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

An episode of [Behind the Bastards](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1373812661), 13 Aug 2026, 54 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/e5f91208-cc7e-4726-a312-ae280140ad11/6d113318-8a93-4f66-aafe-b4a401698771/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=d64f756d-6d5e-4fae-b24f-ae280140ad36

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

## Transcript

[0:01] Speaker 1: Also media, Welcome back once again to Behind the Bastards,
[0:07] Speaker 1: the show where we tell you everything you don't know
[0:09] Speaker 1: about the worst people in all of history.
[0:11] Speaker 2: And our subject for this week is one of the
[0:14] Speaker 2: worst people today too, Alex Karp, the CEO of paland
[0:18] Speaker 2: here and here to talk about this. One of the
[0:21] Speaker 2: worst people is one of the best people. Our friends,
[0:24] Speaker 2: Zarren Burnette, a ridiculous crime and very special episode. Saren
[0:28] Speaker 2: welcome back.
[0:28] Speaker 3: Thank you Chuch for having me. I love being here.
[0:31] Speaker 3: And even though we're talking about Alex Krp, this has
[0:33] Speaker 3: been fantastic.
[0:34] Speaker 2: So yeah, all Alex, Yeah, that's that's what you're get
[0:38] Speaker 2: Hebramas said something along those lines. Right aside from Alex,
[0:42] Speaker 2: it was great. No, it is interesting the two of them,
[0:45] Speaker 2: because we finished in the last episode how he's seeking
[0:48] Speaker 2: the kind of approval and endorsement of this legendary academic
[0:53] Speaker 2: Habermass and kind of doesn't really get it. You're getting
[0:57] Speaker 2: very polite to him. But Alex goes back home without that,
[1:01] Speaker 2: and he's not immediately quitting academy. He's actually finishing his
[1:04] Speaker 2: dissertation while he After he moves back to San Francisco
[1:07] Speaker 2: for a while and he still kind of has ambitions
[1:09] Speaker 2: of maybe becoming an academic in Germany, but I think
[1:12] Speaker 2: ultimately this clash kind of kills those or at least
[1:16] Speaker 2: makes it a lot less attractive when some other offers
[1:18] Speaker 2: come by. And one of the things that's really interesting
[1:21] Speaker 2: to me about that is he and Hebermoss have kind
[1:23] Speaker 2: of the exact opposite journeys in life. So we've just
[1:26] Speaker 2: talked about Alex who grows up in this very left
[1:28] Speaker 2: wing home and a very left wing neighborhood and has
[1:30] Speaker 2: raised very left wing and has turned out to be
[1:33] Speaker 2: on the side of all these reactionaries, providing like spy software.
[1:37] Speaker 2: Jurgen grows up in Germany in the Nazi era. He's
[1:40] Speaker 2: in the Hitler youth. He achieves a high level in
[1:44] Speaker 2: the Hitler youth, and he's running anti aircraft guns. At
[1:46] Speaker 2: the end of the war, he very narrowly escapes getting
[1:48] Speaker 2: drafted into the Wehrmacht before the Americans take him in
[1:51] Speaker 2: his town. And obviously he was a kid during like
[1:54] Speaker 2: it's not really his faults. He happened to grow up
[1:57] Speaker 2: be like one when the Nazi stick over, and the
[2:00] Speaker 2: rest of his life he fought against fascism, but they
[2:03] Speaker 2: have very opposite journeys in a lot of ways, and
[2:06] Speaker 2: I do find that kind of interesting.
[2:08] Speaker 3: Mm.
[2:15] Speaker 2: So when we last left, are definitely not a hero.
[2:18] Speaker 2: Alex had run into a stumbling block and returned home
[2:21] Speaker 2: to the West Coast, well, not home to the West Coast,
[2:23] Speaker 2: but returned to the West Coast. He seems to have
[2:25] Speaker 2: liked that more than the place he had grown up,
[2:28] Speaker 2: so he moves back to the Bay Area. He takes
[2:30] Speaker 2: a job with the Jewish Philanthropy Partnership, and he shares
[2:33] Speaker 2: an apartment in the Bay with his brother Ben while
[2:35] Speaker 2: he puts the finishing touches on his dissertation. And so
[2:39] Speaker 2: you can see he's, you know, not certainly not rich
[2:41] Speaker 2: at this point. You don't you generally wind up living
[2:43] Speaker 2: with your brother if you've got a lot of spare cash,
[2:46] Speaker 2: and he's working a job that's got to give him
[2:48] Speaker 2: like a pretty probably a comfortable working class life, but
[2:50] Speaker 2: nothing crazy. And he's still really thinking he might want
[2:53] Speaker 2: to return to Berlin and continue having anonymous sex. Right,
[2:56] Speaker 2: that still seems pretty good to Alex at this point
[2:59] Speaker 2: in time.
[2:59] Speaker 4: Do we know what Ben Carp ended up doing with
[3:03] Speaker 4: his life.
[3:04] Speaker 2: Yeah, he becomes a novelist. He lives in a successful author.
[3:08] Speaker 5: Yeah, so they're both successful, but not a weird little
[3:12] Speaker 5: uh not a weird.
[3:13] Speaker 2: Little running palatineer.
[3:15] Speaker 4: No, yeah, yeah, it's always interesting when that happens.
[3:21] Speaker 2: Yeah, like what happened here?
[3:23] Speaker 4: Where was the disconnect with one brother to another.
[3:27] Speaker 2: It's about to really hit so this point, yeah, he
[3:30] Speaker 2: and his brother are together still too, right, they're living
[3:32] Speaker 2: in the same place. And what changes this ultimately is
[3:35] Speaker 2: Peter Teal. Peter obviously has started PayPal or is in
[3:39] Speaker 2: the process. He's like getting PayPal off the ground. He's
[3:42] Speaker 2: become rich, and he comes back into Alex's life because
[3:45] Speaker 2: he's coming back in and out of the Bay. I
[3:46] Speaker 2: assume he has several houses, but he at least keeps
[3:48] Speaker 2: one home in the area. And he and Alex get
[3:51] Speaker 2: together and start talking again, and they start doing like,
[3:54] Speaker 2: you know, talking about politics in their lives and their
[3:56] Speaker 2: opinions like they always had.
[3:58] Speaker 3: Now.
[3:58] Speaker 2: At the same time as Peter's kind of reconnecting with
[4:01] Speaker 2: his buddy Alex, he's also starting to experience something with PayPal,
[4:05] Speaker 2: which is that they're trying to deal with fraud. Right,
[4:07] Speaker 2: PayPal's got like a shitload of fraud problems happening, and
[4:11] Speaker 2: they develop a fraud detection system called Egor, which is
[4:14] Speaker 2: like an acronym for something that works really well. I've
[4:16] Speaker 2: told this story before over the years on the podcast
[4:19] Speaker 2: and the Peter Teal episodes, and Egor works so well
[4:22] Speaker 2: that not only does it help PayPal deal with their
[4:24] Speaker 2: fraud program, but it provides information that leads federal prosecutors
[4:27] Speaker 2: to take down a number of like scammers who are
[4:29] Speaker 2: part of organized criminal groups. And so Peter starts thinking, oh,
[4:33] Speaker 2: should I be like selling software to law enforcement and
[4:36] Speaker 2: like federal spy agencies, and shit, is there like a
[4:39] Speaker 2: market in that because it seems like we may have
[4:41] Speaker 2: stumbled upon something like this machine learning stuff that we're
[4:44] Speaker 2: using could also help with these other problems. So Peter
[4:48] Speaker 2: and some of his top guys, it's not just Peter,
[4:49] Speaker 2: He's got some coders he really trusts that are also
[4:53] Speaker 2: kind of brainstorming all this, and they start to wonder, like,
[4:56] Speaker 2: maybe there's a way to make purpose built systems that
[4:59] Speaker 2: can help law enforcement or whoever carry out similar kinds
[5:02] Speaker 2: of investigation to spot criminal activity or even maybe just
[5:05] Speaker 2: inefficiencies in a business. And I'm YadA yadaying a lot
[5:09] Speaker 2: of the mental development process here. But this train of
[5:12] Speaker 2: thought initially leads Teal to provide some funding to get
[5:15] Speaker 2: a company called Palanteer off the ground. And at the
[5:18] Speaker 2: very first days of Palenteer, Alex is not a part
[5:20] Speaker 2: of it, right, He's not initially in the group of
[5:22] Speaker 2: guys that are trying to start this company. Kind of.
[5:25] Speaker 2: By that point in time, he had moved on to
[5:27] Speaker 2: starting an investment company of his own called the Cadmon
[5:30] Speaker 2: Group with twelve thousand dollars he inherited, and he's good
[5:33] Speaker 2: enough at investing that he turns that into a sizable business.
[5:36] Speaker 2: He gets a number of rich people start putting in
[5:38] Speaker 2: their assets to have him invest them. And his goal
[5:41] Speaker 2: is to personally put together a next egg of like
[5:43] Speaker 2: a quarter of a million dollars so he can buy
[5:45] Speaker 2: a place in Berlin and live a life of and
[5:48] Speaker 2: he generally describes its as debaucheries. Right, So that's his
[5:51] Speaker 2: life goal. He's in his early thirties by this point.
[5:54] Speaker 2: You know, he's starting an investment because he doesn't like
[5:56] Speaker 2: working in finance. He doesn't want to be doing investment stuff.
[5:59] Speaker 2: It's just the easiest way to get the money, he
[6:01] Speaker 2: needs to live a better lifestyle, right.
[6:03] Speaker 3: Okay, relatable? I mean, who doesn't want to, like, you know,
[6:06] Speaker 3: spend just a little bit of time doing something they hate?
[6:08] Speaker 3: To go live that libertine life of reading in the daytime,
[6:11] Speaker 3: sleeping around.
