August 11, 2026 • 51 mins
Robert begins his exploration of the early life of Alex Karp, current CEO of Palantir and best friend to Peter Thiel. He traces Alex's journey from left-wing academic to overlord of an "Anti-Woke" defense contractor.
Sources:
Robert Evans
Sun, Aug 16, 7:55 PM (21 hours ago)
to me
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/alex-karp-from-dyslexic-outsider-ai-war-ceo-michael-murphy-asslc/
https://archive.is/mITxe#selection-2543.0-2557.72
https://archive.is/aVOyY#selection-1659.0-1671.192
https://kristindemontfort.substack.com/p/alex-karps-aggression-in-the-lebenswelt
https://kristindemontfort.substack.com/p/alex-karps-aggression-in-the-lebenswelt
https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-what-the-company-does/
https://medium.com/coriers/can-palantir-take-over-the-entire-data-stack-e9a40b842d0c
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Alsome Media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we
tell you everything you don't know about the very worst
people in all of history and today. And this is
a today episode. We're covering a guy who's not dead yet,
so his bastardy is still ongoing. So you should consider
these episodes. The first two parts of our episodes on
Alex Karp, the CEO of Palenteer, and to talk to
(00:29):
me about Alex and Pallentier. I have the great Zaren Burnett, Zaren,
you work on Ridiculous Crime, a great iHeart podcast and
also very special episodes. Thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Thank you for having me. Thank you both. Robert Sophia
really stoked to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
So what do you know about Palenteer and Alex Karp?
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Yeah, what do you know? But before we get to that,
tell us a little bit about your shows real quick, okay.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Ridiculous Crime is a show similar to yours where we
tell each other stories and one person it doesn't know
what the story is going to be. So me and
my co host, Elizabeth Dutton, we have a show that
the tagline says is ninety nine percent murder free and
one hundred percent ridiculous. So it's true crime stories without
the murder, and they're always pretty insane.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Well lots of murders today.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
It's nice change for me, change of pace, and then
very special episodes. The other show I do is kind
of like a magazine style audio show. They're like little
movies where we kind of do feature stories that often
take place in the recent past, sometimes very far a
long time ago, and they have hosts interaction, sometimes with
the actual people. Sometimes it's just participants to rye witnesses
(01:38):
or experts, authors. You get the idea.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Well, awesome, that sounds great. We love another podcast idiot
format show, which is I think the term that got developed. Ah.
What do you know about Alex Karp and Palenteer, Sarah?
Speaker 3 (01:52):
I know more about Palenteer than I know about Alex
carb Alex Carp. Every time I read about them, he
pisses me off, so I kind of have liked to
keep him at arms length approach. I'm forced to know
about him.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
He's a real skinny, athletic guy with like curly hair, Yeah,
curly hair that looks a little bit like in the
explosions that he helps to facilitate. Yes, and he does
tai chi a lot while standing around and talking to people.
Like one of his the things interviewers and his colleagues
will note about him is that, like, if you're just
talking with Alex during a meeting, he'll periodically just start
(02:21):
doing taichi. That's the way I think because his ADHD like,
I think it's a self managing methods.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
Sure it is stemming. He needs to move the energy around.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Right, right, right. We all have a thing that we do.
You know, for some of us, I would say honorable,
god fearing, decent people. We just picked drugs. Alex just
take drugs, you know, but he's got to do his
fucking tai chi or whatever. He was heart rate low.
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Anyway, I chose gardening.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Oh that's a good one. Yeah, gardening and drugs is
a fantastic one.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
It's very easy to mix your gardening and your drugs
if you know what you're doing. So this week we
are going to be talking about Alex is one of
the more immediately danger subjects we have ever covered. I've
talked about periodically. I'll have one of these modern bastards.
There's a lot of guys that I think are are
awful and dangerous. There's not a lot of them that
I think are like really formidable, and Alex is really formidable.
(03:13):
He is not a stupid man. He is not a
foolish person. He is a planner and a thinker, and
unfortunately he's quite good at what he does. I've said
similar things about Peter Teel Teal is also kind of
losing his mind lately, Like if you think back to
our episodes on the Antichrist stuff, I'm hearing a lot
more disordered thinking from Peter than I that I previously had.
I think Alex is still kind of got a gimlet
(03:36):
eye on the straight and arrow. He knows exactly what
he's going for and what he's building, and I think
that makes him very frightening.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
He's got that Kissinger level focus.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Yeah, yeah, he kind of does. And obviously, Karp is
best known for his work as the CEO of Palentier.
Most people don't really know much about what Palanier does.
It's usually described as a data broker that works for
a bunch of different like intelligence agencies and also like
large corporations. That's not truly accurate. Pellanteer like data broker
isn't exactly the right thing to call them. What they
(04:05):
really do is provide methods for large organizations to analyze
and draw conclusions from data that they already have and
are gathering. But because of the agencies they work for,
a lot of that data is used to, for example,
plan a series of air strikes on Iran. Right, Like,
that's that's kind of what Palenteer does. We'll talk more
about that in part two.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
So they're the new rand corporation.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
Well, it's more what they're doing is newer than that, right, Okay,
they're trying to provide what you have in the modern
era in the twenty first century, is you have both
like intelligence agencies and governments and also corporations are taking
in so much more data than it ever existed in
the entire world before. Palenteer is one of a number
of companies that helps them organize it, and at least
(04:45):
in terms of what they do. A lot of people
say that they're the best at it. There's arguments about that,
but that's the gist of what Palenteer is, and so
it's it's not really a company like palenter couldn't have
existed until the twenty first century. Really, yes, yeah, so
for years you'd basically only read or hear about Alex.
Carr described as like Peter Teal's sidekick, almost an Igor
(05:07):
like figure. Right. If Peter Teal is doctor Frankenstein, he's
this Igor guy in the background, right, this caretaker he
puts in charge of his techno spy corporation. Right. And
when Alex was described in the detail at all, and
I think if you go back even to my Peter
Teal episodes, I think I described him, quoting another article
as a neo Marxist, Right, A lot of people would
(05:27):
call him that. He was noted as being Peter's weird
left wing friend who's running palanteer. Interesting, Yeah, that's not
quite accurate to how he is today, but it's certainly
like a part of his journey. And depending on how
you encounter Alex in the wild these days, when you
run into quotes from him, he does still sometimes seem
like the sanest man in the room, if Silicon Valley
(05:48):
tech CEOs could be considered a room. Just this July,
the Wall Street Journal described him as quote saying what
every angry CEO is thinking about AI. Quote he declared
that something has gone completely wrong and the relationship between
AI labs and their customers. Speaking at a frenetic pace,
the tech company boss rattled on about AI labs hyping
their capabilities, overcharging for tokens or units of aiuse, all
(06:08):
while insisting that he wasn't throwing shade at rivals. While
doing just that, Karp, who counts some of the largest
US companies as well as the government as clients, added
at every single enterprise I deal with, these people are livid.
They're like, I am paying for tokens that create more
value and so year. Stuff like that. For alex is like, oh, well,
maybe he's like one of the people who hasn't completely
lost his mind, you know. But in other times he
(06:30):
sounds increasingly authoritarian and even monomaniacal. After donating to support
Kamala Harris's presidential campaign in twenty twenty four, he has
pivoted in the last couple of years towards pro MAGA messaging.
In November of twenty twenty five, he quoted W. B.
Yeats in a letter to shareholders. You all know the line.
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Politico described the
(06:50):
letter to shareholders as a peculiar part of an even
more peculiar letter, where he proceeded to warn against the
dangers of proclaiming the equality of all cultures and cultural values.
Alex is going on one, and he's clearly one of
these guys who's been sort of seized by this anti
woke mania that swept through Silicon Valley and a lot
of like particularly the East Coast intelligencia set. I don't
(07:13):
know how much I think Alex believes that as much
as he thinks that it's the safest thing to be saying.
But we'll come back to that a little later. In
February of twenty twenty six, Karp shared a pre recorded
video with employees addressing concerns that some of them had
expressed over Pallenteer working with ICE to deport people. Karp
defended supporting ICE, claiming Democrats and Republicans both prioritized the
(07:33):
issue and that Pallanteer, by which he meant himself, had
zero issue providing the Trump administration with whatever it needed.
Of all the Silicon Valley CEOs, then, who have bent
the knee to Donald Trump, Karp is the one whose
own background seems like it shouldn't have led him down
that path. But after critiquing Trump's first term, he's become
what The New York Times is Michelle Goldberg called a
(07:54):
trump enabler. So how did he go from being a
kid who wore a kefia at protests and spoke out
against race violence by cops to proudly bragging that Pallanteer
was the first completely anti woke company, that my friends,
is a journey and we're going to go on it. Now.
This guy's covered some ground in his life. You got
to say that at least a lot.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Of times with these like modern day people that are
so obviously evil, they're not interesting.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
They don't have like a story. Peter Thiel's always wanted
to kill democracy, right, Yeah, Alex took some steps.
Speaker 4 (08:24):
You know, it's usually pretty easy to figure out and like, yeah,
it's like okay, because we get we get asked all
the time to do these like Republican politicians or so
and so, and it's like they're a brand of got
they're just not interesting.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yeah, but Alex isn't that, Yeah, how.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Did we get here?
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Tell us? I'm like, yeah, So the number one book
about Karp right now is also his only biography, Michael
Steinberger's The Philosopher in the Valley and I would say
Steinberger's take on carp which is a critical one. He's
not a guy who like drinks. This dude's kool aid entirely.
He describes him as like a principled and fiercely intelligent
young man with a reflexive need for contrarianism, following his
(09:03):
own self interest to a dark destination and never quite
letting himself admit that's what's happened, right. I think that's
like the short answer to what happened to this guy?
And the long answer is everything we're going to talk
about here. So Alex's father is Bob Karp, a German
Jewish working class man whose own father was a guidance
counselor and a carpenter, and who himself became a pediatrician.
(09:24):
So his dad, Bob is a doctor. Right now, While
in med school, Bob meets Alex's wife, Leah James, who
is an inspiring artist from Illinois and the great granddaughter
of a former enslaved person. Both Bob and Leah have
their issues as a couple, as all parents do. Bob
grew up a wash in progressive politics, and he was
drawn to Leah because she was black and per Steinberger quote,
(09:45):
dating Leah was a powerful way of signaling his progressivism.
This isn't what Bob says. I don't know that it's
what Leah says, but it's what both Alex and his
brother believe about their dad. That he got with their
mom because it was a way of like woke signaling.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Basically, yesization of the mother.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Okay, interesting, right, right, Yeah, so we're starting offs.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
All of us are already like okay, okay.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
Yeah. So Alex and his younger brother Ben both seem
to be in agreement on this point. And while Steinberger
notes that a genuine romance eventually developed between Bob and Lea,
that doesn't seem to be how his kids kind of
interpreted things because of what happens later. But they have
Alex on October second, nineteen sixty seven, he's born in
New York City. Alex is never going to forgive his
(10:31):
parents for getting married and creating him as what he
saw as the result of identity politics. Quote from Steinberger.
He felt as if he had been the product of
virtue signaling, and it bothered him. And now, what I
don't know is how early this bothers him, right, Because
there's not a lot of signs that this is upsetting
him in his early life. This may be something that
like he more comes back to later. That's kind of
(10:52):
unclear to me, but later in life. Carp Will insists
that he never personally experienced racism as a biracial man
in America, and as a kid, he primarily identified with
and was socialized as a black kid, right, Like, that's
how he grows up. That's what real of his friends. Yeah,
that's all of his friends will say. That's how we
saw him, right, Yeah, and how he is Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
So he's kind of got a Clarence Thomas thing going
where he like starts out in a little bit progressive,
definitely black, and then moves away from that as fast
as he can.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
And he's you know, the complication being that he's also biracial,
and so he's both black and Jewish. That's a confusing
you know, especially in the sixties milange of identities.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
Maybe being biracial. I relate to that. It can be
confusing in terms of how the world reacts to you. Yeah,
your own self identity shouldn't be as confusing.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah, And it doesn't seem like it is initially right
and don't get a lot of a hint of that.
