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

(upbeat music) - Cool, so media. - Welcome back. Once again, to Behind the Basters, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the worst people in all of history and our subject for this week is one of the worst people today to Alex Carp, the CEO of Palantir. And here to talk about this one of the worst people is one of the best people. Our friends, Zaryn Bernette, a ridiculous crime and very special episode. Zaryn, welcome back. - Thank you guys for having me, I love being here. And even though we're talking about Alex Carp, this is been fantastic. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, old Alex. Yeah, that's what, you're getting Habermost said something along those lines more. Aside from Alex, it was great. Now, it is interesting, the two of them, 'cause we finished in the last episode, how he's seeking the kind of approval and endorsement of this legendary academic, Habermost. And kind of doesn't really get it. You're getting very polite to him, but Alex goes back home without that. And he's not immediately quitting academia, he's actually finishing his dissertation while he after he moves back to San Francisco for a while. And he still kind of has ambitions of maybe becoming an academic in Germany, but I think ultimately this clash kind of kills those, or at least makes it a lot less attractive when some other offers come by. And one of the things that's really interesting to me about that is he and Habermost have kind of the exact opposite journeys in life. So we've just talked about Alex who grows up in this very left-wing home and a very left-wing neighborhood and is raised very left-wing and has turned out to be on the side of all these reactionaries providing like spice software. Jürgen grows up in Germany in the Nazi era. He's in the Hitler youth. He achieves a high level in the Hitler youth and he's running anti-aircraft guns at the end of the war. He very narrowly escapes getting drafted into the Vermost before the Americans take him in his town. And obviously, he was a kid during, like it's not really his fault. But he happened to grow up, he like won when the Nazis took over. And the rest of his life he fought against fascism. But they have very opposite journeys in a lot of ways. And I do find that kind of interesting. This is an "I Heart" podcast. Guaranteed human. I survived nine months in captivity. And I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the survivor files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus, or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Pignero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. Each week, we talk to someone in show business, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time, and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stillert, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're bookshelf and you're for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture. With your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed. So obsessed. Listen to Pro Society on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So when we last left, are definitely not a hero. Alex had run into a stumbling block and returned home to the West Coast. Well, it was not home to the West Coast, but returned to the West Coast. He seems to have liked that more than the place he had grown up. So he moves back to the Bay Area. He takes a job with the Jewish Philanthropy Partnership, and he shares an apartment in the Bay with his brother Ben. Well, he puts the finishing touches on his dissertation. And so you can see he's, you know, not certainly not rich at this point. You don't usually wind up living with your brother if you've got a lot of spare cash. And he's working a job that's gonna give him like a pretty, probably a comfortable working class life, but nothing crazy. And he's still really thinking he might want to return to Berlin and continue having anonymous sex, right? That still seems pretty good to Alex at this point in time. Do we know what Ben Carp ended up doing with his life? Yeah, he becomes a novelist. He lives in Tokyo, he's a successful author. Yeah, so they're both successful. But, but not a weird little, not a weird little guy like this. Not running Palantir. Yeah. No, yeah. Yeah. It's always interesting when that happens. Yeah. So what happened here? Where was the disconnect one brother to another? It's about to really hit. So at this point, yeah, he and his brother are together still too, right? They're living in the same place. And what changes this, ultimately, is Peter Teal. Peter obviously has started PayPal, or is it the process? He's like getting PayPal off the ground. He's become rich and he comes back into Alex's life, because he's coming back in and out of the bay. I assume he has several houses, but he at least keeps one home in the area. And he and Alex get together and start talking again. And they start doing like, you know, talking about politics and their lives and their opinions like they always had. Now, at the same time, as Peter is kind of reconnecting with his buddy, Alex, he's also starting to experience something with PayPal, which is that they're trying to deal with fraud, right? PayPal's got like a shitload of fraud problems happening. And they develop a fraud detection system called Igor, which is like an acronym for something that works really well. I've told this story before over the years on the podcast and the Peter Teal episodes. And Igor works so well that not only does it help PayPal deal with their fraud program, but it provides information that leads federal prosecutors to take down a number of like scammers who are part of organized criminal groups. And so Peter starts thinking, Oh, should I be like selling software to law enforcement and like, if federal spy agencies and shit is there like a market in that because it seems like we may have stumbled upon something like this machine learning stuff that we're using could also help with these other problems. So Peter and some of his top guys, it's not just Peter. He's got some, some coders he really trusts that are also kind of brainstorming all this. And they start to wonder like, maybe there's a way to make purpose built systems that can help law enforcement or whoever carry out similar kinds of investigation to spot criminal activity or even maybe just inefficiencies in a business and I'm yada yadaing a lot of the mental development process here. But this train of thought initially leads Teal to provide some funding to get a company called Palantir off the ground. And at the very first days of Palantir, Alex is not a part of it, right? He's not initially in the group of guys that are trying to start this company. And by that point in time, he had moved on to starting an investment company of his own called the Cademon group with $12,000 he inherited. And he's good enough at investing that he turns that into a sizeable business. He gets a number of rich people start putting in their assets to have him invest them. And his goal was to personally put together a nest egg of like a quarter of a million dollars. So he can buy a place in Berlin and live a life of, and he generally describes it as debauchery. Right. So that's his life goal. And his early 30s by this point, he's starting an investment, because he doesn't like working in finance. He doesn't want to be doing investment stuff. It's just the easiest way to get the money he needs to live a better lifestyle, right? Okay. Relatable. I mean, who doesn't want to spend just a little bit of time doing something they hate to go live that libertine life of reading at the daytime, sleeping around at night? Right. Right. The Berlin lifestyle. Yeah. I've got several friends doing that. And his biographer, Steinberger, even suggests that like this idea that like, oh, if I can just get a little bit of money for a seed, I'll go move to Berlin was never something Alex would have ever have done. It was a form of self-methologizing, right? Steinberger doubts Alex would have ever settled for anything that approaches