Palantir CEO Alex Karp: Why the West is Destroying Itself, Data Empire, Skeptics, How to Win

[Music] Sometimes traditional stock analysis just lets you down. That's how I feel about the stock of Poundinger. A billion dollars in quarterly revenue for the first time ever. The stock has just ripped. They have delivered here beyond the expectation and the expectations were obviously remarkably high. Carb's the kind of guy who kicks you know what and then he gets in your face afterwards and he tells you that he just did that. As usual, I've been cautioned to be a little modest about our bombastic numbers. If you work for Palanteer, everyone knows you're good. And to all supporters of Palanteer, merry Christmas and a happy New Year's. And to all people who hated on us, enjoy your cult. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Palunteer CEO Alex Carp. [Music]

Great to see you. Thanks for coming out. Hey, man. How are you?

Awesome.

How are you doing?

Well, thanks for coming out.

By the way, thank all of you guys. Great crowd. You have the best people. You have a lot of fans here.

Yeah.

Yesterday, we also had a number of protesters.

Hopefully enough.

Why are they—what are they protesting? They're protesting Alex Karp being here. Categorize for me what's going on. Who are the protesters? Why do they protest? Who are the fans? Why do they love you? What can you see?

Good taste. Good taste. Well, there is an issue of taste. I think you always have to try to steelman the other side. Probably the people protesting me have just heard that they should protest me. But if you ask why they could have an argument, or why you should like me—love me—in some cases, honestly, some of you guys like and love me more than I like myself, which takes a little work.

I think this audience, as an example, is almost unfair, because builders basically learn by watching highly talented people put a discount rate on everything anyone says and measure accomplishment based on outperformance against that discount rate. You'll find, if you're managing future builders, that a lot of people who are Palantir-shaped, de facto, get street cred by outperforming against expectations, where expectations are multiplied against a high discount rate.

I think what you'd find in this audience is 2 things converging. One, the journey of Palantir is completely counterintuitive, especially to technical experts. The FDE thing was viewed as if you weren't going to get a multiple. I was viewed as this magical wizard who could get the smartest people in the world to work on something that was de facto stupid.

We were, quote-unquote, terrible at public relations, and we stood up for the U.S. government even when it was really, really unpopular. There are a lot of people in the audience who agree with that. But, as importantly, look at the results. Look at the fruits we bore. Look at the people we have on our side.

Then you get to the other side. It would be easy just to dismiss the other side as stupid or as not knowing what's going on. Let's take the intellectually rigorous version of why you would be against what we're doing. There's a misconception that AI and technology are going to exclude everyone who's not in this room. A lot of people who are protesting are actually protesting the idea that there's no way to get into this room.

In fact, the way aptitude and the implementation of things have worked, they're just wrong. Because they've assumed that, they then go into what I would call super-regressive, nonworking philosophical or empirical models, where they assume the losers are noble. But what they're really assuming is that they can't win.

Then you get to more subtle things. I do think there's an issue with our elite institutions, which have taken the best and brightest and the most valuable things you could teach someone and turned them into something Stalinist that is anticorrelated with everything that works in the West, like individual accomplishment.

If you had to say what is the central thing we do in America better than anyone else, it's allowing people to express their individual artistry in a way where you win with no apologies. Because they think they're on the losing side of this, they assume morality can't be against them. They are trained to believe that and to understand it.

Of course, if you're a professor at Berkeley teaching about Heidegger, you think losing is good because you lost. That's the whole reason you think that. You think that because you are the noble loser. But again, where it gets super, super dangerous—and where I do think we have to do a better job—is that you can't just assume there's no truth in what they believe, which is that we have not done an adequate job of helping people at the bottom.

Is some part of their criticism about the situation in Gaza?

Oh, so now you can get to that. No. First of all, I get yelled at about—you know what I get yelled at most about? It's actually enforcing the border. That's number 1.

Our southern border.

Our southern border. Again, I'll go through all 3 issues. So, they're legitimate issues to go over, but I just want for those of you who don't know the history. For decades, I got yelled at primarily for supporting special operations in America. You just have to imagine that I'm being protested for bringing soldiers home alive and killing our enemies. These are people who serve our country and have been largely screwed by both parties. Both parties have totally screwed them.