Alex grows up in Philadelphia, and Philadelphia in the sixties
obviously is a wash in racial violence. There is a
lot of particularly like racist white cops really fucking with
black people in Philadelphia. Frank Rizzeau is the zil yeah right. Alex, though,
is going to grow up insulated from this because his
(11:58):
home is a neighborhood called mount Airy, and mount Airy
is a really abnormally progressive place. And here again Alex
encounters loud in public identity politics because the mount Airy
neighborhood had been founded initially by Dutch Mennonites. And if
you know anything about the Mennonites and the United States,
you know the Mennonites have been correct about eighty percent
of the time when they've disagreed with the rest of
(12:18):
the country, usually correct the Mennits. In an article for
Philadelphia Federal Bank, Keith Rowland and Kyle de Maria right
of mount Airy quote. In the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties,
African Americans faced widespread hostility and resistance from white residents,
real estate agents, and city officials when they tried to
buy homes in white neighborhoods in northeastern and Midwestern cities.
(12:39):
In contrast, in mount Airy, as well as in Shaker Heights,
Ohio and Oak Park, Illinois, middle class white home owners
and some renters, motivated by the goals of racial justice
following World War Two, tried to intentionally integrate their communities,
welcome African Americans, and allay the fears of white residents.
And that article cites a book called Making Good Neighbors
written by Abigail Perkins. Abigail grew up up in mount
(13:00):
Airy and became a professor of history, and she writes
around the country. Small groups of homeowners opted not to
give into the belief that racial transition necessarily brought about
neighborhood decline. Instead of meeting would be black buyers with
antagonism or acquiescing to the efforts of blockbusting realtors, these residents,
largely white and middle class, decided to welcome their new neighbors.
Beginning with a coordinated pledge in the mid nineteen fifties,
(13:21):
homeowners in Mount Airy waged a community wide battle towards
intentional integration through innovative real estate efforts, creative marketing techniques,
religious activism and institutional partnerships. Residents work to preserve the
viability of their community by replacing residential segregation with residential integration.
They sought to disrupt a system of separation and thus
infuse their daily lives with the experience of interracial living.
(13:42):
So he grows up in like this really not unique
because there are a few neighborhoods like this, but he
gets extraordinarily fortunate at this place that is really making
an effort to integrate and doing so in a ground
up way rather than like a way where this National
Guard's coming in.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
You know, totally, it's a good faith effort. It's actually
community based.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I don't want to leave you
the impression it was just Mennonites driving this, right, There's
an inner faith alliance that participates in the effort, including
the Germantown Jewish Center. Great efforts are taken to balance
admission to local public schools and citizens. They would even
pressure their local banks, like the one that hosted the
article I quoted from, and threatened to take their money
elsewhere if prejudicial lending policies were't addressed. So there's like
this is a really cool chapter of US history, and
(14:25):
while there were some problems along the way, the efforts
of the Mount Area community represent one of the most
successful long term examples of racial integration in a neighborhood
in a major US city, and in large part because
it was enthusiastically embraced and carried out by people who
believed in the cause. Now, obviously there is a you
could call a performative nature to this too, not in
the shallow sense that that word normally connotates, but in
(14:46):
the sense that the people who live there wanted to
make an example for the rest of the country, right,
they wanted to be an example.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
It's strategic performativeness and as opposed to like, you know,
kind of mirroring back on the self. It's more like,
I want the community to see these new standards.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yes, I want people to see that this works and
this can create a better community than the one that
existed before. And young Alex undeniably benefits from their efforts.
We can see this in the fact that he insisted
his whole life that racial prejudice was not a factor
in his childhood, and that simply wasn't the case for
a lot of black and biracial kids in Philadelphia in
those days and probably now right.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
Yeah. Home of the push bombing, yes, Stefaniel.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Yeah, home of the pushbombing yes? Or move bomb what
is it?
Speaker 3 (15:27):
Yeah, move bombing yeah, sorry, not question the move bombing.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Yeah. So the Karp family are comfortable. They're like middle class.
His dad's a doctor, right, middle class, upper middle class.
Over the course of Alex's childhood and adolescence, the Carp
parents were known as being both strict and enthusiastic leftists.
They despised American consumer culture and mass media. Bob would
trace the family lineage on the Carp side back to
(15:49):
Karl Marx. That's what their family lore says, like, that's
the level of like dedicated that Bob is. Leah reportedly
cut the cord of the family television after Alex and
his brother fought over a TV show, and they wouldn't
have one again until they were almost grown. So they
are not They're growing up like being encouraged to get
into nature, to interact with the world around them, to read,
(16:10):
and not to be like normal Americans. Their parents really
hate normal Americans. It Kaida seems like right or what
they see is normal Americans. The family is comfortable enough
that they had a lake house in Vermont where they
would vacation, but said lake house had no power or
running water, So it's not like a fancy lake house, right,
but it is a lake house. Alex's parents modeled homes
(16:30):
with few possessions and little unnecessary clutter. This is something
Karp is going to carry with him his whole life.
He has a lot of homes, but he likes to
have them be mostly like empty and not super cluttered. Right.
They spent a lot of time in the wilderness developing
practical skills too. For political reasons, the Carps also insisted
that Alex and his brother Ben attend to public school.
Henry M Houston and Henry in Houston seems to have
(16:51):
provided a decent education, but it had a lot of bullies.
Both Alex and Ben recall quote some really tough kids
who would bully anyone who was different, which obviously included Alex. Right,
he's a really brainy kid. He's noted as being like
the smart kid. He also can't read for a long time.
He's dyslexic, right, So obviously any time you're a kid
(17:12):
that's different, that's not always great in public school, and
he and his brother are angry about this to the
present day, like they are pissed that their parents did
not take them out of Henry Houston and put them
into a private school.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
They remain pissed about this, yes, decades later, as opposed
to being like, you know, part of their like identity
formation of like I transcended this. It's why did you
make me suffer through this? Okay?
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Right? Why didn't you pull me out of this? You
had the resources too, Yeah, I didn't have to go
through this, and you made me because of your politics,
because you thought that it was the best for me. Right.
Alex claims to have had to bring bride money to
class to pay off a bully, and the overwhelming impact
of his time there seems to be a deep and
lingering anger at his parents that would extend in time
to their politics. As time went on, Alex's mother, Lair,
(17:57):
became a somewhat prominent artist. She does mixed media work,
and Sophie's going to show you one example here of
Leah's art. She's very much still left wing. Her art
is very much inspired by her politics. The piece that
you're seeing now, which I mean it's mixed media, so
there's like I don't really know. It looks like a
writing on a children's notebook, alongside with like people try
(18:18):
to draw out like the letters in cursive and in
like normal caricatures with like flowers superimposed over. This particular
piece is part of her Creation Story series, which the
Gush Fisher Gather Gallery describes this way. Kart made these
collashes in the early nineteen eighties in response to local
racialized killings known as the Atlanta child murders. So that's
an idea of his mom, right, Like, she is very political,
(18:41):
and they grow up aware of this, aware of racial
violence in their community. It's deeply affecting to their parents.
One assumes it's a big part of their childhood hearing
about this, even though they're not experiencing it directly. In
a twenty eighteen profile of Alex in Forbes, well before
his shift to the right, he was described as quote
the son of an artist and a pediatrician who's many
of their weekends taking him to protest for labor rights
(19:03):
and against anything Reagan did. He recalls, and every account
of his youth repeats that claim. So we should assume
it's true, right that his parents really hated Reagan. Yeah,
he grows up kind of inundated in that as a child,
Alex acquires the nickname professor. This is not apparently an insult.
You would kind of like assume it was, maybe, but
it's a reference to his obvious intellect. And again he
(19:25):
comes to feel like mixed about that. I think, because
he still can't read by age eight. You know, he's
kind of able. He's smart enough that he's able to
develop skills to make his teachers and some of his
classmates think that he's able to read right, because he's
you know, that's a thing, especially like a lot of
smart kids with dyslexi develop really really robust coping mechanisms,
you know.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Because so more than just avoiding having to read aloud
in class, they're actually like doing like whole word sounded
out kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Yes, yes, like that kind of stuff. I think, because
you don't want people to know, and you're trying to
figure out ways to deal with it, right, And eventually,
like when he's eight, I think the school figure out
what's going on. He gets properly diagnosed, and he sent
to a special school for like two years right where
he gets direct hands on like help working with his dyslexia,
and he learns to read right. And this is another
(20:12):
sign that whatever his issues with the school district were,
they seem to have been pretty on top of things
right the fact that they do realize and they sent
and it works right this special program, he learns how
to read and becomes a voracious reader. He returns to
Houston after these two years at the special school, and
he graduates eighth grade and moves into high school. Now,
Alex is emphatic that learning to read during those two
(20:35):
years was the hardest thing he has ever had to do.
And I have again no reason to doubt that his
dyslexia was a constant source of struggles, but it also
taught him how to deal with adversity and reinforced the
lesson that he had to rely on and trust other
people in order to get things done. A lot of
folks will argue this is part of why he's such
a competent CEO today, is that, unlike a lot of
(20:55):
people in that position, he's really good at like taking
feedback from his subordinates because he's always learned that he
needs the help of people to get by and do
things right. That's not an issue he has wanting to
do everything by himself. And this is actually a recognized
phenomenon among CEOs and founders. Dyslexics are wildly overrepresented among
like tech founders and CEOs.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Yeah, I wonder what the connection there is.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Well, there's some theorizing about that. In two thousand and two,
Betsy Morris wrote an article for Fortune about this after
interviewing multiple dyslexic founders and business leaders, and she writes
this quote, Dyslexia is a crucible, particularly in a high
pressure society that allows so little room for late bloomers.
People are either defeated by it or they become much
more tenacious, says McCaw don. Winkler, a top financial services
(21:39):
executive at Bank one and then Ford Motor, remembers coming
home from school bloodied by fights he'd had with kids
who called him dumb. Kinko's founder Paul Orfalia, failed second
grade and spent a part of third in a class
for mentally retarded children. He could not learn to read,
despite the efforts of parents who took him to testers, tutors, therapists,
special reading groups, and eye doctors. As young classmates read
aloud or Faalia says it was as if Angel whispered
(22:00):
words into their ears. Right. So there's a long history
of people who like Karp struggle with this and it
teaches them coping skills that allow them to get ahead,
that like allow them to figure out how society works
and how to work within it. Right, And that Krp's
going to be one of these guys. He comes out
of this with over developed social skills as well as
(22:20):
as a voracious leader. He's really good at knowing what
people are thinking. People will say this about Alex, like
he's very empathetic, and if he's in a room with people,
he's always concerned with like how people are doing and
like who's feeling what? Right, That's something that he just knows.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
So he was able to read people even though you
had difficulty reading language exactly exactly.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Yeah, yeah, and you know who else has difficulty reading people,
which is why they contact with us to read their advertisements.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
I don't know, you're almost there.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Yeah, can all be great. Here's ad and we're back.
Hopefully not after just having an ad from Palent here.
It'd be weird for Palente to advertise on a podcast. Yeah,
maybe not. The Joe Rogan experience.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
That would be not the strangest thing that's ever happened.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
Sure, if you guys had that happen where you actually
like are talking, Yes, we have as well.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Yeah, we've had the police Department. We were critiquing do
an add on our show and we were and yeah,
oh we work, Yeah we work.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Remember the good old days.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Bloomberg. Bloomberg is running for president.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Yeah, we had an episode of about maybe not guys.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yeah, sponsored by Mike Bloomberger. So Alex graduates high school
both with overveloped social skills and as a voracious reader,
but also with a massive chip on his shoulder. He's
not not angry as a result of the struggles of
his youth. Per his biography, The Philosopher in the Valley
years later, Karp would say that dyslexia added to the
(23:51):
sense of vulnerability that he felt as a child. He
claims that he intuited from an early age because he
was a biracial jew with a disability, he had some
strikes against him. As he put it, you're a racially amorphous,
far left Jewish kid who's also dyslexic. Would you not
come up with the idea that you're fucked He says
that he also recognized that his parents, hamstrung by their
own limitations, were not in a position to protect him.
They loved him, of course, but they couldn't shelter him
(24:13):
from a world that seemed especially dangerous for someone with
his particular identity. Long before he left for college, Karp
felt that he could only truly depend on himself for survival.
And one thing he's always angry about is that neither
of his parents become like rich and famous. He thinks
that his dad could have been like a really prominent
famous physician, and he thinks his mom could have been
(24:33):
a much more famous artist, and they both kind of
lack hustle and savvy that he has. That's his conclusion
as an adult, right.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
Yeah, he's got a lot of resentment about his parents.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Yes, it is a boiling well inside of glex car. Yeah. Yeah.