a normal life. But it's also not clear that he would have had a choice to, you know, on that if his old pal Peter Teal hadn't come a calling. So again, they start hanging out. And at one point, he invites Peter to a donor meeting for the Jewish philanthropy partnership, which he's also still working at, on the logic that, hey, you know, normally it's me and a bunch of other Jewish guys. And we're always at each other's throats. If we bring a Gentile in, maybe we'll stop fighting, right? And it works really well. And Peter walks away and press like, Oh, Alex is actually like really good with people. He might be a really good manager. So he asks as kind of like a test gig. He asks Carp to help him raise money for his clarium capital fund. And I guess Alex does well enough at this that a few months later, he offers Alex a job at what's becoming Palantir. Now, this is the early 2000s, 9/11 is not, didn't have it all that long ago, right? It's like 2003, I think when they're having these talks. And the company is extremely primitive at this point. Palantir does not have clients and it's kind of a laughing stock of Silicon Valley a little bit, right? Because in this period, we're not quite up to like social media, but we're starting to hit the early days of social media, right? And apps are a few years away. These are also like internet companies and whatnot that are starting to take off. [BLANK_AUDIO] Everything is focused, even though it's kind of still evolving to, you know, the social media and app era, everything's really focused on, like, consumers, right? Yeah, still very much to the.com era. Right. You don't go to Silicon Valley to make products for, like, spy agencies that are the government, right? That's, like, not a normal thing in this period of time. But carp isn't a Silicon Valley guy. He's not even a tech guy, and that's part of why Peter thinks he might be right for a job and volunteer. He's a philosophy nerd who's obsessed with the Holocaust and really paid surprisingly patriotic by this point in his life. Now, carp is so patriotic because, I guess, his ideologically, he's come to conclude at this point, probably not wrongly, that a weirdo like him could only have survived and thrived in a society as good at protecting the rights of minorities as, like, Western civilization. And he says minority, not just in the racial sense, but in the ideological sense, right? And so he decides anything I can do to help these governments use data and machine learning to get a leg up on their enemies, be they terrorist or China or whatever. That's fundamentally good. So he's intrigued by this job offer and he, what Peter is impressed by as soon as carp learns what Palantir is, he's like a true believer. And he starts spinning all of this ideological shit about how, like, this is how we protect, you know, the great achievements of Western civilization from, you know, the Western ideals. Yes. Right. Right. I'll beat your shield. Exactly. Oh shit. This guy is drinking the same Kool-Aid. Yeah. We were more at odds than it turns out we are. And he's even more surprised by how skilled Alex is at evangelizing and selling the Palantir brand, first to his new colleagues. And in short order, those first couple of guys that Peter had started planning Palantir with are like, this guy is a co-founder. He should be the CEO. So carp becomes CEO of Palantir in 2004. And whether or not you want to call him a co-founder, because he's not there at the earliest days, most of the company considers him one. He's 34 when he gets the job. And he's not rich. That's really important. He's like, I don't even know, maybe upper middle class on his own at this, at the point at which he gets the job. Certainly, by the time he gets the job, he is, because he's paid like 125 grand a year, which is like a good salary in 2004, but it's not like an insane CEO salary, right? Yeah. And he's, he's going to make that much money for like most of the first 10 years. It takes a while for Palantir to be worth a bunch of money. And so there's, there's kind of a hunger Alex has because Palantir is his only chance to get rich, right? Yeah. And it's also his only chance to be really important. And I think he wants to be rich and important by this point, very clearly. Maybe there's some jealousy with his buddy Peter who started PayPal and got super rich and is clearly important. And he's like, I want that for me, you know? And that link in his opinion, that his parents failing to do this. So he could prove them wrong, prove that he, you know, he should have had family like him. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And that he could do it, too, where they couldn't, you know. Now he's old for the startup world. But this likely aided him given that Palantir's customers aren't a bunch of like teenagers and 20 somethings on the internet. They're like the CIA. Right. And so if you walk into a meeting with the CIA and your doctor's so-and-so and you're wearing a suit and you don't look like Mark fucking Zuckerberg in 2005, you know, it probably helps. So carp is a strange pick though in a number of ways because he's got no managerial experience really when he becomes CEO of a Palantir. And he also doesn't know how to code. He's not, he doesn't have any real tech background. Nor is he in background a software of any kind. And this is something that his biographer and a lot of his employees seem to think benefits him, right? Palantir's chief software engineers, like a lot of their kind, can be hard to manage. Like really brilliant coders, not the easiest people to work with always. And Alex doesn't even pretend to try to mind macro manage them. He doesn't pretend to try to understand like the directness of like the actual coding and how that works. So he's never going to give them like criticism like that. Instead, he's going to try to more broadly direct them to achieve specific like operational goals, right? And he's because he's so good at understanding what motivates people, even like weird people. And then he's really good at incentivizing them and getting these genius coders to work a lot harder and longer and to also deliver a product that maybe is more to spec with what the customer wants, because he also is better at understanding what the customer wants. He's a great middleman between the people skills, distinguishing them exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Alex recalls one anecdote about his early days at Palantir to Marine Dowd. I kept telling Palantirians to call me Alex and they kept calling me Dr. Carp. I realized the only thing they believed in was that I had a PhD and no one really knows if this company's going to work at this point. And they're all like, well, should I be trying to get a job at like Facebook that's getting off the ground now or Google that's, you know, suddenly huge or Apple. Why am I hanging around this company that may never be worth anything? One early employee, Bob McGrew, said we didn't know what to make of him at first and that in order to help their new boss fit in several software guys handed Carp a copy of Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near, which was basically the Bible for this kind of tech guy at that point in time. And it's when he works in AI now was nursed on this book. Or at least any of the older people working in AI were nursed on this fucking book. And yeah, it's talking about how we're going to hit the fucking Singularity that the title kind of gives you the gist of the book, right? Over time, Alex added some of his favorite books to the list of books that new Palantirians would get. This included improv, which is a guide improvisational theater that I guess he felt is like a good guide to creativity and the looming tower, which is a book about how 9/11 happened by Lawrence writes, um, yes, Palantir's early years were slow. And it was an open question for years as to whether or not the company would succeed. Carp led from the front, taking a salary of 125,000 and telling his employees, I only make money when you make money. Displays of wealth like fancy new cars were