source of struggles, but it also taught him how to deal with adversity and reinforced the lesson that he had to rely on and trust other people in order to get things done. A lot of folks will argue this is part of why he's such a competent CEO today is that unlike a lot of people in that position, he's really good at like taking feedback from his subordinates, cause he's always learned that he needs like the help of people to like get by and do things, right? That's not an issue he has, wanting to do everything by himself. And this is actually a recognized phenomenon among CEOs and founders. Dyslexics are wildly overrepresented among like tech founders and CEOs.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  Really?

• 23:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  I wonder what the connection there is.

• 23:33Robert Evans?

  Well, there's some theorizing about that. In 2002, Betsy Morris wrote an article for Fortune about this after interviewing multiple dyslexic founders and business leaders. And she writes this, quote, "Dyslexia is a crucible, particularly in a high-pressure society that allows so little room for late bloomers. People are either defeated by it or they become much more tenacious," says McCaw. Don Winkler, a top financial services executive at Bank One and then Ford Motor, remembers coming home from school bloodied by fights he'd had with kids who called him dumb. Kinko's founder, Paul Orfalia, failed second grade and spent a part of third in a class for mentally retarded children. He could not learn to read despite the efforts of parents who took him to testers, tutors, therapists, special reading groups, and eye doctors. As young classmates read aloud, Orfalia says it was as if angels whispered words into their ears, right?

• 24:18Robert Evans?

  So there's a long history of people who like Karp struggle with this and it like teaches them coping skills that allow them to get ahead, that like allow them to figure out how society works and how to work within it, right? And that Karp's gotta be one of these guys. He comes out of this with overdeveloped social skills as well as as a voracious leader. He's really good at knowing what people are thinking. People will say this about Alex, like he's very empathetic and if he's in a room with people, he's always concerned with like how people are doing and like who's feeling what, right? That's something that he, he just knows.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  So he was able to read people even though he had difficulty reading language?

• 24:53Robert Evans?

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And you know who else has difficulty reading people, which is why they contact with us to read their advertisements? I don't know.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  You're almost there.

• 25:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, can't all be great. Here's ads.

• 25:07Speaker 03

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• 25:38Speaker 02

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• 25:58Speaker 04

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• 26:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:24Speaker 03

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• 26:36Speaker 02

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• 26:43Speaker 04

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• 26:46Speaker 03

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

• 26:55Speaker 04

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

• 27:02Speaker 03

  It's raw.

• 27:02Speaker 05

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

• 27:11Speaker 03

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• 27:12Speaker 05

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• 27:23Speaker 03

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• 27:26Speaker 05

  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.

• 27:36Speaker 04

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

• 27:41Speaker 03

  Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 27:45Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Hopefully not after just having an ad from Palantir. It'd be weird for Palantir to advertise on a podcast. Yeah. Maybe not the Joe Rogan experience.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  That would be not the strangest thing that's ever happened.

• 27:57Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  If you guys had that happen where you actually like are talking, yes, we have as well.

• 28:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we, we've had the police department we were critiquing, doing ad on our show before.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  And we were, and.

• 28:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Oh, we work. Yeah, uh, we work.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  Remember the good old days Bloomberg? When Bloomberg was running for president.

• 28:16Robert Evans?

  When he was running for president?

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had an episode about. Uh, maybe not, guys.

• 28:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Sponsored by Mike Bloomberg. So Alex graduates high school both with overdeveloped social skills and as a voracious reader, but also with a massive chip on his shoulder. He's not, not angry as a result of the struggles of his youth. Per his biography, The Philosopher in the Valley. Years later, Karp would say that dyslexia added to the sense of vulnerability that he felt as a child. He claims that he intuited from an early age that because he was a biracial Jew with a disability, he had some strikes against him. As he put it, "You're a racially amorphous, far-left Jewish kid who's also dyslexic. Would you not come up with the idea that you're fucked?" He says that he also recognized that his parents, hamstrung by their own limitations, were not in a position to protect him. They loved him, of course, but they couldn't shelter him from a world that seemed especially

• 29:05Robert Evans?

  dangerous for someone with his particular identity. Long before he left for college, Karp felt that he could only truly depend on himself for survival. And one thing he's always angry about is that neither of his parents become like rich and famous. He thinks that his dad could have been like a really prominent, famous physician and he thinks his mom could have been a much more famous artist and they both kind of lack hustle and savvy that he has. That's his conclusion as an adult, right?