So that's what I got yelled at about. I got yelled at about that every single day. Then I got yelled at under Biden, under Obama, Biden. Especially, obviously, if Trump is doing it, you're definitely getting yelled at for enforcing the border.

I don't understand how, in the world of AI, you cannot be for somewhat of a constrained border, because we can make it work for every single person who's actually American, and we can make laborers more valuable. We need extra labor that isn't either completely the most talented in the world, like many people in this room, or bringing skills.

Also, we have enough transparency. You can't say you don't know who's in your country. It's complete BS. It's completely anticorrelated, by the way, with being progressive. I grew up in the most progressive family ever, and every Friday night at Shabbat, there was a lecture on how the Republicans were screwing our country by undermining the worker and bringing in cheap labor.

So, okay, I got yelled at about that. Then I got yelled at—actually, mostly and then commercially—about how, “How could you have these FDEs? It's going to blow up your multiple.” Now everybody wants to be an FDE.

But now you're getting yelled at primarily about ICE. What's going on? Is the treatment just?

The one thing I would say—and we can go through each one of these individual things—is that the weird, obvious fact is this: If you care about not being surveilled illegally, if you care about the treatment of people who come into the country illegally but deserve adequate treatment, and if you care about lives in Gaza, in Ukraine, and all over the world where Palantir is used, you're going to want the best software in the world.

It's the only way you can reduce and more precisely target the people, justifiably, and actually the only way where you can say, “This person did this, and they deserve to go.” Each one of these things has to be steelmanned.

Let's do that for the second one, the border. Tucker said yesterday, when he spoke to President Trump, that there was no way to know: Is there 30 million? Are there 30 million people here illegally? 40 million? 50 million? Whatever it happens to be. You say you call BS on that. Is that right?

No, I just say we could easily do it. I'm not calling BS on that. I'm actually saying it's a very, very hard problem. But in the world of AI and software, you can't say it can't be done.

It could very easily be done if we put cameras everywhere and just did facial recognition. But we don't want to live in that.

It could be very easily done if you eviscerate our civil liberties.

Yeah. That's not being done, right?

That's like saying, “I could grow your revenue at 400%, but I'll lose money in perpetuity.” That's not a business.

Yeah, of course. And so let's talk about what the solution to that would be.

The border issue is actually a bit overstated. You have 80–90% of the country believing the border should be orderly. That is actually something that most people—

Okay, sorry, I just have to interrupt you. 80–90% of people believing in it happening are completely disconnected.

Of course, whatever the reason the Biden administration didn't do it, that's over, and now we're here and it's closed. But what would your solution be to identifying the people who are—

Well, again, I think you're jumping over a lot of things. It happened. Okay. What's interesting about political parties in America is that they're anticorrelated with what they claim.

Democrats claim to be progressive, like me. Having a border is not progressive. President Trump is conservative. Having a border is progressive. Unfortunately, until we change our polity so that the people actually get a say on the border—

By the way, the single best example of this is in Europe. How do you explain the complete dysfunction in Europe? Most Europeans—Germans, and there are many Germans in the audience—hello. How many of you guys are happy with the immigration situation you have in Germany? None. How many will talk about it publicly? How many will do anything?

The polity will frame the issue so that there is no solution. The only solution is to accept a solution no one wants. And that's what we had. It's not—and part of the problem is that the reason the border is such an interesting thing is that politicians do not want to address the real problems of society, which would mean that the workers of today have more value tomorrow than they have today, because they have no earthly clue how to do that.

They're like, “We'll just open the border and we'll get free labor, and if you're on the left, we'll get people who will vote for us.” The reason why, if you kind of steelman your questions—Gaza, Ukraine, the border—you have to raise the moral standard. Again, the way you led this is like, “If we just put up a camera, yes, you can stop terrorism, or you can have civil liberties.”

It's a little bit like you can have growth without revenue, or you can have revenue without growth. If you want to solve the problem, you have to increase civil liberties and stop people from being in your country illegally. The reason it doesn't happen is because there's slippage in the execution, which is absolutely purposeful.