discouraged among executives in the early days, although Alex has said to have liked to show off his black MX card. This passage from the philosopher in the valley gives you an idea of what working for Alex was like at this time. While Carp was approachable and entertaining, then as now he enjoyed regaling colleagues with stories about German women and their attraction to him. Conversations with him could be difficult. He spit out thoughts and observations in a non-linear fashion that sometimes left his colleagues befuddled. "I don't know that anyone would say he's easy to talk to," says Brian Schimp, who was hired by Palantir in 2007, and eventually became its director of engineering. Joshua Goldenberg, who was Palantir's head of design, recalls the discussions with Carp were unstructured and sometimes seemed a little bit incoherent. After all hands meetings with Carp, staffers would congregate to try to make sense of what they'd heard. We would debrief and tell it and see if anyone could divine the signal in the chaos of Carp's speech pattern, says one former employee, but he says they all recognize that Carp has a kind of crazy charisma and was exceptionally intelligent. So then what we see as his interviews these days has always been true of his speech pattern. He's just kind of ping ponging around, darting back and forth as fast as he can. He gets bored easily and he's not really interested in usually like delivering a specific point to you. He's interested in like a shotgun of points, you know, conviction with great conviction. And he wants to tell you that German woman really wanted to really bring that up. Really important mission critical load bearing for the Carp story. Alex framed Palantir's mission in grand civilizational terms that sometimes bordered on apocalyptic. Palantir existed to defend the West and democracy, just like tokens Palantiri didn't. The name has never made a lot of sense and I've never read a good explanation. Like I know what the Palantiri were, but if you're hosting us to defend the West, that's not what they do in the books. No. Yeah. Okay. The way Alex saw it, 9/11 had been a wake up call that the ideals of liberal democracy were under attack and the whole rest of the tech industry was obsessing over useless or outright toxic bullshit while the underpinning of our collective security was in danger. Carp hated and still hates Facebook as he felt selling people's personal data was unethical. He distressed at Google too as much for their supposed high-minded ideals as for their data policies. And he avoided hiring from either company. Alex expressed disgust for the quote, move fast and break things, Silicon Valley ethos, which he felt was incompatible with security because it is. For his part, the valley didn't take an immediate shine to Palantir. It was a weird company with a weird CEO who constantly trash talked all of the companies that were actually making money. Today, Alex likes to hype up their unpopularity. Quote, we were like pariahs. We couldn't get meetings. If they did, it was a favor to Peter. During one pitch meeting with Sequoia Capital, Alex pitched his heart out and watched a major Sequoia partner, Michael Moritz draw on a napkin because he was bored. Years later, Alex still feels rage about this, telling an interviewer, "I should have told him to go fuck himself," but he didn't. So eventually, Palantir finds an investment partner in Q-Tel. You guys know who in Q-Tel is? No. I'm afraid. It's the CIA's venture capital firm. Oh. There you go. Yeah. Well, welcome. Yeah. Well done, Alex. Yes. Palantir, a CIA partnership. Yes. It had been founded in 1999, and it just so happened the agency was in the market for what Palantir was selling. Their current data analytics program was named Analysts Notebook, and it was aging and lacked modern capabilities. Basically, it was good for a previous time, but it would not scale up to the internet age. That's kind of the issue. They know they need something new. Alex has to rush out and buy suits for him in his engineering team before the meeting in D.C. Because they're Silicon Valley coders. They don't have suits. - Yeah, probably one between the seven of them. - Now, in QTEL's CEO, Gilman Louie shows up at this meeting only because he knows Peter Teal, and so he wants to see Carp's pitch, right? So that's the only reason the boss is in the room. Carp is able to sell Palantir to Louie, both its technology and its mission. When Louie explained what the CIA needed from its software, the Palantir team immediately breaks out and starts sketching out a new program and like designing it in the room, and that really impresses him. The fact that like, oh, they're working to build this in the room with us to our specs. Ultimately, in QTEL invests 1.25 million, which convinces Peter Teal to put in almost another $3 million, and the rest is kind of history, right? There's more I could say, but this is not a detailed history of Palantir, and so I'm gonna have to skim a lot of their early years. What you need to know is that this investment not only brings the money, it gives them their first access to the federal government, which starts a long history of collaboration, and they're going to sell to a bunch of other federal agencies as well as local agencies. Carp turns out to be really fucking good at sales, so good that for most of its life, Palantir doesn't hire sales people because it's got Alex, right? That's really his skill at CEO. He's very good at this. In an interview with Marine Dowd, Peter Teal gave his opinion on what made Alex so effective. Quote, "In some ways, Alex doesn't look like a sales person "from central casting, he would send to the CIA. "The formulation I always have is that if you're trying "to sell something to somebody, the basic paradox is, "you have to be just like them so they can trust you, "but you have to be very different from them, "so they think you have something they don't have." She's smart. Palantir, again, not a normal organization, and from its first integration, Carp develops a habit of embedding his engineers and client agencies and organizations, so they can build new software from within the entity that needed it. Because all this is happening in the early years of the Global War on Terror, and most of Palantir's work circles around organizing data about terrorists and insurgencies, a distinctly military strain of thought becomes embedded in the organization from its early days. Per an article in "Wired" by Carolyn Haskins. Palantir sends its employees to work inside client organizations essentially as consultants, helping to customize their data pipelines, troubleshoot problems, and fix bugs. It calls these workers forward-deployed software engineers, a term that appears to be inspired by the concept of forward-deployed troops who are stationed in adversarial regions to deter nearby enemies from attacking. A former Palantir employee tells Wired that the company has also has code words for certain job titles, like Delta, for a forward-deployed engineer, and Echo for Palantir's version of a product manager, which they say are sourced from the North Atlantic Treaty organizations, phonetic alphabet of code words, meant for use over military radio. So you've got this really weird mishmash of like Silicon Valley dudes, who are now getting like increasingly familiar with the military and working alongside former CIA guys and special operations guys, and it's kind of cascading as to them using their language and their jargon. It becomes a really weird like melange of cultures. Now, at the same time, Carpensister and calling his employees hobbits and referring to the West that they needed to protect as the Shire. This can be traced as much to he and Teel's love of the books as it can be to the fact that the Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies was released during the early years of Palantir's rise to continue with another quote from that piece by Hastings. - Yeah, but fuck off, fuck off, Rose. - I mean, it is annoying. It is annoying. A common internal motto in Palantir's early days was "Save the