• 29:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. He's got a lot of resentment about his parents.

• 29:36Robert Evans?

  Yes. It is a boiling well inside of Alex Karp.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So he is noted by some early friends and relatives as being an angry kid who quote, "lived in his own world." But he was also popular and once he went through puberty, he was very stylish and elevently quite good with the ladies. He's not an isolated kid in high school and he's not like, I mean, he's nerdy in some ways, but he's repeatedly noted as being like pretty good with women, right? His brother says that he wasn't acted like a young black man in school and there's no evidence that we get from anyone close to him that he had any issues with that identity as a kid. Rather, his chief issues are with his parents, you know? Like it's this, "They didn't have enough to get me out of the school I didn't like. They didn't have enough to like make me feel safer from the world. So I had to go and become rich and powerful myself."

• 30:24Robert Evans?

  Is, is kind of what I take out of Alex's conclusions from his childhood.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's definitely some deep pathology there.

• 30:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. I think this might be mixed with the fact that the Karp's certainly are not happy with the fact that Alex went on to become the CEO of Palantir. They did not change their minds about that when he became a billionaire. They wanted their sons to become intellectuals and artists. His brother Ben recalled, "My father said that he became a doctor so that his sons could become poets." And Ben would go on to become a successful author, like he, I mean, he is to this day. But Alex is gonna be drawn in a very different direction. Now, his grades are excellent and he has no trouble getting into a really good college, Haverford, which is a really good college. He kinda hates it now because they've never asked him to come back and speak. Like Haverford's like a left-wing college.

• 31:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:14Robert Evans?

  For an idea of Haverford's background, one of the professors who infiltrated the FBI and stole a bunch of files from them to reveal their like surveillance programs was a Haverford professor, right?

• 31:23Speaker 03

  Okay, yes.

• 31:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. So this is a school with like a long left-wing tradition and I just don't think they're that fond of Alex Karp and he's really broken up about the fact that they have not asked him to come speak. The reason he went there in the first place is that as a kid, he went to some event that was held at Haverford and they served a steak dinner and his parents would never buy them steak. So he's like, that's why he wanted to go there?

• 31:46Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 31:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And it's, again, he seems to be a very left-wing kid as he's going to college. One of his professors described the 1984 election between Reagan and Mondale as an election between a proud and a guilty capitalist pig. So like, that's the environment he's in there. And he thrives educationally, although it's also a time of great pain. His parents get divorced pretty much as soon as he leaves for college. Now, the inciting incident here is that Lea has decided she cannot stand to be married to Bob anymore. And for his part, Bob is like, "All right, if you don't want anything to do with me, then fuck this whole family." And he takes it out on the boys. So he takes it on Lea, too, but he moves out and he stops paying the mortgage, which forces Lea into something near destitution. She and his younger brother Ben are only able to afford an apartment because a kindly

• 32:31Robert Evans?

  old landlady helped out his mom, who Alex described as totally fucked in this period of time. Karp would later help this lady out, send money to her business, basically, because he's really grateful to what she does for his mom. But he never forgets the fact that his father separated from the family and that this threw them suddenly from being, like, comfortable to being poor. Because Bob calls Alex and he's like, "I'm not paying for your college tuition anymore." So his mom has to take out, Bob is a real dick, it sounds like.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  Seriously.

• 32:59Robert Evans?

  His mom has to take out loans and basically mortgage every ash that she has to barely afford sending Alex to school. The uncertainty over whether or not he'd be able to afford each semester meant that Alex is under constant stress. He never knows if he's gonna be able to stay much longer. And he really, it doesn't seem like he ever forgives his father for what he sees as a betrayal of the family. I think rightfully.

