November 17, 2025 • 47 mins
The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson examines the civil war inside the White House and how Trump’s chief of staff may be on the way out. Author, Michael Steinberger, details his new book, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds, and EMPTG says Trump's policies are not America.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
First, we have such a great show for you today,
the Lincoln Project Zone. Rick Wilson joins us to discuss
the Civil War in the White House and how Trump's
chief of staff may be heading for the door. And
we'll talk to author Michael Steinberger about his new book,
The Philosopher in the Valley, alex garp Pilunteer, and the
(00:34):
rise of the surveillance State. But first the news.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Some of the good news is on Thursday, government employees
will be paid again. They're paying out snap again. But
the bad news is a lot of people are about
to lose their food stamps permanently.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
It was you remember when Elon Musk danced around with
the chainsaw.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
I think about it every day. What I'm like, what
was the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life?
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, he was celebrating the reverse philanthropy that this administration
is engaging in. Brooke Rollins directed the us DA staff
during a record setting forty three days shutdown to continue
ushering states towards compliance with the Republican's signature tax and
spending law, which is projected to kick millions out of
the nation's largest anti hunger program. So here's what they're doing.
(01:24):
They're making it harder for you to get food stamps,
just like they're making it harder for you to get unemployment,
and they're making it harder for you to get medicaid.
The thinking here is that if they make it harder
for people to get these things, then they won't get them.
They'll just starve. Yes, that's right. And you want to
(01:44):
know why they're doing it, Jesse.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
I would love for you to tell me, please, please, just.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Doing it because rich people do not want to pay taxes.
That's literally why they're doing this. Yep, more Americans will
starve because Donald J. Trump wants to have his rich
friends pay list axes. And there you have it, all.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Right, my So I'm going to show how much integrity
I have where I'm going to tell you an embarrassing
journalistic editor I door knocked for one Bill de Blasio
on his first barrel cauepe page de Bungler.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
By the way, we didn't talk at all about Bill
de Blasio cheating on the good thing that ever happened
to him, Nomiki, constant justice for Nomiki. It turns out,
by the way, the Bill de Blasio, despite I, by
the way, have a long thought he sucked, but it
turns out that he is also a philanderer. So a
(02:37):
hearty fuck you to mister Bill de Blasio, in case
you're there, in case you're the five people who still
know who you are. Justice for Nomiki.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
So allow me to keep clowning myself. And I will
say so. I door knocked for many days for the
de Blasio campaign before he was elected mayor.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Let the record show I'm making a horrified fit.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
You are you also know this, So what I do
or knocked on it. What I kept hearing from people
was everyone's going to move out of the city if
he's elected. Rich people will leave the city. Do you
know what happened? That did not happen. And they said
the same thing about Zoramondanni. And now we have two
top real estate CEOs saying no one's putting their houses
up for sale, no one's leaving the city.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
You know, it's so incredibly stupid. This is so stupid.
I can't even tell you how stupid it is. This
always happened. They always say this. So basically outspoken conservative
hedge fund millionaire Ken Griffin, who is a partner at
a wounin project, Ken is committed, and we'll have more
(03:43):
employees at three point fifty Park Avenue than Miami. Now,
by the way, we're going to say something nice about
a billionaire here. Ken Griffin has been one of the
very few billionaires who from the beginning has said Donald J.
Trump is a complete and utter fuck more on. I mean,
he hasn't quite said that, but he's criticized the tariffs
(04:03):
at the time when every other rich person was like,
thank you, sir, please enact more stupid legislation. Ken Griffin,
who donated to Trump and is in no way a
liberal lefty, he did in fact say that this was ridiculous.
And look, in a world filled with sycophans, the people
(04:24):
who say the real stuff are actually the good guys.
So in that way, I think that was good. But yeah, no,
New York is not going anywhere. There are going to
be millions and millions of feet of office space. I
don't know who's going to work in them, because there
are no more businesses, but you know, the data farmers
will all have their own beautiful data farms, and you
(04:48):
know New York is not going anywhere.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
I would really like to put this one to death
with the things that people should be laughed at when
they say because it's proven to never be true. Just
like that voters don't women in executive roles like governors
when we saw how well that went last week.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
I mean, I still think probably not going to be
able to elect a woman president, at least on the left.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
I think that there's a very interesting thing to be there.
But I think that what the myth is is people
carry this over as if it's governors too, And that's
a ridiculous, ridiculous statement.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Governors. I don't think it's necessarily true.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Yeah, they get the analysis wrong when they make it
about the executive choices being made.
Speaker 4 (05:28):
That's a ridiculous statement.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Yeah, especially conser Yeah, we have a dozen female governors
right now, or we will in January.
Speaker 4 (05:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Okay, So it's a Sunday, So that means Scott the
Scent has gone on a Sunday show, yes, my man,
and said something that seems to really really really really
make very little sense. But hear he's saying that Trump's
two thousand dollars tariff check requires a new law to happen.
Speaker 5 (05:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
By the way, first of all, there's no here. Here's
what happens on Sundays. Scott Bissent and his low affect
monotone go on a Sunday show and on that Sunday
show he be clowns himself in a way that Mega demands.