Shire," a reference to the Hobbit homeland, which they say was a rallying cry that reflected the company's ethos at the time. It was all about "Save the Shire" and "Do Good for the Warfighters," the ex-staffer said. It was all about, really, we are going in and solving hard problems. And again, first off, the Shire saves itself and everybody else. - Right. - Let's note that. Like, the warriors actually are the ones that need the Shire. - The Shire, yeah. They've been heard of the relationships. - Sorry. - I'm frustrated by the fact that everything's reversed and they're understanding of the learn-of-the-rinks. Like, that's not how the books work. - No. - Or even the popular movies. Now, as I said earlier, the inspiration behind Palantir was a tool PayPal had created to track down fraud. But that bids the question, what is Palantir's cell? Which most people don't really know. And I said at the opening of these episodes that they're usually described as like a data broker, sometimes a data miner or some sort of surveillance spy company in business lingo, Palantir provides B2B SAAS, business to business software as a service, right? You could say they sell software, I guess. Like you just say they sell software, but like, there's not, that's not fun. Most clients, yeah. What do you say? - It's kind of the distinction between them and like they sales force. And they're very very different, so. - Yeah, that's certainly not like enough to really understand what Palantir is like bringing to the table. You know who else brings a lot to the table. - Who's that? - The sponsors of this podcast. - I'm straight. - Legally, I have to say that. - When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. - I just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. - Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. - I knew if he woke up. Without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. - I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. - They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced, but these aren't stories about what's taken from them. Their stories about what it takes to make it out alive, to listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. - If your bookshelf and your four-year page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pro's Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. - I'm gonna have to look up this story. - Yeah, I'm obsessed, I'm obsessed. - From best-selling authors and your favorite bookshelf creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. - It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, and that is the Trojan horse. - Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro's Society on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. - On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. - I can wait four hours for the next bus, or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Bignero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. - Every time I try to be alone, I kept meeting people, and they were like, "You smiled at us, not a lot of people smile around here." - It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is, and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. - And Sean Clements. - We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook on the big money players network. - Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week, we talk to someone in show business, AKA The Biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. - We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, not that great. - Actually, can you help me shape this? - Yeah. - How about we flip it on his head? - No. - Okay, how about we flip this around, okay? How, what is the surprise one, man? Well, actually, you think as the straight man, is actually the one who's acting weird. Adam Scott, love. - This entire time you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. - I would never let go of that. - I have, I would never set expectations for something like that. - It sounds like if the universe allows for something like that to happen. - I am open to it. - I'm always going to accept, you know? - Danny McBride, fine. - Yeah, it's all this fragile masculinity exuding. I could smell it walking on the hallway to be honest with you. - I was like, I was like, is that what you need? - Nope, it's fragile masculinity. - Ben Stiller, no. - I think there's a lot of times out of context, people don't get it, or even know what a circle is. You know what I mean? Like, you're like, oh, it's just so stupid. - Everyone's so dumb. - Ben, fake. - Right, fake, and also not interested, or just like, oh, I've got my life. I don't care about your life. - And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. - Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally, he loves the show, and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - We're back. Most volunteer clients use one of two programs that were developed during Carp's early years of CEO, Foundry and Gotham. One employee described Foundry as, quote, a supercharged filing cabinet. Corporate customers and Palantir doesn't start to take on corporate customers out until after 2020 I think I'm getting a little ahead of us here But these are their two big programs corporate customers use founder to do stuff like maybe you've got a factory And you know like we have a point at which we're losing us like a higher than we should amount of these materials that we need to build Whatever this is we need to figure out where along the production line the problems are happening Foundry is supposed to be able to help you with that, right? That's like one thing they could do They look for points of failure or waste credit suisse and investment bank contracts Palantir to help spot money laundering while Ferrari uses Palantir software to help design formula one cars Common attitude among Palantirians is that for the New York Times many problems are data integration problems And that's true and there's nothing really wrong with providing data integration services inherently But once we start talking about Gotham things get a lot more sinister which at least is appropriate to the name Prowired quote foundry and Gotham are similar both ingest data and give people a neat platform to work with it The main difference between them is what data they're ingesting Gotham takes any data that government or law enforcement customers may have including things like crime reports booking logs or Information they collected by subpoena in a local a social media company Gotham then extracts every person placed into tail that might be relevant Customers need to already have the data they want to work with and Palantir itself does not provide any right So they're really good at data to say disaggregation essentially. Yes. Yes. That's that's their whole fucking deal Now another former Palantir staffer who uses Gotham says that in just minutes a law enforcement official or government analyst can map out Who may be in a person's network and see documents that link them together? They can also centralize everything in agency knows about a person in one place including their eye color from their driver's license Or their license plate from a traffic ticket making it easy to build a detailed intelligence report They can also use Gotham to search for a person based on a characteristic like their immigration status What state they live in or whether they have tattoos So now we're starting to get upsetting, right? Yes, we are So this kind of thing is what caused the first backlash against Palantir and gave it the sinister reputation to enjoy today as a company Embedded in the growing global surveillance binopticon But Alex Carp doesn't look at things that way the way he sees it Palantir exists to protect the Shire a.k.a the West It existed I don't like this freak taking like taking like this beautiful Hobby of like all of the greatest people I know and myself and using it for his fucking weird Bullshit company spy software We're the hobbits really spy in on people Alex absolutely not save the Shire Yeah, you