If we don't want this country to be what Europe is now—and I lived in Europe most of my life—my grandmother, if German law made any sense, would be German, and I would have a German passport. If we don't want that, you have to close the border. You have to make sure that people who have a right to be here get to stay. People who don't have a right to stay get treated fairly.

By the way, both sides have to step up. It's not enough to say, “I'm against the border,” or whatever, but have no solution for what's going to happen to people, which is unfortunately my point.

What's your solution—just your personal solution—for what to do with the 30 million people who are here illegally? What would you do?

First of all, my personal solution would be to divide the pie. Everybody who's criminal, criminal-adjacent, or has anything to do with crime is going to leave, and I'm going to make it so that they self-deport, because I'm going to come tomorrow in a way you don't like. That's number 1. And there's 90%.

No, that's easy to agree on. Nobody wants felons here. It's easy to agree on.

Yeah, but the paradigm is that it's easy because, again, you're like, “Civil liberties”—but in any case, these things are much harder than they look. As an example, how do you do that without eviscerating our civil liberties? How do we make sure the criminals—how do you know someone's a criminal? What standard of practice do you use to define if someone's criminal? Are all criminals the same?

De facto, if you go with the broad brush the way you basically are, it's like, yes, but being in the country illegally is a felony. Killing someone, or potentially killing someone, is a different kind. How do you deal with the people who are around them? How do you deal with law-enforcement databases that aren't made public to you? How do you deal with imputed data? How do you deal with data? How do you—do you predict?

But that's the question. You're restating the question. I'm asking you to answer it.

Well, I'm restating the question. It's a question.

I think that's the thing. Let me—I'm hoping you'd answer it. Let me flesh this out a bit. Look, everyone on the right at least agrees that we should have a strong border. One of the criticisms or concerns that I hear on the right, or from civil libertarians, is that Palantir has a large-scale data-collection program on American citizens—not foreign terrorists, not illegals, but American citizens. Can you just clear that up and say either that Palantir is not doing that, or under what circumstances you do?

Yeah. First of all, I just want to say that, technically, there's a version of this answer that I'm going to give you. We had a Democratic administration come to us and basically ask us to do a Muslim database. You would think, given the way I'm kind of besmirched as some kind of—I don't know, it's like a Jewish conspiracy—that would be the first thing, according to them, I would do. We've never done anything like this. I've never done anything like this.

I love these questions about skeptics because I actually love skeptics. I tend to divide the world into Palantir Derangement Syndrome, which I don't spend a lot of time on, and people who are anti-builder; Palantir skeptics; and people who don't like Palantir. If you're a Palantir skeptic or you don't like us, I want to engage.

Any technology that works can be abused. We are the single worst technology to use to abuse civil liberties, which is, by the way, the reason why we could never get the NSA or the FBI to actually buy our product. Until recently, intelligence institutions would never buy our product. You laugh because it's obvious: if you want to do data analytics in a way that eviscerates our civil liberties, you don't want ACLs, you don't want branching, and you don't want pipelining.

You don't want logs.

You don't want logs, and you don't want serialization and deserialization in your product. If you have serialization and deserialization in your product, that's intelligible. You are basically creating a product that's going to be really, really hard to abuse. The logs are immutable in Palantir.

The single most civil-liberties-heavy place in the world is hating on us every day. And you know what they're buying every day? Palantir. It's called Europe.

And you know why? Sorry, I want to get to this because this is important. I get basically attacked by skeptics and anti-Palantir people who deserve an answer. By the way, this is a lesson for you: do not believe anything I'm saying. If you're online watching—I don't know, Nick Fuentes—call me part of the Jewish conspiracy. Do yourself a favor and say, “Yeah, that could be really interesting.” Spend 20 minutes looking at the product.

Spend 20 minutes looking at the product and say, “Is this not the hardest product to abuse in the world? Is it not built to be?” By the way, then I'll get to direct answers to your questions. Those civil-liberties protections we built into Palantir Gotham are the same things that we use to orchestrate large language models, the same way we orchestrate internally, and the same things you will need to make any enterprise in the world work.