• 33:20Speaker 03

  Rightfully.

• 33:21Robert Evans?

  Betrayal, yeah. Like, you shouldn't take it out on your kids. They're not divorcing you, they're your kids.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  I mean, it's also like another sweeping symbolic thing, starting with the tokenization of the mother. Now, he's like, just rejects her and the progeny that she's, you know, bore him. That's some deep Shakespearean stuff right there.

• 33:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, it is. And it's, yeah. Alex's dad, certainly a guy with some stuff going on under the hood.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:46Robert Evans?

  Alex remains, you know, outgoing, even though he's really broken up during this whole period of time. He runs track, and his friends describe him as aloof and hard to read, but also well-liked and particularly active in the school's black student community. From his biography, "His social life mainly revolved around Haverford's black community. He was much more of a black man than he is now," says Ward Breeze, who was one of Karp's closest friends. "In the fall of senior year, Karp helped organize a conference at Yale University sponsored by a group called Campuses Against Racial Violence. Alex even wound up in the paper. The Detroit Free Press quoted him in an article on racial violence on US campuses." And this is Alex. "The most distressing thing was that finding someone to talk about racial violence was as simple as asking someone to speak. It is that pervasive. Alex attacked the deans

• 34:30Robert Evans?

  of his school for giving a green light to racists by not taking steps to prevent racism. Steinberger notes that he also wore a keffiyeh in his yearbook picture, which, quote, 'suggested a broader interest in fighting injustice.'" And I'm sure he means that to signal that Karp had some solidarity with Palestine. That's not clear to me at all. I don't know if that meant that as much as it does now back then. And Alex never talks about that. Furthermore, even though his parents are left-wing, it seems like Alex's mom likes Israel. She wins a scholarship to Israel as a teenager. I don't know how she feels about it now, but as a teenager, she has a really positive experience there that he would have grown up hearing about. And I, I haven't ever heard that he took any kind of stand on Israel

• 35:12Robert Evans?

  and Palestine as a kid. He does as an adult, but I just don't get any evidence that he was particularly aware of anything happening there at the time.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  And as you point out, it was a very different perspective then, in terms of all of this, like, just even black and Israeli relations.

• 35:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it could have just been something he thought was, like, fashionable, for whatever reason, I don't know. But I don't know that we should read, like, too much into that. His professors seem to remember him as brilliant, someone who could have been a world-class academic, which is surely what his mom and dad would have wanted for him more. Instead, after graduating with a BA in philosophy, he chooses to go to law school. Alex's, his grades are so good that he gets accepted by Columbia, Harvard, Penn State, and Stanford. So he's, he's a really smart cookie, right? Like, that's, that's a hard one to beat.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  He ran the table.

• 36:01Robert Evans?

  He ran the fucking table, yeah. "In the summer of 1989, he picked Stanford and he starts attending Stanford. He seems to have decided almost immediately that he didn't want to work as a lawyer, but he nonetheless stuck it out despite finding it the worst three years of my adult life," per an article in The Times by Steinberger. He says that he knew within a week of enrolling that he had made a mistake. "In his view, Stanford was just a glorified trade school. His classmates were mainly animated by a desire to land prestigious jobs, and the intellectual discourse was highly performative," as he puts it. "What made Stanford bearable was his unlikely friendship with Peter Thiel, a classmate. They bonded over their shared disdain for law school and a love of political debate. Thiel had already achieved some prominence for his libertarian views. As a Stanford undergraduate, he had helped found the right-leaning Stanford Review, and he and Karp spent

• 36:44Robert Evans?

  much of their free time interrogating each other's positions. We argued like feral animals," Karp recalled. According to Thiel, "Their conversations generally took place late at night in the law school dorm. It sounds too self-aggrandizing, but I think we were both genuinely interested in ideas. He was more the socialist, I was more the capitalist. He was always talking about Marxist theories of alienated labor and how this was true of all the people around us." And, yeah, he and Peter are just like peas in a pod in this really otherwise miserable time in Alex's life. And it, it says a lot, both that he immediately knows he doesn't want to go to law school, and he sticks it out for three years.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 37:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  I imagine law school is very difficult if, as a former dyslexic student. I mean, all the reading he's gotta do, it's gotta be very frustrating, he's gotta be using all the talents he's learned.

