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

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

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Welcome back once again to Behind the Bastards,
the show where we tell you everything you don't know
about the worst people in all of history.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
And our subject for this week is one of the
worst people today too, Alex Karp, the CEO of paland
here and here to talk about this. One of the
worst people is one of the best people. Our friends,
Zarren Burnette, a ridiculous crime and very special episode. Saren
welcome back.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
Thank you Chuch for having me. I love being here.
And even though we're talking about Alex Krp, this has
been fantastic.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
So yeah, all Alex, Yeah, that's that's what you're get
Hebramas said something along those lines. Right aside from Alex,
it was great. No, it is interesting the two of them,
because we finished in the last episode how he's seeking
the kind of approval and endorsement of this legendary academic
Habermass and kind of doesn't really get it. You're getting

(00:57):
very polite to him. But Alex goes back home without that,
and he's not immediately quitting academy. He's actually finishing his
dissertation while he After he moves back to San Francisco
for a while and he still kind of has ambitions
of maybe becoming an academic in Germany, but I think
ultimately this clash kind of kills those or at least
makes it a lot less attractive when some other offers

(01:18):
come by. And one of the things that's really interesting
to me about that is he and Hebermoss have kind
of the exact opposite journeys in life. So we've just
talked about Alex who grows up in this very left
wing home and a very left wing neighborhood and has
raised very left wing and has turned out to be
on the side of all these reactionaries, providing like spy software.
Jurgen grows up in Germany in the Nazi era. He's

(01:40):
in the Hitler youth. He achieves a high level in
the Hitler youth, and he's running anti aircraft guns. At
the end of the war, he very narrowly escapes getting
drafted into the Wehrmacht before the Americans take him in
his town. And obviously he was a kid during like
it's not really his faults. He happened to grow up
be like one when the Nazi stick over, and the
rest of his life he fought against fascism, but they

(02:03):
have very opposite journeys in a lot of ways, and
I do find that kind of interesting.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
Mm.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
So when we last left, are definitely not a hero.
Alex had run into a stumbling block and returned home
to the West Coast, well, not home to the West Coast,
but returned to the West Coast. He seems to have
liked that more than the place he had grown up,
so he moves back to the Bay Area. He takes
a job with the Jewish Philanthropy Partnership, and he shares
an apartment in the Bay with his brother Ben while

(02:35):
he puts the finishing touches on his dissertation. And so
you can see he's, you know, not certainly not rich
at this point. You don't you generally wind up living
with your brother if you've got a lot of spare cash,
and he's working a job that's got to give him
like a pretty probably a comfortable working class life, but
nothing crazy. And he's still really thinking he might want
to return to Berlin and continue having anonymous sex. Right,

(02:56):
that still seems pretty good to Alex at this point
in time.

Speaker 4 (02:59):
Do we know what Ben Carp ended up doing with
his life.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
Yeah, he becomes a novelist. He lives in a successful author.

Speaker 5 (03:08):
Yeah, so they're both successful, but not a weird little
uh not a weird.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
Little running palatineer.

Speaker 4 (03:15):
No, yeah, yeah, it's always interesting when that happens.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
Yeah, like what happened here?

Speaker 4 (03:23):
Where was the disconnect with one brother to another.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
It's about to really hit so this point, yeah, he
and his brother are together still too, right, they're living
in the same place. And what changes this ultimately is
Peter Teal. Peter obviously has started PayPal or is in
the process. He's like getting PayPal off the ground. He's
become rich, and he comes back into Alex's life because
he's coming back in and out of the Bay. I
assume he has several houses, but he at least keeps

(03:48):
one home in the area. And he and Alex get
together and start talking again, and they start doing like,
you know, talking about politics in their lives and their
opinions like they always had.

Speaker 3 (03:58):
Now.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
At the same time as Peter's kind of reconnecting with
his buddy Alex, he's also starting to experience something with PayPal,
which is that they're trying to deal with fraud. Right,
PayPal's got like a shitload of fraud problems happening, and
they develop a fraud detection system called Egor, which is
like an acronym for something that works really well. I've
told this story before over the years on the podcast

(04:19):
and the Peter Teal episodes, and Egor works so well
that not only does it help PayPal deal with their
fraud program, but it provides information that leads federal prosecutors
to take down a number of like scammers who are
part of organized criminal groups. And so Peter starts thinking, oh,
should I be like selling software to law enforcement and
like federal spy agencies, and shit, is there like a

(04:39):
market in that because it seems like we may have
stumbled upon something like this machine learning stuff that we're
using could also help with these other problems. So Peter
and some of his top guys, it's not just Peter,
He's got some coders he really trusts that are also
kind of brainstorming all this, and they start to wonder, like,
maybe there's a way to make purpose built systems that

(04:59):
can help law enforcement or whoever carry out similar kinds
of investigation to spot criminal activity or even maybe just
inefficiencies in a business. And I'm YadA yadaying a lot
of the mental development process here. But this train of
thought initially leads Teal to provide some funding to get
a company called Palanteer off the ground. And at the
very first days of Palenteer, Alex is not a part

(05:20):
of it, right, He's not initially in the group of
guys that are trying to start this company. Kind of.
By that point in time, he had moved on to
starting an investment company of his own called the Cadmon
Group with twelve thousand dollars he inherited, and he's good
enough at investing that he turns that into a sizable business.
He gets a number of rich people start putting in
their assets to have him invest them. And his goal

(05:41):
is to personally put together a next egg of like
a quarter of a million dollars so he can buy
a place in Berlin and live a life of and
he generally describes its as debaucheries. Right, So that's his
life goal. He's in his early thirties by this point.
You know, he's starting an investment because he doesn't like
working in finance. He doesn't want to be doing investment stuff.
It's just the easiest way to get the money, he
needs to live a better lifestyle, right.