Every enterprise in the world, public or private, needs serialization and deserialization, ACLs, branching, and some kind of scaffolding to make the LLMs work. That means the LLMs have the ability to do a taxonomy on your business without touching the business; that you can control where they're deployed; that they don't have access to your data; that you have immutable logs; and that you can measure the output against high-fidelity data sets that can be viewed in any permissible way, with the permissions enforced.

It's the hardest product in the world to abuse. I'm telling you, we've never done anything like this. Please verify. Do not trust me. Certainly, do not trust the P.E. By the way, as a rule, the one thing I would say critically on the outside is: do not trust anyone who's never built anything.

It's so easy to have all these opinions about how the world works, how data works, how businesses work, and how we got off the ground. “I'm a conspiracy. Somehow they gave it to me, but not you,” even though I'd be the least likely person to get to sue the U.S. government twice. We had to hire the most important engineers in the world and be laughed and shat upon by the whole world for 20 years before anyone took it seriously, because we were a conspiracy.

You know why people believe it? Because they've never had a job. They've never built anything. There's no—that's just not the way the world works. For me to succeed, just like for you to succeed, you're going to have to be 10 times better than anyone else in the room, or you will fail. That's true for me. That's true for you. That's true for every American.

And it's always been true.

It's always been true. Anyone who tells you that's not true, you are the mark. You are the mark. If you're being taught—and that's what I would tell the protesters or the college students—you are the mark. They're telling you I'm succeeding because I just got it handed to me and somehow it's unfair.

No one handed anything to anyone at Palantir. Palantir Gotham is still the best product on the market. No one even tries to compete with Foundry. Go ahead. Go try to build it. Try to organize a team of people as good as Palantirians. Go ahead. Try, try, try to do it for 20 years. Try to build a visioning game.

I would like to try to ask a question.

Sorry. One second.

All I want to say is I'm glad you're on our side.

So then, my lord, try to build ontology and FDEs 5 or 6 years before anyone thought it was a thing. Try to raise the capital. Try to be laughed at. But to your questions: no, we are not surveilling U.S. citizens.

No, our data is not being used to aggregate and create an imputed view. You could say, “Do you do it directly? Do you do it indirectly?” That’s a fair question. No. Would I do this? You don’t have to believe me, but I’ve never done this in 20 years. I do a lot of constructive engagement internationally, including with countries, because people know I’m kind of on their side in the West.

I’ve told every single major leader I’ve ever dealt with that I would not do something, and it’s cost—and, by the way, it’s cost Palantir a lot of money. We never worked with China. We never worked with Russia. We never worked with adversarial countries. We got laughed out of the same room.

Okay. This morning, there was a report that there was some sort of attack that Israel conducted inside Qatar against the terrorists of Hamas. I just want to give you a chance to talk about Israel, Gaza, and that whole conflict. You’ve talked about it a lot, and you have a lot of opinions. People have tried to attack you and mischaracterize some of the things you said.

Well, actually, they’ve often characterized what I’ve said correctly.

Oh. Okay.

For me, there are just fundamental issues. Does Israel have a claim to the land? Yes. Does Israel have a right to defend itself? Yes. Has Israel done something America would not have done under these circumstances? I think America would have been a lot more brutal.

Now you get to the humanitarian thing, and I’ll say, abstracting from there, I believe progressives in this country are working day and night to hurt poor people in this country. I don’t believe they’re progressive. Through direct and indirect engagement, I am clearly not in favor of Palestinian innocent people being killed. I am not in favor of that.

The question is, are you allowed to fight a war? The other point is, if you want to minimize innocent human life being killed, you’re going to have to use software. This is going to have to be better in the future than it is now. It’s true that Israel’s ratio of innocent to non-innocent casualties is better than anyone has ever had in the history of humanity, and it’s going to have to be better in the future.

Does your software help send aid to the refugees, or can it?

You have to be very careful. I can’t go into exact detail. I’m not allowed to say where we’re used and where we’re not used. But sometimes there’s a trick people do: “Oh, I’m not used for this, and I’m not used for that,” when, in fact, we are used in Israel.

As a generalization, what we’re used for in Israel is something most people in this audience would be very supportive of, and it’s actually been very precise and deadly. I support that.

