Going One on One With Palantir CEO Alex Karp | The Big Interview | WIRED

Intro and Palantir vs. Silicon Valley

00:00- We have to build systems like Palantir and we have to explain to people with working class skills, people with normal jobs, that their labor's gonna become more important and more valuable over time with products like ours. If you run around saying that, you know, oh, the economy is gonna completely shift to value creation, only owned by 10,000 people, people on the left and the right are gonna go nuts. - I'm Steven Levy, Editor at Large at "Wired." I sat down with Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, a controversial company that orchestrates data and solves problems for government and business. We discussed Palantir's work with ICE and Israel and why he feels the company has no competitors. Welcome to "The Big Interview."

00:37[intense music]

Palantir's break with Silicon Valley

00:44Well, first of all, lemme say welcome to "The Big Interview." - Okay. - Dr. Alex Karp. You said that Palantir is at odds with Silicon Valley from the very beginning. You have kind of a harsh critique of Silicon Valley. You want Palantir to be different. What do you think the biggest problem of Silicon Valley was? - Well, we have a long and managing relationship with Silicon Valley. In the beginning we were at odds because we were pro-American, pro-West, and pro-making the government functional, and that was very controversial in Silicon Valley because it equated to not making any money and being a loser. We won that battle. And I think Silicon Valley actually has become very, at least officially and even behind closed doors, patriotic

01:25and Silicon Valley has always been pro-meritocracy and we're very aligned with that. Where we're currently at like a misalignment-alignment apex again, is we believe in using large language models in a way that creates actual empirical value, but also, is very strong for workers, technical people, whether you're a plumber, carpenter, or electrician, or you are a high school grad working in a plant where you'd normally be doing engineering things or couldn't do them. We see our products as being able to enhance your market value. And so, we're kind of pro-labor and pro-military. So we're much closer to Silicon Valley on the patriotism thing. But for decades we fought Silicon Valley about, you know, government is something we should support.

Project Maven and military targeting

02:07We walked towards the government when everyone walked away. That's how we ended up powering Maven, which is the, you know, US government's military. - Yeah, you took advantage when the Google workforce said, "We don't want Google to work on Maven." - And then we built it, yeah, but. - Explain what Project Maven is. - Well, so to find an adversary on a battlefield from any sensor including space, is a massive integration in analytics project. So, how do you find basically a needle in a haystack? And where that needle is also complex because it may look like your adversary, but maybe that person's actually working for you. Maybe they're in your service, maybe their phone has been compromised. Finding that needle in a haystack, so find a person

02:48that is your adversary, you wanna take out across a massive landscape where you have a human controlled in the loop, like targeting workbench. So you say, you know, this target's been approved. Why? Under what conditions? The data protections that are necessary, the civil liberty protections, interestingly, that are necessary. And doing that at scale on the battlefield was not possible. And now, it's been used in every operational context across the world. And you know, there are many things that have led to America's ability to reestablish its deterrence, I would say, after the disaster in Afghanistan. But one of them was actually one of many corrosicism of our soldiers may, I think one of the other things

03:25is just the superiority of the targeting capabilities the US government has. And you know, there are other people in other companies, but we are the backbone of that. - A lot of your government connections, they go back early. You know, you've worked for ICE, you've had long-term contract with them, right? - Well, that's actually later. I mean, our first contracts were at US Intelligence, so CIA, Special Operations, and FBI and our biggest contracts ended up being in the DOD. And then later we started working in Homeland Security under Democrats. Now it's very controversial because it's Trump in my view. - Well, it's controversial because he's doing things that we haven't seen done before. I want to ask you, do you keep an eye on that?

ICE, government contracts, and refusing work

04:05Are you making sure that your products are being used according to your code, which supports democracy? And you know, it says people can't be discriminated against. I'm wondering if there's a line for you where you would say- - Okay. - To a president, "No." - We were the, I mean this is like, there's all these things that no one believes are true. I was the first, and I may be one of the few CEOs to say we would not build a Muslim database. Now, everyone thinks I'm like, and I am, you know, I've defended Israel. I think, like, people who wake up in the morning thinking about how Jews are running the world, and actually, you believe whatever you wanna believe. I'm not so concerned about people

04:42who are skeptical about Jews or even their antisemitic, but like people who wake up in the morning, in the evening, and night thinking about this. I think like, you know, Jewish derangement syndrome is a little bit of a carcinogen. So, I think I'm the last person in the world people kind of expect in the kind of rude and crude way people think of this to refuse revenue, to build, you know, a Muslim database. And I would say more like at a high level, 'cause I can't go into the details, people internally know I pulled things from places where I thought there was anything like that going on in the US. Discrimination, yes, I'm against that. By the way, even if I was in favor of it, our products make that nearly as impossible