Speaker 3 (06:03):
Okay, relatable? I mean, who doesn't want to, like, you know,
spend just a little bit of time doing something they hate?
To go live that libertine life of reading in the daytime,
sleeping around.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
At night, you know, right, right, the Berlin lifestyle. Yeah,
I've got several friends doing that. And his biographer Steinberger
even suggests that like this idea that like, oh, if
I can just get a little bit of money for
a seed, I'll go move to Berlin was never something
Alex would ever have done. It was a form of
self mythologizing, right. Steinberger doubts Alex would have ever settled

(06:33):
for anything that approaches a normal life, But it's also
not clear that he would have had a choice to,
you know, on that if his old pow Peter Teal,
hadn't come a calling. So again they start hanging out,
and at one point he invites Peter to a donor
meeting for the Jewish Philanthropy Partnership, which's also still working
at on the logic that hey, you know, normally it's
me and a bunch of other Jewish guys and we're

(06:54):
always at each other's throats, if we bring a gentile in,
maybe we'll stop fighting, right, And it works really well,
and walks away and pressed that like, oh, Alex is
actually like really good with people, he might be a
really good manager. So he asks as kind of like
a test gig, he asks Karp to help him raise
money for his clarium capital fund, and I guess Alex
does well enough at this that a few months later,

(07:14):
he offers Alex a job at what's becoming Palentier. Now
this is the early two thousands, nine to eleven, is not,
It didn't happen all that long ago, right, there's like
two thousand and three, I think, when they're having these talks,
and the company is extremely primitive. At this point. Palenteer
does not have clients, and it's kind of a laughingstock
of Silicon Valley a little bit, right, because in this

(07:35):
period we're not quite up to like social media, but
we're starting to hit the early days of social media, right,
and apps are a few years away. These are also
like internet companies and whatnot that are starting to take off,
and so everything is focused even though it's it's it's
kind of still evolving to you know, the social media
and app era everything's really focused on like consumers, right, yeah, right,

(07:58):
you don't go to Silicon Valley to make products for
like spy agencies that or the government. Right, that's like
not a normal thing in this period of time. But
Karp isn't a Silicon Valley guy. He's not even a
tech guy. And that's part of why Peter thinks he
might be right for a job. And Palenteer, he's a
philosophy nerd who's obsessed with the Holocaust and really paid
surprisingly patriotic by this point in his life. Now caps

(08:22):
and Karp is so patriotic because I guess his ideolog ideologically,
he's come to conclude at this point, probably not wrongly,
that a weirdo like him could only have survived and
thrived in a society as good at protecting the rights
of minorities as like Western civilization. And he says minority
not just in the racial sense, but in the ideological sense. Right.

(08:42):
And so he decides, anything I can do to help
these governments use data and machine learning to get up
on their enemies, be they terrorist or China or whatever,
that's fundamentally good. So he's intrigued by this job offer,
and what Peter is impressed by is. As soon as
Karp learns what Palanteer is, he's like a true believer
and he's we are spinning all this ideological shit about
how like this is how we protect you know, the

(09:03):
great achievements of Western civilization for yes, right right shield exactly.
Oh shit, this guy's drinking the same kool aid.

Speaker 3 (09:13):
I am.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah. I thought maybe we were more at odds than
it turns out we are. And he's even more surprised
by how skilled Alex is at evangelizing than selling the
Palenteer brand. First to his new colleagues, and in short order,
those first couple of guys that Peter had started planning
Palenteer with are like, this guy is a co founder,
he should be the CEO. So Car becomes CEO Palenteer

(09:34):
in two thousand and four, and whether or not you
want to call him a co founder, because he's not
there at the earliest days, most of the company considers
him one. He's thirty four when he gets the job,
and he's not rich. That's really important. He's like, I
don't even know, maybe upper middle class on his own
at this at the point at which he gets the job,
certainly by the time he gets the job, he is
because he's get paid like one hundred and twenty five

(09:55):
grand a year, which is like a good salary in
two thousand and four, but it's still an insane CEO salary, right, Yeah,
and he's he's he's got to make that much money
for like most of the first ten years. It takes
a while for Pallenteer to be worth a bunch of money,
and so there's there's kind of a hunger Alex has
because Pallenteer is his only chance to get rich, right,
and it's also his only chance to be really important.

(10:18):
And I think he wants to be rich and important
by this point, very clearly. Maybe there's some jealousy with
his buddy Peter who started PayPal and got super rich.
It is clearly important, and he's like, I want that for.

Speaker 3 (10:28):
Me, you know, and that linger his parents failing to
do this, so he could then prove them wrong, to
prove that he you know, he should have had family
like him.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yeah, exactly exactly, and that he could do it too
where they couldn't.

Speaker 1 (10:39):
You know.

Speaker 2 (10:41):
Now, he's old for the startup world, but this likely
aided him, given that Palenteer's customers aren't a bunch of
like teenagers and twenty somethings on the Internet. They're like
the CIA, And so if you walk into a meeting
with the CIA and your doctor so and so, and
you're wearing a suit and you don't look like Mark
fucking Zuckerberg in two thousand and five, you know it
probably helps. So Karp is a strange pick, though in

(11:03):
a number of ways, because he's got no managerial experience
really when he becomes CEO of Palanteer, and he also
doesn't know how to code. He doesn't have any real
tech background Northy's m background and software of any kind.
And this is something that his biographer and a lot
of his employees seem to think benefits him. Right. Palanteer's
chief software engineers, like a lot of their kind, can

(11:25):
be hard to manage, like really brilliant coders not the
easiest people to work with always, And Alex doesn't even
pretend to try to macromanage them. He doesn't pretend to
try to understand like the directness of the actual coding
and how that works. So he's never going to give
him like criticism like that. Instead, he's going to try
to more broadly direct them to achieve specific like operational goals, right.

(11:49):
And he's because he's so good at understanding what motivates people,
even like weird people, and he's really good at incentivizing
them and getting these genius coders to work a lot
harder and longer into also deliver a product that maybe
is more to spect with what the customer wants, because
he also is better at understanding what the customer wants.
He's a great middleman between the people who are filled

(12:09):
exactly exactly Yeah. Alex recalls one anecdote about his early
days at Palaeer to Marine Dowd. I kept telling paleteerians
to call me Alex, and they kept calling me doctor carp.
I realized the only thing they believed in was that
I had a PhD. And no one really knows if
this company's gonna work at this point. And they're all like, well,
should I be trying to get a job at like

(12:30):
Facebook that's getting off the ground now, or Google that's
you know, suddenly huge, or Apple? Why am I hanging
around this company that may never be worth anything. One
early employee, Bob McGrew, said, we didn't know what to
make of him at first, and that in order to
help their new boss fit in, several software guys handed
Karp a copy of Ray Kurzweild's The Singularity Is Near,
which was basically the bible for this kind of tech

(12:52):
guy at that point in time. And it's anyone who
works in AI now was nursed on this book. The
older people working at AI were nursed on this fucking book.
And yeah, it's talking about how we're going to hit
the fucking singularity. That the title kind of gives you
the gist of the book right a post card. Over time,
Alex added some of his favorite books to the list

(13:13):
of books that new Palantarians would get. This included Improv,
which is a guide to improvisational theater that I guess
he felt as like a good guide to creativity, and
The Looming Tower, which is a book about how nine
to eleven happened by Lawrence writes. Pallenteer's early years were slow,
and it was an open question for years as to
whether or not the company would succeed. Karp led from