So he is noted by some early friends and relatives
as being an angry kid who quote lived in his
own world. But he was also popular and once he
went through puberty, he was very stylish and elegently quite
good with the ladies. He's not an isolated kid in
(25:05):
high school, and he's not like, I mean he's nerdy
in some ways, but he's repeatedly noted as being like
pretty good with women. Right. His brother says that he
wasn't acted like a young black man in school, and
there's no evidence that we get from anyone close to
him that he had any issues with that identity as
a kid. Rather, his chief issues are with his parents,
you know, like it's this, they didn't have enough to
(25:26):
get me out of the school I didn't like, they
didn't have enough to make me feel safer from the world,
so I had to go and become rich and powerful myself.
Is kind of what I take out of Alex's conclusions
from his childhood.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
And there's Sophie some deep pathology there.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Yeah, yeah, I think this might be mixed with the
fact that the Carps certainly are not happy with the
fact that Alex went on to become the CEO of Palanteer.
They did not change their minds about that when he
became a billionaire. They wanted their sons to become intellectuals
and artists. His brother been recalled. My father said that
he became a doctor so that his sons could look poets,
(26:01):
and Ben would go on to become a successful author,
like I mean he is to this day. But Alex
is going to be drawn in a very different direction now.
His grades are excellent and he has no trouble getting
into a really good college, Haverford, which is a really
good college. He kind of hates it now because they've
never asked him to come back and speak. Like Haverford's
like a left wing college. Yeah. For an idea of
(26:24):
Haverford's background, one of the professors who infiltrated the FBI
and stole a bunch of files from them to reveal
their like surveillance programs was a Haverford professor, right, Okay, yeah, Yeah,
So this is a school with like a long left
wing tradition, and I just don't think they're that fond
of Alex Karp. And he's really broken up about the
fact that they have not asked him to come speak.
(26:44):
The reason he went there in the first place is
that as a kid, he went to some event that
was held at Haverford and they served a steak dinner
and his parents would never buy them stakes. So that's
why he wanted to go there.
Speaker 3 (26:56):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Yeah, And it's again he seems to be a very
left kid. As he's going to college. One of his
professors described the nineteen eighty four election between Reagan and
Mondale as an election between a proud and a guilty
capitalist Big so like, that's the environment he's in there,
and he thrives educationally, although it's also a time of
great pain. His parents get divorced pretty much as soon
as he leaves for college. Now, the inciting incident here
(27:19):
is that Leah has decided she cannot stand to be
married to Bob anymore. And for his part, Bob is like,
all right, if you don't want anything to do with me,
then fuck this whole family, and he takes it out
on the boys. So he takes it out on Leiah too.
But he moves out and he stops paying the mortgage,
which forces Leah into something near destitution. She and his
younger brother Ben are only able to afford an apartment
(27:40):
because a kindly old landlady helped out his mom, who
Alex described as totally fucked in this period of time.
Carp would later help this lady out send money to
her business, basically because he's really grateful to what she
does for his mom, But he never forgets the fact
that his father separated from the family, and that this
threw them suddenly from being like comfortable to be poor
(28:00):
because Bob calls Alex and he's like, I'm not paying
for your college tuition anymore, so his mom has to
take out Bob is a real dick. It sounds like, seriously,
his mom has to take out loans and basically mortgage
every ash that she has to barely afford sending Alex
to school. The uncertainty over whether or not he'd be
able to afford each semester meant that Alex is under
constant stress. He never knows that he's going to be
(28:22):
able to stay much longer, and he really it doesn't
seem like he ever forgives his father for what he
sees as a betrayal of the family. I think, rightfully,
this is rightfully betrayal. Yeah, like, you shouldn't take it
out on your kids. They're not divorcing you, they're your kids.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
I mean, it's also like another sweeping symbolic thing starting
with the tokenization of the mother. Now he's like just
rejects her and the progeny that she's bore him. That's
some deep shakespeareence stuff, right then.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Yeah, yeah it is. And it's yeah, Alex's dad certainly
a guy with some stuff going on under the hood. Yeah,
Alex remains, you know, outgoing, even though he's really broken up.
During this whole period of time. He runs track and
his friends describe him as aloof and hard to read,
but also well liked and particularly active in the school's
black student community. From his biography, his social life mainly
(29:10):
revolved around he her for his black community. He was
much more of a black man than he is now,
says Ward Breeze, who was one of Karp's closest friends.
In the fall of senior year, Karpt helped organize a
conference at Yale University sponsored by a group called Campuses
Against Racial Violence. Alex even wound up in the paper.
The Detroit Free Press quoted him in an article on
racial violence on US campuses, and this is Alex. The
(29:31):
most distressing thing was that finding someone to talk about
racial violence was as simple as asking someone to speak.
It is that pervasive. Alex attacked the deans of his
school for giving a green light to racists by not
taking steps to prevent racism. Steinberger notes that he also
wore a kefia in his yearbook picture, which quote suggested
a broader interest in fighting and justice, and I'm sure
(29:52):
he means that to signal that Karp had some solidarity
with Palestine. That's not clear to me at all. I
don't know if that meant that as much as it
does now back then, and Alex never talks about that. Furthermore,
even though his parents are left wing, it seems like
Alex's mom likes Israel. She wins a scholarship to Israel
as a teenager. I don't know why she feels about
(30:13):
it now, but as a teenager, she has a really
positive experience there that he would have grown up hearing about.
And I haven't ever heard that he took any kind
of stand on Israel in Palestine as a kid. He
does as an adult, but I just don't get any
evidence that he was particularly aware of anything happening there
at the time.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
And as you point out, it was a very different
perspective then in terms of all of this, like, yeah,
just even black and Israeli relations.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Yeah, it could have just been something he thought was
like fashionable for whatever reason. I don't know, But I
don't know that we should read like too much into that.
His professor seemed to remember him as brilliant, someone who
could have been a world class academic, which is surely
what his mom and dad would have wanted for him. More. Instead,
after graduating with a BA in philosophy, he chooses to
go to law school alex His grades are so good
(30:58):
that he gets accepted by Columbia, Harvard, Penn State, and Stanford.
So he's a really smart cookie, right, that's a hard
one to beat.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
He ran the table.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
He ran the fucking table. Yeah. In the summer of
nineteen eighty nine, he picked Stanford, and he starts attending Stanford.
He seems to decide it almost immediately that he didn't
want to work as a lawyer, but he nonetheless stuck
it out, despite finding it the worst three years of
my adult life. Per an article in The Times by Steinberger,
he says that he knew within a week of enrolling
that he had made a mistake. In his view, Stanford
was just a glorified trade school. His classmates were mainly
(31:32):
animated by a desire to land prestigious jobs, and the
intellectual discourse was highly performative. As he puts it, what
made Stanford bearable was his unlikely friendship with Peter Teel,
a classmate. They bonded over their shared disdain for law
school at a loff of political debate. Teal had already
achieved from prominence for his libertarian views. As a Stanford undergraduate,
he had helped found the right leaning Stanford Review, and
(31:52):
he and Carp spent much of their free time interrogating
each other's positions. We argued like feral animals, Carp recalled.
According to Teal, their conversations generally took place late at
night in the law school dorm. It sounds too self aggrandizing,
but I think we were both genuinely interested in ideas.
He was more the socialist, I was more the capitalist.
He was always talking about Marxist theories of alienated labor
and how this was true of all the people around us.
(32:13):
And yeah, he and Peter are just like peas in
a pod in this really and otherwise miserable time in
Alex's life. And it says a lot both that he
immediately knows he doesn't want to go to law school
and he sticks it out for three years.
Speaker 3 (32:26):
Yes, imagined law school is very difficult if as a
former dyslexic student. I mean, all the reading's got to do.
It's got to be very frustrating. He's got to be
using all the talents he's learned.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Yeah, and per thing he doesn't want to do. Yeah,
does he take the bar?
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Does he be?
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Actually?
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Because no, no, I don't think he ever does, because
he's going to go immediately from that to Germany for
more school to do a totally different thing.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
That's so baffling because if you know any lawyers, or
if you know anyone who's been to law school, that
shit is not a walk in the park. That is
a full time commitment.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
Yeah, and it's maybe he just needed to prove he
could do it once he'd started. I don't know, but
it's really interesting that he doesn't want to be a lawyer.
He knows that right away.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
I feel like he should apologize to all the lawyers
for his fuckery here, Like what the.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
I don't know. I don't know if anyone should apologize
to lawyers.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
My sister in law would disagree.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
So, as you can see in that quote though, Alex
is also like, I think the reason why he and
Peter hit it off because there's this like mystery that
you get in these accounts of them, of like these
two guys were so different politically, and yet they became
the best of friends's because they're not really all that different.
Like they're interested maybe in arguing about different things, but
the center of their belief system isn't left wing or
(33:43):
right wing. It's being contrariant.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Yeah, an individualist.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Yeah exactly. That everyone around me is dumber than me
and I'm angry at them all the time is kind
of how Alex and Peter both feel.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
Completely on the surface, you see, like, oh, this is
apartheid South Africans, and then like raised by liberals in Pennsylvania,
like you know, black child, and then they meet up
and they like arguing late at night in college. It means, oh,
of course if they would ben but their cantankerousness would
bond them.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Yeah, yeah, their cantankerousness and their disdain for others.
Speaker 3 (34:15):
Yeah right, Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Both men believe very strongly and separating themselves from the herd. Now,
because Alex comes from a left wing background, he will
first come to define this as a terror at the
idea of fascism and right wing populism right, and Peter's
going to go in a really different direction initially, but
even at the time, Alex was comfortable hanging out with
a guy whose campus claimed to fame was launching a
(34:38):
right wing alternative to the school paper that hosted columns
mocking date rape and gay people. That's what Peter til
does in college, and Alex knows that, right.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
While Teal finds his mentor, Rene Gerardo we talk about
in the Teal episodes through Stanford, Alex is going to
have to travel to Germany to do the same, well,
to attempt to do the same, because his mentor never
likes him all that much. It's kind of the feeling
I get. He won't agree with that, but we'll see
how you feel. That's wild. So after he leaves Stanford,
(35:07):
Karp applies to become a doctoral student at the Sigmund
Freud Institute in Frankfurt. He seems to have grown more
fascinated with the Holocaust as time goes on, and as
a Jewish Man, Alex has always maintained a healthy fear
of fascism and a dread like something like the Third
Reich might come again and target people like him. His
ambition at this point was to become a German Jewish intellectual,
(35:27):
and he took to that life like a duck to water.
He later described his education at this stage as quote
a quick path to being unemployed, and he kind of
disdains it now, but he seems to have been very
happy there. He learns German and like literally he goes
from not speaking German to fluent in three months. Again
for another example of how smart this man is. Yeah,
and he starts to display here in these days some
(35:49):
of the social savvy that's going to get him the
job running Palenteer, one of his friends, who also is
a German savant and learns how to speak German perfectly,
can't get over the like all of the low still
really mean to him and cold to him, and he
doesn't understand why because his German is so good, and
Karp immediately identifies, well, it's because your German and your
accent is perfect, so they think that you're a German,
(36:10):
but you don't know all of the social mores that
people who grow up in Germany are expected to perform,
so they just think that you're like a shitty, weird
German as opposed to a foreigner who's really got a
good capture of the language and cares. And he's like,
so what you need to do is pepperin some mispronunciations, and.
Speaker 3 (36:26):
He's going to say.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Exactly exactly, and it works really well, and it shows you,
like that's the way, That's how Alex's mind works. He's
really very intuitive about people. He enjoys Germany as an escape.
He starts dating a lot of women, and he finds
the European attitude towards casual sex intoxicating and liberating. He
decides at this point that he's not going to be monogamous,
and he never really is as far as I can
(36:51):
tell in the rest of his life. Some of this
is probably reaction to his father, who, after the divorce,
remarries and adopts several kids and basically replaces his first
with a new family. Yeah, maybe he didn't get a
great example, right, Yeah, that's for sure. So his dissertation
(37:12):
focused on how aggressive language and public discourse in Germany
contributed to anti Semitism, and his work was influenced by
the recent publication at that point in time of a
book called Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen. Now that
book is about how the Holocaust was made possible by
huge numbers of willing German volunteers with eliminationist beliefs about
(37:32):
the Jews, that when I summarize it like that, that's
not really wrong. But the book itself fucks up a
lot of stuff and is very heavily been criticized. Norman
Finkelstein of The New Left Review calls it worthless as scholarship.
Goldhagen believed that German anti Semitism wasn't just like eliminationist,
and that that contributed to this groundswol of people who
(37:52):
participated in the Holocaust, but he believed specifically that German
anti Semitism was uniquely demonic in its intensity, and that
the desire to murder Jews prior to the Holocaust had
become central to German culture, and then in nineteen forty five,
after Hitler was defeated, that very suddenly changed forever, right,
Like that's kind of the attitude there, and that gets
that's not really accurate. People will criticize that quite a bit.
