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

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But before we get to that, tell us a little bit about your shows real quick. Okay. Ridiculous Crime is a show similar to yours where we tell each other stories and one person who 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. True crime stories without the murder. And they're always pretty insane. Well, lots of murders today. 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 along time ago. And they have hosts interaction sometimes with the actual people. Sometimes it's just, you know, participants who are eyewitnesses or experts, authors, you get the idea. 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, Zarin? 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 arm's length approach. I'm forced to know about him. He's a real skinny athletic guy with like curly hair. Yeah. Yeah. Curly hair that looks a little bit like a man. A little bit like in the explosions that he helps to facilitate. Yes. And he does Tai Chi a lot while standing around and talking to people. Like one of his, the things 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 as a way. I think because his ADHD, like I think it's a self-managing method. Sure, it's his stemming. He needs to move the energy around. 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. I chose gardening. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah. Gardening and drugs is a fantastic one. It's very easy to mix your gardening and your drugs if you know what you're doing. So this week we are going to be talking about, Alex is 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 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 him very frightening. He's got that Kissinger level focus. 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 kind of what Palantir does. We'll talk more about that in part two. So they're the new RAND Corporation. Well, it's more, what they're doing is newer than that, right? 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 trying to provide and 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. - Yes, yeah. - Yeah. So for years, you'd basically only read or hear about Alex Karp, described as like Peter Thiel's sidekick, 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. - Interesting. - Yeah, that's not quite accurate to how he is right now, but it 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 is 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. He's charging 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. "They're like, I am paying for tokens "that create more 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' 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. 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's 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 prerecorded 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, health. zero issue providing the Trump administration with whatever it needed. 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' 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. 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. Peter Thiel's always wanted to kill democracy, right? Yeah. Alex took some steps, you know? It's usually pretty easy to figure out and like, it's like, OK, because we get we get asked all the time to do these like Republican politicians or or so and so. And it's like they're a brand of guy. They're just not interesting. But Alex isn't that. Yeah. How did we get here? Tell us. I'm like, yeah. So the number one book about Karp right now is also his only biography. Michael Steinberger's The Philosopher in the Valley. And I would say Steinberger'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. 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, Bob, is a doctor. Right now, while in med school, Bob meets Alex's wife, Leah James, who is an inspiring artist from Illinois and the great granddaughter of a former enslaved person. Both Bob and Leah have their issues. As a couple, as all parents do, Bob grew up awash in progressive politics and he was drawn to Leah because she was black. And per Steinberger, quote, dating Leah was a powerful way of signaling his progressivism. This isn't what Bob says. I don't know that it's what Leah 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, yes. Tokenization of the mother. OK, interesting. Right, right. Yeah. So we're starting off. All of us are already like, OK. OK. OK. OK. 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 Leah, 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 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. Yeah. And how he acts. Yeah. 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. 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. Being biracial. I relate to that. It can be confusing in terms of how the world reacts to you. Your own self identity shouldn't be as confusing. Yeah. And it. It doesn't seem like it is initially. Right. Okay. 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. Frank Rizzo. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Alex, though, is going to 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 percent of the time when they've disagreed with the rest of the country. Totally. Right? Usually correct the Mennonites. Yeah. In an article for Philadelphia Federal Bank, Keith Rowland and Kyle DeMaria 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 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 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 at 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? Totally. It's a good faith effort. It's actually community based. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't want to leave you with the impression it was just Mennonites driving. That's 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 who would even pressure their local banks like the one that hosted the article I quoted from and threatened to take their money elsewhere if prejudicial lending policies weren't addressed. So there's like this is a really cool chapter of U.S. history. 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 U.S. city. And in large part because it was enthusiastic. Embraced and carried out by people who believed in the cause. Now, obviously, there is a you could call a performative nature to this, too, not in the shallow sense that that word normally connotates, but in the sense that the people who live there wanted to make an example for the rest of the country. Right. They wanted to be an example. 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. 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. 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. Yeah. Home of the push bombing. Yes, definitely. Yeah. The push. Yes. Or move. What is. Yeah. Move bombing. Yeah. Sorry. Not pushing the move bombing. Yeah. So the carp family are comfortable. They're like middle class. His dad's a doctor. Right. Middle class. Upper middle class. Over the course of. Alex's childhood and adolescence. The carp 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 carp side back to Karl Marx. That's what their family lore says. Like that's the level of like dedicated that Bob is. Leah 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. They're growing up to have the courage to get into nature, to interact with the world around them, to read and not to be 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 carp is going to carry with him his whole life. He has a lot of home. 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 carps also insisted that Alex and his brother, Ben, attend a public school, Henry M. Houston. And Henry in Houston seems to have provided a decent education, but it 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. They remain pissed about this. Yes. Decades later. 