[6:11] Speaker 2: At night, you know, right, right, the Berlin lifestyle. Yeah,
[6:15] Speaker 2: I've got several friends doing that. And his biographer Steinberger
[6:20] Speaker 2: even suggests that like this idea that like, oh, if
[6:23] Speaker 2: I can just get a little bit of money for
[6:24] Speaker 2: a seed, I'll go move to Berlin was never something
[6:28] Speaker 2: Alex would ever have done. It was a form of
[6:29] Speaker 2: self mythologizing, right. Steinberger doubts Alex would have ever settled
[6:33] Speaker 2: for anything that approaches a normal life, But it's also
[6:36] Speaker 2: not clear that he would have had a choice to,
[6:38] Speaker 2: you know, on that if his old pow Peter Teal,
[6:40] Speaker 2: hadn't come a calling. So again they start hanging out,
[6:44] Speaker 2: and at one point he invites Peter to a donor
[6:46] Speaker 2: meeting for the Jewish Philanthropy Partnership, which's also still working
[6:49] Speaker 2: at on the logic that hey, you know, normally it's
[6:53] Speaker 2: me and a bunch of other Jewish guys and we're
[6:54] Speaker 2: always at each other's throats, if we bring a gentile in,
[6:56] Speaker 2: maybe we'll stop fighting, right, And it works really well,
[6:59] Speaker 2: and walks away and pressed that like, oh, Alex is
[7:01] Speaker 2: actually like really good with people, he might be a
[7:04] Speaker 2: really good manager. So he asks as kind of like
[7:07] Speaker 2: a test gig, he asks Karp to help him raise
[7:09] Speaker 2: money for his clarium capital fund, and I guess Alex
[7:13] Speaker 2: does well enough at this that a few months later,
[7:14] Speaker 2: he offers Alex a job at what's becoming Palentier. Now
[7:18] Speaker 2: this is the early two thousands, nine to eleven, is not,
[7:21] Speaker 2: It didn't happen all that long ago, right, there's like
[7:23] Speaker 2: two thousand and three, I think, when they're having these talks,
[7:26] Speaker 2: and the company is extremely primitive. At this point. Palenteer
[7:29] Speaker 2: does not have clients, and it's kind of a laughingstock
[7:32] Speaker 2: of Silicon Valley a little bit, right, because in this
[7:35] Speaker 2: period we're not quite up to like social media, but
[7:38] Speaker 2: we're starting to hit the early days of social media, right,
[7:41] Speaker 2: and apps are a few years away. These are also
[7:43] Speaker 2: like internet companies and whatnot that are starting to take off,
[7:47] Speaker 2: and so everything is focused even though it's it's it's
[7:49] Speaker 2: kind of still evolving to you know, the social media
[7:52] Speaker 2: and app era everything's really focused on like consumers, right, yeah, right,
[7:58] Speaker 2: you don't go to Silicon Valley to make products for
[8:00] Speaker 2: like spy agencies that or the government. Right, that's like
[8:03] Speaker 2: not a normal thing in this period of time. But
[8:06] Speaker 2: Karp isn't a Silicon Valley guy. He's not even a
[8:09] Speaker 2: tech guy. And that's part of why Peter thinks he
[8:10] Speaker 2: might be right for a job. And Palenteer, he's a
[8:13] Speaker 2: philosophy nerd who's obsessed with the Holocaust and really paid
[8:16] Speaker 2: surprisingly patriotic by this point in his life. Now caps
[8:22] Speaker 2: and Karp is so patriotic because I guess his ideolog ideologically,
[8:26] Speaker 2: he's come to conclude at this point, probably not wrongly,
[8:29] Speaker 2: that a weirdo like him could only have survived and
[8:32] Speaker 2: thrived in a society as good at protecting the rights
[8:34] Speaker 2: of minorities as like Western civilization. And he says minority
[8:38] Speaker 2: not just in the racial sense, but in the ideological sense. Right.
[8:42] Speaker 2: And so he decides, anything I can do to help
[8:44] Speaker 2: these governments use data and machine learning to get up
[8:47] Speaker 2: on their enemies, be they terrorist or China or whatever,
[8:50] Speaker 2: that's fundamentally good. So he's intrigued by this job offer,
[8:53] Speaker 2: and what Peter is impressed by is. As soon as
[8:56] Speaker 2: Karp learns what Palanteer is, he's like a true believer
[8:59] Speaker 2: and he's we are spinning all this ideological shit about
[9:02] Speaker 2: how like this is how we protect you know, the
[9:03] Speaker 2: great achievements of Western civilization for yes, right right shield exactly.
[9:10] Speaker 2: Oh shit, this guy's drinking the same kool aid.
[9:13] Speaker 3: I am.
[9:13] Speaker 2: Yeah. I thought maybe we were more at odds than
[9:16] Speaker 2: it turns out we are. And he's even more surprised
[9:19] Speaker 2: by how skilled Alex is at evangelizing than selling the
[9:22] Speaker 2: Palenteer brand. First to his new colleagues, and in short order,
[9:25] Speaker 2: those first couple of guys that Peter had started planning
[9:28] Speaker 2: Palenteer with are like, this guy is a co founder,
[9:30] Speaker 2: he should be the CEO. So Car becomes CEO Palenteer
[9:34] Speaker 2: in two thousand and four, and whether or not you
[9:37] Speaker 2: want to call him a co founder, because he's not
[9:38] Speaker 2: there at the earliest days, most of the company considers
[9:41] Speaker 2: him one. He's thirty four when he gets the job,
[9:44] Speaker 2: and he's not rich. That's really important. He's like, I
[9:47] Speaker 2: don't even know, maybe upper middle class on his own
[9:50] Speaker 2: at this at the point at which he gets the job,
[9:51] Speaker 2: certainly by the time he gets the job, he is
[9:53] Speaker 2: because he's get paid like one hundred and twenty five
[9:55] Speaker 2: grand a year, which is like a good salary in
[9:58] Speaker 2: two thousand and four, but it's still an insane CEO salary, right, Yeah,
[10:02] Speaker 2: and he's he's he's got to make that much money
[10:04] Speaker 2: for like most of the first ten years. It takes
[10:06] Speaker 2: a while for Pallenteer to be worth a bunch of money,
[10:09] Speaker 2: and so there's there's kind of a hunger Alex has
[10:12] Speaker 2: because Pallenteer is his only chance to get rich, right,
[10:15] Speaker 2: and it's also his only chance to be really important.
[10:18] Speaker 2: And I think he wants to be rich and important
[10:20] Speaker 2: by this point, very clearly. Maybe there's some jealousy with
[10:23] Speaker 2: his buddy Peter who started PayPal and got super rich.
[10:26] Speaker 2: It is clearly important, and he's like, I want that for.
[10:28] Speaker 3: Me, you know, and that linger his parents failing to
[10:31] Speaker 3: do this, so he could then prove them wrong, to
[10:33] Speaker 3: prove that he you know, he should have had family
[10:35] Speaker 3: like him.
[10:36] Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly exactly, and that he could do it too
[10:38] Speaker 2: where they couldn't.
[10:39] Speaker 1: You know.
[10:41] Speaker 2: Now, he's old for the startup world, but this likely
[10:43] Speaker 2: aided him, given that Palenteer's customers aren't a bunch of
[10:46] Speaker 2: like teenagers and twenty somethings on the Internet. They're like
[10:48] Speaker 2: the CIA, And so if you walk into a meeting
[10:51] Speaker 2: with the CIA and your doctor so and so, and
[10:52] Speaker 2: you're wearing a suit and you don't look like Mark
[10:55] Speaker 2: fucking Zuckerberg in two thousand and five, you know it
[10:58] Speaker 2: probably helps. So Karp is a strange pick, though in
[11:03] Speaker 2: a number of ways, because he's got no managerial experience
[11:06] Speaker 2: really when he becomes CEO of Palanteer, and he also
[11:09] Speaker 2: doesn't know how to code. He doesn't have any real
[11:12] Speaker 2: tech background Northy's m background and software of any kind.
[11:15] Speaker 2: And this is something that his biographer and a lot
[11:18] Speaker 2: of his employees seem to think benefits him. Right. Palanteer's
[11:22] Speaker 2: chief software engineers, like a lot of their kind, can
[11:25] Speaker 2: be hard to manage, like really brilliant coders not the
[11:29] Speaker 2: easiest people to work with always, And Alex doesn't even
[11:33] Speaker 2: pretend to try to macromanage them. He doesn't pretend to
[11:36] Speaker 2: try to understand like the directness of the actual coding
[11:40] Speaker 2: and how that works. So he's never going to give
[11:42] Speaker 2: him like criticism like that. Instead, he's going to try
[11:44] Speaker 2: to more broadly direct them to achieve specific like operational goals, right.
[11:49] Speaker 2: And he's because he's so good at understanding what motivates people,
[11:52] Speaker 2: even like weird people, and he's really good at incentivizing
[11:56] Speaker 2: them and getting these genius coders to work a lot
[11:58] Speaker 2: harder and longer into also deliver a product that maybe
[12:02] Speaker 2: is more to spect with what the customer wants, because
[12:04] Speaker 2: he also is better at understanding what the customer wants.
[12:06] Speaker 2: He's a great middleman between the people who are filled
[12:09] Speaker 2: exactly exactly Yeah. Alex recalls one anecdote about his early
[12:14] Speaker 2: days at Palaeer to Marine Dowd. I kept telling paleteerians
[12:18] Speaker 2: to call me Alex, and they kept calling me doctor carp.
[12:20] Speaker 2: I realized the only thing they believed in was that
[12:22] Speaker 2: I had a PhD. And no one really knows if
[12:25] Speaker 2: this company's gonna work at this point. And they're all like, well,
[12:28] Speaker 2: should I be trying to get a job at like
[12:30] Speaker 2: Facebook that's getting off the ground now, or Google that's
[12:32] Speaker 2: you know, suddenly huge, or Apple? Why am I hanging
[12:35] Speaker 2: around this company that may never be worth anything. One
[12:38] Speaker 2: early employee, Bob McGrew, said, we didn't know what to
[12:41] Speaker 2: make of him at first, and that in order to
[12:43] Speaker 2: help their new boss fit in, several software guys handed
[12:46] Speaker 2: Karp a copy of Ray Kurzweild's The Singularity Is Near,
[12:49] Speaker 2: which was basically the bible for this kind of tech
[12:52] Speaker 2: guy at that point in time. And it's anyone who
[12:54] Speaker 2: works in AI now was nursed on this book. The
[13:00] Speaker 2: older people working at AI were nursed on this fucking book.