(38:14):
At the time. Karp seems to have bought Goldhagen's argument,
and his dissertation was inspired by a critique of the
book by a German writer named Martin Walser, who made
the perhaps poor decision to describe the Holocaust as a
moral bludgeon used to unfairly beat the Germans. So Alex
gets really angry at this guy, Waltzer, and buys into
the stuff that Goldhagen is arguing about. And just to
(38:36):
be clear, folks, there was nothing uniquely demonic about German
anti semitism. Was very related to the rest of European
anti semitism. It was related to French anti.
Speaker 3 (38:43):
Semitism, European Project.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Yeah, you should not separate these things Banish, yes, the
Spanish right, you should not separate German anti semitism anyway.
His thesis advisor Corolla Breed described Karp's paper as a
study of secondary anti semitism, based on the work of
socialist Telcott Parsons Theodoraderno. Karp concluded that Walzer's outburst had
been quote a parochial form of fascism that occurs by
(39:06):
purposefully saying things that are incorrect in speech, which I
consider a bizarre interpretation of that guy's getting angry that
people are made to Germans today. Alex describes his dissertation
as niche scholarship only a few people would understand or
find interesting, but he was dedicated to the work, and
more than anything, he was obsessed with philosopher Jurgen Habermas,
who's taught at Girtha University and was considered one of
(39:28):
the great intellectuals in post war Europe. A protege of
Adorno and a member of the Frankfurt School, Hebermas concerned
himself with the question of what sustains a democracy not
long before his death. Earlier this year in twenty twenty six,
You're going to open to symposium by stating, no one
is free until we are all free. To give you
an idea of where this man stood. In his memorial service,
(39:49):
German President Frank Walter Steinmeier said this. Throughout his life,
Hebermus reminded us that democratic legitimacy grows out of public
debate through the exchange of arguments, disagreement and mutual understanding
within an open public sphere in which everyone can participate.
At a time when authoritarian movements are gaining influence around
the world, this idea is more relevant than ever. Democracy
is not sustained by elections alone. It depends on participation, responsibility,
(40:12):
and the protection of fundamental rights, and it must be
renewed every day. Habermas's legacy reminds us that democratic achievements
can never be taken for granted, but must be actively
defended and brought to life again every single day. This
is the guy Alex loves. This is the guy Alex
wants to have as his mentor. Right and initially, Habermass
seems to have liked Alex Karp. He invites the precocious
(40:34):
young academic to an exclusive sort of academic salon he ran,
where participants would talk about their research and receive feedback
from Habermass and their fellows. Karp has gone on to
claim Habermas as his dissertation advisor, which Heberas himself strenuously denied.
Was like, yeah, it was my thesis advisor. And you're like, no, No,
I was not. Absolutely it was not this kid's thesis advisor.
(40:56):
I did not sign off on this thing. Do not
say that about me?
Speaker 3 (40:59):
Wow? I like how no one wants to claim him
in college.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Off his parents.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
Yeah, I don't know about that. That's kind of me.
I'm sorry. Can I not bully Alex? I guess we
could bully child Alex Carp. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
One of Robert's returning bits is that we should have
like for some of the worst people in history, like
if only someone had been meaner to them.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
Yeah, it turns out not true. For Alex, I don't
think that helped. That may have been a bad idea
on my part.
Speaker 3 (41:37):
Sorry, everybody, they might have got just gotten started earlier.
You know, maybe shoving them in the locker actually becomes
the straw that breaks that Campbell's back.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
Yeah, there's a right amount of time in the locker.
We just haven't found it yet.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
But if daddy was nicer, that.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
Really might have helped. Maybe if Daddy hadn't abandoned the
family after a divorce. I don't know. You know who
else abandoned their family after it divorce, Probably some of
the sponsors of this podcast.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
At least the dick Pill sponsors for sure.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
Look, you have to assume a lot of CEOs have second, third,
fourth families, you know, and are not taking care of
all of the first couple, right, that's just my assumption.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Assumption.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Anyway, send them money and we're back. So the fact
that Jurgen Habermas was his like dissertation advisor, which he wasn't,
but that being seen as true is extremely important to Alex,
and clearly while he is in Germany attending this university,
that's his goal is to get close to Habermas and
(42:36):
to get him to like endorse his research. He wants
to be the same way that Habermas was like Adorno's protege.
He wants to be Habermas's protegee. Right, that's his life
goal at this point, Right, he.
Speaker 3 (42:46):
Wants to be the aristol on the line of the
great thinkers.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
Yes, yes, and there's there's a degree to which you
can see this is even kind of shallow for Alex
because he tells an interviewer, if you can get Habermass
to work with you for even two minutes, you can
be a tenured professor at Columbia. Right, So we say
that like being any way associated with this guy like
guarantees you or respected career. That's why he wants to
be close to him. I think, even more than any
ideological simpatico between them, it's this man's prestige that draws
(43:13):
in Alex.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
It's the opportunism that he seeks out.
Speaker 2 (43:16):
That's right. But Habermas declines to be his dissertation advisor,
he declines to be the second reader of his dissertation. Now,
Carp sends it to him, and Hebermass sends back a
three page letter, and he does give a short critique,
and he says he did a couple of things well,
but here's my issues with it. But I'm not going
to be your advisor. Right, That's the endpoint of the
paper is like, I will give you this much, but
(43:37):
I'm not going to be your advisor. And as Steinberger
describes it, the paper was kind but firm, although I
think it would be pretty devastating for a kid like
Alex to get. I'm going to read a quote from
the philosopher in the Valley here. Habermass expressed doubt about
whether Karp's German comprehension was sufficient to allow him to
grapple with some of the texts that he was drawing on.
Your topic would require a literary approach to a topic
(43:59):
that all overwhelms the linguistic sensibility of US native speakers
and yours. You won't blame me. Even more so, heber
Must wrote, for you, literary German must be as much
a foreign language as literary English is for me. Moreover,
it is not a reproach to remind oneself of the
limits of the competencies that we expect from an educated sociologist.
At the end, haberr Mus struck an apologetic tone. Please
(44:21):
don't be angry with me, mister Carp, for my candid assessment,
he wrote, adding I would be happy to see you
again if the occasion arises. So he's a really nice
guy and he's trying to do this very kindly, but
he's like, dude, I know you think like you speak
German really well, this isn't speaking German.
Speaker 3 (44:37):
This is a second form of German.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
Yeah, exactly, you're not competent to do this. You know
which one thing I will say, I fuck up plenty.
You know, on this job there's always little bits that
I get wrong around the edges. There's so much history
we're covering with it's hard to as like not a historian, right,
you have to have humility when you're approaching shit like this,
and I don't think Karp is capable of that. Because
Habermass is trying to give him really good advice, which
(45:01):
is stick to something like you're capable of meaningfully contributing
to and I don't think you are here, and Alex like,
but I want to and he he just can't get
over that, right, It's really fun. Habermas wrote what he
describes as a generic letter of recommendation and notes that quote.
Carp continues to maintain that Habermass was his doctoral advisor
for a period. He says that Habermas, now in his
(45:23):
late nineties, is downplaying their connection and that he is
at a loss to understand why that's his biographer right,
that Karp keeps saying like, no, we he really did
help me with my with my uh, he was by
a doctoral advisor. He's just pretending not to be now.
And I don't know why.
Speaker 3 (45:37):
His age it makes it.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
He can't remember. He's forgotten that he agreed to help me.
One of the things that really pissed me off is
that when Habermass died early this year, Politico published an
article by Alex Karp reminiscing about his supposed mentor. In
the newsletter Unpopular Front, John Gans writes Karp's picture of
haber Moss is of a crotchety and even slightly i
(46:00):
rannical doyenne who terrorized his students, routinely referred to people
as idiots and half idiots, and who ultimately declined to
supervise Karp's dissertation, A rejection who Sting would linger for years,
Karp wrote, Gans describes this, And what I think is
interesting both is that in this obituary he's willing to
admit finally, Yeah, he rejected me, right, and he was
really mean to people. As brilliant as he was, he
(46:21):
was cruel to all of us. Nobody else who worked
with Haro Loss describes it this way is pretty much
just alice. I would have quote again from Ganz's piece quote,
and this is him talking about how other students and
peers remember Jurgen. They remember someone patient, unpretentious, and generous
with his time and intellectual energy. Is it possible that
Harmss just didn't like Carp very much? He certainly didn't
(46:42):
think highly of his work, Writing to Karp, you simply
cannot compete with literary critics and theorists who have recently
waited on this subject.
Speaker 3 (46:49):
The self we see or get glimpses of in the
letter is a kind, patient, intellectual.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
Nice, decent man. Do it as best. Yeah, exactly, kind
and patient, way too patient with this kid, No, And
so maybe that means he just he got fed up
with carb after a while and started calling Hi an
idiot because Corm wouldn't listen. I don't know, I wasn't there.
Gans theorizes that this piece by Karp reveals a substantive
disagreement the two men have over He suggests constitutional patriotism,
(47:18):
the idea that one could be loyal to their state
and not also bigoted against other nations. Right, Jergen is
likely you don't have to hate other countries to be
a patriot, and Karp is certainly in twenty twenty six
going to disagree with that. Here's what he wrote. The
vision was noble, yet in hindsight it seems clear strikingly
premature and misguided. In twenty eleven, the German magazine Der
Spiegel described him Hey Ross as the last European as
(47:41):
the continental government for which he had advocated so fiercely
came under increasingly sustained assault. His hope for a sort
of disembodied political identity, untethered from the inconvenient particularities of
family and culture represented an aspirational cosmopolitanism that has proven
insufficient to animate allegiance in the modern era. Put differently,
he believed in the possibility of a purely rational public discourse.
I believed and still believed that such a discourse must
(48:03):
be rooted in a more corporeal and traditional and indeed
national and cultural source. He may yet be vindicated, but
I fear not in our time. Basically, Jurgen was a
nice guy, but he wasn't like enough of a bigot
to be, you know, really as smart as I Alex
Karp am.
Speaker 3 (48:18):
They're blending the lines of patriot and nationalists, you know,
like kind of like, you know, conflating the two for
their own purposes. Because a patriot loves their country and
their fellow countrymen and women. A nationalist does only like
people that are of their people and not of the
other people.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
So exactly, and Karp is only really capable of nationalists,
I think, so well, it's not quite nationalism. It's like
a Western chauvinism, because he's not like an America guy.
He loves Germany, he loves the West. So it is
broader than nationalism, I should say. I don't want to
get him wrong here, but I do think all this
reveals a lot, this conflict with Habermass, because while Alex
Karp entertains the possibility of academic life in Berlin, for years.
(48:55):
It seems to really excite him. And he's excited by
the idea of like right papers during the day and
reading and discussing his ideas and then like sleeping around
constantly at night with all of these Berlin girls that
he's been flirting with.
Speaker 3 (49:07):
How can you hate that idea?
Speaker 2 (49:08):
How can you hate that idea?
Speaker 1 (49:10):
Right?
Speaker 2 (49:10):
And honestly, if he'd gone for this, life probably would
have been happier, I know the rest of us would
have been. But ultimately Alec is going to choose to
leave academia behind, tail between his legs kinda and return
to the United States to start down the road that's
going to lead him in part two to Palanteer. But
that's all we've got for part one. Zaren Burnett, how
(49:31):
are you feeling.
Speaker 3 (49:32):
Oh dude, I'm loving this. I'm learning so much about
Alex carp in the ways that it's more than humanizing him.
It's really giving that character arc Roback can see where
the anger and the bubbling resentment form. And yet also
he is very much a humanist. I mean, he's getting laid,
he likes people. He's always arguing for like conversation and
fighting in public, and you know, you know, nice and
kind and thoughtful ways he wants to be this intellectual
(49:54):
and then I'm very curious to see where the turn is.
Speaker 2 (49:57):
Yeah, yeah, well it is coming very soon after this point.
It's going to come as a result of his friendship
with Peter Tiel. But again, that's all in part two.
You got anything to plug before we roll out here?
Speaker 3 (50:06):
Zee, I would say, check out Ridiculous Crime. We have
a bunch of interesting historic will For instance, we cover
the files for the FBI they get robbed. We have
an episode on that.
Speaker 2 (50:16):
Yeah, one of the coolest chapters of US left right history. Yeah,
absolutely so.
Speaker 3 (50:22):
Yeah. I would say check out Ridiculous Crime, and also
check out very special episodes for the exact same reason,
stories that will beguile.