something out for your patina respectability. It's upsetting. I don't think that the hobbits or the Shire were saved by data aggregation and like spy solutions, right? I don't think they were saved by giving the CIA more methods of like tracking people to kill I'm pretty sure the Shire was saved when the hobbits used a volcano to destroy the literal physical embodiment of state political power anyway And forming a union of communities, you know and forming a union of communities that's multi-racial and multi-national. Yes anyway One thing that's really important to Alex though is that part of why Palantir needs to defend the West is so that weirdos like him can safely be deviants Right, that's really important to him is that only I could only grow up safely as a weirdo in the West And that's a huge part of it for Alex as Marine Dow wrote for the New York Times Palantir does not do business with China Russia or other countries that are opposed to the West Mr. Teal said the company tries to work with more allied and less corrupt governments noting dryly that aside from their ideological stances with corrupt countries you never get paid We have a consistently pro-Western view that the West is a superior way of living and organizing itself especially if we live up to our aspirations, Mr. Carp said it's interesting how radical that is considering it's not in my view that radical and Like the people the issue isn't that like people are angry that the West is good at letting like weirdos You know have civil rights man. That's actually one of the things that that we like the issue is that that's not really what you're Helping your your helping agencies that are carrying out for example unprovoked wars that drive up the cost of living massively and like and kill huge numbers of people and actually like make the West a lot weaker like that's what I would say is the kind of The ultimate conclusion of a lot of y'all's work is that it's the governments here are more corrupt and weaker than ever and you're part of it Anyway, and also the post-colonial paradigms of power you're maintaining are very much not helping the West No, no. None of it's helping the West right? Speaking of radical as you probably noticed our supposed neo-Marxist philosopher seems a lot less radical at least in a left-wing direction by this point in the story and Some of this is the obvious result of the fact that by the Aughts Alex is starting to become a rich man and Palantir is now contracting with the Pentagon and numerous state and federal agencies Including ice. I think it's 2011 that there's a hack by anonymous that shows that several Palantir employees are involved in a misinformation campaign to discredit WikiLeaks and I mean Glenn Greenwald although Honestly guys Glenn did not need help with that part You know he went abandoned handling that eventually on his own There's at least one Palantir employee involved in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal with Facebook data that the Trump campaign uses for the 2016 election So I mean in Alex is always talking about like my big thing is stopping the rise of the right and fascism and it It sure seems like your company's done the opposite There's a really fucked up quote from that New York Times piece by Dowd that I want to read here about like kind of Palantir in the Aughts A pro bono contract with the New Orleans police department starting in 2012 was dropped after six years Amid criticism that it's predictive policing a Roted privacy and had a disparate impact on people of color. We reduced the rates of black-on-black death in New Orleans Mr. Carp said and we have these critics who are like Palantir is racist I don't know the hundreds of people are now alive don't think that we're racist and again He makes a lot of claims like this. I'll also say we've saved like Europe from multiple 9/11 style terrorist attacks that would have fueled the far right But it's secret stuff. So yeah, you gotta see that Yeah, I'll start looking at doing predictive policing for free. He's like I'm down Okay, you can't see the actual like roof that saved all these people and stopped all these stuff It was also funny. I should note Alex doesn't have a security clearance So he's not privy to that information So he doesn't know it's super rumored that Palantir was provided the information that led to a song been live and getting killed But every time Alex talks about it. He's like, well, I don't know I can't say because like he does he literally does not have access to that information Leavely he would have committed serious crimes It's pretty universally believed it seems among Palantirians that they did, but I don't have a security clearance And I don't there's certainly not evidence also it's you should never forget it would be really good for Palantir Yes, it's great. Advertising maybe that's why people want to believe it During Trump's first term and Biden's Palantir worked with ice to help them track down migrants at the border this spawned protests in 2019 and led some 200 Palantirians or Hobbits now to write an open letter to Alex Carp about their moral issues with helping ice Carp was unmoved and he lost employees during the first Trump administration And 2020 Palantir goes public and starts taking on non-governmental clients like IBM and JP Morgan and some of the other corporations We've talked about Alex becomes a billionaire in September of 2020 Which has an impact on his politics as well as his lifestyle He begins buying up multiple homes around the world almost always near great alpine skiing trails As a bid to keep up with his demanding schedule He decides he has to be as like fit as a professional athlete And so he hires a team of former Norwegian Special Forces skiers to like make him into an Olympic level skier And he spends all of his free time skiing like these incredibly long distances Do we know if they get close? Is he good? Yeah, I mean he's supposed to be pretty good Okay, I don't know I can't evaluate that but like he like he's supposed to be pretty good Has he does he like computer or anything or no? I don't think he can eat the skiing I think he does occasionally because he does competitive long-distance pistol shooting - he's really into like super long-distance pistol shooting Which he seems to enjoy as both a hobby and I think he can do performatively in front of journalists to impress or rattle them Primoireen Dowd's article in New Hampshire. We had a lunch of lobster pasta. He kept his panic button on the table and then went shooting on his property He expertly hit targets with a 9 millimeter pistol from 264 yards when an aide suggested that a photographer not shoot Mr. Carp in the active shooting He overruled the idea actually honestly guns would be much better regulated if you had someone who knows guns He said I'm not a hunter. I'm an artist with a gun And I got it I got it I got it I got it I got stuff. Yeah, I got it stuff. Yeah And look 264 yards is extremely long range for any gun. That's a great shot to be ever to be able to make That's a hell of a shot, right? And obviously he is not using like your grandpa's 45 He is using a purpose built. I've seen a picture of a distance pistol long distance shooting pistol, right? That armed race for the most people it doesn't have an arm brace because I don't think that's part of the But I'm I doubt it costs any less than 20 or 30 thousand dollars. I'd be shocked if it's much less than that It's got to be at least like in the six to ten thousand dollar range for a gun like that So he's very good and he I mean he's using the right equipment But artists is a little much because 264 yards again great distance The current world record shot from a nine millimeter pistol is set by it was set recently by a former ice agent named Victor Avila And he had a steel target two thousand and ten yards away. So I'm not quite gonna call you you an artist with a gun, Alex. There's a pretty big discrepancy between you and world class there. Again, great shot. Really good. I don't, I could do that. I need to do 65. Anybody with a gun? Yeah, for sure. Sure. Not