(13:34):
the front, taking a salary of one hundred and twenty
five thousand and telling his employees, I only make money
when you make money. Displays of wealth like fancy new
cars were discouraged among executives in the early days, although
Alex is said to have liked to show off his
black Amex card. This passage from the Philosopher in the
Valley gives you an idea of what working for Alex
was like at this time. While Karp was approachable and

(13:55):
entertaining then as now, he enjoyed regaling colleagues with stories
about German women and they're at t to him, conversations
with him could be difficult. He spit out thoughts and
observations in a nonlinear fashion that sometimes left his colleagues befuddled.
I don't know that anyone would say he's easy to
talk to, says Brian Schimp, who was hired by Palanteer
in two thousand and seven and eventually became its director
of engineering. Joshua Goldenberg, who was Palenteer's head of design,

(14:17):
recalls the discussions with Karp were unstructured and sometimes seemed
a little bit incoherent. After all hands meetings with Karp,
staffers would congregate to try to make sense of what
they'd heard. We would debrief and tell it and see
if anyone could divine the signal in the chaos of
carp speech pattern, says one former employee. But he says,
they all recognize that Karp has a kind of crazy
charisma and was exceptionally intelligent.

Speaker 3 (14:37):
So what we see all these interviews these days has
always been true off his speech pattern. He's just kind
of ping ponging around.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
He's darting back and forth as fast as he can.
He gets bored easily, and he's not really interested in
usually like delivering a specific point to you. He's interested
in geik a shotgun of points, you know, conviction with
great conviction, and he wants to tell you that German
women really wanted to find I.

Speaker 4 (15:01):
Really important mission critical load bearing.

Speaker 2 (15:07):
For the Carp story, Alex framed Palenteer's mission in grand
civilizational terms that sometimes bordered on apocalyptic. Palenteer existed to
defend the West and democracy, just like Tokein's Pallentieri didn't.
That the name has never made a lot of sense,
And I've never read a good explanation, like I know
what the Palenteeri were, But if your whole thing is

(15:27):
to defend the West, that's not what they do in
the books. No, Yeah, okay. The way Alex saw it,
nine to eleven had been a wake up call that
the ideals of liberal democracy were under attack and the
whole rest of the tech industry was obsessing over useless
or outright toxic bullshit while the underpinning of our collective
security was in danger. Carp hated and still hates Facebook,

(15:48):
as he felt selling people's personal data was unethical. He
distrusted Google too, as much for their supposed high minded
ideals as for their data policies, and he avoided hiring
from either company. Alex discussed for the quote move fast
and break things Silicon Valley ethos, which he felt was
incompatible with security because it is for his part, the
Valley didn't take an immediate shine to Palanteer. It was

(16:11):
a weird company with a weird CEO who constantly trash
talked all of the companies that were actually making money today.
Alex likes to hype up their unpopularity quote we were
like Pariah's We couldn't get meetings if they did. It
was a favorite to Peter. During one pitch meeting with
Sequoia Capital, Alex pitched his heart out and watched a
major Sequoia partner Michael Maritz draw on a napkin because

(16:33):
he was bored. Years later, Alex still feels rage about this,
telling an interviewer I should have told him to go
fuck himself, but he did. He's like a billionaire venture capitalist.

Speaker 4 (16:45):
So it's like I don't like him by default, but
very funny.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
But it's really funny. It's really funny that Maritsa is
just like, all right, man, okay, John dicks on a
paper about a note.

Speaker 5 (16:58):
Yeah, that's really funny.

Speaker 2 (17:01):
So eventually Palaenteer finds an investment partner in Qtel. You
guys know who inqtel is No, I'm afraid it's the
CIA's venture capital firm.

Speaker 3 (17:11):
Oh there you go.

Speaker 2 (17:14):
Yeah, well, yes, yes, Palateer a CIA partnership. Yes, it
had been founded in nineteen ninety nine, and it just
so happened the agency was in the market for what
Palenteer was selling. Their current data analytics program was named
Analysts Notebook, and it was aging and lacked modern capabilities. Basically,
it was good for a previous time, but it would

(17:36):
not scale up to the Internet age. That's kind of
the issues. They know they need something new. Alex has
to rush out and buy suits for him and his
engineering team before the meeting in DAC because they're Silicon
Valley coders, they don't have suits. Yeah, the seven of
m h uh Now in QTL CEO Gilman Lewis shows
up at this meeting only because he knows Peter Teel

(17:57):
and so he wants to see Carp's pitch, right, So
that's the only reason the boss is in the room.
Karp is able to sell Palenteer to Louis both its
technology and its mission. When Louis explained what the CIA
needed from its software, the Palenteer team immediately breaks out
and starts sketching out a new program and like designing
it in the room. And that really impresses him, the
fact that like, oh, they're working to build this in

(18:18):
the room with us to our specs. Ultimately, MQTEL invests
one point twenty five million, which convinces Peter Teal to
put in almost another three million dollars and the rest
is kind of history. Right. There's more I could say,
but this is not a detailed history of Palenteer, and
so I'm gonna have to skim a lot of their
early years. What you need to know is that this
investment not only brings the money, it gives them their

(18:39):
first access to the federal government, which starts a long
history of collaboration, and they're going to sell to a
bunch of other federal agencies as well as local agencies.
Karp turns out to be really fucking good at sales,
so good that for most of its life, Palenteer doesn't
hire salespeople because it's got Alex right. That's really his
skill is CEO. He's very good at this. In an

(19:00):
interview with Marine Dowd, Peter Teel gave his opinion on
what made Alex so effective. Quote, in some ways, Alex
doesn't look like a salesperson from Central Casting you would
send to the CIA. The formulation I always have is
that if you're trying to sell something to somebody, the
basic paradox is you have to be just like them
so they can trust you, but you have to be
very different from them so they think you have something

(19:21):
they don't have. Just smart. Palenteer again not a normal organization,
and from its first integration, Karp develops a habit of
embedding his engineers in client agencies and organizations so they
can build new software from within the entity that needed it.
Because all this is happening in the early years of
the Global War on Terror, and most of Palanteer's work

(19:41):
circles around organizing data about terrorists and insurgencies, a distinctly
military strain of thought becomes embedded in the organization from
its early days. Per an article in Wired by Carolyn Haskins,
Palenteer sends its employees to work inside client organizations, essentially
as consultants, helping to customize their data pipelines, troublesh problems,
and fixed bugs. It calls these workers forward deployed software engineers,

(20:04):
a term that appears to be inspired by the concept
of forward deployed troops who are stationed in adversarial regions
to detern nearby enemies from attacking. A former Palanteer employee
tells Wired that the company has also also has codewords
for certain job titles like DELTA for a forward deployed
engineer and echo for Palteer's version of a product manager,
which they say are sourced from the North Atlantic Treaty

(20:25):
Organization's phonetic alphabetic code words meant for use over military radio.
So you've got this really weird mishmash of like Silicon
Valley dudes who are now getting like increasingly familiar with
the military and working alongside former CIA guys and Special
Operations guys as.