Speaker 2 (50:28):
Yeah, and check out You're good habermas Unlet's use isn't
good enough? I guess I don't know.
Speaker 1 (50:36):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 2 (50:46):
You get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (50:48):
Full video episodes that Behind the Bastards are now streaming
on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Remind me on
Netflix you don't miss an episode. For clips and our
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YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love
about forty percent of you, statistically speaking,
Alsome Media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we
tell you everything you don't know about the very worst
people in all of history and today. And this is
a today episode. We're covering a guy who's not dead yet,
so his bastardy is still ongoing. So you should consider
these episodes. The first two parts of our episodes on
Alex Karp, the CEO of Palenteer, and to talk to
(00:29):
me about Alex and Pallentier. I have the great Zaren Burnett, Zaren,
you work on Ridiculous Crime, a great iHeart podcast and
also very special episodes. Thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Thank you for having me. Thank you both. Robert Sophia
really stoked to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
So what do you know about Palenteer and Alex Karp?
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Yeah, what do you know? But before we get to that,
tell us a little bit about your shows real quick, okay.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Ridiculous Crime is a show similar to yours where we
tell each other stories and one person it doesn't know
what the story is going to be. So me and
my co host, Elizabeth Dutton, we have a show that
the tagline says is ninety nine percent murder free and
one hundred percent ridiculous. So it's true crime stories without
the murder, and they're always pretty insane.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Well lots of murders today.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
It's nice change for me, change of pace, and then
very special episodes. The other show I do is kind
of like a magazine style audio show. They're like little
movies where we kind of do feature stories that often
take place in the recent past, sometimes very far a
long time ago, and they have hosts interaction, sometimes with
the actual people. Sometimes it's just participants to rye witnesses
(01:38):
or experts, authors. You get the idea.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Well, awesome, that sounds great. We love another podcast idiot
format show, which is I think the term that got developed. Ah.
What do you know about Alex Karp and Palenteer, Sarah?
Speaker 3 (01:52):
I know more about Palenteer than I know about Alex
carb Alex Carp. Every time I read about them, he
pisses me off, so I kind of have liked to
keep him at arms length approach. I'm forced to know
about him.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
He's a real skinny, athletic guy with like curly hair, Yeah,
curly hair that looks a little bit like in the
explosions that he helps to facilitate. Yes, and he does
tai chi a lot while standing around and talking to people.
Like one of his the things interviewers and his colleagues
will note about him is that, like, if you're just
talking with Alex during a meeting, he'll periodically just start
(02:21):
doing taichi. That's the way I think because his ADHD like,
I think it's a self managing methods.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
Sure it is stemming. He needs to move the energy around.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Right, right, right. We all have a thing that we do.
You know, for some of us, I would say honorable,
god fearing, decent people. We just picked drugs. Alex just
take drugs, you know, but he's got to do his
fucking tai chi or whatever. He was heart rate low.
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Anyway, I chose gardening.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Oh that's a good one. Yeah, gardening and drugs is
a fantastic one.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
It's very easy to mix your gardening and your drugs
if you know what you're doing. So this week we
are going to be talking about Alex is one of
the more immediately danger subjects we have ever covered. I've
talked about periodically. I'll have one of these modern bastards.
There's a lot of guys that I think are are
awful and dangerous. There's not a lot of them that
I think are like really formidable, and Alex is really formidable.
(03:13):
He is not a stupid man. He is not a
foolish person. He is a planner and a thinker, and
unfortunately he's quite good at what he does. I've said
similar things about Peter Teel Teal is also kind of
losing his mind lately, Like if you think back to
our episodes on the Antichrist stuff, I'm hearing a lot
more disordered thinking from Peter than I that I previously had.
I think Alex is still kind of got a gimlet
(03:36):
eye on the straight and arrow. He knows exactly what
he's going for and what he's building, and I think
that makes him very frightening.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
He's got that Kissinger level focus.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Yeah, yeah, he kind of does. And obviously, Karp is
best known for his work as the CEO of Palentier.
Most people don't really know much about what Palanier does.
It's usually described as a data broker that works for
a bunch of different like intelligence agencies and also like
large corporations. That's not truly accurate. Pellanteer like data broker
isn't exactly the right thing to call them. What they
(04:05):
really do is provide methods for large organizations to analyze
and draw conclusions from data that they already have and
are gathering. But because of the agencies they work for,
a lot of that data is used to, for example,
plan a series of air strikes on Iran. Right, Like,
that's that's kind of what Palenteer does. We'll talk more
about that in part two.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
So they're the new rand corporation.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
Well, it's more what they're doing is newer than that, right, Okay,
they're trying to provide what you have in the modern
era in the twenty first century, is you have both
like intelligence agencies and governments and also corporations are taking
in so much more data than it ever existed in
the entire world before. Palenteer is one of a number
of companies that helps them organize it, and at least
(04:45):
in terms of what they do. A lot of people
say that they're the best at it. There's arguments about that,
but that's the gist of what Palenteer is, and so
it's it's not really a company like palenter couldn't have
existed until the twenty first century. Really, yes, yeah, so
for years you'd basically only read or hear about Alex.
Carr described as like Peter Teal's sidekick, almost an Igor
(05:07):
like figure. Right. If Peter Teal is doctor Frankenstein, he's
this Igor guy in the background, right, this caretaker he
puts in charge of his techno spy corporation. Right. And
when Alex was described in the detail at all, and
I think if you go back even to my Peter
Teal episodes, I think I described him, quoting another article
as a neo Marxist, Right, A lot of people would
(05:27):
call him that. He was noted as being Peter's weird
left wing friend who's running palanteer. Interesting, Yeah, that's not
quite accurate to how he is today, but it's certainly
like a part of his journey. And depending on how
you encounter Alex in the wild these days, when you
run into quotes from him, he does still sometimes seem
like the sanest man in the room, if Silicon Valley
(05:48):
tech CEOs could be considered a room. Just this July,
the Wall Street Journal described him as quote saying what
every angry CEO is thinking about AI. Quote he declared
that something has gone completely wrong and the relationship between
AI labs and their customers. Speaking at a frenetic pace,
the tech company boss rattled on about AI labs hyping
their capabilities, overcharging for tokens or units of aiuse, all
(06:08):
while insisting that he wasn't throwing shade at rivals. While
doing just that, Karp, who counts some of the largest
US companies as well as the government as clients, added
at every single enterprise I deal with, these people are livid.
They're like, I am paying for tokens that create more
value and so year. Stuff like that. For alex is like, oh, well,
maybe he's like one of the people who hasn't completely
lost his mind, you know. But in other times he
(06:30):
sounds increasingly authoritarian and even monomaniacal. After donating to support
Kamala Harris's presidential campaign in twenty twenty four, he has
pivoted in the last couple of years towards pro MAGA messaging.
In November of twenty twenty five, he quoted W. B.
Yeats in a letter to shareholders. You all know the line.
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Politico described the
(06:50):
letter to shareholders as a peculiar part of an even
more peculiar letter, where he proceeded to warn against the
dangers of proclaiming the equality of all cultures and cultural values.
Alex is going on one, and he's clearly one of
these guys who's been sort of seized by this anti
woke mania that swept through Silicon Valley and a lot
of like particularly the East Coast intelligencia set. I don't
(07:13):
know how much I think Alex believes that as much
as he thinks that it's the safest thing to be saying.
But we'll come back to that a little later. In
February of twenty twenty six, Karp shared a pre recorded
video with employees addressing concerns that some of them had
expressed over Pallenteer working with ICE to deport people. Karp
defended supporting ICE, claiming Democrats and Republicans both prioritized the
(07:33):
issue and that Pallanteer, by which he meant himself, had
zero issue providing the Trump administration with whatever it needed.
Of all the Silicon Valley CEOs, then, who have bent
the knee to Donald Trump, Karp is the one whose
own background seems like it shouldn't have led him down
that path. But after critiquing Trump's first term, he's become
what The New York Times is Michelle Goldberg called a
(07:54):
trump enabler. So how did he go from being a
kid who wore a kefia at protests and spoke out
against race violence by cops to proudly bragging that Pallanteer
was the first completely anti woke company, that my friends,
is a journey and we're going to go on it. Now.
This guy's covered some ground in his life. You got
to say that at least a lot.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Of times with these like modern day people that are
so obviously evil, they're not interesting.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
They don't have like a story. Peter Thiel's always wanted
to kill democracy, right, Yeah, Alex took some steps.
Speaker 4 (08:24):
You know, it's usually pretty easy to figure out and like, yeah,
it's like okay, because we get we get asked all
the time to do these like Republican politicians or so
and so, and it's like they're a brand of got
they're just not interesting.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yeah, but Alex isn't that, Yeah, how.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Did we get here?
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Tell us? I'm like, yeah, So the number one book
about Karp right now is also his only biography, Michael
Steinberger's The Philosopher in the Valley and I would say
Steinberger's take on carp which is a critical one. He's
not a guy who like drinks. This dude's kool aid entirely.
He describes him as like a principled and fiercely intelligent
young man with a reflexive need for contrarianism, following his
(09:03):
own self interest to a dark destination and never quite
letting himself admit that's what's happened, right. I think that's
like the short answer to what happened to this guy?
And the long answer is everything we're going to talk
about here. So Alex's father is Bob Karp, a German
Jewish working class man whose own father was a guidance
counselor and a carpenter, and who himself became a pediatrician.
(09:24):
So his dad, Bob is a doctor. Right now, While
in med school, Bob meets Alex's wife, Leah James, who
is an inspiring artist from Illinois and the great granddaughter
of a former enslaved person. Both Bob and Leah have
their issues as a couple, as all parents do. Bob
grew up a wash in progressive politics, and he was
drawn to Leah because she was black and per Steinberger quote,
(09:45):
dating Leah was a powerful way of signaling his progressivism.
This isn't what Bob says. I don't know that it's
what Leah says, but it's what both Alex and his
brother believe about their dad. That he got with their
mom because it was a way of like woke signaling.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Basically, yesization of the mother.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Okay, interesting, right, right, Yeah, so we're starting offs.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
All of us are already like okay, okay.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
Yeah. So Alex and his younger brother Ben both seem
to be in agreement on this point. And while Steinberger
notes that a genuine romance eventually developed between Bob and Lea,
that doesn't seem to be how his kids kind of
interpreted things because of what happens later. But they have
Alex on October second, nineteen sixty seven, he's born in
New York City. Alex is never going to forgive his
(10:31):
parents for getting married and creating him as what he
saw as the result of identity politics. Quote from Steinberger.
He felt as if he had been the product of
virtue signaling, and it bothered him. And now, what I
don't know is how early this bothers him, right, Because
there's not a lot of signs that this is upsetting
him in his early life. This may be something that
like he more comes back to later. That's kind of
(10:52):
unclear to me, but later in life. Carp Will insists
that he never personally experienced racism as a biracial man
in America, and as a kid, he primarily identified with
and was socialized as a black kid, right, Like, that's
how he grows up. That's what real of his friends. Yeah,
that's all of his friends will say. That's how we
saw him, right, Yeah, and how he is Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
So he's kind of got a Clarence Thomas thing going
where he like starts out in a little bit progressive,
definitely black, and then moves away from that as fast
as he can.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
And he's you know, the complication being that he's also biracial,
and so he's both black and Jewish. That's a confusing
you know, especially in the sixties milange of identities.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
Maybe being biracial. I relate to that. It can be
confusing in terms of how the world reacts to you. Yeah,
your own self identity shouldn't be as confusing.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah, And it doesn't seem like it is initially right
and don't get a lot of a hint of that.
Alex grows up in Philadelphia, and Philadelphia in the sixties
obviously is a wash in racial violence. There is a
lot of particularly like racist white cops really fucking with
black people in Philadelphia. Frank Rizzeau is the zil yeah right. Alex, though,
is going to grow up insulated from this because his
(11:58):
home is a neighborhood called mount Airy, and mount Airy
is a really abnormally progressive place. And here again Alex
encounters loud in public identity politics because the mount Airy
neighborhood had been founded initially by Dutch Mennonites. And if
you know anything about the Mennonites and the United States,
you know the Mennonites have been correct about eighty percent
of the time when they've disagreed with the rest of
(12:18):
the country, usually correct the Mennits. In an article for
Philadelphia Federal Bank, Keith Rowland and Kyle de Maria right
of mount Airy quote. In the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties,
African Americans faced widespread hostility and resistance from white residents,
real estate agents, and city officials when they tried to
buy homes in white neighborhoods in northeastern and Midwestern cities.