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. Right. Why didn't you pull me out of this? you had the resources. Yeah, 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, Leia, became a somewhat prominent artist. She does mixed media work, and Sophie's going to show you one example here of Leia'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 writing on a children's notebook alongside with people trying to draw out the letters in cursive and in normal caricatures with flowers superimposed over it. This particular piece is part of her creation story 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 protest for labor rights and against anything Reagan did, he recalls. And every account of his youth repeats that claim. So, we should assume it's true, right? That his parents really hated Reagan? Yeah. 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? Because 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? So, more than just avoiding having to read aloud in class, they're actually, like, doing, like, whole word sounded out kind of thing? Yes, yes. Like, that kind of stuff, I think, because you don't want people to know. 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. 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, because 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. Yeah. I wonder what the connection there is. 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, 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 going to be one of these guys. He comes out of this with overdeveloped social skills, as well 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 just knows. So he was able to read people, even though he had difficulty reading language. Exactly. Interesting. 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. You're almost there. Yeah. Can't all be great. Here's ads. This ad is brought to you by Visa. They're makers of Devato, Dolutigravir, Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devato. Devato is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devato is right for you. 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Insurify keeps watching and tells you when that changes. So you're never stuck overpaying. Millions of people have used Insurify to shop for their car insurance. So insure with Insurify. Go to Insurify.com. Insurify dot com. This is Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture East with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. You know when people try a new food and suddenly it's like, wait. It's the one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle. You've probably seen it in the grocery store before. And if you've ever just walked past it, some people would say that's a huge mistake. Because this mayo is different. It's smoother. Deeper. And almost buttery. Egg sandwiches. Fries. Burgers. Some fans even swear by dipping pizza crust in it. And once you notice it, you start seeing it everywhere. Chefs use it. Restaurants use it. Never tried it? Grab the bottle with the red cap next time you're at the store. And we're back. Hopefully not after just having an ad from. From Palantir. It'd be weird for Palantir to advertise on a podcast. Yeah. Maybe not the Joe Rogan experience. That would be not the strangest thing that's ever happened. Sure. If you guys had that happen where you actually like are talking. Yes, we have as well. Yeah. We've had the police department we were critiquing do an ad on our show before. And we work. And. Yeah. Oh, we work. Yeah, we work. Remember the good old days? Bloomberg. When Bloomberg was running for president. When he was running for president. Yeah, we had an episode about. But maybe not, guys. 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 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. him of course but they couldn't shelter him from a world that seemed especially dangerous for someone with his particular identity long before he left for college carp 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 yeah he's got a lot of resentment about his parents yes it is a boiling well inside of alex car yeah right 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 evidently quite good with the ladies he's not an isolated kid in high school and he's not an isolated kid in high school and he's not an isolated kid in high school 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 is kind of what i take out of alex's conclusions from his childhood yeah there's definitely some deep pathology there yeah yeah i think this might be mixed with the fact that the carps 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 going to 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 kind of hates it now because they've never asked him to come back and speak like haverford's like a left wing college yeah 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 with like a long left wing tradition and i just don't think they're that fond of alex carp 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 oh wow 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 leah 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 leah too but he moves out and he stops paying the mortgage which forces leah into something near destitution she and his younger brother ben are only able to afford an apartment because a kindly old landlady helped out his mom who alex described as totally fucked in this period of time carp 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 care of take out bob is a real dick it sounds like seriously 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 going to 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 this is rightfully a betrayal yeah like you shouldn't take it out on your kids they're not divorced you they're your kids 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 being bore him that's some deep shakespearean stuff right there yeah yeah it is and it's yeah alex's dad certainly a guy with some stuff going on under the hood yeah 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 carp's closest friends in the fall of senior year carp 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 u.s 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 talk about racial violence it is that pervasive alex attacked the deans 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 carp 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 were not racist they were not racist they were not racist they were not 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 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 and as you point out it was very different perspective then in terms of all of this like yeah just even black and israeli relations yeah it could have just been something he thought was like fashionable for whatever reason i don't know but i 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 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 yeah like it's that's that's a hard one to beat he ran the table 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 high performative as he puts it what made stanford bearable was his unlikely friendship with peter teal a classmate they bonded over their shared disdain for law school at a luff of political debate teal 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 carp spent much of their free time interrogating each other's positions we argued like feral animals carp recalled according to teal 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 yes yeah i mentioned law school is very difficult if as a former dyslexic student i mean all the reading he's got to do it's got to be very frustrating he's got to be using all the talents he's learned yeah and for a thing he doesn't want to do yeah does he take the bar does he actually become 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 and 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 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 i feel like he should apologize to all the lawyers for his fuckery here like