So he goes on there he says things that are
(06:17):
completely nuts. Here's one. So he's going to send a
tariff dividend check to most Americans. Here's how this is
going to work. It's not going to happen that this
is how it's gonna work. It's not because, first of all,
there's no way they can do this. I'd be very
surprised if the Supreme Court doesn't say the tariffs are illegal.
(06:38):
So we're already going to be in a nightmare scenario
where they're trying to undo tariffs that are undoable. I
think that we are in a moment of stupid and
I would say this, Thessent is trying to save his
job here, he's also trying to save the economy. Also,
(06:59):
the other thing that I think it's worth like pulling
back and realizing is the reason that Trump world is
cutting tariffs on food on a Friday night and having
Scott on the Sunday shows on a Sunday morning. It's
because they see these consumer confidence numbers and they're the
lowest in seventy eight years. I think that's right. They're
like these crazy low consumer confidence numbers and they are
(07:21):
seeing them and they're coming up into Thanksgiving and Christmas
and they are like, holy fuck, we just got slathered
in a twenty twenty five cycle. We are now into
holiday that's going to be fucking nightmare fuel. This is
what is known as panic. This is what is known
as an administration that is trying desperately to change the
(07:44):
subject and it's not working.
Speaker 4 (07:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
I would strongly agree, so Molli, I think one of
the things with analyzing Trump is we always look at
what he's truthing. It was interesting this weekend he's fixated
on Missus Taylor Green for obvious reasons. He did not
address some things in the Epstein files. Most notably, but
what I did think was the more ateristic thing that
is not being covered is how pist he is at
(08:08):
Indiana politicians.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Oh yeah, this is an amazing thing. So he wants
so one of the good things about Trump is he
has no idea what the fuck he's doing. So he
is trying to now redistrict because he thinks that redistricting
will mean you won't lose the House. But what I
don't think he understands, and what I think these other
(08:30):
Republicans understand, is that they can't redistrict seats that don't exist.
So if you have five seats and you spread out
the Republican votes, eventually you make yourself into a dommymander,
you say, and R plus ten becomes an R plus five.
And when you have a headwind of eight ten points,
which it's looking like you may, you end up with
(08:51):
the dummy Manders. And by the way, redistricting is already
going to be tough because it's anti democratic. And you know,
at this point, I mean effectively and a credit where
credit is due, my man, and I don't like everything
he does. I think ideologically we are not a match.
But there is a reason why this has gone so
(09:13):
off the rails, and it is Gavin Newsom. Because if
they had stolen those five seats in Texas, you and
I both know that he would have been like done.
I'm good, even though a traditional midterm where they get
slaughtered is thirty five seats. But if they had just
done those five seats, then I think we would have
(09:36):
ended up with like Trump going into the midterms thinking
he was okay. But because those California seats have now
gone to demes, though of course the Trump DOJ has
tried to fight it because it's gone to demes. I
think this is just a shit show. And Trump sees
five to five, you know, five from Texas to the Republicans,
five to California. I think there's a point in which
(09:59):
this just no longer makes any sense, and I think we.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
May have hit It sounds about right.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Rick Wilson is the founder of the Lincoln Project and
the host of the Enemy's List.
Speaker 4 (10:12):
Rick Wilson, Molly John Fast a little bird told me
you were in the Gettysburg of the Maga Civil War this.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Weekend, the district of Columbia where I ate dish next
to Todd Blanche and Borish Epstein.
Speaker 4 (10:26):
Oh my gosh, they could not have ever been doing
anything corrupt or dirty.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Well, they were with their families, so I would assume not,
but who knows. I also couldn't hear anything because it
was so loud, but I will say I am reminded
that the district of Columbia has about seven people who
live in it, and it is literally like being on
a cruise ship.
Speaker 4 (10:48):
Yes, it's like a country club in a mid sized town.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
It's the country club from Hell. Speaking of from Hell,
Susie Wilds, who is Donald Trump's chief of stab and
probably why Donald Trump is president today, a meaningful part
of it, yes, and she comes from Desanta's world where
DeSantis did something so stupid. I don't know what he means.
Speaker 4 (11:09):
Lady Lady macbeth, Casey DeSantis, right, Casey McBeth alienator. She
fired her and then publicly humiliated her in the press.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
And Susie Wiles went and made Donald Trump president as
Susan I was.
Speaker 4 (11:25):
Weighed carefully her options and said, how am I going
to fuck these people harder than they've ever been fucked before?
And she went back to Trump and all of this,
all these machinations of Ronda Sant's running for president, were
happening before he was even governor, and she blew up
their ten year plan absolutely train wrecked his presidential campaign
(11:50):
and was really one of the reasons Donald Trump was
elected because she would go to the big donors, the
serious people, not the crazies, and say I'm going to
control it. I can make I'll set up systems. We'll
let him go and play with parades and watch the
fighter planes fly over, and the grown ups will do business.
Speaker 5 (12:09):
But do.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
So what happen?
Speaker 2 (12:12):
So let's fast forward to Susie Wilds today. What is
happening with miss Wilder?