[13:02] Speaker 2: And yeah, it's talking about how we're going to hit
[13:04] Speaker 2: the fucking singularity. That the title kind of gives you
[13:07] Speaker 2: the gist of the book right a post card. Over time,
[13:11] Speaker 2: Alex added some of his favorite books to the list
[13:13] Speaker 2: of books that new Palantarians would get. This included Improv,
[13:16] Speaker 2: which is a guide to improvisational theater that I guess
[13:19] Speaker 2: he felt as like a good guide to creativity, and
[13:22] Speaker 2: The Looming Tower, which is a book about how nine
[13:24] Speaker 2: to eleven happened by Lawrence writes. Pallenteer's early years were slow,
[13:29] Speaker 2: and it was an open question for years as to
[13:31] Speaker 2: whether or not the company would succeed. Karp led from
[13:34] Speaker 2: the front, taking a salary of one hundred and twenty
[13:36] Speaker 2: five thousand and telling his employees, I only make money
[13:39] Speaker 2: when you make money. Displays of wealth like fancy new
[13:42] Speaker 2: cars were discouraged among executives in the early days, although
[13:45] Speaker 2: Alex is said to have liked to show off his
[13:47] Speaker 2: black Amex card. This passage from the Philosopher in the
[13:50] Speaker 2: Valley gives you an idea of what working for Alex
[13:53] Speaker 2: was like at this time. While Karp was approachable and
[13:55] Speaker 2: entertaining then as now, he enjoyed regaling colleagues with stories
[13:58] Speaker 2: about German women and they're at t to him, conversations
[14:01] Speaker 2: with him could be difficult. He spit out thoughts and
[14:03] Speaker 2: observations in a nonlinear fashion that sometimes left his colleagues befuddled.
[14:07] Speaker 2: I don't know that anyone would say he's easy to
[14:09] Speaker 2: talk to, says Brian Schimp, who was hired by Palanteer
[14:11] Speaker 2: in two thousand and seven and eventually became its director
[14:13] Speaker 2: of engineering. Joshua Goldenberg, who was Palenteer's head of design,
[14:17] Speaker 2: recalls the discussions with Karp were unstructured and sometimes seemed
[14:20] Speaker 2: a little bit incoherent. After all hands meetings with Karp,
[14:23] Speaker 2: staffers would congregate to try to make sense of what
[14:25] Speaker 2: they'd heard. We would debrief and tell it and see
[14:27] Speaker 2: if anyone could divine the signal in the chaos of
[14:29] Speaker 2: carp speech pattern, says one former employee. But he says,
[14:32] Speaker 2: they all recognize that Karp has a kind of crazy
[14:34] Speaker 2: charisma and was exceptionally intelligent.
[14:37] Speaker 3: So what we see all these interviews these days has
[14:40] Speaker 3: always been true off his speech pattern. He's just kind
[14:42] Speaker 3: of ping ponging around.
[14:43] Speaker 2: He's darting back and forth as fast as he can.
[14:47] Speaker 2: He gets bored easily, and he's not really interested in
[14:50] Speaker 2: usually like delivering a specific point to you. He's interested
[14:54] Speaker 2: in geik a shotgun of points, you know, conviction with
[14:56] Speaker 2: great conviction, and he wants to tell you that German
[14:58] Speaker 2: women really wanted to find I.
[15:01] Speaker 4: Really important mission critical load bearing.
[15:07] Speaker 2: For the Carp story, Alex framed Palenteer's mission in grand
[15:11] Speaker 2: civilizational terms that sometimes bordered on apocalyptic. Palenteer existed to
[15:16] Speaker 2: defend the West and democracy, just like Tokein's Pallentieri didn't.
[15:20] Speaker 2: That the name has never made a lot of sense,
[15:22] Speaker 2: And I've never read a good explanation, like I know
[15:24] Speaker 2: what the Palenteeri were, But if your whole thing is
[15:27] Speaker 2: to defend the West, that's not what they do in
[15:29] Speaker 2: the books. No, Yeah, okay. The way Alex saw it,
[15:34] Speaker 2: nine to eleven had been a wake up call that
[15:36] Speaker 2: the ideals of liberal democracy were under attack and the
[15:38] Speaker 2: whole rest of the tech industry was obsessing over useless
[15:41] Speaker 2: or outright toxic bullshit while the underpinning of our collective
[15:44] Speaker 2: security was in danger. Carp hated and still hates Facebook,
[15:48] Speaker 2: as he felt selling people's personal data was unethical. He
[15:52] Speaker 2: distrusted Google too, as much for their supposed high minded
[15:54] Speaker 2: ideals as for their data policies, and he avoided hiring
[15:58] Speaker 2: from either company. Alex discussed for the quote move fast
[16:02] Speaker 2: and break things Silicon Valley ethos, which he felt was
[16:04] Speaker 2: incompatible with security because it is for his part, the
[16:08] Speaker 2: Valley didn't take an immediate shine to Palanteer. It was
[16:11] Speaker 2: a weird company with a weird CEO who constantly trash
[16:15] Speaker 2: talked all of the companies that were actually making money today.
[16:18] Speaker 2: Alex likes to hype up their unpopularity quote we were
[16:21] Speaker 2: like Pariah's We couldn't get meetings if they did. It
[16:24] Speaker 2: was a favorite to Peter. During one pitch meeting with
[16:27] Speaker 2: Sequoia Capital, Alex pitched his heart out and watched a
[16:30] Speaker 2: major Sequoia partner Michael Maritz draw on a napkin because
[16:33] Speaker 2: he was bored. Years later, Alex still feels rage about this,
[16:37] Speaker 2: telling an interviewer I should have told him to go
[16:39] Speaker 2: fuck himself, but he did. He's like a billionaire venture capitalist.
[16:45] Speaker 4: So it's like I don't like him by default, but
[16:48] Speaker 4: very funny.
[16:48] Speaker 2: But it's really funny. It's really funny that Maritsa is
[16:51] Speaker 2: just like, all right, man, okay, John dicks on a
[16:55] Speaker 2: paper about a note.
[16:58] Speaker 5: Yeah, that's really funny.
[17:01] Speaker 2: So eventually Palaenteer finds an investment partner in Qtel. You
[17:05] Speaker 2: guys know who inqtel is No, I'm afraid it's the
[17:09] Speaker 2: CIA's venture capital firm.
[17:11] Speaker 3: Oh there you go.
[17:14] Speaker 2: Yeah, well, yes, yes, Palateer a CIA partnership. Yes, it
[17:22] Speaker 2: had been founded in nineteen ninety nine, and it just
[17:24] Speaker 2: so happened the agency was in the market for what
[17:26] Speaker 2: Palenteer was selling. Their current data analytics program was named
[17:29] Speaker 2: Analysts Notebook, and it was aging and lacked modern capabilities. Basically,
[17:33] Speaker 2: it was good for a previous time, but it would
[17:36] Speaker 2: not scale up to the Internet age. That's kind of
[17:38] Speaker 2: the issues. They know they need something new. Alex has
[17:41] Speaker 2: to rush out and buy suits for him and his
[17:43] Speaker 2: engineering team before the meeting in DAC because they're Silicon
[17:45] Speaker 2: Valley coders, they don't have suits. Yeah, the seven of
[17:50] Speaker 2: m h uh Now in QTL CEO Gilman Lewis shows
[17:54] Speaker 2: up at this meeting only because he knows Peter Teel
[17:57] Speaker 2: and so he wants to see Carp's pitch, right, So
[17:59] Speaker 2: that's the only reason the boss is in the room.
[18:01] Speaker 2: Karp is able to sell Palenteer to Louis both its
[18:04] Speaker 2: technology and its mission. When Louis explained what the CIA
[18:07] Speaker 2: needed from its software, the Palenteer team immediately breaks out
[18:10] Speaker 2: and starts sketching out a new program and like designing
[18:13] Speaker 2: it in the room. And that really impresses him, the
[18:16] Speaker 2: fact that like, oh, they're working to build this in
[18:18] Speaker 2: the room with us to our specs. Ultimately, MQTEL invests
[18:22] Speaker 2: one point twenty five million, which convinces Peter Teal to
[18:24] Speaker 2: put in almost another three million dollars and the rest
[18:27] Speaker 2: is kind of history. Right. There's more I could say,
[18:31] Speaker 2: but this is not a detailed history of Palenteer, and
[18:33] Speaker 2: so I'm gonna have to skim a lot of their
[18:34] Speaker 2: early years. What you need to know is that this
[18:36] Speaker 2: investment not only brings the money, it gives them their
[18:39] Speaker 2: first access to the federal government, which starts a long
[18:42] Speaker 2: history of collaboration, and they're going to sell to a
[18:45] Speaker 2: bunch of other federal agencies as well as local agencies.
[18:48] Speaker 2: Karp turns out to be really fucking good at sales,
[18:51] Speaker 2: so good that for most of its life, Palenteer doesn't
[18:54] Speaker 2: hire salespeople because it's got Alex right. That's really his
[18:57] Speaker 2: skill is CEO. He's very good at this. In an
[19:00] Speaker 2: interview with Marine Dowd, Peter Teel gave his opinion on
[19:03] Speaker 2: what made Alex so effective. Quote, in some ways, Alex
[19:06] Speaker 2: doesn't look like a salesperson from Central Casting you would
[19:09] Speaker 2: send to the CIA. The formulation I always have is
[19:12] Speaker 2: that if you're trying to sell something to somebody, the
[19:14] Speaker 2: basic paradox is you have to be just like them
[19:17] Speaker 2: so they can trust you, but you have to be
[19:19] Speaker 2: very different from them so they think you have something
[19:21] Speaker 2: they don't have. Just smart. Palenteer again not a normal organization,
[19:27] Speaker 2: and from its first integration, Karp develops a habit of
[19:29] Speaker 2: embedding his engineers in client agencies and organizations so they
[19:33] Speaker 2: can build new software from within the entity that needed it.