Speaker 3 (20:41):
Them using their language and their jargon.

Speaker 2 (20:44):
It becomes a really weird like millage of cultures now.
At the same time, carp insisted on calling his employees
Hobbits and referring to the west that they needed to
protect as the Shire. This could be traced as much
to he and teals love of the books as it
can be to the fact that the Lord of the
Rings trilogy of movies was released during the early years
of Pallenteers rise to continue with another quote, but from

(21:06):
that piece that hastens, but fuck off, fuck off, bro,
I mean it is annoying. It is annoying. A common
internal motto in Pallatiers early days was save the Shire,
a reference to the Hobbit homeland, which they say was
a rallying cry that reflected the company's ethos at the time.
It was all about save the Shire and do good
for the war fighters. The ex staffer said, it was
all about, really, we are going in and solving hard problems.

(21:28):
And again, first off, the Shire saves itself and everybody else. Right,
let's let's know that, like the warriors actually are the
ones that need the shire Sire relationships. But I'm just
I'm frustrated by the fact that everything's reversed in their
understanding of the learning the rings, Like that's not not
how the books worked now, or even the popular movies

(21:49):
or even the popular movies now. As I said earlier,
the inspiration behind Palenteer was a tool PayPal had created
a track down fraud. But that begs the question what
does pallenteers sell, which most people don't really know. And
I said at the opening of these episodes that they're
usually described as like a data broker, sometimes a data minor,
or some sort of surveillance spy company. In business lingo,

(22:10):
palunteer provides B two B SaaS business to business software
as a service. Right, you could say they sell software.
I guess like you just say they sell software, but
like there's not that's not fun most clients.

Speaker 3 (22:23):
Do you Also, I think kind of the distinction between
them and like say Salesforce, and they're very very different.

Speaker 2 (22:27):
So yeah, that's certainly not like enough to really understand
what palunteer is like bringing to the table. You know
who else brings a lot to the table. Who's there
the sponsors of this podcast, And I'm straight legally, I
have to say that we're back. Most Palaunteer clients use

(22:50):
one of two programs that were developed during Carp's early
years as CEO Foundry and Gotham. One employee described Foundry
as quote a supercharged filing cabinet corporate customers, and Palentteer
doesn't start to take on corporate customers out until after
twenty twenty. I think I'm getting a little ahead of
us here, but these are their two big programs. Corporate
customers use Foundry to do stuff like maybe you've got

(23:10):
a factory and you know, like we have a point
at which we're losing us like a higher than we
should amount of these materials that we need to build,
whatever this is. We need to figure out where along
the production line the problems are happening. Foundry is supposed
to be able to help you with that, right, That's
like one thing they can do. They look for points
of failure or waste. Credit SUITEE and Investment Bank contracts
Palenteer to help spot money laundering, while Ferrari uses Palatier

(23:34):
software to help design formula one. Cars common attitude among
Palenteerians is that, per the New York Times, many problems
are data integration problems. And that's true, and there's nothing
really wrong with providing data integration services inherently, But once
we start talking about Gotham, things get a lot more sinister,
which at least is appropriate to the name. Per Wired quote,

(23:55):
Foundry and Gotham are similar, both ingest data and give
people a neat platform to work with it. The main
difference between them is what data they're ingesting. Gotham takes
any data that government or law enforcement customers may have,
including things like crime reports, booking logs, or information they
collected by subpoena ining a social media company. Gotham then
extracts every person, place in detail that might be relevant.

(24:16):
Customers need to already have the data they want to
work with, and Palanteer itself does not provide any, right,
So they're.

Speaker 3 (24:22):
Really good at data disaggregation essentially.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
Yes, Yes, that's their whole fucking deal. Now. Another former
Palateer staffer who uses Gotham says that in just minutes,
a law enforcement official or government analyst can map out
who may be in a person's network and see documents
that link them together. They can also centralize everything an
agency knows about a person in one place, including their
eye color from their driver's license or their license plate
from a traffic ticket, making it easy to build a

(24:46):
detailed intelligence report. They can also use Gotham to search
for a person based on a characteristic like their immigration status,
what state they live in, or whether they have tattoos.
So now we're starting to get upsetting, right, yes we are.
So this kind of thing is what caused the first
backlash against Palanteer and gave it the sinister reputation in Joyce.
Today is a company embedded in the growing global surveillance

(25:06):
ben oopticon, But Alex KRP doesn't look at things that way.
The way he sees it, Palenteer exists to protect the
Shire aka the West.

Speaker 5 (25:15):
It exists to like this freak taking taking like this
beautiful hobby of like all of the greatest people I
know and myself, and using it for his fucking weird
bullshit company by software's.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
Really spying on people else. Absolutely saved the Shire.

Speaker 3 (25:40):
Respectability.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
It's upsetting. I don't think the Hobbits or the Shire
were saved by data aggregation and like spy solutions, right.
I don't think they were saved by giving the CIA
more methods of like tracking people to kill. I'm pretty
sure the Shire was saved when the Hobbits used a
volcano to destroy the literal physical embodiment of state political

(26:02):
power anyway, and forming a union of communities, you know,
and forming a union of communities that's multiracial and multinational, yes, anyway.
One thing that's really important to Alex though, is that
part of why Palanteer needs to defend the West is
so that weirdos like him can safely be deviance. Right.

(26:23):
That's really important to him is that only I could
only grow up safely as a weirdo in the West.
And that's a huge part of it for Alex. As
Marine Dao wrote for The New York Times, Palenteer does
not do business with China, Russia or other countries that
are opposed to the West. Mister Teal said the company
tries to work with more allied and less corrupt governments,
noting dryly that aside from their ideological stances, with corrupt countries,
you never get paid. We have a consistently pro Western

(26:46):
view that the West has a superior way of living
and organizing itself, especially if we live up to our aspirations.
Mister carp said, it's interesting how radical that is, considering
it's not in my view that radical, and like the people,
the issue is that like people are angry that the
West is good at letting like weirdos, you know, have
civil rights. Man, that's actually one of the things that

(27:06):
we like. The issue is that that's not really what
you're helping. You're helping agencies that are carrying out, for example,
unprovoked wars that drive up the cost of living massively
and like kill huge numbers of people and actually like
make the West a lot weaker. Like That's what I
would say is kind of the ultimate conclusion of a
lot of y'all's work is that it's the governments here

(27:29):
are more corrupt and weaker than ever, and you're part
of it anyway.