Speaker 4 (12:18):
Well, I will tell you the Magi are now have
They've looked at the last ten months. They've looked at
the steep decline in Trump's polling. They looked at one
disaster after another since ten days ago. On election night,
there's a rising drum beat inside the Maga world of
both people inside the White House who don't like her
(12:39):
e g. Stephen Miller, and of the MAGA influencer ecosystem
out there in the world. They're all looking for a
way to say no, this isn't Trump's fault, this isn't
Trump's bad decisions, this isn't a public assessment of Donald
Trump being a terrible leader in destroying the economy and
ZIP tying children in the streets and running police state
(13:01):
this small is it must all be Susie Wiles's fault
because she's the one who's secret. They call her like
swampy Susie. She's getting the nicknames. She's in that moment
right now. There's always an arc. I wrote about this
today in an article on my sub stet called Run Susie, Run.
And there's an arc with Trump. First, you're the essential person,
the highly respected Susie Wiles, you know, great chief of staff.
(13:23):
And then it's you get the responsibility of trying to
clean up the message, and you're always behind the elephant
with the smallest shovel in the world. Then in the
point where all his mistakes and fuck ups start to
accrete and they can't be cleaned up, it's like, well,
it must be her fault or their fault, whoever, whoever
the person is. And right now she's in the phase
where Trump is on the phone and people going, do
you think Susie's doing a good job?
Speaker 5 (13:43):
Once he does that, start the clock fucked?
Speaker 4 (13:47):
Yeah, Everything Trump touches dies at that point.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Here's a question for you. Stephen Miller wants Susie out,
But what is Stephen Miller. Doing that is like bankable
or good, nothing, nothing.
Speaker 4 (14:02):
It doesn't matter. Look, there are three reasons you want
to be chief of staff. Reason one is that you're
loyal to the guy. You came up with him as
a congressman, a governor, a president. Lifers. Trump has no
one like that around him, no one, not even this family. Right.
The second reason is it's the highest you can ascend
in the pairmid of political power in America without being
an elected official. It is the most powerful non elected
(14:24):
job in DC by far. And the third reason you
want to do it is once you're chief of staff,
the rest of your life, you're never on schedule to
or travel again. You are going You're on corporate boards
all over the country. You travel around the world to
give compensated speeches and beautiful resorts to very wealthy people.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Steven Miller is going to be on corporate boards.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
Oh no, Steven Miller will not. This is what Susie Wiles.
These are what Susie Wilds wanted. Steven Miller is going
to be in a fucking prison if I have anything
to do with it.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Well, he's certainly not going to be on the board
of American airlines. No, he is being like being like,
let's pepper spray babies.
Speaker 6 (14:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (15:00):
Yeah, So her position is tenuous now. A lot of
her people have been leaving DC. A lot of people
she brought in who were more sane, more rational people.
They're already out of the administration. They're like, I need
to spend more time with my family. My. Wow, you know, my, my, my, my,
My service here has been the greatest honor of my life. Sir,
But my, you know, I've got to.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Go mow my lawn whatever, right, lawn mowing is important, That's.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
What That's what I'm told.
Speaker 5 (15:28):
But but she is.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
She is not immune to the power of everything Trump
touches dies. And she's not immune to the power that
the MAGA influencer class has over Trump. And and I've
been keeping an eye on a couple of them. I
haven't seen her attack directly yet by lumersobiac all those
sort of people that you would start to you know
(15:51):
that Trump's made a decision by the time they start
attacking somebody, right, right, you're not there yet. But she is.
She is. You know, She's got this enough of the
smell of death around her that the vultures are circling
over her.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Head when this happens eventually. I mean, one of the
things Trump two point zero has done the Trump one
point zero has not done, is that he does not
fire people in this new administration. Right, people move, they
move to Greece, like Don Junior's girlfriend. They get moved around,
but they don't necessarily get fired. That I think he
(16:26):
thinks that will keep the leakers at bay. So this
would actually be a paradigm shift.
Speaker 4 (16:32):
Yes, it would be, And I will tell you it's
a paradigm shift because they are in a crisis that
they have not been able to break the cycle on
when the Epstein stuff first started. You and I had
this conversation. This is the first thing we'd ever seen
end a decade of watching this craziness that he can't
get under control. He may push it back for a
(16:53):
day or two, but it always comes back. Epstein is
the underscore of the soundtrack of the Trump presidency too.
And right now, you know, we saw basically what's estimated
to be about five percent of the materials that are
out there about Epstein RaaS this week, and it has
been a pure firestorm on this gun. He has been
(17:15):
taking a chaotic approach to handling it. You know, for
these people to spend all week trying to come up
with a plan, and they're going to say, well, we're
going to investigate Reid Hoffman and Bill Clinton and not
Donald Trump even his own people. The MAGA reaction to
this was like, come on, come.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
On, bro, my man read Hoffman, though, let us give
a little credit where credit. I have brother Hoffman extremely
crotchety and cranky with Reid Hoffman in any number of
different ways and criticized him ad nauseum, including sending him
a DM that said I'm very disappointed in you, which
(17:55):
is the way I Jewish mother American democracy. And yet
my man stood up to Trump said go for it. Fight, fight, fight,
That's the only way. And and by the way, I mean, look,
you know, tell you.