• 37:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 03

  And.

• 37:27Robert Evans?

  For a thing he doesn't want to do.

• 37:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Does he take the bar? Does he be actually become a lawyer?

• 37:31Robert Evans?

  No, no, I don't think he ever does. He's, because he's going to go immediately from that to Germany for more school, to do a totally different thing.

• 37:37Speaker 02

  That's so baffling, because if you know any lawyers, or if you know anyone who's been to law school, that shit is not a walk in the park. It is a full-time commitment.

• 37:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and it's, maybe he just needed to prove he could do it once he'd started. I don't know, but it's really interesting that he doesn't want to be a lawyer. He knows that right away.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  I feel like he should apologize to all the lawyers for his fuckery here. Like, what the hell?

• 38:04Robert Evans?

  I don't know. I don't know if anyone should apologize to lawyers.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  My sister-in-law would disagree.

• 38:13Robert Evans?

  So, as you can see in that quote, though, Alex is also, like, I think the reason why he and Peter hit it off, because there's this, like, mystery that you get in these accounts of them of, like, these two guys were so different politically, and yet they became the best of friends. Well, it's because they're not really all that different. Like, they're interested, maybe, in arguing about different things, but the center of their belief system isn't left-wing or right-wing, it's being contrarian.

• 38:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, an individualist.

• 38:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. That, "Everyone around me is dumber than me, and I'm angry at them all the time," is, is kind of how Alex and Peter both feel.

• 38:46Speaker 03

  Completely. On the surface, you see, like, oh, this apartheid South African son, and then this, like, raised by liberals in Pennsylvania, like, you know, black child. And then they meet up and they, like, arguing late at night in college. It makes, oh, of course, they would be, but their cantankerousness would bond them.

• 39:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Their cantankerousness and their disdain for others, right?

• 39:06Speaker 03

  Oh, my god, yes.

• 39:07Robert Evans?

  Both men believe very strongly in separating themselves from the herd. Now, because Alex comes from a left-wing background, he will first come to define this as a terror at the idea of fascism and right-wing populism, right? And Peter's gonna go in a really different direction initially. But even at the time, Alex was comfortable hanging out with a guy whose campus claim to fame was launching a right-wing alternative to the school paper that hosted columns mocking date rape and gay people. That's what Peter Thiel does in college, and Alex knows that, right?

• 39:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:37Robert Evans?

  While Thiel finds his mentor, Renee Girard, who we talk about in the Thiel episodes through Stanford, Alex is gonna have to travel to Germany to do the same. Well, to attempt to do the same, because his mentor never likes him all that much, is kind of the feeling I get. He won't agree with that, but we'll see how you feel.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  That's wild.

• 39:56Robert Evans?

  So, after he leaves Stanford, Karp applies to become a doctoral student at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt. He seems to have grown more fascinated with the Holocaust as time goes on, and as a Jewish man, Alex has always maintained a healthy fear of fascism and a dread like something like the Third Reich might come again and target people like him. His ambition at this point was to become a German-Jewish intellectual, and he took to that life like a duck to water. He later described his education at this stage as, quote, "A quick path to being unemployed." And he kind of disdains it now, but he seems to have been very happy there. He learns German, and, like, literally, he goes from not speaking German to fluent in three months. Again, for another example of how smart this man is, yeah. And he starts to display here in these days some of the

• 40:40Robert Evans?

  social savvy that's going to get him the job running Palantir. One of his friends, who also is a German savant, and learns how to speak German perfectly, can't get over the, like, all of the locals still are really mean to him and cold to him, and he doesn't understand why, because his German is so good. And Karp immediately identifies, "Well, it's because you're German and your accent is perfect, so they think that you're a German, but you don't know all of the social mores that people who grow up in Germany are expected to perform, so they just think that you're like a shitty weird German, as opposed to a foreigner who's really got a good capture of the language and cares." And he's like, "So what you need to do is pepper in some mispronunciations."