05:21as anyone's ever seen in a product. Because the way you do these things, the way you discriminate against people politically or based on their gender or race, you do not have what are called ackles. So, you can't see where the data's flowing. What you can immediately see, not as a technical person, but as you, your cameraman, everyone watching this can go look and see how is the data merged? What kind of pipelines did you create? What were the assumptions that went into it? Where did the data flow? But where you and I disagree with maybe is I spent half my life in Europe. I am an immigration skeptic. Like, and I personally think that US people, meaning citizens, have to decide by their vote what our immigration policy is gonna be.

Immigration skepticism and open borders

06:05And I'll tell you one of the reasons I'm very skeptical of my own party is that open border was not only a disaster, but it was tolerated. And that is massively corrosive and it's corrosive to democracy and it's corrosive to people. And leaving all the theory aside, like I was, I grew up in a progressive family, classic progressives my age and older were massive immigration skeptics. Open borders is not a progressive policy. It is not a progressive policy. It never was. And then the fruits of this, you know, I spent most of my life, adult life in Germany. Look at what a version of open borders a little different has done to Germany. On any vector: rights of women, rights of gay people, future of society. - Well.

06:46- I just wanna make it clear. - Yeah, yeah. - I am against discrimination. I'm not saying you're saying this, but people tend to merge being against discrimination with being, to be against discrimination, I have to accept that there's nothing that can be done about illegal immigration in the West. And I just, I disagree with that. But more importantly than me disagreeing with it, the American people disagree with it. And I, quite frankly, you're not asking this, I think one of the reasons why the Democratic Party continues to fail and continues to fail and continues to fail is their talent managed. Which like in businesses, like you have this problem where the people doing the work sometimes need to be told,

07:20"No, you're wrong and we're not doing that." And the Democratic party and people like it, the Green Party in Germany, I don't view these policies as progressive. - Well, I guess what I'm saying is are you monitoring sort of what's happening with this government and democracy in this country and saying, "Maybe at some point I have to look at-" - I would say the more important question is have I ever worked against our commercial interest because it violated our norms? Yes. Have I done this in governments? Yes. Have I refused? We get no credit for this, but we almost went outta business, 'cause we were not working in Russia, China, or anywhere else, so yes. Have we refused give our product to foreign governments because we didn't agree with them?

Drawing lines: when Karp says no

07:58Yes. Do I agree with your implicit assertion that what's going on in immigration as you formulate it has never been done before? No, I think actually that's completely crazy. You know, when you're in Japan, if you miss your visa, do you know what happens to you? - I didn't overstay my visa. - Okay, great. I'll tell you what happens. You politely are put on a plane. Is Japan not a democracy? Do you know what happens in like Singapore? - Well, I think like- - You're, but I just, no, I think this is a very valuable line of questioning. You're asking does our product allow for civil rights abuses and will I intervene? - Yeah. - Our product is the hardest in the world to violate. Will I intervene?

08:37Yes. Do I agree with some of the assertions you just made? No. The legitimate criticism could be, hey, these are two very rational people. You know, you're bringing up exactly the core and right question. And I'm telling you that I have done this, I will do it. And I've continued to do it. And by the way, not that people our age like the term constructive engagement, I am as obnoxious in private as I am with you, with people I agree with. So, like, when they're asking me to do stupid shit, I can assure you, I'm telling- - Wait, is this stupid shit or something? - No, no, I'm not saying you're asking me to do it, but I can assure you one of the things you can be certain of 100% is when somebody calls me

09:13and asking me to do some completely illogical, mostly it's illogical before it's immoral. That's the thing people understand. It's illogical. It will not get you the result you think. I am telling them, "This is illogical and we're not gonna do it." By the way, there's variants of this commercial. I have commercial clients, this is not even moral, who are like, "Hey, could you give me 50 engineers to do some crazy thing that will not help their business?" And you know what I'm telling them? No. One of the things that happens when people work with me is they see I'm meeting clients and they'll ask me to do something that makes no sense and I'll tell them, "I can't go to my engineers and tell them to do something that makes no sense."