(12:39):
In contrast, in mount Airy, as well as in Shaker Heights,
Ohio and Oak Park, Illinois, middle class white home owners
and some renters, motivated by the goals of racial justice
following World War Two, tried to intentionally integrate their communities,
welcome African Americans, and allay the fears of white residents.
And that article cites a book called Making Good Neighbors
written by Abigail Perkins. Abigail grew up up in mount
(13:00):
Airy and became a professor of history, and she writes
around the country. Small groups of homeowners opted not to
give into the belief that racial transition necessarily brought about
neighborhood decline. Instead of meeting would be black buyers with
antagonism or acquiescing to the efforts of blockbusting realtors, these residents,
largely white and middle class, decided to welcome their new neighbors.
Beginning with a coordinated pledge in the mid nineteen fifties,
(13:21):
homeowners in Mount Airy waged a community wide battle towards
intentional integration through innovative real estate efforts, creative marketing techniques,
religious activism and institutional partnerships. Residents work to preserve the
viability of their community by replacing residential segregation with residential integration.
They sought to disrupt a system of separation and thus
infuse their daily lives with the experience of interracial living.
(13:42):
So he grows up in like this really not unique
because there are a few neighborhoods like this, but he
gets extraordinarily fortunate at this place that is really making
an effort to integrate and doing so in a ground
up way rather than like a way where this National
Guard's coming in.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
You know, totally, it's a good faith effort. It's actually
community based.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I don't want to leave you
the impression it was just Mennonites driving this, right, There's
an inner faith alliance that participates in the effort, including
the Germantown Jewish Center. Great efforts are taken to balance
admission to local public schools and citizens. They would even
pressure their local banks, like the one that hosted the
article I quoted from, and threatened to take their money
elsewhere if prejudicial lending policies were't addressed. So there's like
this is a really cool chapter of US history, and
(14:25):
while there were some problems along the way, the efforts
of the Mount Area community represent one of the most
successful long term examples of racial integration in a neighborhood
in a major US city, and in large part because
it was enthusiastically embraced and carried out by people who
believed in the cause. Now, obviously there is a you
could call a performative nature to this too, not in
the shallow sense that that word normally connotates, but in
(14:46):
the sense that the people who live there wanted to
make an example for the rest of the country, right,
they wanted to be an example.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
It's strategic performativeness and as opposed to like, you know,
kind of mirroring back on the self. It's more like,
I want the community to see these new standards.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yes, I want people to see that this works and
this can create a better community than the one that
existed before. And young Alex undeniably benefits from their efforts.
We can see this in the fact that he insisted
his whole life that racial prejudice was not a factor
in his childhood, and that simply wasn't the case for
a lot of black and biracial kids in Philadelphia in
those days and probably now right.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
Yeah. Home of the push bombing, yes, Stefaniel.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Yeah, home of the pushbombing yes? Or move bomb what
is it?
Speaker 3 (15:27):
Yeah, move bombing yeah, sorry, not question the move bombing.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Yeah. So the Karp family are comfortable. They're like middle class.
His dad's a doctor, right, middle class, upper middle class.
Over the course of Alex's childhood and adolescence, the Carp
parents were known as being both strict and enthusiastic leftists.
They despised American consumer culture and mass media. Bob would
trace the family lineage on the Carp side back to
(15:49):
Karl Marx. That's what their family lore says, like, that's
the level of like dedicated that Bob is. Leah reportedly
cut the cord of the family television after Alex and
his brother fought over a TV show, and they wouldn't
have one again until they were almost grown. So they
are not They're growing up like being encouraged to get
into nature, to interact with the world around them, to read,
(16:10):
and not to be like normal Americans. Their parents really
hate normal Americans. It Kaida seems like right or what
they see is normal Americans. The family is comfortable enough
that they had a lake house in Vermont where they
would vacation, but said lake house had no power or
running water, So it's not like a fancy lake house, right,
but it is a lake house. Alex's parents modeled homes
(16:30):
with few possessions and little unnecessary clutter. This is something
Karp is going to carry with him his whole life.
He has a lot of homes, but he likes to
have them be mostly like empty and not super cluttered. Right.
They spent a lot of time in the wilderness developing
practical skills too. For political reasons, the Carps also insisted
that Alex and his brother Ben attend to public school.
Henry M Houston and Henry in Houston seems to have
(16:51):
provided a decent education, but it had a lot of bullies.
Both Alex and Ben recall quote some really tough kids
who would bully anyone who was different, which obviously included Alex. Right,
he's a really brainy kid. He's noted as being like
the smart kid. He also can't read for a long time.
He's dyslexic, right, So obviously any time you're a kid
(17:12):
that's different, that's not always great in public school, and
he and his brother are angry about this to the
present day, like they are pissed that their parents did
not take them out of Henry Houston and put them
into a private school.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
They remain pissed about this, yes, decades later, as opposed
to being like, you know, part of their like identity
formation of like I transcended this. It's why did you
make me suffer through this? Okay?
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Right? Why didn't you pull me out of this? You
had the resources too, Yeah, I didn't have to go
through this, and you made me because of your politics,
because you thought that it was the best for me. Right.
Alex claims to have had to bring bride money to
class to pay off a bully, and the overwhelming impact
of his time there seems to be a deep and
lingering anger at his parents that would extend in time
to their politics. As time went on, Alex's mother, Lair,
(17:57):
became a somewhat prominent artist. She does mixed media work,
and Sophie's going to show you one example here of
Leah's art. She's very much still left wing. Her art
is very much inspired by her politics. The piece that
you're seeing now, which I mean it's mixed media, so
there's like I don't really know. It looks like a
writing on a children's notebook, alongside with like people try
(18:18):
to draw out like the letters in cursive and in
like normal caricatures with like flowers superimposed over. This particular
piece is part of her Creation Story series, which the
Gush Fisher Gather Gallery describes this way. Kart made these
collashes in the early nineteen eighties in response to local
racialized killings known as the Atlanta child murders. So that's
an idea of his mom, right, Like, she is very political,
(18:41):
and they grow up aware of this, aware of racial
violence in their community. It's deeply affecting to their parents.
One assumes it's a big part of their childhood hearing
about this, even though they're not experiencing it directly. In
a twenty eighteen profile of Alex in Forbes, well before
his shift to the right, he was described as quote
the son of an artist and a pediatrician who's many
of their weekends taking him to protest for labor rights
(19:03):
and against anything Reagan did. He recalls, and every account
of his youth repeats that claim. So we should assume
it's true, right that his parents really hated Reagan. Yeah,
he grows up kind of inundated in that as a child,
Alex acquires the nickname professor. This is not apparently an insult.
You would kind of like assume it was, maybe, but
it's a reference to his obvious intellect. And again he
(19:25):
comes to feel like mixed about that. I think, because
he still can't read by age eight. You know, he's
kind of able. He's smart enough that he's able to
develop skills to make his teachers and some of his
classmates think that he's able to read right, because he's
you know, that's a thing, especially like a lot of
smart kids with dyslexi develop really really robust coping mechanisms,
you know.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Because so more than just avoiding having to read aloud
in class, they're actually like doing like whole word sounded
out kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Yes, yes, like that kind of stuff. I think, because
you don't want people to know, and you're trying to
figure out ways to deal with it, right, And eventually,
like when he's eight, I think the school figure out
what's going on. He gets properly diagnosed, and he sent
to a special school for like two years right where
he gets direct hands on like help working with his dyslexia,
and he learns to read right. And this is another
(20:12):
sign that whatever his issues with the school district were,
they seem to have been pretty on top of things
right the fact that they do realize and they sent
and it works right this special program, he learns how
to read and becomes a voracious reader. He returns to
Houston after these two years at the special school, and
he graduates eighth grade and moves into high school. Now,
Alex is emphatic that learning to read during those two
(20:35):
years was the hardest thing he has ever had to do.
And I have again no reason to doubt that his
dyslexia was a constant source of struggles, but it also
taught him how to deal with adversity and reinforced the
lesson that he had to rely on and trust other
people in order to get things done. A lot of
folks will argue this is part of why he's such
a competent CEO today, is that, unlike a lot of
(20:55):
people in that position, he's really good at like taking
feedback from his subordinates because he's always learned that he
needs the help of people to get by and do
things right. That's not an issue he has wanting to
do everything by himself. And this is actually a recognized
phenomenon among CEOs and founders. Dyslexics are wildly overrepresented among
like tech founders and CEOs.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Yeah, I wonder what the connection there is.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Well, there's some theorizing about that. In two thousand and two,
Betsy Morris wrote an article for Fortune about this after
interviewing multiple dyslexic founders and business leaders, and she writes
this quote, Dyslexia is a crucible, particularly in a high
pressure society that allows so little room for late bloomers.
People are either defeated by it or they become much
more tenacious, says McCaw don. Winkler, a top financial services
(21:39):
executive at Bank one and then Ford Motor, remembers coming
home from school bloodied by fights he'd had with kids
who called him dumb. Kinko's founder Paul Orfalia, failed second
grade and spent a part of third in a class
for mentally retarded children. He could not learn to read,
despite the efforts of parents who took him to testers, tutors, therapists,
special reading groups, and eye doctors. As young classmates read
aloud or Faalia says it was as if Angel whispered
(22:00):
words into their ears. Right. So there's a long history
of people who like Karp struggle with this and it
teaches them coping skills that allow them to get ahead,
that like allow them to figure out how society works
and how to work within it. Right, And that Krp's
going to be one of these guys. He comes out
of this with over developed social skills as well as
(22:20):
as a voracious leader. He's really good at knowing what
people are thinking. People will say this about Alex, like
he's very empathetic, and if he's in a room with people,
he's always concerned with like how people are doing and
like who's feeling what? Right, That's something that he just knows.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
So he was able to read people even though you
had difficulty reading language exactly exactly.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Yeah, yeah, and you know who else has difficulty reading people,
which is why they contact with us to read their advertisements.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
I don't know, you're almost there.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Yeah, can all be great. Here's ad and we're back.
Hopefully not after just having an ad from Palent here.
It'd be weird for Palente to advertise on a podcast. Yeah,
maybe not. The Joe Rogan experience.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
That would be not the strangest thing that's ever happened.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
Sure, if you guys had that happen where you actually
like are talking, Yes, we have as well.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Yeah, we've had the police Department. We were critiquing do
an add on our show and we were and yeah,
oh we work, Yeah we work.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Remember the good old days.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Bloomberg. Bloomberg is running for president.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Yeah, we had an episode of about maybe not guys.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yeah, sponsored by Mike Bloomberger. So Alex graduates high school
both with overveloped social skills and as a voracious reader,
but also with a massive chip on his shoulder. He's
not not angry as a result of the struggles of
his youth. Per his biography, The Philosopher in the Valley
years later, Karp would say that dyslexia added to the
(23:51):
sense of vulnerability that he felt as a child. He
claims that he intuited from an early age because he
was a biracial jew with a disability, he had some
strikes against him. As he put it, you're a racially amorphous,
far left Jewish kid who's also dyslexic. Would you not
come up with the idea that you're fucked He says
that he also recognized that his parents, hamstrung by their
own limitations, were not in a position to protect him.
They loved him, of course, but they couldn't shelter him
(24:13):
from a world that seemed especially dangerous for someone with
his particular identity. Long before he left for college, Karp
felt that he could only truly depend on himself for survival.
And one thing he's always angry about is that neither
of his parents become like rich and famous. He thinks
that his dad could have been like a really prominent
famous physician, and he thinks his mom could have been
(24:33):
a much more famous artist, and they both kind of
lack hustle and savvy that he has. That's his conclusion
as an adult, right.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
Yeah, he's got a lot of resentment about his parents.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Yes, it is a boiling well inside of glex car. Yeah. Yeah.
So he is noted by some early friends and relatives
as being an angry kid who quote lived in his
own world. But he was also popular and once he
went through puberty, he was very stylish and elegently quite
good with the ladies. He's not an isolated kid in
(25:05):
high school, and he's not like, I mean he's nerdy
in some ways, but he's repeatedly noted as being like
pretty good with women. Right. His brother says that he
wasn't acted like a young black man in school, and
there's no evidence that we get from anyone close to
him that he had any issues with that identity as
a kid. Rather, his chief issues are with his parents,
you know, like it's this, they didn't have enough to
(25:26):
get me out of the school I didn't like, they
didn't have enough to make me feel safer from the world,
so I had to go and become rich and powerful myself.