Alex, yesterday we had Tucker here, and he made some references to opening borders, declining fertility rates, and actual programs for assisted suicide in Canada—all of which may speak to the West’s intention of committing suicide. Do you think the West generally is committing suicide? If so, why? What gets us here?

You have to disambiguate America. I walked around your audience. This isn’t an audience committing suicide. This is an audience fighting to win.

Before I get to this question, the one thing I would tell you guys is that you’re going to have to fight to win, because currently I’m one of the few people onstage who speak up. You’re going to have to speak up and explain to people why you have the right to win, or it may be taken from you. You’re going to have to fight.

By the way, I don’t mean left or right here. Both parties need a little bit of a kick in the ass here. We have a right to win. We need to win. You have an individual right to fight to win in this country, and it should not be taken away from you. It could be, if you don’t stand up and tell people, “No, your idea is ridiculous. Let me explain to you how this works.”

The country I spent half my life in—I wrote this Ph.D. in Germany—is a country I know. I know France reasonably well, actually. When I’m talking about Europe, Europe is obviously not Europe. You have Eastern and Western Europe, and Eastern European countries are very, very different from Western European countries. Denmark is very different, and the Nordics are very different.

But generally, when people in this country are talking about committing suicide, they’re really thinking, in their mind’s eye, of Germany. It’s a country that arguably had the best industrial base in the world before software and AI, the best schools in the world, and vocational schools. Germany never neglected its working class. You have 2 different kinds of vocational schools in Germany, for lower-level and high-level vocational training. In Germany, vocational training puts you on the factory floor doing important things, and you earn a real salary with real benefits your whole life and have rights.

It has the best healthcare, the best life, and, for those of you who embrace a lascivious lifestyle, by far the best. Think about it. It has the highest level of data protection and the highest level of integrity. It was in the best position to win.

Suddenly, they blew up the energy market. They blew up immigration, and they blew up, essentially, their tech scene. Now it’s very hard to answer the question, “What is the future?”

As a kind of sideline diagnostic, Peter and I—whom they should be calling every day on speed dial—they spend every day talking about us. For those of you who are German, you’ll know: every single day, 3 times a day, it’s, “Peter Darth Vader and I'm Lord Cyph.” Meanwhile, they should be calling us.

The way you commit suicide in the West is that you stop believing your particular culture has something superior in it. Yes, Germany screwed up a lot of stuff in World War II, but to believe that there’s nothing special, unique, and uniquely valuable about German culture is insanity. It’s complete insanity. There’s nothing wrong with saying you’re proud to be German. In Germany, you’re literally far right of center if you’re like, “I’m proud to be German.”

One of the crazy things about Palantir is how German we are. We take everything to the nth degree and then recatenate the thing before we make a decision. Every single person at Palantir.

So, I get that Germany has this problem, to some degree, with being able to look in the mirror, but what about France and Britain? They won World War II. Why are they pursuing the same policies?

Canada.

And the policy we’re talking about, just to be clear, is allowing an extreme amount of immigration.

Well, I’m trying to ask if there’s a thread that can connect these things. Again, the jump-off place here is that, for very different and very nonconnected reasons, they all decided there was nothing special about their culture.

Right?

France would be an even better example, because they have a much better narrative. They actually had a resistance. It wasn’t as big as people say, but it existed.

The crazy thing about LLMs is that they should have been built in France. The whole center of gravity should be in France. The 2 best math cultures in the world are Russia and France, and we hire ad nauseam from France.

But France gave up on 2 things, and France actually might be the better example. For those of you who aren’t French, France is religiously focused on meritocracy. They have this one school you have to get into. It’s all about math. The reason it’s about math is that the socialists in France decided that having a high verbal IQ was class-based. They therefore adhered religiously to meritocracy, and the whole definition of it is mathematical aptitude.

France is complicated. You have the far right, the far left, and everything in between, somehow. It’s very hard to articulate in France why you think French culture is better than any other culture in Europe from a French perspective.

Concretely, if you want to build a product, if you build it in France, it should be absolutely mathematical and aesthetic. If you build it in Germany, it’s going to have to be conceptual and manufacturing-based. You’re going to have a different tech scene and a different way of organizing it.