[19:36] Speaker 2: Because all this is happening in the early years of
[19:39] Speaker 2: the Global War on Terror, and most of Palanteer's work
[19:41] Speaker 2: circles around organizing data about terrorists and insurgencies, a distinctly
[19:46] Speaker 2: military strain of thought becomes embedded in the organization from
[19:49] Speaker 2: its early days. Per an article in Wired by Carolyn Haskins,
[19:53] Speaker 2: Palenteer sends its employees to work inside client organizations, essentially
[19:57] Speaker 2: as consultants, helping to customize their data pipelines, troublesh problems,
[20:00] Speaker 2: and fixed bugs. It calls these workers forward deployed software engineers,
[20:04] Speaker 2: a term that appears to be inspired by the concept
[20:06] Speaker 2: of forward deployed troops who are stationed in adversarial regions
[20:10] Speaker 2: to detern nearby enemies from attacking. A former Palanteer employee
[20:14] Speaker 2: tells Wired that the company has also also has codewords
[20:17] Speaker 2: for certain job titles like DELTA for a forward deployed
[20:19] Speaker 2: engineer and echo for Palteer's version of a product manager,
[20:23] Speaker 2: which they say are sourced from the North Atlantic Treaty
[20:25] Speaker 2: Organization's phonetic alphabetic code words meant for use over military radio.
[20:29] Speaker 2: So you've got this really weird mishmash of like Silicon
[20:33] Speaker 2: Valley dudes who are now getting like increasingly familiar with
[20:35] Speaker 2: the military and working alongside former CIA guys and Special
[20:39] Speaker 2: Operations guys as.
[20:41] Speaker 3: Them using their language and their jargon.
[20:44] Speaker 2: It becomes a really weird like millage of cultures now.
[20:48] Speaker 2: At the same time, carp insisted on calling his employees
[20:50] Speaker 2: Hobbits and referring to the west that they needed to
[20:53] Speaker 2: protect as the Shire. This could be traced as much
[20:56] Speaker 2: to he and teals love of the books as it
[20:58] Speaker 2: can be to the fact that the Lord of the
[21:00] Speaker 2: Rings trilogy of movies was released during the early years
[21:02] Speaker 2: of Pallenteers rise to continue with another quote, but from
[21:06] Speaker 2: that piece that hastens, but fuck off, fuck off, bro,
[21:09] Speaker 2: I mean it is annoying. It is annoying. A common
[21:13] Speaker 2: internal motto in Pallatiers early days was save the Shire,
[21:16] Speaker 2: a reference to the Hobbit homeland, which they say was
[21:18] Speaker 2: a rallying cry that reflected the company's ethos at the time.
[21:20] Speaker 2: It was all about save the Shire and do good
[21:22] Speaker 2: for the war fighters. The ex staffer said, it was
[21:25] Speaker 2: all about, really, we are going in and solving hard problems.
[21:28] Speaker 2: And again, first off, the Shire saves itself and everybody else. Right,
[21:33] Speaker 2: let's let's know that, like the warriors actually are the
[21:35] Speaker 2: ones that need the shire Sire relationships. But I'm just
[21:39] Speaker 2: I'm frustrated by the fact that everything's reversed in their
[21:42] Speaker 2: understanding of the learning the rings, Like that's not not
[21:45] Speaker 2: how the books worked now, or even the popular movies
[21:49] Speaker 2: or even the popular movies now. As I said earlier,
[21:52] Speaker 2: the inspiration behind Palenteer was a tool PayPal had created
[21:55] Speaker 2: a track down fraud. But that begs the question what
[21:58] Speaker 2: does pallenteers sell, which most people don't really know. And
[22:01] Speaker 2: I said at the opening of these episodes that they're
[22:03] Speaker 2: usually described as like a data broker, sometimes a data minor,
[22:07] Speaker 2: or some sort of surveillance spy company. In business lingo,
[22:10] Speaker 2: palunteer provides B two B SaaS business to business software
[22:15] Speaker 2: as a service. Right, you could say they sell software.
[22:18] Speaker 2: I guess like you just say they sell software, but
[22:20] Speaker 2: like there's not that's not fun most clients.
[22:23] Speaker 3: Do you Also, I think kind of the distinction between
[22:24] Speaker 3: them and like say Salesforce, and they're very very different.
[22:27] Speaker 2: So yeah, that's certainly not like enough to really understand
[22:31] Speaker 2: what palunteer is like bringing to the table. You know
[22:33] Speaker 2: who else brings a lot to the table. Who's there
[22:36] Speaker 2: the sponsors of this podcast, And I'm straight legally, I
[22:39] Speaker 2: have to say that we're back. Most Palaunteer clients use
[22:50] Speaker 2: one of two programs that were developed during Carp's early
[22:52] Speaker 2: years as CEO Foundry and Gotham. One employee described Foundry
[22:57] Speaker 2: as quote a supercharged filing cabinet corporate customers, and Palentteer
[23:01] Speaker 2: doesn't start to take on corporate customers out until after
[23:04] Speaker 2: twenty twenty. I think I'm getting a little ahead of
[23:05] Speaker 2: us here, but these are their two big programs. Corporate
[23:08] Speaker 2: customers use Foundry to do stuff like maybe you've got
[23:10] Speaker 2: a factory and you know, like we have a point
[23:13] Speaker 2: at which we're losing us like a higher than we
[23:16] Speaker 2: should amount of these materials that we need to build,
[23:18] Speaker 2: whatever this is. We need to figure out where along
[23:20] Speaker 2: the production line the problems are happening. Foundry is supposed
[23:23] Speaker 2: to be able to help you with that, right, That's
[23:24] Speaker 2: like one thing they can do. They look for points
[23:26] Speaker 2: of failure or waste. Credit SUITEE and Investment Bank contracts
[23:30] Speaker 2: Palenteer to help spot money laundering, while Ferrari uses Palatier
[23:34] Speaker 2: software to help design formula one. Cars common attitude among
[23:38] Speaker 2: Palenteerians is that, per the New York Times, many problems
[23:41] Speaker 2: are data integration problems. And that's true, and there's nothing
[23:44] Speaker 2: really wrong with providing data integration services inherently, But once
[23:49] Speaker 2: we start talking about Gotham, things get a lot more sinister,
[23:52] Speaker 2: which at least is appropriate to the name. Per Wired quote,
[23:55] Speaker 2: Foundry and Gotham are similar, both ingest data and give
[23:58] Speaker 2: people a neat platform to work with it. The main
[24:00] Speaker 2: difference between them is what data they're ingesting. Gotham takes
[24:03] Speaker 2: any data that government or law enforcement customers may have,
[24:06] Speaker 2: including things like crime reports, booking logs, or information they
[24:09] Speaker 2: collected by subpoena ining a social media company. Gotham then
[24:13] Speaker 2: extracts every person, place in detail that might be relevant.
[24:16] Speaker 2: Customers need to already have the data they want to
[24:18] Speaker 2: work with, and Palanteer itself does not provide any, right,
[24:22] Speaker 2: So they're.
[24:22] Speaker 3: Really good at data disaggregation essentially.
[24:25] Speaker 2: Yes, Yes, that's their whole fucking deal. Now. Another former
[24:29] Speaker 2: Palateer staffer who uses Gotham says that in just minutes,
[24:32] Speaker 2: a law enforcement official or government analyst can map out
[24:34] Speaker 2: who may be in a person's network and see documents
[24:37] Speaker 2: that link them together. They can also centralize everything an
[24:39] Speaker 2: agency knows about a person in one place, including their
[24:42] Speaker 2: eye color from their driver's license or their license plate
[24:44] Speaker 2: from a traffic ticket, making it easy to build a
[24:46] Speaker 2: detailed intelligence report. They can also use Gotham to search
[24:49] Speaker 2: for a person based on a characteristic like their immigration status,
[24:52] Speaker 2: what state they live in, or whether they have tattoos.
[24:55] Speaker 2: So now we're starting to get upsetting, right, yes we are.
[24:58] Speaker 2: So this kind of thing is what caused the first
[25:00] Speaker 2: backlash against Palanteer and gave it the sinister reputation in Joyce.
[25:04] Speaker 2: Today is a company embedded in the growing global surveillance
[25:06] Speaker 2: ben oopticon, But Alex KRP doesn't look at things that way.
[25:10] Speaker 2: The way he sees it, Palenteer exists to protect the
[25:13] Speaker 2: Shire aka the West.
[25:15] Speaker 5: It exists to like this freak taking taking like this
[25:21] Speaker 5: beautiful hobby of like all of the greatest people I
[25:25] Speaker 5: know and myself, and using it for his fucking weird
[25:29] Speaker 5: bullshit company by software's.
[25:34] Speaker 2: Really spying on people else. Absolutely saved the Shire.
[25:40] Speaker 3: Respectability.
[25:41] Speaker 2: It's upsetting. I don't think the Hobbits or the Shire
[25:45] Speaker 2: were saved by data aggregation and like spy solutions, right.
[25:50] Speaker 2: I don't think they were saved by giving the CIA
[25:52] Speaker 2: more methods of like tracking people to kill. I'm pretty
[25:55] Speaker 2: sure the Shire was saved when the Hobbits used a
[25:58] Speaker 2: volcano to destroy the literal physical embodiment of state political
[26:02] Speaker 2: power anyway, and forming a union of communities, you know,
[26:06] Speaker 2: and forming a union of communities that's multiracial and multinational, yes, anyway.
[26:13] Speaker 2: One thing that's really important to Alex though, is that
[26:17] Speaker 2: part of why Palanteer needs to defend the West is
[26:20] Speaker 2: so that weirdos like him can safely be deviance. Right.
[26:23] Speaker 2: That's really important to him is that only I could
[26:25] Speaker 2: only grow up safely as a weirdo in the West.
[26:27] Speaker 2: And that's a huge part of it for Alex. As
[26:29] Speaker 2: Marine Dao wrote for The New York Times, Palenteer does
[26:32] Speaker 2: not do business with China, Russia or other countries that
[26:34] Speaker 2: are opposed to the West. Mister Teal said the company
[26:36] Speaker 2: tries to work with more allied and less corrupt governments,
[26:39] Speaker 2: noting dryly that aside from their ideological stances, with corrupt countries,
[26:43] Speaker 2: you never get paid. We have a consistently pro Western
[26:46] Speaker 2: view that the West has a superior way of living
[26:48] Speaker 2: and organizing itself, especially if we live up to our aspirations.