saying that. But let's, maybe not artist. Yes. So, Carp also continues to live a non-monogamous life. Although he tends to describe himself as being geographically monogamous, which means like he has a couple of different ladies and different continents that he visits from time to time. But I think he's been with at least one for like well over 10 years. So these are pretty long term relationships. And you know, he seems to be, I don't have a problem with that. Like that's, that's up to you. It's more the whole evil federal government spy agency shit. That's, that's a problem. His morality's really tested there. Not so much of the whole. I've got different housing area codes. So, yeah, exactly. That's, that's, that's whatever. I just like, I just like really don't. He really loves to tell you about it though. He really wants you to know. He, it's really important to him that you know what he's doing. The, the girl who pops don't like you. We think you do need to stop telling us about that. Probably helps that you're a billionaire. Um, so he is also one of a number of Palantir employees who refuse to get clearances to view classes. I set to get classified top secret information. Employees with clearance, let's have to talk with him and some of their other bosses and like vague generalities or like euphemistic terms when they need guidance on an issue they can't discuss directly. And Alex justifies not getting a clearance by saying he wants to be able to speak freely in interviews. And there's a lot of speculation that he and a number of other Palantirians like smoking weed and probably do another drugs that they don't want to have to give up in order to get a security clearance. That makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't either, man. Carp in fact takes no small amount of pride in being a deviant in a 2013 Forbes profile. He complained about his security detail. It puts a massive cramp on your life. There's nothing worse for reducing your ability to flirt with someone. Alex went on to reminisce about Germany where he'd go into skanky places in Berlin all night. I'd talk to whoever would talk to me occasionally go home with people as often as I could. I went to places where people were doing things, smoking things. I just loved it. And like, bro, we have all done drugs and had casual sex in Berlin, okay? It's not special. Berlin kind of encourages that base. It's kind of their known for who amongst us hasn't had a beautiful night with a Scotsman five floors below in a fucking huge civil war or World War Two bunker. Right? Like it's Berlin. We've all done that shit. You're not special, man. Every single interview with him talks about this stuff. Like I think I quoted him five times on it now. He brings this up constantly. So there's another fun quote from that article. This is again, this is from 2013 because they're talking to him about like, well, it seems weird that you're so you find privacy so important and being able to be a weirdo is so important. You're helping all these agencies that like crack down on people who are weirdos and crop told Forbes, well, we have to find places where we that we protect away from government so that we can all be unique and interesting. And in my case, there's somewhat deviant people we'd like to be. And so like, so how have you and he'll say like, well, because Palantir has robust privacy protocols and stuff. And it's like, I don't know that I believe that matters in the way you think it does that like there's the potential to enable privacy settings on spy software for the CIA. I don't know that I care about that, man. It's the smallest of wins. Yeah. Your privacy settings didn't help the girls in that school in Iran who got blown up, like, right, which we'll talk about. Um, so the one thing that's become clear to me through this research is that carp either never really believed all this or that as soon as he decided the rise of fascism, his greatest fear was inevitable, his first priority became ensuring his own safety and ability to continue living the way he wanted, no matter what happened to the rest of us. In public at least, this seems to have been a gradual process. And he still described himself and was described as a progressive or even a neo Marxist into the 2020s. You could find articles calling on that up through the Biden years and he remained a consistent democratic donor. Carpet attempted to explain this evident cognitive dissonance by arguing that terrorist attacks on a failure to secure borders fuel the growth of the far right. I see it is pretty simple. You have an open border. You get the far right. And once you get them, you can't get rid of them. We saw it in Brexit. We saw it with Le Pen in France. You see it across Europe. Now you see it in Germany. They should be much stricter. That is, he said, the only reason we have the rise of the right, the only reason when people tell you we need an open border, they also tell you they're electing right wing politicians because they are the biggest mistake. And it's not one politician. It's a generation was believing that there was something bigoted about having a border. And there are just a lot of people who believe that he said. And that's, that's very much reductive in terms of like, what's with only is really doing a lot of work, a lot of heavy lifting. I mean, the fact that a border is the only thing that leads to the far right is like so speech, but you know, what made people really pissed about? Was it like years of news and media propaganda? Like, was it that? I don't know. Weird stuff. So these quotes come from a very compelling profile on carp that I've quoted from several times by Marine Doubt. This is from 2024. And during that interview, he told Doubt, I didn't enjoy it working with the Trump administration. There's a lot of reasons I cut Biden at check. I do not enjoy being protested every day. It was completely ludicrous and ridiculous. It was actually the opposite because Peter had supported Mr. Trump. It was harder to get things done, right? That like actually the fact that Peter Teal was in with Trump made it hard for Palantir, you know, it didn't help us at all. That said, his attitude has done a complete 180 in the most recent Trump term. And the inciting incident above everything else seems to have been October 7th, right? He reacted with particular venom to student protesters like he'd once been who started protesting these Rayleigh government's response. He offered 180 jobs to students who were fearful of staying in school due to their support for Israel. And he urged his fellow business leaders to grow a spine and stand up to those dastardly student protesters. If we do not win the battle of ideas and reassert basic norms and the basic obvious idea that America is a noble, great, wonderful aspiration of a dream that we are blessed to be a part of, we will have a much, much worse world for all of us. And it's interesting. He thinks this battle is being lost because students are angry that we're providing like arms to a government that's doing fucked up stuff. And I think the battle is being lost because people like him continue to empower our government and other governments to massacre civilians. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that's the real stuff that's the problem. It's the lies lost. Not the like this could happen one day. Yeah, I don't want to be an American so much when that's going on. Right. It doesn't feel very good. And it's also worth noting that from not quite the beginning, but about a decade ago, Palantir has been in heavily involved in the Israeli state and the Israeli military. Palantir established in the office in Tel Aviv in 2015. And Carp had been maintained a deep sympathy for Israel since his youth. I want to quote from a summary of Palantir's business dealings in Israel by an "is race" of the cradle. Quote, this location underscores the company's deep integration into the Israeli tech ecosystem. Carp himself highlighted Palantir's strong ties to Israel in December 2023 interview on Fox Business stating, "We are very well known in Israel. Israel appreciates our product. The partnership between Palantir and Israel's military began to solidify with a formal agreement signed on the 12th of January 2024. Three months after the genocide of Palestinians and Gaza began, following a visit by company executives to Israel during which they held their first board meeting in the of the year in Tel Aviv. The recent carnage in Rafah on the 26th of May, in which Israel bombed a refugee camp killing dozens of Palestinians in the deaths of seven world central kitchen workers in April during airstrikes, highlight the brutal misuse of Palantir's so-called precision technology. The company's Titan system promoted as a highly-accurate AI model designed to enhance targeting precision, epitomizes the problems with Palantir's claimed high-accuracy capabilities. While there is no direct evidence that Titan specifically is used by Israel, the company's tech claims are integral to its broader product offerings, some of which are employed by Tel Aviv." And this is something we really need to talk about is what do Palantir's products do on the ground? How are they integrated into what has become like killing by several different states of large numbers of civilians? As Alex has gained wealth and experience, he's come to some questionable conclusions about grand strategy and the history of warfare. He seems to believe that a three-front front war with the US and China, Russia and Iran, is inevitable. In other words, the US is going to be inevitably being a war with China, Russia and Iran, all like either Allied or at least working together. And he seems to have come to this conclusion at least as far back as the Biden administration. Proudoud's piece, he argues we have to keep going full tilt on autonomous weapon systems because our adversaries will. They don't have the same moral considerations that we do. I think we're in an age when nuclear deterrent is actually less effective because the West is very unlikely to use anything like a nuclear bomb, whereas our adversaries might, he said, where you have technological parity but moral disparity. The actual disparity is much greater than people think. In fact, given that we have parity technologically but we don't have parity morally, they have a huge advantage. You know what you see when he's saying that, right? Well, we're not as evil as our enemies and so we can't beat them yet. Even though we're the ones who've dropped the bombs, he's saying they're going to drop them eventually and we all know that. And then also the idea is that by putting them together and calling them to your enemies, you're basically forcing them to be together. Like, do you not have the possibility of making an inventory conflict? Yes. It's so fucking frustrating. Like so much of this is like really just like disgusting and irrational leaps and logic for one thing. If you guys remember, back on January 6th of 2021, General Mark Milley was like reaching out to his colleagues in Russia in China to be like, trust me, then Nukes are not gonna get fired. We have it under control. No one's had to do that for China recently. - Right. - Not apologizing for their government, but it's not China that I'm most worried about Nuking us. It's not Russia. I'm most worried about firing off Nukes, right now, you know? - We're talking about low grade tactical nukes. They are not the blue candidates. - Mm-mm, mm-mm. No. (laughs) It's also the idea that, well, we have a disadvantage if we're not as immoral as our enemies is complete horseshit historically. For one thing, history is replete with examples of how utterly immoral warmongers fare in conflict. Look at the empire of Japan in World War II. - Yeah. - Look at Nazi Germany, right? These are not people to imitate. And Karte basically says, well, if we wanna beat guys like that, we gotta become as bad as they are, which ignores the important reality that this whole three-front war thing only seems really likely now because we elected a fascist to utilize Paladir's software to help make thousands of targeting decisions into disaster's war of choice with Iran. So let's talk about that. - But first. - One appallant. Oh, yeah, let's talk about ads, I guess, first. Sorry. - I just remember this low-taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. - They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. Their story is about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. - If you're a bookshelf and you're for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. - From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. - It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is the Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. 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I don't care about your life." - And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. I choose option B. I'm Julie Bignetto, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. - Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people, and they were like, "You smiled at us, not a lot of people smile around here." - It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is, and not the lies you're sold about it. So whether you're a solo travel veteran, or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. (keyboard clicking) - We're back. One of Palantir's big jobs for the Pentagon is the creation of the Maven Smart System. This had initially been a Google contract, but employees there had protested leading the company to back away. Palantir responded to this, seeing opportunity, and by publishing a tweet by Alex Carp, he said, "Silicon Valley is telling the average American, "I will not support your defense needs "while selling products that are adversarial to America." That is a loser position. Palantir picked up the contract in 2019. - First of all, well done by the Google employees, for yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But last time, we'll see stones like that, that actually matter in a tech company, but it was good to see. - Last time, they were like, "Don't be evil." And they're like, "Okay, we've given that up." - We've given that up, we're done now. - Palantir isn't the only contractor with Maven, but they are the backbone to the project, which has had, let us say, mixed success. Per an article in Reuters by David Jeans and Mike Stone, Maven supported almost all of the 13,500 US strikes in Iran. This would include the February 28th strike on that girl's school in Minab, Iran, which killed between 155 and 175 students. Reuters continues, "The question is why a military system designed to move faster from information to action has no equally clear public requirement to slow down after grave civilian harm. In software engineering, an error budget is meant to protect users. When a service exceeds an agreed level of failure, new releases stop until the problem is understood and fixed. War is obviously not software, but in Washington's AI assisted operations, civilian deaths do not automatically trigger a temporary suspension of the relevant tools, an independent review of the data, or a public account of the decisions that led to the strike. Advocates of military AI argue that better data and faster analysis can make attacks more precise. That is possible in principle, but precision is not something software simply possesses. It depends on the quality and age of the data, what a system treats as suspicious, and whether people have enough time to challenge its output." - Huh. - And they're moving too fast and breaking things. - Right, even though App says he doesn't like that, right? In handing over power to utilize a system like this to men like Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, Karp has guaranteed its misuse and proved his critics within the company dreadfully correct. I would not presume to make this episode an end-all be all summary of how Palantir works on the modern battlefield, but I do want to end by discussing a paper by Jessica Dorsey and Luke Moffett, I read hosted by the Lieber Institute in West Point's website. The accused Palantir of beating a major