Speaker 4 (18:09):
And I wish, I wish we had more billionaires in
this country who would display the guts read Hoffman showed
this week said bring it on, fuck you, Yeah, I
will fight you. Let's go. Every time you show Trump
you're not afraid of him, they always take a beat
because they expect everybody to do what well a lot
(18:29):
of people have done over the over the over the years. Yes, sir, Yes, sir,
how many? How many make it better? Never apologize to
Trump always said go fuck yourself, get right back in
his face. Stick.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
That's the only way, only way. But I think it's
worth for a minute going back to this moment here,
because I actually think this is the end of MAGA,
and I want you and I'm going to tell you.
I'm going to tell you my theory, and they.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
Tell me your theory.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Why you think it's wrong or right or whatever. You know,
you and I we exchange theories, and you know all
I have for a long time. So my theory is this,
there are two things that are taking down MAGA at
the same time, but only one is visible. So one
is the Epstein stuff, right, you see, Marjorie Taylor Green,
(19:22):
Lauren Beaupert, Thomas Massey, Nancy Mace, Nancy Mayce. These people
are all like breaking with the party in a big way.
And supposedly there's like one hundred republic go into We're
going to vote for the discharge petition. Ye, big deal.
But the underlying reason why the MAGA is disintegrating is
(19:43):
because of inflation.
Speaker 4 (19:45):
Yes, these people are taking the economy in the face, right,
and they finally reached a point where they couldn't spend
it anymore, and they couldn't say, well, you know, I'm
sacrificing for the good of the country because Donald Trump
needs this. Now they're based at the point like he's
fucking us. Yeah, we're getting screwed. And you notice there's
(20:06):
an interesting and I think your theory is correct. Inflation
and economics are taking there cracking.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
They're the underlying right And why is.
Speaker 4 (20:14):
That, Molly, Because one of their most fundamental beliefs from
all the way back in twenty sixteen was that Donald
Trump was a masterful negotiator. He'd be great for the economy.
He's the guy who could solve all these economic problems
that the Libs have caused. Well, the Libs didn't cause them,
but what he did. What he did was shattered the
(20:37):
country with this tariff deal. And it is kept inflation
grinding away under the water. And it is not a
visible process. It's it's like it's like a disease and
it's eating away at them and they and they it's
hard to go into the grocery store and say, yeah, no,
this isn't a two hundred and fifty dollars bill for
five bags of groceries. It's it's an eighty dollars bill,
(20:57):
like Trump told me. It is because it's not true, right,
can't spin it.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
And we know that the inflation is a problem and
that Trump is saying uncle. And you know why we know.
Speaker 4 (21:08):
That because he's reversing the tariffs at nine o'clock on
a Friday.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Night as one does.
Speaker 4 (21:15):
He as one does. He's reversing the food tariffs that
have caused coffee and chocolated and meat, wheat and meat
and all this other stuff to.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Skyrocket because my man sees Thanksgiving around the corner and Christmas.
And even though he did explain to Maga voters that
you might get one dollar instead of three or eleven.
By the way, this is the problem with making a
billionaire president is that he's not you know, you get
(21:47):
one you know you'll only get one jet that I
think this is really seeing it come apart here.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
Look, I think, and I think there are there are
large things and small things that are shattering the coalition
on the economic axis. And if you look at all
the public polling and all the survey work that's out
there right now, everything in the economic basket, he's upside
down by between eleven and twenty seven points. Right on inflation,
he's down about twenty seven points across multiple polls. A
(22:18):
couple are worse, a couple are better, but the aggregate.
You you know, this is the same lesson gerald Ford
learned in nineteen seventy six. Inflation is a killer app
for voters. They will not tolerate it. Joe Biden and
Gerald Ford learned that lesson. Yeah, it was virus, but
by extension.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
I was just going to say, like, you can, you
can just pull back from like a year ago. Yeah, No,
it's true. I mean the but the great irony of
all of this, which I think should not be ignored,
is that this is caused by Trump.
Speaker 4 (22:58):
Every bit of this inflation under Joe Biden was coming down.
It was coming down swiftly. But I mean, look, was
everybody happy. Of course not. I wasn't happy.
Speaker 5 (23:08):
Nobody was happy. The Fed wasn't happy. That's why they
kept the brakes on.
Speaker 4 (23:13):
And that the reason Joe Biden ended up with inflation
was because Donald Trump had botched COVID so badly that
we had to juice the economy. In the beginning of
the Biden administration, and we paid for it on the
back end with inflation.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
I mean, I also think everybody had inflation and even
if you hadn't used the economy. Yeah, but I also
think Biden world was fad at messaging it, so that
got them to a place where everything was a shit show.
But this is a problem of Donald Trump's so making.
Now I want to talk about what's happening right now
(23:48):
in there are a couple of cities where Donald Trump
is pulling out the National Guard, indeed, but there are
a couple of cities warmer weather Donald Trump is sending
in ice.