Is kind of what I take out of Alex's conclusions
from his childhood.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
And there's Sophie some deep pathology there.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Yeah, yeah, I think this might be mixed with the
fact that the Carps certainly are not happy with the
fact that Alex went on to become the CEO of Palanteer.
They did not change their minds about that when he
became a billionaire. They wanted their sons to become intellectuals
and artists. His brother been recalled. My father said that
he became a doctor so that his sons could look poets,
(26:01):
and Ben would go on to become a successful author,
like I mean he is to this day. But Alex
is going to be drawn in a very different direction now.
His grades are excellent and he has no trouble getting
into a really good college, Haverford, which is a really
good college. He kind of hates it now because they've
never asked him to come back and speak. Like Haverford's
like a left wing college. Yeah. For an idea of
(26:24):
Haverford's background, one of the professors who infiltrated the FBI
and stole a bunch of files from them to reveal
their like surveillance programs was a Haverford professor, right, Okay, yeah, Yeah,
So this is a school with like a long left
wing tradition, and I just don't think they're that fond
of Alex Karp. And he's really broken up about the
fact that they have not asked him to come speak.
(26:44):
The reason he went there in the first place is
that as a kid, he went to some event that
was held at Haverford and they served a steak dinner
and his parents would never buy them stakes. So that's
why he wanted to go there.
Speaker 3 (26:56):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Yeah, And it's again he seems to be a very
left kid. As he's going to college. One of his
professors described the nineteen eighty four election between Reagan and
Mondale as an election between a proud and a guilty
capitalist Big so like, that's the environment he's in there,
and he thrives educationally, although it's also a time of
great pain. His parents get divorced pretty much as soon
as he leaves for college. Now, the inciting incident here
(27:19):
is that Leah has decided she cannot stand to be
married to Bob anymore. And for his part, Bob is like,
all right, if you don't want anything to do with me,
then fuck this whole family, and he takes it out
on the boys. So he takes it out on Leiah too.
But he moves out and he stops paying the mortgage,
which forces Leah into something near destitution. She and his
younger brother Ben are only able to afford an apartment
(27:40):
because a kindly old landlady helped out his mom, who
Alex described as totally fucked in this period of time.
Carp would later help this lady out send money to
her business, basically because he's really grateful to what she
does for his mom, But he never forgets the fact
that his father separated from the family, and that this
threw them suddenly from being like comfortable to be poor
(28:00):
because Bob calls Alex and he's like, I'm not paying
for your college tuition anymore, so his mom has to
take out Bob is a real dick. It sounds like, seriously,
his mom has to take out loans and basically mortgage
every ash that she has to barely afford sending Alex
to school. The uncertainty over whether or not he'd be
able to afford each semester meant that Alex is under
constant stress. He never knows that he's going to be
(28:22):
able to stay much longer, and he really it doesn't
seem like he ever forgives his father for what he
sees as a betrayal of the family. I think, rightfully,
this is rightfully betrayal. Yeah, like, you shouldn't take it
out on your kids. They're not divorcing you, they're your kids.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
I mean, it's also like another sweeping symbolic thing starting
with the tokenization of the mother. Now he's like just
rejects her and the progeny that she's bore him. That's
some deep shakespeareence stuff, right then.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Yeah, yeah it is. And it's yeah, Alex's dad certainly
a guy with some stuff going on under the hood. Yeah,
Alex remains, you know, outgoing, even though he's really broken up.
During this whole period of time. He runs track and
his friends describe him as aloof and hard to read,
but also well liked and particularly active in the school's
black student community. From his biography, his social life mainly
(29:10):
revolved around he her for his black community. He was
much more of a black man than he is now,
says Ward Breeze, who was one of Karp's closest friends.
In the fall of senior year, Karpt helped organize a
conference at Yale University sponsored by a group called Campuses
Against Racial Violence. Alex even wound up in the paper.
The Detroit Free Press quoted him in an article on
racial violence on US campuses, and this is Alex. The
(29:31):
most distressing thing was that finding someone to talk about
racial violence was as simple as asking someone to speak.
It is that pervasive. Alex attacked the deans of his
school for giving a green light to racists by not
taking steps to prevent racism. Steinberger notes that he also
wore a kefia in his yearbook picture, which quote suggested
a broader interest in fighting and justice, and I'm sure
(29:52):
he means that to signal that Karp had some solidarity
with Palestine. That's not clear to me at all. I
don't know if that meant that as much as it
does now back then, and Alex never talks about that. Furthermore,
even though his parents are left wing, it seems like
Alex's mom likes Israel. She wins a scholarship to Israel
as a teenager. I don't know why she feels about
(30:13):
it now, but as a teenager, she has a really
positive experience there that he would have grown up hearing about.
And I haven't ever heard that he took any kind
of stand on Israel in Palestine as a kid. He
does as an adult, but I just don't get any
evidence that he was particularly aware of anything happening there
at the time.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
And as you point out, it was a very different
perspective then in terms of all of this, like, yeah,
just even black and Israeli relations.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Yeah, it could have just been something he thought was
like fashionable for whatever reason. I don't know, But I
don't know that we should read like too much into that.
His professor seemed to remember him as brilliant, someone who
could have been a world class academic, which is surely
what his mom and dad would have wanted for him. More. Instead,
after graduating with a BA in philosophy, he chooses to
go to law school alex His grades are so good
(30:58):
that he gets accepted by Columbia, Harvard, Penn State, and Stanford.
So he's a really smart cookie, right, that's a hard
one to beat.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
He ran the table.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
He ran the fucking table. Yeah. In the summer of
nineteen eighty nine, he picked Stanford, and he starts attending Stanford.
He seems to decide it almost immediately that he didn't
want to work as a lawyer, but he nonetheless stuck
it out, despite finding it the worst three years of
my adult life. Per an article in The Times by Steinberger,
he says that he knew within a week of enrolling
that he had made a mistake. In his view, Stanford
was just a glorified trade school. His classmates were mainly
(31:32):
animated by a desire to land prestigious jobs, and the
intellectual discourse was highly performative. As he puts it, what
made Stanford bearable was his unlikely friendship with Peter Teel,
a classmate. They bonded over their shared disdain for law
school at a loff of political debate. Teal had already
achieved from prominence for his libertarian views. As a Stanford undergraduate,
he had helped found the right leaning Stanford Review, and
(31:52):
he and Carp spent much of their free time interrogating
each other's positions. We argued like feral animals, Carp recalled.
According to Teal, their conversations generally took place late at
night in the law school dorm. It sounds too self aggrandizing,
but I think we were both genuinely interested in ideas.
He was more the socialist, I was more the capitalist.
He was always talking about Marxist theories of alienated labor
and how this was true of all the people around us.
(32:13):
And yeah, he and Peter are just like peas in
a pod in this really and otherwise miserable time in
Alex's life. And it says a lot both that he
immediately knows he doesn't want to go to law school
and he sticks it out for three years.
Speaker 3 (32:26):
Yes, imagined law school is very difficult if as a
former dyslexic student. I mean, all the reading's got to do.
It's got to be very frustrating. He's got to be
using all the talents he's learned.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Yeah, and per thing he doesn't want to do. Yeah,
does he take the bar?
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Does he be?
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Actually?
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Because no, no, I don't think he ever does, because
he's going to go immediately from that to Germany for
more school to do a totally different thing.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
That's so baffling because if you know any lawyers, or
if you know anyone who's been to law school, that
shit is not a walk in the park. That is
a full time commitment.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
Yeah, and it's maybe he just needed to prove he
could do it once he'd started. I don't know, but
it's really interesting that he doesn't want to be a lawyer.
He knows that right away.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
I feel like he should apologize to all the lawyers
for his fuckery here, Like what the.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
I don't know. I don't know if anyone should apologize
to lawyers.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
My sister in law would disagree.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
So, as you can see in that quote though, Alex
is also like, I think the reason why he and
Peter hit it off because there's this like mystery that
you get in these accounts of them, of like these
two guys were so different politically, and yet they became
the best of friends's because they're not really all that different.
Like they're interested maybe in arguing about different things, but
the center of their belief system isn't left wing or
(33:43):
right wing. It's being contrariant.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Yeah, an individualist.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Yeah exactly. That everyone around me is dumber than me
and I'm angry at them all the time is kind
of how Alex and Peter both feel.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
Completely on the surface, you see, like, oh, this is
apartheid South Africans, and then like raised by liberals in Pennsylvania,
like you know, black child, and then they meet up
and they like arguing late at night in college. It means, oh,
of course if they would ben but their cantankerousness would
bond them.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Yeah, yeah, their cantankerousness and their disdain for others.
Speaker 3 (34:15):
Yeah right, Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Both men believe very strongly and separating themselves from the herd. Now,
because Alex comes from a left wing background, he will
first come to define this as a terror at the
idea of fascism and right wing populism right, and Peter's
going to go in a really different direction initially, but
even at the time, Alex was comfortable hanging out with
a guy whose campus claimed to fame was launching a
(34:38):
right wing alternative to the school paper that hosted columns
mocking date rape and gay people. That's what Peter til
does in college, and Alex knows that, right.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
While Teal finds his mentor, Rene Gerardo we talk about
in the Teal episodes through Stanford, Alex is going to
have to travel to Germany to do the same, well,
to attempt to do the same, because his mentor never
likes him all that much. It's kind of the feeling
I get. He won't agree with that, but we'll see
how you feel. That's wild. So after he leaves Stanford,
(35:07):
Karp applies to become a doctoral student at the Sigmund
Freud Institute in Frankfurt. He seems to have grown more
fascinated with the Holocaust as time goes on, and as
a Jewish Man, Alex has always maintained a healthy fear
of fascism and a dread like something like the Third
Reich might come again and target people like him. His
ambition at this point was to become a German Jewish intellectual,
(35:27):
and he took to that life like a duck to water.
He later described his education at this stage as quote
a quick path to being unemployed, and he kind of
disdains it now, but he seems to have been very
happy there. He learns German and like literally he goes
from not speaking German to fluent in three months. Again
for another example of how smart this man is. Yeah,
and he starts to display here in these days some
(35:49):
of the social savvy that's going to get him the
job running Palenteer, one of his friends, who also is
a German savant and learns how to speak German perfectly,
can't get over the like all of the low still
really mean to him and cold to him, and he
doesn't understand why because his German is so good, and
Karp immediately identifies, well, it's because your German and your
accent is perfect, so they think that you're a German,
(36:10):
but you don't know all of the social mores that
people who grow up in Germany are expected to perform,
so they just think that you're like a shitty, weird
German as opposed to a foreigner who's really got a
good capture of the language and cares. And he's like,
so what you need to do is pepperin some mispronunciations, and.
Speaker 3 (36:26):
He's going to say.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Exactly exactly, and it works really well, and it shows you,
like that's the way, That's how Alex's mind works. He's
really very intuitive about people. He enjoys Germany as an escape.
He starts dating a lot of women, and he finds
the European attitude towards casual sex intoxicating and liberating. He
decides at this point that he's not going to be monogamous,
and he never really is as far as I can
(36:51):
tell in the rest of his life. Some of this
is probably reaction to his father, who, after the divorce,
remarries and adopts several kids and basically replaces his first
with a new family. Yeah, maybe he didn't get a
great example, right, Yeah, that's for sure. So his dissertation
(37:12):
focused on how aggressive language and public discourse in Germany
contributed to anti Semitism, and his work was influenced by
the recent publication at that point in time of a
book called Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen. Now that
book is about how the Holocaust was made possible by
huge numbers of willing German volunteers with eliminationist beliefs about
(37:32):
the Jews, that when I summarize it like that, that's
not really wrong. But the book itself fucks up a
lot of stuff and is very heavily been criticized. Norman
Finkelstein of The New Left Review calls it worthless as scholarship.
Goldhagen believed that German anti Semitism wasn't just like eliminationist,
and that that contributed to this groundswol of people who
(37:52):
participated in the Holocaust, but he believed specifically that German
anti Semitism was uniquely demonic in its intensity, and that
the desire to murder Jews prior to the Holocaust had
become central to German culture, and then in nineteen forty five,
after Hitler was defeated, that very suddenly changed forever, right,
Like that's kind of the attitude there, and that gets
that's not really accurate. People will criticize that quite a bit.
(38:14):
At the time. Karp seems to have bought Goldhagen's argument,
and his dissertation was inspired by a critique of the
book by a German writer named Martin Walser, who made
the perhaps poor decision to describe the Holocaust as a
moral bludgeon used to unfairly beat the Germans. So Alex
gets really angry at this guy, Waltzer, and buys into
the stuff that Goldhagen is arguing about. And just to
(38:36):
be clear, folks, there was nothing uniquely demonic about German
anti semitism. Was very related to the rest of European
anti semitism. It was related to French anti.