09:45- Yeah. - And this is, I think a lot of these questions come down to that. Now, where we have to expand the prism of dialogue is I think in complete honesty, there is a place where you and I, forget you and I, you step in, you're just honestly talking to you's just like talking to my family. It's like, where me and my family disagree. And I'll tell you where those places are. They're on the border, they're in Israel, and they're in Ukraine. And what's super surprising is I get yelled at all day about of those three issues. And by the way, the issue I don't get yelled at about the elite is about Ukraine. The issue I get, obviously, the Israel thing is like, you know, only thing anyone ever wants to talk about.

What Palantir actually does

10:23You would not, it's like somehow people have forgotten it's a country with a GDP smaller than Switzerland, but you know, and then my progressive friends, it's all ICE all day. - Some people might actually not even know what Palantir does. In the shortest possible way, could you explain to people who just know it as sort of something they see on a page and don't like and saying, "Hey, this is what it really is?" - Or love. We have a lot of people who love us and some people don't, but yeah, we tend to elicit strong reactions on both sides. So, that's definitely fair. If you're internal or external intelligence, you're using us to find terrorists and find organized criminals while maintaining security

11:01and maintaining the data protection of your country. So, like the highest data protection environments in the world, Western Europe would love to get rid of us. They try every day to get rid of us. But building a data protection environment that actually allows you to do anti-organized criminality environment with that also does data protection at any level of granularity, at any level of complexity is very, very hard. Ask the German government. They would love to find another alternative. And honestly, I'd have no problem with them finding it, but it's very hard. So, that's one thing we do. Then you have the battlefield, the Project Maven, and also organizing the battlefield, what the Special Forces use it for.

11:35How do you know where your troops are? How do you bring them home with all the data that you'd have from any source environment? How do you manage assets while doing that? Meaning assets from the other side, assets meaning spies, basically. How do you get the human, how do you prepare your egress? How do you get in and out of the battlefield safely, as safely as possible? So, avoiding mines, avoiding enemies, those things change rapidly on the battlefield. That's a software problem that's powered in great part by us across America and with our allies. How do you supply targeting capabilities to allies, Ukraine, Israel, so that they get the product, but obviously, we don't have access to the full data they use,

12:13'cause we're not part of those countries. That's a Palantir thing. On the commercial side, it's, you know, how do you to make, I mean the current version would be if you want AI to work, you're gonna have to have precursor things. You can think of it as like the precursor to make anything. What are those things gonna be? You're gonna need high fidelity data. To have high fidelity data, you're gonna need to be able to integrate your data with a model you understand. You're gonna have to build something called pipelining, meaning you can serialize and deserialize a technical way of taking apart and putting together the assumptions within the data. You're gonna have to be able to maintain your security model

12:44and maintain the logic and actions of your business. And you're gonna have to be able to extract that, so ontology. So shorthand, if you're doing anything that involves operational intelligence, whether it's analytics or AI, you're gonna have to find something like ontology or foundry and you know, and FTEs to install it. That's Palantir. - It's interesting, 'cause you, going back a little, you implied that, you know, the rest of Silicon Valley hasn't figured out how to do that. That you're unique in exploiting that. - Well it's, yeah. What I'm really saying is we know how to do it. If you find someone else who can do it and you don't wanna work with us, buy it from them. - I mean, is there anyone you consider a competitor?

Political competition, not commercial

13:26- Our competition is actually political. The woke left and the woke right wake up every day figuring out how they can hurt Palantir and if they get into power, they'll hurt Palantir. How could you build a society with unfettered migration in Europe and not have Palantir? I don't know how you're gonna do that, but they think they can do that. If they win, if the communists in France win, they will pull us out. If like the Mamdani win of the Democratic party takes over, I viewed that as my party. But if that's the party I'm not in it. Or if the right woke wing, which is like everything is a conspiracy. Any use of technology is actually gonna only be used to eviscerate and attack us is like, our data protection part of Palantir

14:05is built into the software. It is literally the hardest software to abuse in the world, but they don't seem to want it. But if you like, don't want meritocracy, either left or right, you don't like the consequence of it, you hate Palantir. And that is actually our competition. And by the way, not that they believe it. The thing that is protecting those people, the people that hate us the most is actually our product. Because it is the hardest product to misuse to take away the rights of human beings that's ever been built. And don't believe me, just go look at it, spend 10 minutes looking at it, find a technical person and look at our architecture or look at it yourself. And that's actually our competition.

14:41And you know, in a weird way, we embrace the competition because they say these crazy things about us and then the smart people go look at it. - My head's spinning a little, how did Mamdani get in there? - I would say some of is downstream from, if you explain to the world that labor's gonna be valueless, people are gonna elect the most ridiculous people ever. We have to build systems like Palantir and we have to explain to people, but also let them see the results, the fruit of our labor that their labor, meaning people with working class skills, people with normal jobs, that their labor's gonna become more important and more valuable over time with products like ours. Which happens to be true.