Speaker 4 (24:03):
YEP, Charlotte is the new victim city.
Speaker 5 (24:07):
But Charlotte why there is.
Speaker 4 (24:10):
A meaningful Hispanic population in Mecklenburg County, which is the
main county in the Charlotte area. A lot of them
are legal, but that doesn't matter to Ice. Their criteria
is not legal or illegal. Their criteria is brown or
not brown. I also think that they reached a point
where Chicago was not providing them with the visuals they wanted.
And Folks, if you don't believe me and believe us
(24:32):
that the MAGA media ecosystem is super coordinated, why haven't
you heard the word Portland in weeks.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Yeah, why haven't you heard?
Speaker 4 (24:39):
Why why is it that suddenly we're not seeing every
MAGA influencer, Bennie Johnson and all the rest, all the
way down the food chain out in Portland trying to
get on camera. Yeah, why not because it wasn't giving
them the picture they wanted. They were being mocked and
ridiculed by people in frog outfits. Fuck this, We'll go
to Chicago. And they went to Chicago and people were
(25:00):
going out in the streets with whistles and people were
coming out. There was one of these small towns they
showed up in outside suburbs outside of Chicago with a
population of four thousand people, and five hundred showed up
to protest ICE. They were getting the message like, fuck you,
arrest us all give it a shot. And so now
they're going to try for a different city and try
for a different set of visuals. And yes, it's a
(25:23):
lot warmer insurre than it is in Chicago. And a
lot of these proud boys and these goons that have
joined ICE in the last five minutes, they're not exactly
like Navy seal toughness levels.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
It is interesting to me that this crew that is
doing the arresting, so to speak, is headed by dog
killer and dog.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
Killer and fraud queen Christy nome.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Yes, who has in fact, now there's this new reporting
from Pro Publica showing that she did in fact self
deal or give you know, she's violated ethics so shockingly
this woman.
Speaker 5 (26:04):
Yes, So the.
Speaker 4 (26:04):
Strategy Group is the company that she used to build
all these maga ads, all these ice ads that she's in,
and they're all of her fully made up, beautiful old extensions.
Heir riding horses, trying to look tough, you know, wearing
body armor, the whole thing. I'm gonna I'm gonna flip
on the wayback machine for a second. The Strategy Group
(26:26):
for media and and and apparently also Chris Losovita. I
heard the other day. I read that somewhere they're cashing
in on this media buy to the tune of Milly
many many millions of the of the two hundred million dollars.
They're the people. The company was once headed by the
guy that sent Michelle Bachman the vibrator when she was
a customer. I don't know if you that's a way back.
(26:47):
That's a little probably a little too obscure, too much
of a deep but they are. The Strategy Group for
Media is truly batshit insane, and by a remarkable coincidence,
trisham Glaughlin, who is her who was nomes comms director,
is married to Ben Yoho, who runs what the strategy
group for Media? Wait, how did that happen? It's a miracle,
(27:12):
It's amazing.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
I also just think that Christy Nome is a like,
you know, when you think about this administration, you think
about like one of the things I think we learned
in twenty twenty five was that this is not going
to be forever. Trump is going to lose, he's going
to lose the House, he's going to lose the Senate.
(27:34):
He's not going to be president for the rest of
our lives. This is not how this is going to
go down at all. In fact, this is going There's
going to be truth and reconciliation.
Speaker 4 (27:45):
There's going to be oh yes, there will be.
Speaker 5 (27:47):
There's the lies.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
People are going to go to jail or let.
Speaker 4 (27:50):
Me say something a huge time. I will bet you
a dollar right now that Greg Bavino, the guy who
runs all these ice operations around the country, the guy
who shows up in the big hugo boss, you know,
Nazi style greatcoat. I will bet you a dollar that
guy goes to prison. He will be the Patsy and
Chrissy Nome and Steven Miller will go. He just misinterpreted
our orders. We were trying to stay within the and
(28:11):
it just it got out of hand.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
What about Tom Holman?
Speaker 4 (28:15):
Oh, Tom Holman's going to jail.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Cash in the cash in the bag, Tom, Yeah, bag
cave bag bag time.
Speaker 4 (28:22):
I think Pam Bondi's going to jail. I think Tom
Blank is going to jail. And I say this because
I think there's an increasing understanding among the Democrats who
are not the quickest on the uptake about the use
of power in this country. They act, yeah, you do.
I think even now they're realizing, if we don't hold
some people to account for the criminality of the things
(28:46):
that are going on right now, it will allow a
cohort of these people to survive out there like a
like a virus that's dormab more and come back and
come back and do it again.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Like JD. Van's like JD be president in twenty twenty.
Hat just kidding, you know, Guy's never going to be president.
Speaker 7 (29:03):
You know.
Speaker 4 (29:04):
The thing I love about Jennie Vance is the groper demo.
That is a very powerful demo inside the GOP. Now
he is married to a foreigner in their mind, and
she is an alien and a brown person, and therefore
they awaite the nuptials of Erica Kirk.
Speaker 5 (29:22):
And van Rick Wilson.