• 41:17Speaker 03

  He's about to say, "Make some mistakes, make yourself likable and relatable."

• 41:20Robert Evans?

  Exactly, exactly. And it works really well. And it shows you, like, that's the way, that's how Alex's mind works. He's really very intuitive about people. He enjoys Germany as an escape. He starts dating a lot of women, and he finds the European attitude towards casual sex intoxicating and liberating. He decides at this point that he's not going to be monogamous, and he never really is, as far as I can tell, in the rest of his life. Some of this is probably reaction to his father, who, after the divorce, remarries and adopts several kids and basically replaces his first family with a new family?

• 41:52Speaker 03

  Oh, that's the worst.

• 41:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Maybe he didn't get a great example of monogamy.

• 41:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's for sure. So his dissertation focused on how aggressive language in public discourse in Germany contributed to antisemitism. And his work was influenced by the recent publication at that point in time of a book called Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen. Now, that book is about how the Holocaust was made possible by huge numbers of willing German volunteers with eliminationist beliefs about the Jews. That, when I summarize it like that, that's not really wrong, but the book itself fucks up a lot of stuff and is very heavily been criticized. Norman Finkelstein of the New Left Review calls it worthless as scholarship. Goldhagen believed that German antisemitism wasn't just like eliminationist and that

• 42:41Robert Evans?

  that contributed to this groundswell of people who participated in the Holocaust, but he believed specifically that German antisemitism was uniquely demonic in its intensity and that the desire to murder Jews prior to the Holocaust had become central to German culture. And then in 1945, after Hitler was defeated, that very suddenly changed forever, right? Like, that's kind of the attitude there and that gets, that's not really accurate. People will criticize that quite a bit. At the time, Karp seems to have bought Goldhagen's argument and his dissertation was inspired by a critique of the book by a German writer named Martin Walser, who made the perhaps poor decision to describe the Holocaust as a moral bludgeon used to unfairly beat the Germans. So Alex gets really angry at this guy Walser and buys into the stuff that Goldhagen is arguing about.

• 43:26Robert Evans?

  And just to be clear, folks, there was nothing uniquely demonic about German antisemitism. It was very related to the rest of European antisemitism. It was related to French antisemitism.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  Yes, tied to the whole European project.

• 43:36Robert Evans?

  You should not separate these things.

• 43:38Speaker 03

  The Spanish.

• 43:38Robert Evans?

  Yes, the Spanish, right. You should not separate German antisemitism. Anyway, his thesis advisor, Karola Brede, described Karp's paper as a study of secondary antisemitism, based on the work of socialist Talke Parsons and Theodora Durno. Karp concluded that Walser's outburst had been, quote, "a parochial form of fascism that occurs by purposefully saying things that are incorrect in speech," which I consider a bizarre interpretation if that guy's getting angry that people are mean to Germans. Today, Alex describes his dissertation as niche scholarship, only a few people would understand or find interesting. But he was dedicated to the work and more than anything, he was obsessed with philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who's taught at Goethe University and was considered one of the great intellectuals in post-war Europe.

• 44:21Robert Evans?

  A protege of Adorno and a member of the Frankfurt School, Habermas concerned himself with the question of what sustains a democracy. Not long before his death, earlier this year in 2026, you're going to open a symposium by stating, "No one is free until we are all free," to give you an idea of where this man stood. In his memorial service, German President Frank Walter Steinmeier said this. Throughout his life, Habermas reminded us that democratic legitimacy grows out of public debate through the exchange of arguments, disagreement, and mutual understanding within an open public sphere in which everyone can participate. At a time when authoritarian movements are gaining influence around the world, this idea is more relevant than ever. Democracy is not sustained by elections alone. It depends on participation, responsibility, and the protection of fundamental rights,

• 45:05Robert Evans?

  and it must be renewed every day. Habermas's legacy reminds us that democratic achievements can never be taken for granted, but must be actively defended and brought to life again every single day. This is the guy Alex loves. This is the guy Alex wants to have as his mentor, right? And initially, Habermas seems to have liked Alex Karp. He invites the precocious young academic to an exclusive sort of academic salon, he ran, where participants would talk about their research and receive feedback from Habermas and their fellows. Karp has gone on to claim Habermas as his dissertation advisor, which Habermas himself strenuously denied. Jürgen was like, "Yeah, he was my thesis advisor." And Jürgen's like, "No, no, I was not. Absolutely was not this kid's thesis advisor. I did not sign off on this thing. Do not say that about me."