Last but not least—and this is the thing we have to fight for the most—they’ve become anti-meritocratic. If you’re in Germany or France and you’re the best of the best of the best, you’re going to wait 30 years before you have a real job.

Why had they become anti-meritocratic?

Well, there are again the people out there protesting, or the faculty members at Berkeley who have taught them to protest. A lot of strays from Berkeley. We could pick on Stanford, but they equate morally losing in the real world with winning immorally, and it seems like a crazy way to think because, in the end, everyone—

Christian value.

I ask this because I heard someone give a talk about this, where the moral spectrum used to be strong and weak. You know, cavemen: the strongest would survive and the weakest would die, and that was how we measured what was right and wrong. Then what became right and wrong was this notion of good and evil: turn the other cheek, compassion, et cetera.

Now, look, there are many, many different schools of Christianity. Even in this case, Lutheran Christianity and French Catholic Christianity are basically not correlated. They're both Christian. What's special about America was Calvinism: we are the most Calvinist culture in the world, and actually the protesters are anti-Calvinist.

What does Calvinism mean? Calvinism celebrates success. De facto, almost everybody in America—whether you're Jewish, Muslim, or Christian—the underlying backdrop of America is this Calvinist view. And the anti-Calvinist cultures of Europe, Lutheranism, and other kinds of cultures, they do equate—behind every great success is a great crime, a famous Voltairean classic.

We don't have this in this country. If this slips, you basically end up in a situation where everybody who is succeeding, or is perceived to be in a group that is disproportionately succeeding, ends up on the firing line. What does that happen to the whole society?

Are we seeing that with anti-Semitism?

One of the more interesting facts about France is that between 1961 and 1991, its GDP grew faster than America's.

So this is a very special culture. The anti-Semitism—

Well, I don't particularly like it. I actually think it should be disambiguated. Someone liking or not liking a Jewish person, or being skeptical of Jews, that's irrelevant. Somebody who has Jewish derangement syndrome and wants to burn down the whole society to get rid of the obvious fact that Jews do well under a meritocratic situation—that's a problem for everybody, not just for Jews.

It should be very much focused. In private, I'm very critical of advocacy groups, and I'm constantly hanging up on them. Of course I'm not going to give you any money. That's the most ridiculous thing ever. It's the best culture in the world.

The thing that becomes dangerous is when you have derangement syndrome. If you're a classical liberal, the inputs have to be really, really fair—as fair as we can make them—and the outputs are never going to be fair.

Alex, can I ask you about China for one second? We talked with Tulsi yesterday, and one of the things, just to connect the dots, is that we were able to designate these cartels as terrorist organizations. There's all this drug flowing in, and we're trying to shut that down. The precursors are still coming in very aggressively from China.

I'm curious: what is the geopolitical frame that we need to think about China in? How much are they facilitating everything that's happening at the southern border? How responsible may they be for the fentanyl epidemic in the United States? What should we do about it?

Well, it's funny. Obviously Palantir and I are wildly skeptical of the CCP, but I think I'm the highest-ranked Tai Chi practitioner in corporate life in the world.

You're, like—sorry, say that again. You're, like, high-level Tai Chi—

That video was very high-level internal martial arts. I'm not at that level, but among my corporate peers, it's like, yeah, I have the equivalent, in VO2 max terms, of, like, a 72 or something like that in Tai Chi.

The way the kind of part of the culture that I admire works in Tai Chi is that you put pressure on all parts of the system to expose the weak part of the system internally of your adversary. That's just the way Chinese—at least Tai Chi martial arts—works. They're not useful for fighting, but they are very useful for thinking.

If you want to engage with China, in Tai Chi terms, you better make sure the internal dynamics of this country are very strong. Magically, the external dynamics over there will shift.

They're trying to destabilize our country with fentanyl and TikTok, and you have concerns about—

Well, okay. Obviously—

Yeah, obviously.

But again, I'll tell you what. They're obviously—

I'm in full agreement.

No, yeah. No, but my version always of this is: it's their job to stabilize us; it's our job to be stable. Most people here are running successful businesses—

Well said. It's our job to be stable.

It's our job to be stable. The Tai Chi version of this is: you're not going to have to enter the fight if you're strong. There is no fight. If there's a fight, you're not a martial artist—the famous martial arts idea.