Speaker 4 (29:24):
Will come back, of course I will.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Michael Steinberger is a freelance journalist and the author of
The Philosopher in the Valley, Alex Carp Palenteer and the
Rise of the Surveillance State. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 6 (29:40):
Michael, Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
I want you first to explain what Palenteer does, because
I think we all sort of know, but we don't
exactly know, Okay.
Speaker 6 (29:50):
Valenteer is a data analytics company.
Speaker 7 (29:53):
They make software that helps organizations make better, more efficient
use of their data. It's used by a very wide
range of organizations, ranging from the CIA.
Speaker 6 (30:04):
To US Army to corporations like Airbus and BP.
Speaker 7 (30:09):
It's important to say what Penalt two doesn't do, because
then the name Palalteer has become virtually synonymous with surveillance,
and I have now helped make that so, because the
word surveillance is on the cover of my book.
Speaker 6 (30:22):
It is not surveillance technology per se.
Speaker 7 (30:24):
Their technology can be used by clandestine services and law
enforcement to facilitate surveillance. It makes their jobs easier, but
it's not survevance technology per se. And I think there's
another misconception about pala Twer that needs to be addressed
as well, which is they do not collect data, they
do not store data, they do not sell data. So yeah,
(30:46):
because people, you know, it's a name that does give
people the creeps, it does make people very nervous, and
so I think it's important to establish what they don't
do as well as what they do do.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
But they do scrape data, right.
Speaker 7 (30:59):
They don't data, But what happens is so for instance,
they're working with ice snap Ice is scraping data. Data
is fed into Palenteer's software platform. So just to you know,
give an example, So ICE could be pulling in at
social media feeds, and then they also have telephone records,
they have automatic license plate reader information. All this data
gets fed into Palenteer's software platform, and that platform then
(31:24):
the data is integrated and the software finds patterns, correlations, connections.
It's it's network analysis essentially, so you know, it's not
palenteered doing you know, getting this data. It's palenteer enabling
name them, these organizations to make faster, better use of
their data. And in most cases that's just in most
of the work they do. It's you know, yeah, fifty
(31:46):
percent of their work is on the commercial side. It's
just helping companies make their operations more efficient. So it's
nothing that should cause anyone to lose sleep. It's the
work on the other on the government side, you know,
with intelligence services and obviously with ICE, that is reason
for concern.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
Okay, say your eyes, you've got social media feed for
this person, you've got their driver's license. What is the
secret sauce of Hellent does to make those connections. It's
sort of like an AI search.
Speaker 6 (32:15):
I would put it this way.
Speaker 7 (32:16):
It operates with the efficiency of a wood chip or
it pulls in a lot of data very quickly and
finds answers in that data, evidence in that data.
Speaker 6 (32:25):
Very very quickly.
Speaker 7 (32:25):
Because basically the problem is, you know, you can think
of it almost as a digital detective board. So you
think of like, you know, any procedural you see, you know,
the guy standing at the detective standing at the board
playing connect the dots. That's what the software. That's what
this software does. The company began for the was started
for the purpose of helping the United States government fight
the war on terrorism, and the idea behind it was
that you could create technology, build technology that help human
(32:49):
analysts that the CIA foil plots, for instance, by pulling
together information for them and making connections doing the kind
of network analysis that would take human analysts days, hours, weeks,
possibly forever to do. And so this software really speeds
up that kind of work. It's a very powerful tool.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
So Alex Carb talk us through how you got involved
in writing this book on him.
Speaker 6 (33:11):
Well, I grew out of a story I did for
the New York Times magazine. I'm right. For the New
York Times magazine.
Speaker 7 (33:15):
I did a story about carbon Palatude was published in
twenty twenty. There's an even more interesting backstory. Though he
and I went to the same college. We were college classmates,
we did not know each other in college.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
What college did you go to?
Speaker 6 (33:26):
Haverford College?
Speaker 7 (33:27):
Okay, and if you know anything about Haverford you will
know how bizarre it is that two people were in
the same class at Haverford and never exchanged the work.
Because it's a small school, it's like fifteen hundred people total.
Somehow we managed to pull that off. We never exchanged
the work, which is why I was able to do
the story for the New York Times magazine because there
was no relationship, therefore no conflict of interest. He I think,
(33:48):
was a bit more diligent about a schoolwork than I was.
I suspect the library saw a lot more of him
than it did of me, which may go some way
to explaining why he ended up a billionaire and I
did not, but be that SMA.
Speaker 6 (33:58):
So that's kind of the backstory.
Speaker 7 (33:59):
So I did the story for the New York Times magazine,
and as comprehensive as that story was, and it was
about nine thousand words, it was a long magazine feature,
I felt that there was a lot more to say.
Karp is a very distinctive figure in the business world.
This company is obviously one that generates a lot of controversy,
causes a lot of concern for people, and so that
gave rise to the book. He was willing to cooperate
(34:20):
and gave me actually pretty extraordinary access. So I think
it's an unusually rich portrait of someone who really is
at the center of He's a defining figure of this moment.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
So he believes that Talunteer could be like IVM.
Speaker 6 (34:35):
As I said. It was started to help the US
government combat terrorism.