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 45:51Speaker 03

  I like how no one wants to claim him as college, as thesis advisor. But like, no, no, hands off.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  Not to mention his parents.

• 45:59Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:59Robert Evans?

  I don't know about that. His dad, maybe. His dad, maybe. That's kind of mean.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  I'm sorry, can I not bully Alex Karp?

• 46:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, now that he's a volunteer, I guess we can bully child Alex Karp. I don't know.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  One of Robert's returning bits is that we should have, like, for some of the worst people in history, like, if only someone had been meaner to them.

• 46:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it turns out not true for Alex. I don't think that helped.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  I don't think so either.

• 46:26Robert Evans?

  That may have been a bad idea on my part. Sorry, everybody.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, they might have gotten started earlier, you know? Maybe shoving them in the locker actually becomes the straw that breaks that camel's back.

• 46:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's a right amount of time in the locker. We just haven't found it yet. That's what I think.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  But if daddy was nicer.

• 46:41Robert Evans?

  I mean, that really might have helped. Maybe if daddy hadn't abandoned the family after a divorce. I don't know. You know who else abandoned their family after a painful divorce? Probably some of the sponsors of this podcast.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  At least the dick pill sponsors, for sure.

• 46:56Robert Evans?

  Look, you have to assume a lot of CEOs have second, third, fourth families, you know, and are not taking care of all of the first couple, right? That's just my assumption.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  Safe assumption.

• 47:06Robert Evans?

  Anyway, send them money.

• 47:09Speaker 03

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• 47:37Speaker 02

  I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival.

• 47:57Speaker 04

  The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights, I should be dead.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 48:23Speaker 03

  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.

• 48:35Speaker 02

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

• 48:42Speaker 04

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 48:45Speaker 03

  Here's what you missed.

• 48:46Speaker 05

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

• 48:54Speaker 04

  It's real.

• 48:55Speaker 05

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

• 49:01Speaker 03

  It's raw.

• 49:01Speaker 05

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

• 49:10Speaker 03

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 49:11Speaker 05

  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 van."

• 49:22Speaker 03

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

• 49:25Speaker 05

  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.

• 49:35Speaker 04

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

• 49:40Speaker 03

  Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 49:44Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So the fact that Jürgen Habermas was his, like, dissertation advisor, which he wasn't, but that being seen as true is extremely important to Alex. And clearly, while he is in Germany, attending this university, that's his goal, is to get close to Habermas and to get him to, like, endorse his research. He wants to be, the same way that Habermas was like Adorno's protege, he wants to be Habermas's protege, right? That's his life goal at this point, right?

• 50:10Speaker 03

  He wants to be the Aristotle on a line of great thinkers.

• 50:12Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. And there's, there's a degree to which you can see this is even kind of shallow for Alex because he tells an interviewer, if you can get Habermas to work with you for even two minutes, you can be a tenured professor at Columbia, right? So he's saying that, like, being any way associated with this guy, like, guarantees you a respected career. That's why he wants to be close to him. I think even more than any ideological simpatico between them, it's this man's prestige that draws in Alex.

• 50:38Speaker 03

  It's the opportunism. That he seeks out.

• 50:40Robert Evans?