Speaker 3 (27:33):
And also the postcolonial paradigms of power you're maintaining are
very much not helping the West.

Speaker 2 (27:38):
No, no, none of it's helping the West. Right, speaking
of radical, as you probably noticed are supposed neo Marxist philosophers,
seems a lot less radical at least in a left
wing direction by this point in the story. And some
of this is the obvious result of the fact that
by the aughts, Alex is starting to become a rich man,
and Pallanteers now contracting with the Pentagon and numerous eight

(28:00):
and federal agencies, including ICE. I think it's twenty eleven
that there's a hack by anonymous that shows that several
Palanteer employees are involved in a misinformation campaign to discredit WikiLeaks,
and I mean Glenn Greenwald, although honestly, guys, Glenn did
not need help with that part. You know, he wound
up handling that eventually on his own. There's at least

(28:23):
one Palanteer employee involved in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal
with Facebook data that the Trump campaign uses for the
twenty sixteen election. So I mean, and Alex is always
talking about like, my big thing is stopping the rise
of the right and fascism, and it sure seems like
your company has done the opposite. There's a really fucked
up quote from that New York Times piece by Dowd
that I want to read here about like kind of

(28:44):
Palenteer in the oughts, a pro bono contract with the
New Orleans Police Department starting in twenty twelve, was dropped
after six years amid criticism that it's predictive policing eroded
privacy and had a disparate impact on people of color.
We reduced the rates of black on black death in
New Orleans, mister carp said, And we have these critics
who are like, Palanteer is racist. I don't know. The

(29:05):
hundreds of people are now alive. Don't think that we're racist.
And again he makes a lot of claims like this.
I'll also say we've saved like Europe from multiple nine
to eleven style terrorist attacks that would have fueled the
far right. But it's secret stuff, so we can't.

Speaker 3 (29:19):
Actually see that through because of us.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (29:24):
Also, look, he's doing predictive policing for free. He's like,
I'm down.

Speaker 2 (29:27):
I'll you can't see the actual proof that you saved
all these people and stopped all these stuff. It was
also funny you should note Alex doesn't have a security clearance,
so he's not privy to that information. It's super rumored
that Palenteer was provided the information that led to us

(29:50):
how I been laden getting killed. But every time Alex
talks about it. He's like, well, I don't know. I
can't say because like he doesn't, he literally does not
have access to that information vivially, he would have committed
serious crimes. Hattie, it's pretty universally believed. It seems among
Palanteerians that they did. But I don't have a security clearance,
and I don't there's certainly not evidence. Also, it's you

(30:10):
should never forget. It would be really good for Palenteer
if they great out, So maybe that's why people want
to believe it. During Trump's first term and Biden's, Pallenteer
worked with ICE to help them track down migrants at
the border. This spawned protests in twenty nineteen and led
some two hundred Palanteerians or Hobbits now to write an
open letter to Alex Karp about their moral issues with

(30:31):
helping ICE. Karp was unmoved, and he lost employees. During
the first Trump administration and twenty twenty, Palenteer goes public
and starts taking on non governmental clients like IBM and
JP Morgan and some of the other corporations we've talked about.
Alex becomes a billionaire in September of twenty twenty, which
has an impact on his politics as well as his lifestyle.
He begins buying up multiple homes around the world, almost

(30:53):
always near great alpine skiing trails, as a bid to
keep up with his demanding schedule. He decides he has
to be as like fit as a professional athlete, and
so he hires a team of former Norwegian Special Forces
skiers to like make him into an Olympic level skier,
and he spends all of his free time skiing like
these incredibly long distances. Do we know if they get close?

Speaker 3 (31:13):
Is he good?

Speaker 2 (31:14):
Yeah? I mean he's supposed to be pretty good. Okay,
I don't know. I can't evaluate that, but he like
he's supposed to be pretty good.

Speaker 4 (31:22):
Has he does he like compete or anything?

Speaker 5 (31:24):
Or No?

Speaker 2 (31:26):
I don't think he competes in skiing. I think he
does occasionally because he does competitive long distance pistol shooting too.
He's really into like super long distance pistol shooting, which
he seems to enjoy as both a hobby and a
thing he can do performatively in front of journalists to
impress or rattle them. Per Maureen Dawd's article in New Hampshire,
we had a lunch of lobster pasta. He kept his
Panic button on the table and then went shooting on

(31:48):
his property. He expertly hit targets with a nine millimeters
pistol from two hundred and sixty four yards. When an
aid suggested that a photographer not shoot mister carp in
the active shooting, he overruled the idea. Actually, honestly, guns
would be much better regular if you had someone who
knows guns. He said, I'm not a hunter. I'm an
artist with a gun, and I got it. I gotta
I gotta, I gotta stuff, I gotta stuff here. Man, Look,

(32:10):
two or sixty four yards is extremely long range for
a gun. That's a great shot to be ever to
be able to make. That's a hell of a shot, right.
And obviously he is not using like your grandpa's forty five.
He is using a purpose built I've seen a picture
of a distance pistol, long distance shooting pistol, right that
with an arm race more than most people's. It doesn't
have an arm brace, because I don't think that's part

(32:30):
of the But I doubt it cost any less than
twenty or thirty thousand dollars. I'd be shocked if it's
much less than that. It's got to be at least
like in the six to ten thousand dollars range for
a gun like that. So he's very good and he
had I mean, he's using the right equipment. But artist
is a little much because two or sixty four yards. Again,
great distance. The current world record shot from a nine

(32:51):
millimeter pistol is set by It was set recently by
a former ice agent named Victor Avila, and he had
a steel target twenty ten yards away. So I'm not
quite gonna call you you an artist with a gun. Yeah,
there's a pretty big discrepancy between you and world class there. Again,
great shot, really good. I don't think anybody with a gun,

(33:11):
yeah for sure, sure not saying that, but that's maybe
not artists. Yes, I know.

Speaker 3 (33:18):
So.

Speaker 2 (33:19):
Carp also continues to live a non monogamous life, although
he tends to describe himself as being geographically monogamous, which
means like he has a couple of different ladies and
different continents that he visits from time to time. But
I think he's been with at least one for like
well over ten years, so these are pretty long term relationships.
And yeah, he seems to be I don't have a
problem with that, Like, that's that's that's up to you.

(33:40):
It's more the whole evil federal government spy agency shit.
That's that's a problem.