Speaker 7 (34:38):
It was a very political company from the start in
that explicitly political agenda.
Speaker 6 (34:42):
Wanted to serve the US government and make the West stronger.
Speaker 7 (34:46):
So from the start they decided they would not do
business with the Russian government, the Chinese government, or any
Russian or Chinese owned entities because they saw those two
countries as fundamentally adversarial to the United States. While serving
the government, working with the CIA, working with the US military,
they are allo developing a trying to develop a robust
commercial business, and many years later, now in twenty twenty five,
they have both. They are huge in government and they
(35:07):
are huge on the commercial side. Is that like McKenzie
Airbus for instance, so they Airbus began working with him
in around twenty fifteen twenty sixteen. Airbus had a production glitch,
was coming out with a new plane, a three fifty,
and there was a production glitch. But as you can imagine,
the assembly line for a commercial jetliner is a very
(35:28):
very intricate thing, and they couldn't figure out where the
problem was. They brought in volunteer company dispatched five software
engineers to Booz, France, whereas Airbus is located, and within
a matter of days they had detected where the breakdowns
are happening on the production of the assembly line and
it ended up saving the company a lot of money.
And now Palneer is basically the de facto operating system
(35:50):
for Airbus. Around fifty thousand Airbus employees a day use
the company's software.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Why is this story so explosive.
Speaker 6 (35:58):
Well, what's interesting.
Speaker 7 (35:59):
He's he's a very different sort of CEO, not a
standard issue CEO.
Speaker 6 (36:03):
He speaks very candidly.
Speaker 7 (36:05):
He says exactly what's on his mind and says so
in a sort of a very unscripted way. So he's
a very striking presence on television, and a lot of
what he says is controversial, I mean, his view.
Speaker 6 (36:15):
I mean to kind of unpack the Alex Karp story.
Speaker 7 (36:18):
So he is biracial, He's Jewish, severely dyslexic, grew up
in Philadelphia. As he tells it, he understood at a
fairly young age that he had some strikes against him
because he was biracial, because he was Jewish, because he
had a learning disability, and this gave him a sense
of vulnerability that he has carried into adulthood. And you
(36:39):
could say that in a very real sense, Palenteer exists
in part to make the world safer for Alex Karp.
He obviously thinks it's making the world safer for many
other people, but he has this sense of vulnerability.
Speaker 6 (36:50):
He also has a quite dark view of the world.
Speaker 7 (36:53):
I mean, he thinks that humanity is just naturally given
to violence and disorder. There's never been this sort of
techno op demism with talent here. It's always their elevator.
Pitch has always been, you know, in a very dangerous world,
we can maybe make the world a little less dangerous. So,
you know, he and his view is, you know, we
have adversaries. We should kill them before they should kill us.
And the way he expresses this very colorfully, very acerbically,
(37:15):
obviously unnerveous people, as in some of the nature of
their work.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
It's interesting because it's like, I'm dyslacks of Jewish of adhd.
I mean, I still felt like I was pretty much
born on second base.
Speaker 6 (37:28):
Yeah, well, I think, you know, he took a different view, like, how.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Would the world be unsafe?
Speaker 7 (37:34):
Well, you know, I mean anti Semitism is a very
real factor in the world, discrimination against African Americans, right,
I mean.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
That makes sense. But he's a kid of doctors, he is.
Speaker 6 (37:44):
But then part of this is tied up in his job.
Speaker 7 (37:46):
That he felt that his parents, mean, they loved him,
but he felt his parents and I talk about this
in the book he's got bad parents, No, not bad parents,
but does he felt like they were sort of underachievers
in a sense that they didn't know how to navigate
the world in some way, and that he does. And
but he felt because they did know how to navigate
the world in a sense, they couldn't really protect them.
So he has the sense that he is vulnerable, that
(38:10):
others cannot protect him. And you know, listen, we're talking
now about a guy who's worth fifteen sixteen billion dollars
has a large security detail. But I think it's a
really important part of understanding who he is and how
he thinks about the world.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
No, I think it's important, and it's totally fascinating, And
so many of these tech billionaires have a sort of
similar Greshtald right.
Speaker 7 (38:32):
They all seem to be variations on a similar theme.
And of course Karp, like a number of these others,
has found his way to Trump. But his story is
a more interesting one in some sense because he's always identified.
In the early days of Pound here he identified as
a neo socialist, and which made an interesting contrast with
his co founder Peter Teal, who was famously libertarian.
Speaker 6 (38:52):
This is before Teal moved to the far right.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
Is this before these people turned out to be who
they were exactly?
Speaker 6 (38:57):
So Teal identified as a libertarian.
Speaker 7 (39:00):
You know, they met at Stanford Law and then reconnected
some years later, and Teal brought Carp in as a
co founder of Palenteer and eventually made him CEO. But
you know, it was always this sort of interesting dynamic
because Teal was to the right, Karp was to the left.
Speaker 6 (39:13):
That kind of served as a shield for.
Speaker 7 (39:15):
Palenteer, because you know, even if people didn't think well
of Peter Teal's politics, then you had this guy. Alex
Karp is self described progressive, but he's not.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
A progressive anymore.