Labor, AI, and elite institutions

15:18If you run around saying that, you know, oh, the economy is gonna completely shift to value creation only owned by 10,000 people, people on the left and the right are gonna go nuts and they're gonna vote for people who are like basically, yeah, nothing I've said has ever worked in history. It has never worked in history. You cannot find a time in history where any of that stuff has ever worked, ever. They still will gravitate toward it because they're afraid of what could work, which is like an AI-driven AGI environment where no one has a job and the only people who make money are like people sitting out here. And so, that's part of the problem. Now also, honestly, I mean, you know, I think universities and elite institutions

15:56have played a really corrosive role here. People are teaching pagan religion views, again, pagan religion as it's a new of religion with sacrifices. Who's the sacrifice? Me, I'm the sacrifice. And that, again, it's also like, it's a form of thought that has never worked. - You don't seem constrained to me. You're you're doing great. - I mean, I'm not complaining. - Yeah. - Palantir, we're not victims of Palantir. - Yeah. - We're not playing the victimhood thing. We don't, I don't think I'm a victim. I don't actually believe we should, these things should be framed as victims. And yes, we're doing very well, and you know, we might even do better. - You'd have this bonkers earnings call in February.

Earnings and value creation

16:35Huge, huge growth and- - Well, it's like people who are not financial, which is most people, and honestly, I wouldn't be paying attention to this if I wasn't running Palantir. Those numbers are a little bit like flying saucer took off numbers. So, and you know, people are financial, many of whom doubted us are like, wait a minute, the plate dropped, because what it basically, it's what non-financial people might not appreciate is we're not just growing, we're growing with high margins. with, and that's in at our scale basically. In my view, never been done before, not in a similarly situated business. - You said it was an anomalous like, you know, some sort of historic moment, that the company is anomalous.

17:12- You know, in a weird way we undervalue these or I undervalue the whole numeric side of our business, because it's downstream of value creation. So, if you have a, no, if you are doing anything like what we're doing, so call it 68% growth in the US, and again, we're doing it, you know, our way. Salesforce is anemic. We're not running around really trying to sell our wares. We have a conference here, people fight to get in, which is pretty cool. We have the best clients in the world, especially in America. Clearly we've tapped into something. I'll tell you what we've tapped into. There's essentially a simple thing. LLMs and software empowered LLMs create power per the expectation of preyed optimality

17:52between partner and vendor. You are going to get paid in the future a percentage of the value you create. And the value you create is going to be, you know, at some point objectively measured and it's going to flow into your financials and vice versa. - So, you have this unique culture and you even have called it a cult. - It's been called a cult. - I wonder how much you cultivate that outsider mentality. It reminds me we're both from Philadelphia. Jason Kelce, after the first Super Bowl saying, "Nobody likes us, we don't care." - The thing people don't understand is there's a massive feature side to being an outsider or even popular. People forget, people always think of the bug size of being unpopular.

Outsider culture and talent

18:33Like, you know, you're unpopular, it's not pleasant, you're not gonna like it. I don't like it actually. But there are massive feature sides. Like, you get the best people in the world. Like someone says something ridiculously stupid about Palantir. Five people look at it and they, the fifth person who's exactly the kind of person you want inside your business or will be the person buying your product someday or investing in you says, "Hey, it can't be as simple as that. It's a conspiracy." It can't be as simple as they want to eviscerate my rights, because those rights would be the same rights that like an agent would need protected by the agency or something. Then those people investigate and investigate

19:08and investigate and they're like, "Wow, this is a real interesting company." And they're thinking of the 10th derivative of this problem, not the simplistic bullshit that somebody online saying has no idea how our products work. And then you get the best people like a really unexpected consequence of this. There's no country in the world where our brand is as bad as France. We have the best French employees in the world, especially in US commercial. And why did they join? Because every time the communist party says we are doing these crazy things and they clearly know nothing about what they're talking about, the smartest person in France says, "Wait a minute, if it was that simple, any idiot would've done it."

19:44By the time they're done doing the diagnostic, they're like, "Hey, there's only one company in the world I wanna work at." And that's how we have the best French employees in the world. The best French employees arguably in the world are at Palantir in America. And that's very counterintuitive. Working at a company that's apparently a CIA front, which is like, yeah, obviously complete bullshit. - Well, yeah, no, you may not be a front. Thank you so much, Alex. - Thank you very much. Bye. [intense music]