Speaker 3 (33:47):
His morality's really tested there, not so much of the
whole I've got different hose in area codes.

Speaker 2 (33:51):
So yeah, exactly, that's that's that's whatever.

Speaker 4 (33:54):
I just like, I just like, really don't.

Speaker 2 (33:57):
He really loves to tell you about it, though he
really wants you to know. It's really important to him
that you know what he's doing.

Speaker 4 (34:04):
The girllipops don't like you. We think you're Yeah, dude,
do you need to stop telling us about that?

Speaker 2 (34:11):
Probably helps that you're a billionaire. So he is also
one of a number of Palanteer employees who refuse to
get clearances to view class as I said, to get
classified top secret information. Employees with clearance thus have to
talk with him and some of their other bosses and
like vague generalities or like euphemistic terms when they need
guidance on an issue they can't discuss directly, and Alex

(34:32):
justifies not getting a clearance by saying he wants to
be able to speak freely in interviews. And there's a
lot of speculation that he and a number of other
Palanteerians like smoking weed and probably doing other drugs that
they don't want to have to give up in order
to get a security clearance.

Speaker 3 (34:45):
That makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 2 (34:46):
That makes a lot, wouldn't either, man. Yeah, carp in
fact takes no small amount of pride in being a deviant.
In a twenty thirteen Forbes profile, he complained about his
security detail. It puts a massive cramp on your life.
There's nothing worse for reducing your ability to flirt someone.
Alex went on to Hymniss about Germany, where he'd go
into skanky places in Berlin all night. I'd talk to
whoever would talk to me, occasionally go home with people

(35:08):
as often as I could. I went to places where
people were doing things, smoking things. I just loved it.
And like, bro, we have all done drugs and had
casual sex in Berlin. Okay, it's not special. Berlin kind
of encourages that behave.

Speaker 6 (35:23):
Yeah, who amongst us hasn't had a beautiful night with
a scotsman five floors below in a fucking used Civil
War or World War two bunker, Right, Like it's Berlin.

Speaker 2 (35:34):
We've all done that shit. You're not special, man. Every
single interview with him talks about this stuff, Like I
think I've quoted him five times on it now. He
brings this up constantly. So there's another fun quote from
that article. This again, this is from twenty thirteen, because

(35:56):
they're talking him about like, well, it seems weird that
you're so privacy so important and being able to be
a weirdo so important. You're helping all these agencies that
like crack down on people who were weirdos, and told Forbes, well,
we have to find places where we that we protect
away from government so that we can all be unique
and interesting and in my case, the somewhat deviant people
we'd like to be. It's like, so, how have you

(36:17):
And he'll say like, well, because Pallanteer has robust privacy
protocols and stuff, and it's like, I don't know that
I believe that matters in the way you think it does.
That like you have the potential to enable privacy settings
on spy software for the CIA, I don't know that
I care about.

Speaker 4 (36:33):
That, man.

Speaker 3 (36:35):
It's the smallest of wins.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
Yeah, your privacy settings didn't help the girls in that
school in Iran. Who got blown up like right, which
we'll talk about. So the one thing that's become clear
to me through this research is that Karp either never
really believed all this or that as soon as he
decided the rise of fascism his greatest fear was inevitable.
His first priority became ensuring his own safety and ability

(36:57):
to continue living the way he wanted, no matter what
happened to the rest of us. In public, at least,
this seems to have been a gradual process, and he
still described himself and was described as a progressive or
even a neo Marxist into the twenty twenties. You could
find articles calling him that up through the Biden years,
and he remained a consistent Democratic donor. Karp attempted to
explain this evident cognitive dissonance by arguing that terrorist attacks

(37:19):
and a failure to secure borders fuel the growth of
the far right. I see it as pretty simple. You
have an open border, you get the far right, and
once you get them, you can't get rid of them.
We saw it in Brexit, We saw it with the
pin in France, you see it across Europe, now you
see it in Germany. They should be much stricter. That is,
he said, the only reason we have the rise of
the right, the only reason when people tell you we
need an open border, they also tell you they're electing

(37:41):
right wing politicians because they are the biggest mistake. And
it's not one politician, it's a generation was believing that
there was something bigoted about having a border, and there
are just a lot of people he believed that, he said,
And that's that's very much reductive in terms of like
that what.

Speaker 3 (37:55):
With of only is really doing a lot of work.
The fact that a border is the only thing that
leads to the far right is like speach.

Speaker 2 (38:04):
You know what made people really pissed about? Was it
like years of news and media propaganda, Like was it that,
I don't know, weird stuff. So these quotes come from
a very compelling profile on Karp that I've quoted from
several times by Marine Doubt. This is from twenty twenty four,
and during that interview he told Dowd, I didn't enjoy

(38:25):
it working with the Trump administration. There's a lot of reasons.
I cut Biden a check. I do not enjoy being
protested every day. It was completely ludicrous and ridiculous. It
was actually the opposite. Because Peter had supported mister Trump,
it was harder to get things done right that like, Actually,
the fact that Peter Teel was in with Trump made
it hard for Pallanteer. You know, it didn't help us
at all. That said, his attitude has done a complete

(38:46):
one eighty in the most recent Trump term, and the
inciting incident above everything else, seems to have been October seventh, Right,
he reacted with particular venom to student protesters like he'd
once been who started protesting. The Israeli government's response offered
one hundred and eighty jobs to students who were fearful
of staying in school due to their support for Israel,
and he urged his fellow business leaders to grow a

(39:07):
spine and stand up to those dastardly student protesters. If
we do not win the battle of ideas and reassert
basic norms and the basic obvious idea that America is
a noble, great, wonderful aspiration of a dream that we
are blessed to be a part of, we will have
a much, much worse world for all of us. And
it's interesting he thinks this battle is being lost because
students are angry, that we're providing like arms to a

(39:28):
government that's doing fucked up stuff, and I think the
battle is being lost because people like him continue to
empower our government and other governments to massacre civilians. Yes, exactly, Yeah,
I think that's the problem.

Speaker 3 (39:41):
It's the real stuff that's the problem. It's the lives loss,
not the like this could happen one day.