driver of warification. Quote, "As we outline, "warification does not mean law fair, "where law is used to further "strategical operational objectives. "Instead, by turning war into a verb, warify, "we highlight the active process "of interpreting the law under pressure "from parties to armed conflict, "which distorts its original intent or spirit. "In essence, warification describes the process "through which activities, spaces, and technologies "not traditionally associated with armed conflict, "are reconstituted as legitimate components of warfare. "It is both a conceptual expansion and a practical one, "the boundaries of war stretch and with them, "the range of actors, tools, and targets "that become permissible. "Recent developments in the use of artificial intelligence "for targeting in Iran and the conflict in the wider Middle East "offer a stark illustration of warification and action. "See, for example, Palantir's Maven Smart System "and reports of large language models developed "by Anthropic being deployed in operational contexts. "These systems are frequently framed as ushering in an era "of unprecedented precision and efficiency in warfare, "yet the empirical reality, including the reported deaths "of around 1,700 civilians in recent hostilities in Iran, "calls that narrative into serious question. "Sentcom claimed it was generating 1,000 targets per hour, "coupled with the high operational tempo "that has come to become a hallmark of modern warfare, "largely traceable to the Silicon Valley ethos "of move fast and break things. "Such capabilities are often framed as enhancing precision, but they also introduced new layers of abstraction between decision makers and the consequences of their actions. actions. If anything, the integration of AI into targeting workflows may be accelerating very dynamics whereification seeks to describe the normalization, diffusion, and expansion of organized violence under the guise of technological refinement. And that, if you want to know an answer, what does Palantir do to somebody? In the most accurate term, they normalize, they diffuse, and they expand organized violence under the guise of technological refinement. That's what they do. They make violence more acceptable to a larger number of people in a wider number of areas. And they make that violence more possible and easier for the state to achieve. And they do this under the guise of making it more refined and precise. That's what Palantir does. Anyway. At the street level, Al Capone tried doing the same thing. Yeah. I mean, honestly, he sat there and was like, how do I make my violence more palatable? I'll give out the turkeys on Thanksgiving. And then people will be like, all right, he's doing a good thing. Also, there's the point about them trying to expand their idea of what is possible in war fighting. Yeah. But they're borrowing. Yeah. From like the Soviet Union and the Cold War, if I'm getting this wrong, they, if my understanding had deep cover agents, they were supposed to hit Romstein Air Force Base because it would discombobulate the military response in case there was a reason to go to like, you know, actual, full on war and no longer a Cold War, but a hot war. So they were supposed to kill the children at schools because that would affect their parents who were the Romstein Air Force Base commanders. We, for what I understand, did the same thing at Minab with the girl school because a lot of those girls were the daughters of IRGC commanders. So they're kind of doing exactly the thing that they were accusing the immoral Soviet Union of the past. And now the president, Russia, Iran, China, coordinated efforts, I don't think they have a name. They don't have like an axis of yet. Yeah. Yes, they're not. I'm literally part of any kind of ally, like organization or whatever, right? You know, I don't know why because at least the official statement is that it was an accident based on outdated data. That's why the Minab girl school was hit. I think it is a perfectly reasonable theory as to like, well, was this part of an attempt to like further discombobulate and fuck up like the response overall, right? Because that is, I mean, that is something that like happens in warfare planning. So I'm not, I'm not going to say that's not what went down. I certainly, I can't like also say Alex Karp definitely wanted that or like knew, he didn't have secret clearance. Yeah. Exactly. And again, it's, that's kind of his job is to be the salesman, but also like the kind of friendly, like nerdy academic face of this company that he's not even allowed to know a lot of what they're doing. As they are part of these vast slaughters that are being carried out for no, in part, when they're talking about like talent, you're expanding the like, what is like acceptable targets of violence. What that means is the way in which they identify who is like an enemy, who do we have to go after? There's all these different, you know, we talked about earlier, you can search by like tattoos. There's all these different things that, you know, the, the software might decide or like the people building the software might say this makes someone more likely, you know, to be in this instance, an enemy or involved in the insurgency or whatever. And all these factors are generating targets, which means that it's much wider than like needing to have any actual like on the ground intelligence that like someone's doing something right? Like that's not what's happening. They fit a profile. The number, yes, and the number of things that can make you a military aged male, so to speak. Yes. The broader and broader is AI gets brought into it rather than it getting more precise. They've, they've abstractified humanity even more so because of exactly the benefits to them with AI. Yeah. Exactly. If you can categorize people more simply, then you can kill them more effectively. Yep. That's the Palantir promise. So that's all I've really got to say about Alex at this point. You know, he's still alive, still rich, still running Palantir, something none of those things will be true. Yeah. Just that's what time works. The last time hair still talks the way he talks. He's still has that hair still talks the way he talks, still telling you about the German Williams. Yes. He's a weird, he's a weird guy. You got to know about how much the Germans like him. I don't know. If you're in Bergen or something and you see Alex Carr, maybe call him, he doesn't go there still if he ever did. I don't know what I suggest that. To men like the wind. Yeah. They wouldn't let them in anymore. Okay. I think that probably does it for us here at Behind the Bastards. Zaren, you got anything else you want to throw out at us? Anything to plug? Well, mostly on the Ridiculous Crime, we have an interesting two-part interview with the author Matthew Campbell about his book, The Man Who Stole the Gods. It's all about the Cambodian Civil War, Vietnam and some art collectors who use that chaos to pull statuary out of places like Anchor Wat and then sell it in New York and give it to the Met Museum, not give, but donate to the Met Museum. It's interesting crossroads of history that a lot of history people don't know and a lot of things people would instantly recognize about how rich get away with things because they're rich. Cool. Check that out everybody and check us out next week and we'll be talking about another person I don't like very much. Yeah. Bye-bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, CoolZoneMedia.com. 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Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet and pop culture. With your favorite writers, book talk creators and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed, I'm obsessed. Listen to pro society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport and Sean Clements. Each week, we talk to someone in show business and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Pinero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. Listen to Solita on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.