[26:51] Speaker 2: Mister carp said, it's interesting how radical that is, considering
[26:54] Speaker 2: it's not in my view that radical, and like the people,
[26:59] Speaker 2: the issue is that like people are angry that the
[27:01] Speaker 2: West is good at letting like weirdos, you know, have
[27:04] Speaker 2: civil rights. Man, that's actually one of the things that
[27:06] Speaker 2: we like. The issue is that that's not really what
[27:09] Speaker 2: you're helping. You're helping agencies that are carrying out, for example,
[27:13] Speaker 2: unprovoked wars that drive up the cost of living massively
[27:17] Speaker 2: and like kill huge numbers of people and actually like
[27:20] Speaker 2: make the West a lot weaker. Like That's what I
[27:23] Speaker 2: would say is kind of the ultimate conclusion of a
[27:26] Speaker 2: lot of y'all's work is that it's the governments here
[27:29] Speaker 2: are more corrupt and weaker than ever, and you're part
[27:31] Speaker 2: of it anyway.
[27:33] Speaker 3: And also the postcolonial paradigms of power you're maintaining are
[27:36] Speaker 3: very much not helping the West.
[27:38] Speaker 2: No, no, none of it's helping the West. Right, speaking
[27:42] Speaker 2: of radical, as you probably noticed are supposed neo Marxist philosophers,
[27:46] Speaker 2: seems a lot less radical at least in a left
[27:48] Speaker 2: wing direction by this point in the story. And some
[27:52] Speaker 2: of this is the obvious result of the fact that
[27:54] Speaker 2: by the aughts, Alex is starting to become a rich man,
[27:57] Speaker 2: and Pallanteers now contracting with the Pentagon and numerous eight
[28:00] Speaker 2: and federal agencies, including ICE. I think it's twenty eleven
[28:04] Speaker 2: that there's a hack by anonymous that shows that several
[28:08] Speaker 2: Palanteer employees are involved in a misinformation campaign to discredit WikiLeaks,
[28:12] Speaker 2: and I mean Glenn Greenwald, although honestly, guys, Glenn did
[28:16] Speaker 2: not need help with that part. You know, he wound
[28:19] Speaker 2: up handling that eventually on his own. There's at least
[28:23] Speaker 2: one Palanteer employee involved in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal
[28:27] Speaker 2: with Facebook data that the Trump campaign uses for the
[28:29] Speaker 2: twenty sixteen election. So I mean, and Alex is always
[28:32] Speaker 2: talking about like, my big thing is stopping the rise
[28:34] Speaker 2: of the right and fascism, and it sure seems like
[28:37] Speaker 2: your company has done the opposite. There's a really fucked
[28:40] Speaker 2: up quote from that New York Times piece by Dowd
[28:43] Speaker 2: that I want to read here about like kind of
[28:44] Speaker 2: Palenteer in the oughts, a pro bono contract with the
[28:47] Speaker 2: New Orleans Police Department starting in twenty twelve, was dropped
[28:50] Speaker 2: after six years amid criticism that it's predictive policing eroded
[28:55] Speaker 2: privacy and had a disparate impact on people of color.
[28:58] Speaker 2: We reduced the rates of black on black death in
[29:00] Speaker 2: New Orleans, mister carp said, And we have these critics
[29:03] Speaker 2: who are like, Palanteer is racist. I don't know. The
[29:05] Speaker 2: hundreds of people are now alive. Don't think that we're racist.
[29:08] Speaker 2: And again he makes a lot of claims like this.
[29:10] Speaker 2: I'll also say we've saved like Europe from multiple nine
[29:13] Speaker 2: to eleven style terrorist attacks that would have fueled the
[29:16] Speaker 2: far right. But it's secret stuff, so we can't.
[29:19] Speaker 3: Actually see that through because of us.
[29:23] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[29:24] Speaker 3: Also, look, he's doing predictive policing for free. He's like,
[29:27] Speaker 3: I'm down.
[29:27] Speaker 2: I'll you can't see the actual proof that you saved
[29:34] Speaker 2: all these people and stopped all these stuff. It was
[29:36] Speaker 2: also funny you should note Alex doesn't have a security clearance,
[29:42] Speaker 2: so he's not privy to that information. It's super rumored
[29:47] Speaker 2: that Palenteer was provided the information that led to us
[29:50] Speaker 2: how I been laden getting killed. But every time Alex
[29:52] Speaker 2: talks about it. He's like, well, I don't know. I
[29:53] Speaker 2: can't say because like he doesn't, he literally does not
[29:56] Speaker 2: have access to that information vivially, he would have committed
[29:58] Speaker 2: serious crimes. Hattie, it's pretty universally believed. It seems among
[30:03] Speaker 2: Palanteerians that they did. But I don't have a security clearance,
[30:07] Speaker 2: and I don't there's certainly not evidence. Also, it's you
[30:10] Speaker 2: should never forget. It would be really good for Palenteer
[30:13] Speaker 2: if they great out, So maybe that's why people want
[30:16] Speaker 2: to believe it. During Trump's first term and Biden's, Pallenteer
[30:20] Speaker 2: worked with ICE to help them track down migrants at
[30:22] Speaker 2: the border. This spawned protests in twenty nineteen and led
[30:25] Speaker 2: some two hundred Palanteerians or Hobbits now to write an
[30:28] Speaker 2: open letter to Alex Karp about their moral issues with
[30:31] Speaker 2: helping ICE. Karp was unmoved, and he lost employees. During
[30:34] Speaker 2: the first Trump administration and twenty twenty, Palenteer goes public
[30:39] Speaker 2: and starts taking on non governmental clients like IBM and
[30:41] Speaker 2: JP Morgan and some of the other corporations we've talked about.
[30:45] Speaker 2: Alex becomes a billionaire in September of twenty twenty, which
[30:47] Speaker 2: has an impact on his politics as well as his lifestyle.
[30:50] Speaker 2: He begins buying up multiple homes around the world, almost
[30:53] Speaker 2: always near great alpine skiing trails, as a bid to
[30:56] Speaker 2: keep up with his demanding schedule. He decides he has
[30:58] Speaker 2: to be as like fit as a professional athlete, and
[31:01] Speaker 2: so he hires a team of former Norwegian Special Forces
[31:04] Speaker 2: skiers to like make him into an Olympic level skier,
[31:08] Speaker 2: and he spends all of his free time skiing like
[31:10] Speaker 2: these incredibly long distances. Do we know if they get close?
[31:13] Speaker 3: Is he good?
[31:14] Speaker 2: Yeah? I mean he's supposed to be pretty good. Okay,
[31:17] Speaker 2: I don't know. I can't evaluate that, but he like
[31:21] Speaker 2: he's supposed to be pretty good.
[31:22] Speaker 4: Has he does he like compete or anything?
[31:24] Speaker 5: Or No?
[31:26] Speaker 2: I don't think he competes in skiing. I think he
[31:29] Speaker 2: does occasionally because he does competitive long distance pistol shooting too.
[31:32] Speaker 2: He's really into like super long distance pistol shooting, which
[31:35] Speaker 2: he seems to enjoy as both a hobby and a
[31:37] Speaker 2: thing he can do performatively in front of journalists to
[31:40] Speaker 2: impress or rattle them. Per Maureen Dawd's article in New Hampshire,
[31:44] Speaker 2: we had a lunch of lobster pasta. He kept his
[31:46] Speaker 2: Panic button on the table and then went shooting on
[31:48] Speaker 2: his property. He expertly hit targets with a nine millimeters
[31:51] Speaker 2: pistol from two hundred and sixty four yards. When an
[31:53] Speaker 2: aid suggested that a photographer not shoot mister carp in
[31:55] Speaker 2: the active shooting, he overruled the idea. Actually, honestly, guns
[31:59] Speaker 2: would be much better regular if you had someone who
[32:00] Speaker 2: knows guns. He said, I'm not a hunter. I'm an
[32:03] Speaker 2: artist with a gun, and I got it. I gotta
[32:06] Speaker 2: I gotta, I gotta stuff, I gotta stuff here. Man, Look,
[32:10] Speaker 2: two or sixty four yards is extremely long range for
[32:12] Speaker 2: a gun. That's a great shot to be ever to
[32:15] Speaker 2: be able to make. That's a hell of a shot, right.
[32:18] Speaker 2: And obviously he is not using like your grandpa's forty five.
[32:21] Speaker 2: He is using a purpose built I've seen a picture
[32:23] Speaker 2: of a distance pistol, long distance shooting pistol, right that
[32:26] Speaker 2: with an arm race more than most people's. It doesn't
[32:29] Speaker 2: have an arm brace, because I don't think that's part
[32:30] Speaker 2: of the But I doubt it cost any less than
[32:33] Speaker 2: twenty or thirty thousand dollars. I'd be shocked if it's
[32:35] Speaker 2: much less than that. It's got to be at least
[32:37] Speaker 2: like in the six to ten thousand dollars range for
[32:39] Speaker 2: a gun like that. So he's very good and he
[32:42] Speaker 2: had I mean, he's using the right equipment. But artist
[32:45] Speaker 2: is a little much because two or sixty four yards. Again,
[32:48] Speaker 2: great distance. The current world record shot from a nine
[32:51] Speaker 2: millimeter pistol is set by It was set recently by
[32:53] Speaker 2: a former ice agent named Victor Avila, and he had
[32:55] Speaker 2: a steel target twenty ten yards away. So I'm not
[32:59] Speaker 2: quite gonna call you you an artist with a gun. Yeah,
[33:02] Speaker 2: there's a pretty big discrepancy between you and world class there. Again,
[33:06] Speaker 2: great shot, really good. I don't think anybody with a gun,
[33:11] Speaker 2: yeah for sure, sure not saying that, but that's maybe
[33:15] Speaker 2: not artists. Yes, I know.
[33:18] Speaker 3: So.