Speaker 5 (39:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
I don't want to be an American so much when
that's going on, right, it doesn't feel very good. And
it's also worth noting that from not quite the beginning,
but about a decade ago, Pallanteer has been heavily involved
in the Israelis eight in the Israeli military. Palanteer established
in office in Tel Aviv in twenty fifteen, and Karp
maintained a deep sympathy for Israel since his youth. I

(40:08):
want a quote from a summary of Palenteer's business dealings
in Israel by Ennis Race of the Cradle quote this
location underscores the company's deep integration into the Israeli tech ecosystem.
Karp himself highlighted Palanteer's strong ties to Israel in a
December twenty twenty three interview on Fox Business stating we
are very well known in Israel. Israel appreciates our product.
The partnership between Palenteer and Israel's military began to solidify

(40:29):
with a formal agreement signed on the twelfth of January
twenty twenty four, three months after the genocide of Palestinians
and gazab began, following a visit by company executives to Israel,
during which they held their first board meeting in of
the year in Tel Aviv. The recent carnage and Rafah
on the twenty sixth of May, in which Israel bombed
a refugee camp, killing dozens of Palestinians, and the deaths
of seven World Central Kitchen workers in April during airstrikes,

(40:49):
highlight the brutal misuse of Palateer's so called precision technology.
The company's Titan system, promoted as a highly accurate AI
model designed to enhance targeting precision, epitomizes the problems with
Palanteer's claimed accuracy capabilities. Well there is no direct evidence
that Titan specifically is used by Israel. The company's tech
claims are integral to its broader product offerings, some of
which are employed by Tel Aviv and this is something

(41:12):
we really need to talk about, is what do Palanteer's
products do on the ground. How are they integrated into
what has become like killing by several different states of
like large numbers of civilians. As Alex has gained wealth
and experience, he's come to some questionable conclusions about grand
strategy and the history of warfare. He seems to believe
that a three front war with the and China, Russia,

(41:35):
and Iran is inevitable. In otherwids, the US is going
to inevitably being a war with China, Russia, and Iran
all like either allied or at least working together. And
he seems to have come to this conclusion at least
as far back as the Biden administration. For Dowd's piece,
he argues, we have to keep going full tilt on
autonomous weapons systems because our adversaries will they don't have
the same moral considerations that we do. I think we're

(41:58):
in an age when nuclear deterrance is actually effective because
the West is very unlikely to use anything like a
nuclear bomb, whereas our adversaries might. He said, where you
have technological parity but moral disparity, the actual disparity is
much greater than people think. In fact, given that we
have parody technologically, but we don't have parody morally, they
have a huge advantage. You know what you see what
he's saying there right is well, we're not as evil

(42:19):
as our enemies, and so we can't beat them yet even.

Speaker 3 (42:21):
Though we're the ones who've dropped the bombs. He's saying
they're going to drop the con eventually, and we all
know that. And then also the idea is that by
putting them together and calling them to your enemies, you're
basically forcing them to be together. Like do you not
have the possibility of.

Speaker 2 (42:37):
Vincent conflict? Exactly? Yes. It's so fucking frustrating, Like so
much as of this is like really just like disgusting
and irrational leaps and logic. For one thing, if you
guys remember back on January sixth of twenty twenty one,
General Mark Millie was like reaching out to his colleagues
in Russia and China to be like, trust me, the

(43:00):
nukes are not gonna get fired. We have it under control.
No one's had to do that for China recently, not
apologizing for their government. But it's not China that I'm
most worried about nuking US. It's not Russia. I'm most
worried about firing off nukes right now.

Speaker 3 (43:15):
You know, we're talking like low grade tactical nukes. They
are not the league candidates.

Speaker 2 (43:19):
Mm mmmmm.

Speaker 1 (43:20):
No.

Speaker 2 (43:23):
It's also the idea that well, we have a disadvantage
if we're not as immoral as our enemies is complete horseshit. Historically,
for one thing, history is replete with examples of how
utterly am moral aware of warmonger's fair in conflict. Look
at the Empire of Japan in World War Two? Right,
Nazi Germany?

Speaker 3 (43:41):
Right?

Speaker 2 (43:42):
These are not people to imitate. And Kart basically says, well,
if we want to beat guys like that, we got
to become as bad as they are, which ignores the
important reality that this whole free three front war thing
only seems really likely now because we elected a factions
too utilized palled your software to help make thousands of
targeting decisions, and the disasterrous war of choice with iron.
So let's talk about that, But first, wan to pale

(44:04):
Oh yeah, let's talk about it, ads. I guess sorry,
we're back. One of Palenteer's big jobs for the Pentagon
is the creation of the Maven smart system. This had
initially been a Google contract, but employees there had protested,

(44:25):
leading the company to back away. Palentin responded to this,
seeing opportunity and by publishing a tweet by Alex Karp.
He said, quote, Silicon Valley is telling the average American,
I will not support your defense needs while selling products
that are adversarial to America. That is a loser position.
Palenter picked up the contract in twenty nineteen. First of
all an opportunist.

Speaker 4 (44:45):
First of all, well done by the Google employees for.

Speaker 2 (44:49):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. The last time we'll
see stones like that that actually matter in a tech company.
But it was good to see.

Speaker 3 (44:56):
Last time they were like, don't be evil and giving
that up.

Speaker 2 (45:00):
I've given that. We're done now. Pallenteer isn't the only
contractor with Maven, but they are the backbone to the
project which has had, let us say, mixed success. Per
an article in Reuter's by David Jeans and Mike Stone,
Maven supported almost all of the thirteen thousand, five hundred
US strikes in Iran. This would include the February twenty
eight strike on that girls' school in Menabaran, which killed
between one hundred and fifty five and one hundred and

(45:21):
seventy five students. Reuter's continues, the question is why a
military system designed to move faster from information to action
has no equally clear public requirement to slow down after
grave civilian harm. In software engineering, an error budget is
meant to protect users when a service exceeds in a
greed level of failure. New releases stop until the problem

(45:41):
is understood and fixed. War is obviously not software, but
in Washington's AI assisted operations, civilian deaths do not automatically
trigger as temporary suspension of the relevant tools, an independent
review of the data, or a public account of the
decisions that led to the strike. Advocates of military AI
argue that better data and faster analysis can make attacks
more precise. That is possible in principle, but precision is

(46:03):
not something software simply possesses. It depends on the quality
and age of the data, what a system treats as suspicious,
and whether people have enough time to challenge its output.

Speaker 3 (46:12):
Huh, and they're moving too fast and breaking things.