what the hell i don't know i don't know if anyone should apologize to lawyers um my sister-in-law would disagree 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 yeah an individualist 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 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're like oh this is like arguing late at night in college it makes oh of course they would be can but their cantankerousness would bond them yeah yeah their cantankerousness and their disdain for others yes right oh my god 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 teal does in college and alex knows that right yeah while teal finds his mentor renee gerard we talk about in the teal 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 it's kind of the feeling i get he won't agree with that but we'll see how you feel that's wild so after he leaves stanford alex decides 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 a little bit more educated and he seems to have been a little bit more 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 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 carp immediately identifies well it's because you're german and you're actually a german and you're a german and you're a german and you're an 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 make some mistakes make yourself likable and relatable 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 his 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 oh that's the worst yeah maybe he didn't get a great example yeah that's for sure so his dissertation focused on how aggressive language and public discourse in germany contributed to anti-semitism 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 people's lives and i think that's a really good and is is very heavily been criticized norman finkelstein of the new left review calls it worthless as scholarship goldhagen believed that german anti-semitism wasn't just like eliminationist and that that contributed to this groundswell of people who participated in the holocaust but he believed specifically that german anti-semitism 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 carp 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 and just to be clear folks there was nothing uniquely demonic about german anti-semitism was very related to the rest of european anti-semitism it was related to french anti-semitism the whole european project yeah you should not separate these things spanish yes the spanish right you should not separate german anti-semitism anyway his thesis advisor carola breed described carp's paper as a study of secondary anti-semitism based on the work of socialist talcott parsons and theodora dirno carp 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 of that guy's getting angry that people are made 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 jurgen hebermas who's taught at goethe university and was considered one of the great intellectuals in post-war europe a protege of adorno and a member of the frankfurt school hebermas 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 hebermas 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 and it must be renewed every day hebermas'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 hebermas 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 hebermas and their fellows karp has gone on to claim hebermas as his dissertation advisor which hebermas himself strenuously denied you're gonna was like yeah it was my uh my thesis advisor and you're just 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 wow i like how no one wants to claim him as college hands off not to mention his parents oh yeah i don't know about that his dad his dad baby that's kind of me i'm sorry can i not bully alex i guess we can bully child alex karp i don't know one of robert's uh 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 yeah it turns out not true for alex i don't think that helped i don't think so either that may have been a bad idea on my part sorry everybody yeah they might have got just gotten started earlier you know maybe shoving them in the locker actually becomes the straw that breaks that camel's back yeah there's a right amount of time in the locker we just haven't found it yet but if daddy was nicer 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 at least the dick pill sponsors for sure 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 safe assumption anyway send them money this ad is brought to you by vive health care the makers of devato dolutigravir lamivudine if you're living with hiv do learn about devato devato is a complete hiv treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older your doctor will determine if devato is right for you most hiv pills contain three or four medicines devato is as effective with just 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He wants to be the Aristotle on a line of great thinkers. Yes, yes. And 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 drives him. That's what draws in Alex. It's the opportunism that he seeks out. 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 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. This is a second form of German. 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 as 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 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 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, he really did help me with my, he was my doctoral advisor. He's just pretending not to be now. And I don't know why. His age, you know, it makes it very, he can't remember. He's forgotten that he agreed to help me 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 this way. It's pretty much just Alex. I'm going to quote again from Gans' piece. Quote, and this is him talking about how other students and peers remember Juergen. 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 weighed in on this subject. The self we see or get glimpses of in the letter is a kind, patient, intellectual. He's a nice, decent man. Do it as 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. 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? Juergen 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 was born. 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 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, Juergen 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. 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 fellow countrymen and women. A nationalist only likes people that are of their people and not of the other people, so. Exactly, and Karp is only really capable of nationalism. I think so. Well, it's not quite nationalism, it's like a western chauvinism because he's not like an America guy. He loves Germany, like 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. How can you hate that idea? 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? Oh, dude, I'm loving this. I'm learning so much about Alex Karp and 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, nice and kind and thoughtful ways. He wants to be this intellectual and then, I'm very curious to see where the turn is. 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? I would say, check out Ridiculous Crime. We have a bunch of historical, for instance, we cover the files for the FBI that get robbed. We have an episode on that. One of the coolest chapters of U.S. left-wing history. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I would say, check out Ridiculous Crime and also check out very special episodes for the exact same reason, stories that will beguile. Yeah, and check out Jürgen Habermas, unless his German isn't good enough, I guess. I don't know. 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. On Earn Your Leisure, we're all about smart money moves and here's one most people skip. Insurify dot com. A better help ad. 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