Speaker 3 (38:43):
Semitism, European Project.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Yeah, you should not separate these things Banish, yes, the
Spanish right, you should not separate German anti semitism anyway.
His thesis advisor Corolla Breed described Karp's paper as a
study of secondary anti semitism, based on the work of
socialist Telcott Parsons Theodoraderno. Karp concluded that Walzer's outburst had
been quote a parochial form of fascism that occurs by
(39:06):
purposefully saying things that are incorrect in speech, which I
consider a bizarre interpretation of that guy's getting angry that
people are made to Germans today. Alex describes his dissertation
as niche scholarship only a few people would understand or
find interesting, but he was dedicated to the work, and
more than anything, he was obsessed with philosopher Jurgen Habermas,
who's taught at Girtha University and was considered one of
(39:28):
the great intellectuals in post war Europe. A protege of
Adorno and a member of the Frankfurt School, Hebermas concerned
himself with the question of what sustains a democracy not
long before his death. Earlier this year in twenty twenty six,
You're going to open to symposium by stating, no one
is free until we are all free. To give you
an idea of where this man stood. In his memorial service,
(39:49):
German President Frank Walter Steinmeier said this. Throughout his life,
Hebermus reminded us that democratic legitimacy grows out of public
debate through the exchange of arguments, disagreement and mutual understanding
within an open public sphere in which everyone can participate.
At a time when authoritarian movements are gaining influence around
the world, this idea is more relevant than ever. Democracy
is not sustained by elections alone. It depends on participation, responsibility,
(40:12):
and the protection of fundamental rights, and it must be
renewed every day. Habermas's legacy reminds us that democratic achievements
can never be taken for granted, but must be actively
defended and brought to life again every single day. This
is the guy Alex loves. This is the guy Alex
wants to have as his mentor. Right and initially, Habermass
seems to have liked Alex Karp. He invites the precocious
(40:34):
young academic to an exclusive sort of academic salon he ran,
where participants would talk about their research and receive feedback
from Habermass and their fellows. Karp has gone on to
claim Habermas as his dissertation advisor, which Heberas himself strenuously denied.
Was like, yeah, it was my thesis advisor. And you're like, no, No,
I was not. Absolutely it was not this kid's thesis advisor.
(40:56):
I did not sign off on this thing. Do not
say that about me?
Speaker 3 (40:59):
Wow? I like how no one wants to claim him
in college.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Off his parents.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
Yeah, I don't know about that. That's kind of me.
I'm sorry. Can I not bully Alex? I guess we
could bully child Alex Carp. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
One of Robert's returning bits is that we should have
like for some of the worst people in history, like
if only someone had been meaner to them.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
Yeah, it turns out not true. For Alex, I don't
think that helped. That may have been a bad idea
on my part.
Speaker 3 (41:37):
Sorry, everybody, they might have got just gotten started earlier.
You know, maybe shoving them in the locker actually becomes
the straw that breaks that Campbell's back.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
Yeah, there's a right amount of time in the locker.
We just haven't found it yet.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
But if daddy was nicer, that.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
Really might have helped. Maybe if Daddy hadn't abandoned the
family after a divorce. I don't know. You know who
else abandoned their family after it divorce, Probably some of
the sponsors of this podcast.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
At least the dick Pill sponsors for sure.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
Look, you have to assume a lot of CEOs have second, third,
fourth families, you know, and are not taking care of
all of the first couple, right, that's just my assumption.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Assumption.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Anyway, send them money and we're back. So the fact
that Jurgen Habermas was his like dissertation advisor, which he wasn't,
but that being seen as true is extremely important to Alex,
and clearly while he is in Germany attending this university,
that's his goal is to get close to Habermas and
(42:36):
to get him to like endorse his research. He wants
to be the same way that Habermas was like Adorno's protege.
He wants to be Habermas's protegee. Right, that's his life
goal at this point, Right, he.
Speaker 3 (42:46):
Wants to be the aristol on the line of the
great thinkers.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
Yes, yes, and there's there's a degree to which you
can see this is even kind of shallow for Alex
because he tells an interviewer, if you can get Habermass
to work with you for even two minutes, you can
be a tenured professor at Columbia. Right, So we say
that like being any way associated with this guy like
guarantees you or respected career. That's why he wants to
be close to him. I think, even more than any
ideological simpatico between them, it's this man's prestige that draws
(43:13):
in Alex.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
It's the opportunism that he seeks out.
Speaker 2 (43:16):
That's right. But Habermas declines to be his dissertation advisor,
he declines to be the second reader of his dissertation. Now,
Carp sends it to him, and Hebermass sends back a
three page letter, and he does give a short critique,
and he says he did a couple of things well,
but here's my issues with it. But I'm not going
to be your advisor. Right, That's the endpoint of the
paper is like, I will give you this much, but
(43:37):
I'm not going to be your advisor. And as Steinberger
describes it, the paper was kind but firm, although I
think it would be pretty devastating for a kid like
Alex to get. I'm going to read a quote from
the philosopher in the Valley here. Habermass expressed doubt about
whether Karp's German comprehension was sufficient to allow him to
grapple with some of the texts that he was drawing on.
Your topic would require a literary approach to a topic
(43:59):
that all overwhelms the linguistic sensibility of US native speakers
and yours. You won't blame me. Even more so, heber
Must wrote, for you, literary German must be as much
a foreign language as literary English is for me. Moreover,
it is not a reproach to remind oneself of the
limits of the competencies that we expect from an educated sociologist.
At the end, haberr Mus struck an apologetic tone. Please
(44:21):
don't be angry with me, mister Carp, for my candid assessment,
he wrote, adding I would be happy to see you
again if the occasion arises. So he's a really nice
guy and he's trying to do this very kindly, but
he's like, dude, I know you think like you speak
German really well, this isn't speaking German.
Speaker 3 (44:37):
This is a second form of German.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
Yeah, exactly, you're not competent to do this. You know
which one thing I will say, I fuck up plenty.
You know, on this job there's always little bits that
I get wrong around the edges. There's so much history
we're covering with it's hard to as like not a historian, right,
you have to have humility when you're approaching shit like this,
and I don't think Karp is capable of that. Because
Habermass is trying to give him really good advice, which
(45:01):
is stick to something like you're capable of meaningfully contributing
to and I don't think you are here, and Alex like,
but I want to and he he just can't get
over that, right, It's really fun. Habermas wrote what he
describes as a generic letter of recommendation and notes that quote.
Carp continues to maintain that Habermass was his doctoral advisor
for a period. He says that Habermas, now in his
(45:23):
late nineties, is downplaying their connection and that he is
at a loss to understand why that's his biographer right,
that Karp keeps saying like, no, we he really did
help me with my with my uh, he was by
a doctoral advisor. He's just pretending not to be now.
And I don't know why.
Speaker 3 (45:37):
His age it makes it.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
He can't remember. He's forgotten that he agreed to help me.
One of the things that really pissed me off is
that when Habermass died early this year, Politico published an
article by Alex Karp reminiscing about his supposed mentor. In
the newsletter Unpopular Front, John Gans writes Karp's picture of
haber Moss is of a crotchety and even slightly i
(46:00):
rannical doyenne who terrorized his students, routinely referred to people
as idiots and half idiots, and who ultimately declined to
supervise Karp's dissertation, A rejection who Sting would linger for years,
Karp wrote, Gans describes this, And what I think is
interesting both is that in this obituary he's willing to
admit finally, Yeah, he rejected me, right, and he was
really mean to people. As brilliant as he was, he
(46:21):
was cruel to all of us. Nobody else who worked
with Haro Loss describes it this way is pretty much
just alice. I would have quote again from Ganz's piece quote,
and this is him talking about how other students and
peers remember Jurgen. They remember someone patient, unpretentious, and generous
with his time and intellectual energy. Is it possible that
Harmss just didn't like Carp very much? He certainly didn't
(46:42):
think highly of his work, Writing to Karp, you simply
cannot compete with literary critics and theorists who have recently
waited on this subject.
Speaker 3 (46:49):
The self we see or get glimpses of in the
letter is a kind, patient, intellectual.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
Nice, decent man. Do it as best. Yeah, exactly, kind
and patient, way too patient with this kid, No, And
so maybe that means he just he got fed up
with carb after a while and started calling Hi an
idiot because Corm wouldn't listen. I don't know, I wasn't there.
Gans theorizes that this piece by Karp reveals a substantive
disagreement the two men have over He suggests constitutional patriotism,
(47:18):
the idea that one could be loyal to their state
and not also bigoted against other nations. Right, Jergen is
likely you don't have to hate other countries to be
a patriot, and Karp is certainly in twenty twenty six
going to disagree with that. Here's what he wrote. The
vision was noble, yet in hindsight it seems clear strikingly
premature and misguided. In twenty eleven, the German magazine Der
Spiegel described him Hey Ross as the last European as
(47:41):
the continental government for which he had advocated so fiercely
came under increasingly sustained assault. His hope for a sort
of disembodied political identity, untethered from the inconvenient particularities of
family and culture represented an aspirational cosmopolitanism that has proven
insufficient to animate allegiance in the modern era. Put differently,
he believed in the possibility of a purely rational public discourse.
I believed and still believed that such a discourse must
(48:03):
be rooted in a more corporeal and traditional and indeed
national and cultural source. He may yet be vindicated, but
I fear not in our time. Basically, Jurgen was a
nice guy, but he wasn't like enough of a bigot
to be, you know, really as smart as I Alex
Karp am.
Speaker 3 (48:18):
They're blending the lines of patriot and nationalists, you know,
like kind of like, you know, conflating the two for
their own purposes. Because a patriot loves their country and
their fellow countrymen and women. A nationalist does only like
people that are of their people and not of the
other people.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
So exactly, and Karp is only really capable of nationalists,
I think, so well, it's not quite nationalism. It's like
a Western chauvinism, because he's not like an America guy.
He loves Germany, he loves the West. So it is
broader than nationalism, I should say. I don't want to
get him wrong here, but I do think all this
reveals a lot, this conflict with Habermass, because while Alex
Karp entertains the possibility of academic life in Berlin, for years.
(48:55):
It seems to really excite him. And he's excited by
the idea of like right papers during the day and
reading and discussing his ideas and then like sleeping around
constantly at night with all of these Berlin girls that
he's been flirting with.
Speaker 3 (49:07):
How can you hate that idea?
Speaker 2 (49:08):
How can you hate that idea?
Speaker 1 (49:10):
Right?
Speaker 2 (49:10):
And honestly, if he'd gone for this, life probably would
have been happier, I know the rest of us would
have been. But ultimately Alec is going to choose to
leave academia behind, tail between his legs kinda and return
to the United States to start down the road that's
going to lead him in part two to Palanteer. But
that's all we've got for part one. Zaren Burnett, how
(49:31):
are you feeling.
Speaker 3 (49:32):
Oh dude, I'm loving this. I'm learning so much about
Alex carp in the ways that it's more than humanizing him.
It's really giving that character arc Roback can see where
the anger and the bubbling resentment form. And yet also
he is very much a humanist. I mean, he's getting laid,
he likes people. He's always arguing for like conversation and
fighting in public, and you know, you know, nice and
kind and thoughtful ways he wants to be this intellectual
(49:54):
and then I'm very curious to see where the turn is.
Speaker 2 (49:57):
Yeah, yeah, well it is coming very soon after this point.
It's going to come as a result of his friendship
with Peter Tiel. But again, that's all in part two.
You got anything to plug before we roll out here?
Speaker 3 (50:06):
Zee, I would say, check out Ridiculous Crime. We have
a bunch of interesting historic will For instance, we cover
the files for the FBI they get robbed. We have
an episode on that.
Speaker 2 (50:16):
Yeah, one of the coolest chapters of US left right history. Yeah,
absolutely so.
Speaker 3 (50:22):
Yeah. I would say check out Ridiculous Crime, and also
check out very special episodes for the exact same reason,
stories that will beguile.
Speaker 2 (50:28):
Yeah, and check out You're good habermas Unlet's use isn't
good enough? I guess I don't know.
Speaker 1 (50:36):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 2 (50:46):
You get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (50:48):
Full video episodes that Behind the Bastards are now streaming
on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Remind me on
Netflix you don't miss an episode. For clips and our
older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our tube channel,
YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love
about forty percent of you, statistically speaking,
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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