Correct.

This is the same thing in business. When you get to the point where you're competing with someone, you've really screwed something up. If you look at the Palantir version: do FDEs, do Ontology, orchestrate them at scale, grow 93%. Man, people don't want to work with the US government. People are like, "That's kind of hard and really unfun."

Let me give you a precise question here about these cartels who are bringing fentanyl into the country. They're killing 100,000 Americans a year. On 9/11, we lost 3,000 people, tragically. If they're not terrorists, then how would you define them? Should we be using the same test in our engagement with them, and should we be eliminating them as terrorists with prejudice?

I obviously agree with that. I think, honestly, the problem is that they even think they can get away with this. One of the more interesting things is, when you read people who are against America taking out these narco-terrorists, it's always something like, "We've got to use a reified—meaning overly deterministic—form of law," to the point where America has to die.

Back to your question.

Yeah. Due process for al-Qaeda makes no sense.

Well, the interesting thing here, actually, with a point of agreement, is that if you allow—okay, to take just an obvious example of fraud, Human Rights Watch—they'll take a standard, they'll move the standard, and the downstream consequence of it is that we've got to disappear and die, right?

But then, even worse than that, they're actually paving the way for fascism because Americans, and no one else, are going to tolerate that level of dysfunction. These are killing 50,000 to 100,000 of our people. The fact that they think they can get away with this is a real problem.

We should just—and the fact that somebody's going to say it's—again, you have the European version. If you allow it, you have to protect the data and find the terrorists, because otherwise you get a form of fascism. You get it on the left because we have terror attacks and fentanyl across our streets, and you get it on the classic far right, which is—

Alex, what did you mean earlier when you said progressives want you to be poor? I may be paraphrasing it, but what—

The modern progressive movement is clearly not progressive. Progressive is defined by the working class doing better tomorrow than it did today and knowing it.

Right. Okay.

To do that, you need things that you can do at scale now: vocational training on AI-based systems, making our laborers more valuable, obviously closing the border so that you don't reduce the amount that you pay people, and also eviscerate legal protections.

This is not progressive. It's not progressive, by the way, to have so little competence or willingness to use force that we get overrun by drugs. Who do those drugs go to? Disproportionately poor people of color.

It's not progressive to have crime rates. To be a civil war zone, to be a war zone, you have to have 5 deaths per 100,000. That's like half our cities. How's that progressive? What do you mean? You care about poor people so much, you're just going to let them kill each other?

All right, can you shift gears here? Alex, I think you've developed a little bit of a reputation as a defender of the West, and you've talked about that here. I'm wondering, can you criticize any aspect of Western foreign policy? For example, during the War on Terror, was it a good idea to occupy Afghanistan?

I've never been a neocon. I actually don't think that's the pro-Western approach. The pro-Western superiority thing is that we do what we do really well. Why are we trying to make people like us? I've never understood this.

By the way, the neocon thing, the pro-migration people, and the pro-occupation people abroad—it's the same philosophy. I don't actually think migration is working in the West because people don't want to change. Why are we teaching the Arab Middle East how to live better?

The countries that I won't go into by name that seem to love and revere me and Palantir, they're doing really well. They have a way of living their life. It works really well. It largely involves different ways of living than we would.

There’s no First Amendment. There’s really not a Fourth Amendment. And I’m not that interested in that. By the way, I think that destabilizes everyone.

So I am very in favor of using force where it’s needed. But force where it’s needed and doing occupation are completely different things.

You will see across the world people who want to convince Afghan villagers to be pro-feminist will also explain to you that the people who end up coming here are going to be pro-Western in their values three generations out.

I want to thank you for being on our side, and I want to thank my wife for buying your stock at $20.

Thank you.

No, Alex, we deeply appreciate you being here. I think that your voice is one of the most important voices in the world today, and I thought this was such an important voice to bring forward. I don’t see you do a lot of long form. I don’t see a lot of your long form get public.

I think this is so important for everyone to hear, to swallow, to digest, and hopefully to evolve and grow from it. I really appreciate you. Thank you so much for being here today. Please join me in thanking Alex Karp.

Thank you. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, sir.