  That's right. But Habermas declines to be his dissertation advisor. He declines to be the second reader of his dissertation. Now, Karp sends it to him and Habermas sends back a three-page letter and he does give a short critique. And he says, you did a couple of things well, but here's my issues with it. But I'm not going to be your advisor. Right? That's the end point of the paper is like, I will give you this much, but I'm not going to be your advisor. And as Steinberger describes it, the paper was kind but firm, although I think it would be pretty devastating for a kid like Alex to get. I'm going to read a quote from The Philosopher in the Valley here. Habermas expressed doubt about whether Karp's German comprehension was sufficient to allow him to grapple with some of the texts that he was drawing on. Your topic would require a literary approach to a topic

• 51:23Robert Evans?

  that often overwhelms the linguistic sensibility of us native speakers. And yours, you won't blame me even more so, Habermas wrote. For you, literary German must be as much a foreign language as literary English is for me. Moreover, it is not a reproach to remind oneself of the limits of the competencies that we expect from an educated sociologist. At the end, Habermas struck an apologetic tone. Please don't be angry with me, Mr. Karp, for my candid assessment, he wrote, adding, I would be happy to see you again if the occasion arises. So he's a really nice guy. And he's trying to do this very kindly, but he's like, dude, I know you think like you speak German really well. This isn't speaking German.

• 52:01Speaker 03

  This is a second form of German.

• 52:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. You're not competent to do this, you know? Which, one thing I will say, I fuck up plenty, you know, on this job. There's always little bits that I get wrong around the edges. There's so much history we're covering with. It's hard to is like not a historian, right? You have to have humility when you're approaching shit like this. And I don't think Karp is capable of that. Because Habermas is trying to give him really good advice, which is, stick to something like you're capable of meaningfully contributing to, and I don't think you are here. And Alex is like, but I want to. And he, he just can't get over that. Right? It's really fun. Habermas wrote what he describes as a generic letter of recommendation, and notes that, quote, Karp continues to maintain that Habermas was his doctoral advisor for a period. He says that Habermas, now in his

• 52:47Robert Evans?

  late 90s, is downplaying their connection and that he is at a loss to understand why. That's his biographer, right? That Karp keeps saying like, no, we, he really did help me with my, with my, he was my doctoral advisor. He's just pretending not to be now. And I don't know why.

• 53:01Speaker 03

  His age, you know, it makes it where you can't remember.

• 53:05Robert Evans?

  He's forgotten that he agreed to help me.

• 53:09Robert Evans?

  One of the things that really pissed me off is that when Habermas died early this year, Politico published an article by Alex Karp reminiscing about his supposed mentor. In the newsletter unpopular front, John Gans writes, Karp's picture of Habermas is of a crotchety and even slightly tyrannical doyen who terrorized his students, routinely referred to people as idiots and half idiots, and who ultimately declined to supervise Karp's dissertation, a rejection whose sting would linger for years, Karp wrote. Gans describes this. And what I think is interesting both is that, in this obituary, he's willing to admit finally, yeah, he rejected me. Right? And he was really mean to people. As brilliant as he was, he was cruel to all of us. Nobody else who worked with Habermas describes it

• 53:48Robert Evans?

  this way. It's pretty much just Alex. I'm going to quote again from Gans's piece, quote, and this is him talking about how other students and peers remember Jürgen. They remember someone patient, unpretentious, and generous with his time and intellectual energy. Is it possible that Habermas just didn't like Karp very much? He certainly didn't think highly of his work. Writing to Karp, you simply cannot compete with literary critics and theorists who have recently waited on this subject.

• 54:13Speaker 03

  The self we see or get glimpses of in the letter is a kind, patient, intellectual.

• 54:17Robert Evans?

  He's a nice, decent man. Do it his best. Yeah, exactly. Kind and patient. Way too patient with this kid. No. And so maybe that means he just, he got fed up with Karp after a while and started calling him an idiot because Karp wouldn't listen? I don't know. I wasn't there.

• 54:34Robert Evans?