[33:19] Speaker 2: Carp also continues to live a non monogamous life, although
[33:21] Speaker 2: he tends to describe himself as being geographically monogamous, which
[33:25] Speaker 2: means like he has a couple of different ladies and
[33:27] Speaker 2: different continents that he visits from time to time. But
[33:30] Speaker 2: I think he's been with at least one for like
[33:32] Speaker 2: well over ten years, so these are pretty long term relationships.
[33:35] Speaker 2: And yeah, he seems to be I don't have a
[33:37] Speaker 2: problem with that, Like, that's that's that's up to you.
[33:40] Speaker 2: It's more the whole evil federal government spy agency shit.
[33:44] Speaker 2: That's that's a problem.
[33:47] Speaker 3: His morality's really tested there, not so much of the
[33:49] Speaker 3: whole I've got different hose in area codes.
[33:51] Speaker 2: So yeah, exactly, that's that's that's whatever.
[33:54] Speaker 4: I just like, I just like, really don't.
[33:57] Speaker 2: He really loves to tell you about it, though he
[33:59] Speaker 2: really wants you to know. It's really important to him
[34:01] Speaker 2: that you know what he's doing.
[34:04] Speaker 4: The girllipops don't like you. We think you're Yeah, dude,
[34:09] Speaker 4: do you need to stop telling us about that?
[34:11] Speaker 2: Probably helps that you're a billionaire. So he is also
[34:15] Speaker 2: one of a number of Palanteer employees who refuse to
[34:17] Speaker 2: get clearances to view class as I said, to get
[34:20] Speaker 2: classified top secret information. Employees with clearance thus have to
[34:23] Speaker 2: talk with him and some of their other bosses and
[34:25] Speaker 2: like vague generalities or like euphemistic terms when they need
[34:28] Speaker 2: guidance on an issue they can't discuss directly, and Alex
[34:32] Speaker 2: justifies not getting a clearance by saying he wants to
[34:34] Speaker 2: be able to speak freely in interviews. And there's a
[34:36] Speaker 2: lot of speculation that he and a number of other
[34:38] Speaker 2: Palanteerians like smoking weed and probably doing other drugs that
[34:41] Speaker 2: they don't want to have to give up in order
[34:43] Speaker 2: to get a security clearance.
[34:45] Speaker 3: That makes a lot of sense.
[34:46] Speaker 2: That makes a lot, wouldn't either, man. Yeah, carp in
[34:50] Speaker 2: fact takes no small amount of pride in being a deviant.
[34:53] Speaker 2: In a twenty thirteen Forbes profile, he complained about his
[34:55] Speaker 2: security detail. It puts a massive cramp on your life.
[34:58] Speaker 2: There's nothing worse for reducing your ability to flirt someone.
[35:00] Speaker 2: Alex went on to Hymniss about Germany, where he'd go
[35:03] Speaker 2: into skanky places in Berlin all night. I'd talk to
[35:06] Speaker 2: whoever would talk to me, occasionally go home with people
[35:08] Speaker 2: as often as I could. I went to places where
[35:10] Speaker 2: people were doing things, smoking things. I just loved it.
[35:13] Speaker 2: And like, bro, we have all done drugs and had
[35:16] Speaker 2: casual sex in Berlin. Okay, it's not special. Berlin kind
[35:21] Speaker 2: of encourages that behave.
[35:23] Speaker 6: Yeah, who amongst us hasn't had a beautiful night with
[35:27] Speaker 6: a scotsman five floors below in a fucking used Civil
[35:31] Speaker 6: War or World War two bunker, Right, Like it's Berlin.
[35:34] Speaker 2: We've all done that shit. You're not special, man. Every
[35:38] Speaker 2: single interview with him talks about this stuff, Like I
[35:40] Speaker 2: think I've quoted him five times on it now. He
[35:43] Speaker 2: brings this up constantly. So there's another fun quote from
[35:52] Speaker 2: that article. This again, this is from twenty thirteen, because
[35:56] Speaker 2: they're talking him about like, well, it seems weird that
[35:58] Speaker 2: you're so privacy so important and being able to be
[36:02] Speaker 2: a weirdo so important. You're helping all these agencies that
[36:04] Speaker 2: like crack down on people who were weirdos, and told Forbes, well,
[36:08] Speaker 2: we have to find places where we that we protect
[36:10] Speaker 2: away from government so that we can all be unique
[36:12] Speaker 2: and interesting and in my case, the somewhat deviant people
[36:14] Speaker 2: we'd like to be. It's like, so, how have you
[36:17] Speaker 2: And he'll say like, well, because Pallanteer has robust privacy
[36:21] Speaker 2: protocols and stuff, and it's like, I don't know that
[36:23] Speaker 2: I believe that matters in the way you think it does.
[36:26] Speaker 2: That like you have the potential to enable privacy settings
[36:29] Speaker 2: on spy software for the CIA, I don't know that
[36:32] Speaker 2: I care about.
[36:33] Speaker 4: That, man.
[36:35] Speaker 3: It's the smallest of wins.
[36:37] Speaker 2: Yeah, your privacy settings didn't help the girls in that
[36:39] Speaker 2: school in Iran. Who got blown up like right, which
[36:42] Speaker 2: we'll talk about. So the one thing that's become clear
[36:46] Speaker 2: to me through this research is that Karp either never
[36:48] Speaker 2: really believed all this or that as soon as he
[36:50] Speaker 2: decided the rise of fascism his greatest fear was inevitable.
[36:54] Speaker 2: His first priority became ensuring his own safety and ability
[36:57] Speaker 2: to continue living the way he wanted, no matter what
[36:59] Speaker 2: happened to the rest of us. In public, at least,
[37:02] Speaker 2: this seems to have been a gradual process, and he
[37:04] Speaker 2: still described himself and was described as a progressive or
[37:07] Speaker 2: even a neo Marxist into the twenty twenties. You could
[37:10] Speaker 2: find articles calling him that up through the Biden years,
[37:13] Speaker 2: and he remained a consistent Democratic donor. Karp attempted to
[37:16] Speaker 2: explain this evident cognitive dissonance by arguing that terrorist attacks
[37:19] Speaker 2: and a failure to secure borders fuel the growth of
[37:22] Speaker 2: the far right. I see it as pretty simple. You
[37:24] Speaker 2: have an open border, you get the far right, and
[37:26] Speaker 2: once you get them, you can't get rid of them.
[37:28] Speaker 2: We saw it in Brexit, We saw it with the
[37:30] Speaker 2: pin in France, you see it across Europe, now you
[37:32] Speaker 2: see it in Germany. They should be much stricter. That is,
[37:35] Speaker 2: he said, the only reason we have the rise of
[37:36] Speaker 2: the right, the only reason when people tell you we
[37:38] Speaker 2: need an open border, they also tell you they're electing
[37:41] Speaker 2: right wing politicians because they are the biggest mistake. And
[37:43] Speaker 2: it's not one politician, it's a generation was believing that
[37:46] Speaker 2: there was something bigoted about having a border, and there
[37:48] Speaker 2: are just a lot of people he believed that, he said,
[37:51] Speaker 2: And that's that's very much reductive in terms of like
[37:54] Speaker 2: that what.
[37:55] Speaker 3: With of only is really doing a lot of work.
[38:00] Speaker 3: The fact that a border is the only thing that
[38:02] Speaker 3: leads to the far right is like speach.
[38:04] Speaker 2: You know what made people really pissed about? Was it
[38:07] Speaker 2: like years of news and media propaganda, Like was it that,
[38:12] Speaker 2: I don't know, weird stuff. So these quotes come from
[38:17] Speaker 2: a very compelling profile on Karp that I've quoted from
[38:19] Speaker 2: several times by Marine Doubt. This is from twenty twenty four,
[38:22] Speaker 2: and during that interview he told Dowd, I didn't enjoy
[38:25] Speaker 2: it working with the Trump administration. There's a lot of reasons.
[38:28] Speaker 2: I cut Biden a check. I do not enjoy being
[38:30] Speaker 2: protested every day. It was completely ludicrous and ridiculous. It
[38:33] Speaker 2: was actually the opposite. Because Peter had supported mister Trump,
[38:35] Speaker 2: it was harder to get things done right that like, Actually,
[38:38] Speaker 2: the fact that Peter Teel was in with Trump made
[38:40] Speaker 2: it hard for Pallanteer. You know, it didn't help us
[38:42] Speaker 2: at all. That said, his attitude has done a complete
[38:46] Speaker 2: one eighty in the most recent Trump term, and the
[38:49] Speaker 2: inciting incident above everything else, seems to have been October seventh, Right,
[38:52] Speaker 2: he reacted with particular venom to student protesters like he'd
[38:56] Speaker 2: once been who started protesting. The Israeli government's response offered
[39:00] Speaker 2: one hundred and eighty jobs to students who were fearful
[39:02] Speaker 2: of staying in school due to their support for Israel,
[39:05] Speaker 2: and he urged his fellow business leaders to grow a
[39:07] Speaker 2: spine and stand up to those dastardly student protesters. If
[39:10] Speaker 2: we do not win the battle of ideas and reassert
[39:12] Speaker 2: basic norms and the basic obvious idea that America is
[39:15] Speaker 2: a noble, great, wonderful aspiration of a dream that we
[39:17] Speaker 2: are blessed to be a part of, we will have
[39:19] Speaker 2: a much, much worse world for all of us. And
[39:23] Speaker 2: it's interesting he thinks this battle is being lost because
[39:26] Speaker 2: students are angry, that we're providing like arms to a
[39:28] Speaker 2: government that's doing fucked up stuff, and I think the
[39:31] Speaker 2: battle is being lost because people like him continue to
[39:34] Speaker 2: empower our government and other governments to massacre civilians. Yes, exactly, Yeah,
[39:39] Speaker 2: I think that's the problem.
[39:41] Speaker 3: It's the real stuff that's the problem. It's the lives loss,
[39:44] Speaker 3: not the like this could happen one day.
[39:46] Speaker 5: Yeah.