Speaker 2 (46:17):
Right, says he doesn't like that. Right. In handing over
power to utilize a system like this to men like
Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth Karp has guaranteed its misuse improved.
His critics within the company dreadfully correct. I would not
presume to make this episode an end all, be all
summary of how Palateer works on the modern battlefield, but
I do want to end by discussing a paper by

(46:38):
Jessica Dorsey and Luke Moffatt. I read it hosted by
the liber Institute in West Points website. They accused Palenteer
of being a major driver of warrification. Quote. As we outline,
warification does not mean lawfare where law is used to
further strategical operational objectives. Instead, by turning war into a
verb warify, we highlight the active process of interpreting the

(47:00):
law under pressure from parties to armed conflict, which distorts
its original intent spirit. In essence, warification describes the process
through which activities, spaces, and technologies not traditionally associated with
armed conflict are reconstituted as legitimate components of warfare. It
is both a conceptual expansion and a practical one. The
boundaries of war stretch, and with them, the range of actors, tools,

(47:22):
and targets that become permissible. Recent developments in the use
of artificial intelligence for targeting in Iran and the conflict
in the wider Middle East offer a stark illustration of
warification and action. See, for example, Pallanteer's Maven smart system
and reports of large language models developed by Anthropic being
deployed in operational contexts. These systems are frequently framed as
ushering in an era of unprecedented precision and efficiency in warfare.

(47:45):
Yet the empirical reality, including the reported deaths of around
seventeen hundred civilians and recent hostilities in Iran, calls that
narrative into serious question. Syincom claimed it was generating one
thousand targets per hour, coupled with the high operational tempo
that has come to become a hallmark of modern warfare,
largely traceable to the Silicon Valley ethos of movefast and
break things. Such capabilities are often framed as enhancing precision,

(48:07):
but they also introduce new layers of abstraction between decision
makers and the consequences of their actions. If anything, the
integration of AI into targeting workflows may be accelerating very dynamics.
Warrification seeks to describe the normalization, diffusion, and expansion of
organized violence under the guise of technological refinement, and that
if you want to know an answer, what does Palaenteer

(48:29):
do to somebody in the most accurate term, They normalize,
they diffuse, and they expand organize violence under the guise
of technological refinement. That's what they do. They make violence
more acceptable to a larger number of people in a
wider number of areas, and they make that violence more
possible and easier for the state to achieve. And they

(48:50):
do this under the guise of making it more refined
and precise. That's what Palenteer does.

Speaker 3 (48:55):
Anyway, at the street levels, al Capone tried doing the
same thing. Yeah, I mean honestly, he said, there's like,
how do I make my violence more palatable? I'll give
out the turkeys on Thanksgiving and then people will be like,
all right, he's doing a good thing. I mean. Also,
there's the point about them trying to expand their idea
of what is possible in war fighting. Yeah, but they're borrowing, yeah,

(49:16):
from like the Soviet Union and the Cold War. If
it correct me, if I'm if I'm getting this wrong,
they if my understanding had deep cover agents. They were
supposed to hit Romstein Air Force Base because it would
discombobulate the military response in case there was a reason
to go to like, you know, actual full on wars
and it's no longer a cold war but a hot war.
So they were supposed to kill the children at schools

(49:38):
because that would affect their parents, who were the Romstein
Air Force Base commanders. We form, what I understand, did
the same thing at minob with the girls school because
a lot of those girls were the daughters of IRGC commanders.
So they're kind of doing exactly the thing that they're
accusing the immoral Soviet Union of the past and now
the present Russia, Iran, China coordinated efforts. I don't think

(49:59):
they have a name, they don't have like an axis
of yet.

Speaker 2 (50:01):
Yeah, yeah, because they're not we're technically literally part of
any kind of ally like organization or whatever, you know.
I don't know why, because at least the official statement
is that it was an accident based on outdated data,
that's why girls school was hit. I think it is
a perfectly reasonable theory as like, what was this part
of an attempt to like further discombobulate and fuck up

(50:22):
like the response overall, right, because that is I mean,
that is something that like happens in warfare planning. So
I'm not I'm not going to say that's not what
went down. I certainly I can't like also say Alex
Kark definitely wanted that or like news top secret clearance, Yeah, exact.
And again it's that's kind of his job is to
be the salesman, but also like the kind of friendly,

(50:43):
like nerdy academic face of this company that he's not
even allowed to know a lot of what they're doing,
as they are part of these vast slaughters that are
being carried out for no in part when they're talking
about like it paling your expanding the like what is
like acceptable targets of violence, what that means is the
way in which they identify who is like an enemy,

(51:04):
who do we have to go after. There's all these
different you know we talked about earlier. You can search
by like tattoos. There's all these different things that you know,
the software might decide, or like the people building the
software might say, this makes someone more likely you know,
to be in this instance an enemy or involved in
the insurgency or whatever, and all these factors are generating targets,
which means that it's much wider than like needing to

(51:24):
have any actual like on the ground intelligence that like
someone's doing something right, like that's not what's happening. The
fit profile, the number of yes, and the number of
things that can make you a military aged male, so
to speak. Ye get broader and broader as AI gets
brought into it, rather than in getting more precise.

Speaker 3 (51:40):
They've abstractified humanity even more so because of exactly the
benefits to them of AI.

Speaker 2 (51:46):
Yeah, exactly, if you can categorize people more simply, then
you can kill them more effectively. Yep, that's the Palaintier promise.
So that's all I've really got to say about Alex
at this point. You know, he's still alive, still rich,
still run in palace here. None of those things will
be true. That's the way works.

Speaker 4 (52:05):
That hair still talks the way he talks.

Speaker 2 (52:07):
Will has that hair still talks the way he talks.

Speaker 3 (52:09):
Still still tell me about the.

Speaker 4 (52:13):
Yes, he's a weird weird he's a weird guy.

Speaker 2 (52:17):
You got to know about how much the Germans like him.
I don't know if you're in Bragin or something, and
you see Alex Carr, maybe call him. He doesn't go
there still, if he ever did, I don't know why.
It suggests that the wind, Yeah, they wouldn't let him
in anymore. Okay, I think that probably does it for
us here at Behind the Bastards. Zaren you got anything

(52:39):
else you want to throw out at us, anything to plug.

Speaker 3 (52:42):
Well, let's see on a ridiculous crime. We have an
interesting two part interview with the author Matthew Campbell about
his book The Man Who Stole the Gods. And it's
all about the Cambodian Civil War, Vietnam and some some
some you know art collectors who used that chaos to
pull statuary out of places like Anchor Watt and then
sell in New York and give it to the Met Museum.

(53:02):
Not give, but you know, donate to the Met Museum.
And it's interesting crossroads of history that a lot of
history people don't know, and a lot of things people
would instantly recognize about how rich get away with things
because they're rich.

Speaker 2 (53:13):
Cool. Well check that out, everybody, and check us out.
Next week we'll be talking about another person I don't
like very much.

Speaker 1 (53:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (53:20):
The Bye 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 you get your podcasts.
Full video episodes that Behind the Bastards are now streaming
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(53:43):
Netflix you don't miss an episode. For clips in our
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YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love
about forty percent of you, statistically speaking,