  Gans theorizes that this piece by Karp reveals a substantive disagreement the two men have over, he suggests, constitutional patriotism. The idea that one could be loyal to their state and not also bigoted against other nations. Right? Jürgen is like, well, you don't have to hate other countries to be a patriot. And Karp is certainly in 2026 going to disagree with that. Here's what he wrote. The vision was noble, yet in hindsight, it seems clear, strikingly premature, and misguided. In 2011, the German magazine Der Spiegel described him, Habermas, as the last European, as the continental government for which he had advocated so fiercely came under increasingly sustained assault. His hope for a sort of disembodied political identity, untethered from the inconvenient particularities of family and culture, represented an aspirational cosmopolitanism that has proven insufficient

• 55:18Robert Evans?

  to animate allegiance in the modern era. Put differently, he believed in the possibility of a purely rational public discourse. I believed and still believe that such a discourse must be rooted in a more corporeal and traditional, and indeed, national and cultural source. He may yet be vindicated, but I fear not in our time. Basically, Jürgen was a nice guy, but he wasn't like enough of a bigot to be, you know, really as smart as I, Alex Karp, am.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  They're blending the lines of patriot and nationalist, you know, like, kind of, like, you know, conflating the two for their own purposes. Because a patriot loves their country and their, and their fellow countrymen and women. A nationalist doesn't, only likes people that are of their people and not of the other people. So.

• 55:57Robert Evans?

  Exactly. And Karp is only really capable of nationalism.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 56:01Robert Evans?

  Well, it's not quite nationalism. It's like a Western chauvinism. Because he's not like an America guy. He loves Germany. He loves the West. So it is broader than nationalism, I should say. I don't want to get him wrong here. But I do think all this reveals a lot, this conflict with Habermas. Because while Alex Karp entertains the possibility of academic life in Berlin for years, it seems to really excite him. And he's excited by the idea of like, writing papers during the day and reading and discussing his ideas and then like, sleeping around constantly at night with all of these Berlin girls that he's been flirting with.

• 56:31Speaker 03

  How can you hate that idea?

• 56:32Robert Evans?

  How can you hate that idea? Right? And honestly, if he'd gone for this life, probably would have been happier. I know the rest of us would have been. But ultimately, Alec is going to choose to leave academia behind, tail between his legs, kinda, and return to the United States to start down the road that's going to lead him in part two to Palantir. But that's all we've got for part one. Zarin Burnett, how you feeling?

• 56:56Speaker 03

  Oh dude, I'm loving this. I'm learning so much about Alex Karp in the ways that like, it's more than humanizing him. It's really giving that character arc where I can see where the anger and the bubbling resentment form. And yet also, he is very much a humanist. I mean, he's getting laid. He likes people. He's always arguing for like, conversation and fighting in public and, you know, you know, nice and kind and thoughtful ways. He wants to be this intellectual. And then I'm very curious to see where the turn is.

• 57:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, it is coming very soon after this point. It's going to come as a result of his friendship with Peter Thiel. But again, that's all in part two. You got anything to plug before we roll out here, Z?

• 57:31Speaker 03

  I would say, check out Ridiculous Crime. We have a bunch of interesting historical, like, for instance, we cover the files to the FBI that get robbed. We have an episode on that.

• 57:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah. One of the coolest chapters of US left wing history. Yeah, absolutely.

• 57:45Speaker 03

  So, uh, yeah, I would say check out Ridiculous Crime and also check out very special episodes for the exact same reason, stories that will beguile.

• 57:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And check out Jürgen Habermas, unless his German isn't good enough, I guess. I don't know.

• 58:00Speaker 02

  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 iHeartRadio 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.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 58:49Speaker 03

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

• 58:55Speaker 02

  And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.

• 59:13Speaker 04

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 59:16Speaker 03

  Here's what you missed.

• 59:17Speaker 05

  There should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras.

• 59:22Speaker 04

  It's real.

• 59:23Speaker 05

  Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything.

• 59:28Speaker 03

  It's raw.

• 59:29Speaker 05

  And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools.

• 59:32Speaker 03

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

• 59:36Speaker 04

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

• 59:41Speaker 03

  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 59:46Speaker 04

  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. They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff. And they said, maybe she'll find out where this girl is. I saw him violent. Backhand there.

• 1:00:12Speaker 03

  Listen to The Devil's Quarry, season two, in the Bone Valley feed, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.