[39:46] Speaker 2: I don't want to be an American so much when
[39:49] Speaker 2: that's going on, right, it doesn't feel very good. And
[39:54] Speaker 2: it's also worth noting that from not quite the beginning,
[39:56] Speaker 2: but about a decade ago, Pallanteer has been heavily involved
[39:59] Speaker 2: in the Israelis eight in the Israeli military. Palanteer established
[40:02] Speaker 2: in office in Tel Aviv in twenty fifteen, and Karp
[40:05] Speaker 2: maintained a deep sympathy for Israel since his youth. I
[40:08] Speaker 2: want a quote from a summary of Palenteer's business dealings
[40:10] Speaker 2: in Israel by Ennis Race of the Cradle quote this
[40:13] Speaker 2: location underscores the company's deep integration into the Israeli tech ecosystem.
[40:17] Speaker 2: Karp himself highlighted Palanteer's strong ties to Israel in a
[40:20] Speaker 2: December twenty twenty three interview on Fox Business stating we
[40:23] Speaker 2: are very well known in Israel. Israel appreciates our product.
[40:25] Speaker 2: The partnership between Palenteer and Israel's military began to solidify
[40:29] Speaker 2: with a formal agreement signed on the twelfth of January
[40:31] Speaker 2: twenty twenty four, three months after the genocide of Palestinians
[40:34] Speaker 2: and gazab began, following a visit by company executives to Israel,
[40:37] Speaker 2: during which they held their first board meeting in of
[40:39] Speaker 2: the year in Tel Aviv. The recent carnage and Rafah
[40:41] Speaker 2: on the twenty sixth of May, in which Israel bombed
[40:43] Speaker 2: a refugee camp, killing dozens of Palestinians, and the deaths
[40:46] Speaker 2: of seven World Central Kitchen workers in April during airstrikes,
[40:49] Speaker 2: highlight the brutal misuse of Palateer's so called precision technology.
[40:52] Speaker 2: The company's Titan system, promoted as a highly accurate AI
[40:55] Speaker 2: model designed to enhance targeting precision, epitomizes the problems with
[40:59] Speaker 2: Palanteer's claimed accuracy capabilities. Well there is no direct evidence
[41:02] Speaker 2: that Titan specifically is used by Israel. The company's tech
[41:05] Speaker 2: claims are integral to its broader product offerings, some of
[41:08] Speaker 2: which are employed by Tel Aviv and this is something
[41:12] Speaker 2: we really need to talk about, is what do Palanteer's
[41:15] Speaker 2: products do on the ground. How are they integrated into
[41:19] Speaker 2: what has become like killing by several different states of
[41:22] Speaker 2: like large numbers of civilians. As Alex has gained wealth
[41:26] Speaker 2: and experience, he's come to some questionable conclusions about grand
[41:29] Speaker 2: strategy and the history of warfare. He seems to believe
[41:32] Speaker 2: that a three front war with the and China, Russia,
[41:35] Speaker 2: and Iran is inevitable. In otherwids, the US is going
[41:38] Speaker 2: to inevitably being a war with China, Russia, and Iran
[41:41] Speaker 2: all like either allied or at least working together. And
[41:44] Speaker 2: he seems to have come to this conclusion at least
[41:46] Speaker 2: as far back as the Biden administration. For Dowd's piece,
[41:50] Speaker 2: he argues, we have to keep going full tilt on
[41:52] Speaker 2: autonomous weapons systems because our adversaries will they don't have
[41:55] Speaker 2: the same moral considerations that we do. I think we're
[41:58] Speaker 2: in an age when nuclear deterrance is actually effective because
[42:00] Speaker 2: the West is very unlikely to use anything like a
[42:02] Speaker 2: nuclear bomb, whereas our adversaries might. He said, where you
[42:06] Speaker 2: have technological parity but moral disparity, the actual disparity is
[42:09] Speaker 2: much greater than people think. In fact, given that we
[42:11] Speaker 2: have parody technologically, but we don't have parody morally, they
[42:14] Speaker 2: have a huge advantage. You know what you see what
[42:16] Speaker 2: he's saying there right is well, we're not as evil
[42:19] Speaker 2: as our enemies, and so we can't beat them yet even.
[42:21] Speaker 3: Though we're the ones who've dropped the bombs. He's saying
[42:24] Speaker 3: they're going to drop the con eventually, and we all
[42:26] Speaker 3: know that. And then also the idea is that by
[42:29] Speaker 3: putting them together and calling them to your enemies, you're
[42:31] Speaker 3: basically forcing them to be together. Like do you not
[42:34] Speaker 3: have the possibility of.
[42:37] Speaker 2: Vincent conflict? Exactly? Yes. It's so fucking frustrating, Like so
[42:42] Speaker 2: much as of this is like really just like disgusting
[42:46] Speaker 2: and irrational leaps and logic. For one thing, if you
[42:48] Speaker 2: guys remember back on January sixth of twenty twenty one,
[42:52] Speaker 2: General Mark Millie was like reaching out to his colleagues
[42:56] Speaker 2: in Russia and China to be like, trust me, the
[43:00] Speaker 2: nukes are not gonna get fired. We have it under control.
[43:03] Speaker 2: No one's had to do that for China recently, not
[43:07] Speaker 2: apologizing for their government. But it's not China that I'm
[43:11] Speaker 2: most worried about nuking US. It's not Russia. I'm most
[43:13] Speaker 2: worried about firing off nukes right now.
[43:15] Speaker 3: You know, we're talking like low grade tactical nukes. They
[43:18] Speaker 3: are not the league candidates.
[43:19] Speaker 2: Mm mmmmm.
[43:20] Speaker 1: No.
[43:23] Speaker 2: It's also the idea that well, we have a disadvantage
[43:26] Speaker 2: if we're not as immoral as our enemies is complete horseshit. Historically,
[43:30] Speaker 2: for one thing, history is replete with examples of how
[43:33] Speaker 2: utterly am moral aware of warmonger's fair in conflict. Look
[43:36] Speaker 2: at the Empire of Japan in World War Two? Right,
[43:40] Speaker 2: Nazi Germany?
[43:41] Speaker 3: Right?
[43:42] Speaker 2: These are not people to imitate. And Kart basically says, well,
[43:46] Speaker 2: if we want to beat guys like that, we got
[43:48] Speaker 2: to become as bad as they are, which ignores the
[43:50] Speaker 2: important reality that this whole free three front war thing
[43:53] Speaker 2: only seems really likely now because we elected a factions
[43:55] Speaker 2: too utilized palled your software to help make thousands of
[43:58] Speaker 2: targeting decisions, and the disasterrous war of choice with iron.
[44:00] Speaker 2: So let's talk about that, But first, wan to pale
[44:04] Speaker 2: Oh yeah, let's talk about it, ads. I guess sorry,
[44:14] Speaker 2: we're back. One of Palenteer's big jobs for the Pentagon
[44:19] Speaker 2: is the creation of the Maven smart system. This had
[44:22] Speaker 2: initially been a Google contract, but employees there had protested,
[44:25] Speaker 2: leading the company to back away. Palentin responded to this,
[44:28] Speaker 2: seeing opportunity and by publishing a tweet by Alex Karp.
[44:32] Speaker 2: He said, quote, Silicon Valley is telling the average American,
[44:35] Speaker 2: I will not support your defense needs while selling products
[44:37] Speaker 2: that are adversarial to America. That is a loser position.
[44:41] Speaker 2: Palenter picked up the contract in twenty nineteen. First of
[44:44] Speaker 2: all an opportunist.
[44:45] Speaker 4: First of all, well done by the Google employees for.
[44:49] Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. The last time we'll
[44:52] Speaker 2: see stones like that that actually matter in a tech company.
[44:55] Speaker 2: But it was good to see.
[44:56] Speaker 3: Last time they were like, don't be evil and giving
[44:59] Speaker 3: that up.
[45:00] Speaker 2: I've given that. We're done now. Pallenteer isn't the only
[45:02] Speaker 2: contractor with Maven, but they are the backbone to the
[45:05] Speaker 2: project which has had, let us say, mixed success. Per
[45:08] Speaker 2: an article in Reuter's by David Jeans and Mike Stone,
[45:11] Speaker 2: Maven supported almost all of the thirteen thousand, five hundred
[45:14] Speaker 2: US strikes in Iran. This would include the February twenty
[45:16] Speaker 2: eight strike on that girls' school in Menabaran, which killed
[45:19] Speaker 2: between one hundred and fifty five and one hundred and
[45:21] Speaker 2: seventy five students. Reuter's continues, the question is why a
[45:24] Speaker 2: military system designed to move faster from information to action
[45:28] Speaker 2: has no equally clear public requirement to slow down after
[45:31] Speaker 2: grave civilian harm. In software engineering, an error budget is
[45:35] Speaker 2: meant to protect users when a service exceeds in a
[45:38] Speaker 2: greed level of failure. New releases stop until the problem
[45:41] Speaker 2: is understood and fixed. War is obviously not software, but
[45:44] Speaker 2: in Washington's AI assisted operations, civilian deaths do not automatically
[45:48] Speaker 2: trigger as temporary suspension of the relevant tools, an independent
[45:52] Speaker 2: review of the data, or a public account of the
[45:54] Speaker 2: decisions that led to the strike. Advocates of military AI
[45:57] Speaker 2: argue that better data and faster analysis can make attacks
[46:00] Speaker 2: more precise. That is possible in principle, but precision is
[46:03] Speaker 2: not something software simply possesses. It depends on the quality
[46:07] Speaker 2: and age of the data, what a system treats as suspicious,
[46:10] Speaker 2: and whether people have enough time to challenge its output.
[46:12] Speaker 3: Huh, and they're moving too fast and breaking things.
[46:17] Speaker 2: Right, says he doesn't like that. Right. In handing over
[46:21] Speaker 2: power to utilize a system like this to men like
[46:23] Speaker 2: Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth Karp has guaranteed its misuse improved.
[46:28] Speaker 2: His critics within the company dreadfully correct. I would not
[46:31] Speaker 2: presume to make this episode an end all, be all
[46:33] Speaker 2: summary of how Palateer works on the modern battlefield, but
[46:36] Speaker 2: I do want to end by discussing a paper by
[46:38] Speaker 2: Jessica Dorsey and Luke Moffatt. I read it hosted by
[46:40] Speaker 2: the liber Institute in West Points website. They accused Palenteer
[46:44] Speaker 2: of being a major driver of warrification. Quote. As we outline,
[46:48] Speaker 2: warification does not mean lawfare where law is used to
[46:51] Speaker 2: further strategical operational objectives. Instead, by turning war into a
[46:56] Speaker 2: verb warify, we highlight the active process of interpreting the
[47:00] Speaker 2: law under pressure from parties to armed conflict, which distorts
[47:03] Speaker 2: its original intent spirit. In essence, warification describes the process
[47:07] Speaker 2: through which activities, spaces, and technologies not traditionally associated with
[47:11] Speaker 2: armed conflict are reconstituted as legitimate components of warfare. It
[47:16] Speaker 2: is both a conceptual expansion and a practical one. The
[47:18] Speaker 2: boundaries of war stretch, and with them, the range of actors, tools,
[47:22] Speaker 2: and targets that become permissible. Recent developments in the use
[47:25] Speaker 2: of artificial intelligence for targeting in Iran and the conflict
[47:28] Speaker 2: in the wider Middle East offer a stark illustration of
[47:30] Speaker 2: warification and action. See, for example, Pallanteer's Maven smart system
[47:34] Speaker 2: and reports of large language models developed by Anthropic being
[47:37] Speaker 2: deployed in operational contexts. These systems are frequently framed as
[47:41] Speaker 2: ushering in an era of unprecedented precision and efficiency in warfare.
[47:45] Speaker 2: Yet the empirical reality, including the reported deaths of around
[47:49] Speaker 2: seventeen hundred civilians and recent hostilities in Iran, calls that
[47:52] Speaker 2: narrative into serious question. Syincom claimed it was generating one
[47:55] Speaker 2: thousand targets per hour, coupled with the high operational tempo
[47:58] Speaker 2: that has come to become a hallmark of modern warfare,
[48:01] Speaker 2: largely traceable to the Silicon Valley ethos of movefast and
[48:04] Speaker 2: break things. Such capabilities are often framed as enhancing precision,
[48:07] Speaker 2: but they also introduce new layers of abstraction between decision
[48:10] Speaker 2: makers and the consequences of their actions. If anything, the
[48:13] Speaker 2: integration of AI into targeting workflows may be accelerating very dynamics.
[48:17] Speaker 2: Warrification seeks to describe the normalization, diffusion, and expansion of
[48:22] Speaker 2: organized violence under the guise of technological refinement, and that
[48:26] Speaker 2: if you want to know an answer, what does Palaenteer
[48:29] Speaker 2: do to somebody in the most accurate term, They normalize,
[48:33] Speaker 2: they diffuse, and they expand organize violence under the guise
[48:37] Speaker 2: of technological refinement. That's what they do. They make violence
[48:41] Speaker 2: more acceptable to a larger number of people in a
[48:44] Speaker 2: wider number of areas, and they make that violence more
[48:47] Speaker 2: possible and easier for the state to achieve. And they
[48:50] Speaker 2: do this under the guise of making it more refined
[48:52] Speaker 2: and precise. That's what Palenteer does.
[48:55] Speaker 3: Anyway, at the street levels, al Capone tried doing the
[48:58] Speaker 3: same thing. Yeah, I mean honestly, he said, there's like,
[49:00] Speaker 3: how do I make my violence more palatable? I'll give
[49:02] Speaker 3: out the turkeys on Thanksgiving and then people will be like,
[49:04] Speaker 3: all right, he's doing a good thing. I mean. Also,
[49:07] Speaker 3: there's the point about them trying to expand their idea
[49:12] Speaker 3: of what is possible in war fighting. Yeah, but they're borrowing, yeah,
[49:16] Speaker 3: from like the Soviet Union and the Cold War. If
[49:18] Speaker 3: it correct me, if I'm if I'm getting this wrong,
[49:21] Speaker 3: they if my understanding had deep cover agents. They were
[49:23] Speaker 3: supposed to hit Romstein Air Force Base because it would
[49:26] Speaker 3: discombobulate the military response in case there was a reason
[49:29] Speaker 3: to go to like, you know, actual full on wars
[49:33] Speaker 3: and it's no longer a cold war but a hot war.
[49:35] Speaker 3: So they were supposed to kill the children at schools
[49:38] Speaker 3: because that would affect their parents, who were the Romstein
[49:41] Speaker 3: Air Force Base commanders. We form, what I understand, did
[49:43] Speaker 3: the same thing at minob with the girls school because
[49:45] Speaker 3: a lot of those girls were the daughters of IRGC commanders.
[49:48] Speaker 3: So they're kind of doing exactly the thing that they're
[49:50] Speaker 3: accusing the immoral Soviet Union of the past and now
[49:54] Speaker 3: the present Russia, Iran, China coordinated efforts. I don't think
[49:59] Speaker 3: they have a name, they don't have like an axis
[50:01] Speaker 3: of yet.
[50:01] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, because they're not we're technically literally part of
[50:05] Speaker 2: any kind of ally like organization or whatever, you know.
[50:08] Speaker 2: I don't know why, because at least the official statement
[50:10] Speaker 2: is that it was an accident based on outdated data,
[50:12] Speaker 2: that's why girls school was hit. I think it is
[50:15] Speaker 2: a perfectly reasonable theory as like, what was this part
[50:18] Speaker 2: of an attempt to like further discombobulate and fuck up
[50:22] Speaker 2: like the response overall, right, because that is I mean,
[50:25] Speaker 2: that is something that like happens in warfare planning. So
[50:28] Speaker 2: I'm not I'm not going to say that's not what
[50:29] Speaker 2: went down. I certainly I can't like also say Alex
[50:32] Speaker 2: Kark definitely wanted that or like news top secret clearance, Yeah, exact.
[50:37] Speaker 2: And again it's that's kind of his job is to
[50:40] Speaker 2: be the salesman, but also like the kind of friendly,
[50:43] Speaker 2: like nerdy academic face of this company that he's not
[50:46] Speaker 2: even allowed to know a lot of what they're doing,
[50:49] Speaker 2: as they are part of these vast slaughters that are
[50:52] Speaker 2: being carried out for no in part when they're talking
[50:55] Speaker 2: about like it paling your expanding the like what is
[50:59] Speaker 2: like acceptable targets of violence, what that means is the
[51:02] Speaker 2: way in which they identify who is like an enemy,
[51:04] Speaker 2: who do we have to go after. There's all these
[51:06] Speaker 2: different you know we talked about earlier. You can search
[51:08] Speaker 2: by like tattoos. There's all these different things that you know,
[51:11] Speaker 2: the software might decide, or like the people building the
[51:13] Speaker 2: software might say, this makes someone more likely you know,
[51:16] Speaker 2: to be in this instance an enemy or involved in
[51:18] Speaker 2: the insurgency or whatever, and all these factors are generating targets,
[51:22] Speaker 2: which means that it's much wider than like needing to
[51:24] Speaker 2: have any actual like on the ground intelligence that like
[51:27] Speaker 2: someone's doing something right, like that's not what's happening. The
[51:30] Speaker 2: fit profile, the number of yes, and the number of
[51:33] Speaker 2: things that can make you a military aged male, so
[51:35] Speaker 2: to speak. Ye get broader and broader as AI gets
[51:38] Speaker 2: brought into it, rather than in getting more precise.
[51:40] Speaker 3: They've abstractified humanity even more so because of exactly the
[51:44] Speaker 3: benefits to them of AI.
[51:46] Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, if you can categorize people more simply, then
[51:49] Speaker 2: you can kill them more effectively. Yep, that's the Palaintier promise.
[51:54] Speaker 2: So that's all I've really got to say about Alex
[51:57] Speaker 2: at this point. You know, he's still alive, still rich,
[51:59] Speaker 2: still run in palace here. None of those things will
[52:02] Speaker 2: be true. That's the way works.
[52:05] Speaker 4: That hair still talks the way he talks.
[52:07] Speaker 2: Will has that hair still talks the way he talks.
[52:09] Speaker 3: Still still tell me about the.
[52:13] Speaker 4: Yes, he's a weird weird he's a weird guy.
[52:17] Speaker 2: You got to know about how much the Germans like him.
[52:20] Speaker 2: I don't know if you're in Bragin or something, and
[52:22] Speaker 2: you see Alex Carr, maybe call him. He doesn't go
[52:24] Speaker 2: there still, if he ever did, I don't know why.
[52:27] Speaker 2: It suggests that the wind, Yeah, they wouldn't let him
[52:32] Speaker 2: in anymore. Okay, I think that probably does it for
[52:36] Speaker 2: us here at Behind the Bastards. Zaren you got anything
[52:39] Speaker 2: else you want to throw out at us, anything to plug.
[52:42] Speaker 3: Well, let's see on a ridiculous crime. We have an
[52:44] Speaker 3: interesting two part interview with the author Matthew Campbell about
[52:47] Speaker 3: his book The Man Who Stole the Gods. And it's
[52:49] Speaker 3: all about the Cambodian Civil War, Vietnam and some some
[52:53] Speaker 3: some you know art collectors who used that chaos to
[52:57] Speaker 3: pull statuary out of places like Anchor Watt and then
[52:59] Speaker 3: sell in New York and give it to the Met Museum.
[53:02] Speaker 3: Not give, but you know, donate to the Met Museum.
[53:05] Speaker 3: And it's interesting crossroads of history that a lot of
[53:07] Speaker 3: history people don't know, and a lot of things people
[53:09] Speaker 3: would instantly recognize about how rich get away with things
[53:12] Speaker 3: because they're rich.
[53:13] Speaker 2: Cool. Well check that out, everybody, and check us out.
[53:16] Speaker 2: Next week we'll be talking about another person I don't
[53:19] Speaker 2: like very much.
[53:20] Speaker 1: Yeah.
[53:20] Speaker 4: The Bye Behind the Bastards is a production of cool
[53:26] Speaker 4: Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our
[53:29] Speaker 4: website cool Zonemedia dot com or check us out on
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[53:36] Speaker 4: Full video episodes that Behind the Bastards are now streaming
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[53:43] Speaker 4: Netflix you don't miss an episode. For clips in our
[53:45] Speaker 4: older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel,
[53:49] Speaker 4: YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love
[53:53] Speaker 4: about forty percent of you, statistically speaking,

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