Speaker 7 (39:24):
Well, you know, I think he sometimes he still describes
himself as that he has positions on some issues where
you could say, okay, that could be categorized as progressive.
Speaker 6 (39:33):
I think he's in favor of universal health care.
Speaker 7 (39:35):
He does talk about inequality in this country in a
way that there is more than just lip service. But
then he's always had views that you know, would sort
of fall outside of the progressive mainstream. He is opposed
to affirmative action, has always been opposed to it. Are
in Second Amendment enthusiast. He has moved away from the
Democrats and the left. I think he would say that
the left left him. And the book chronicles this because
(39:58):
it takes you through the first Trump present and see
when he makes very clear that he does not like Trump,
and he said so very publicly and including to me.
Speaker 6 (40:05):
He does not like him.
Speaker 7 (40:06):
He disagrees with them about it pretty much everything, including
immigration policy. At that time, I mean pallenteers working with
ICE at the time, it was a source of great
controversy internally and externally.
Speaker 6 (40:15):
The company was, you know, its offices were being protested.
Speaker 7 (40:17):
Karp does not particularly enjoy that period, but he also
makes clear he says, look, I'm not in favor of
open borders, but I have personally no problem with the
demographics of this country changing. But you know, then you see,
you know, over time his views begins to change. I mean,
he said to me this to me in twenty nineteen,
and during Trump's first presidency, he said, look at the voters.
Clearly have an issue with chaotic scenes at the border
(40:39):
and with illegal immigration. He said, if Democrats and progressives
don't take those concerns seriously, voters are going to turn
to people who do, And he said that had happened
in twenty sixteen, and of course here we are in
twenty twenty five and Trumps president again. Even though he
spoke very critically of Trump during Trump's first presidency, he
was already beginning to feel alienated from the left and
(40:59):
that accelerated during the Biden years and and kind of
reaches it's daneumund if you will. With October seventh and
the protest on campus, and he was maybe the most
outspoken CEO, and he saw it a symptomatic you know,
he in his view, you know, the protesters had completely
erased the line between anti Zionism and anti Semitism, and
(41:19):
he saw it as part of a larger rod on
the left.
Speaker 6 (41:21):
And now he's on board with.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
Trump, So he's in Israel voter largely.
Speaker 7 (41:27):
Well, that's a big issue for him. I'm in Palenteer
has been very involved in Israel. They sold their software
to the Mossad and the mid twenty tens, after October seventh,
the idea wants the software. Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence
service in Israel wants it and it. Pound has an
office already and at this time in Tel Aviv, they
got so many people coming in to get trained on
(41:49):
their on their software that they have to rent a
second floor of the building.
Speaker 6 (41:52):
And he very publicly stayed.
Speaker 7 (41:53):
I mean, you know, a couple of days after, maybe
a week or so after the massacre, at the October
seventh massacre, Pound takes out a full page ad in
New York Times saying Palanter stands with Israel. He goes
to Israel and early two thy twenty four holds a
board meeting there. Teal is there they meet with Netan Yahoo.
Wasn't reported at the time. I reporting it in the
(42:13):
book for the first time because no one wanted to
disclose that they had met with net Yahoo. But so
I'm reporting it the first time of the book that
they actually met with Netanyahu. When they were there. So
he has been a staunch support of Israel. They have
pushed back quite furiously against claims that their software has
had any hand in AI driven targeting in Gaza. They said,
that's not the case. But they've been involved with other
stuff in Israel, and he makes no bones about that. So, yes,
(42:36):
Israel matters greatly to him. He is very upset about
anti semitism un left in the right, but he's been more.
Speaker 6 (42:42):
Focused on what he sees as anti semitism on the left,
and this is part of what has driven him away
from the Democrats.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Yeah, so what did you learn from this guy?
Speaker 7 (42:52):
Well, I mean, there are all sorts of things you
can learn from him. I mean one, I mean, like,
he's an interesting figure in that he has a very
improbable story here as a business story, and this is
a guy who grew up in a staunchly left wing household,
ends up no background in computer science, no background in business,
and ends up as the CEO of a company making
software that the principal aim of which is to help.
Speaker 6 (43:15):
The national security state. And he turns this into a
half trillion dollar colossus.
Speaker 7 (43:20):
I mean, the company is just remarkably successful now, So
it's an amazing business story. And what's interesting about Karp,
whatever you think of his views, is he puts them
out there. There is an authenticity, a candor that is unusual,
and I think that is quite striking. And I would
also say, look, there are legitimate reasons to be fearful
of Palenteer, fearful of.
Speaker 6 (43:39):
The use to it.
Speaker 7 (43:39):
It's being put So I would say this, I mean,
because people say, like, how.
Speaker 6 (43:42):
Scared should we be now of Palenteer.
Speaker 7 (43:44):
I would say this in the context of our current moment,
because again, it's the end user who decides how they
use it.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
I feel like I know so many really rich guys
who grew up with liberal intellectual parents who decided that
anti sem was the greatest danger of facing Americans today.
I can think of five people off the top of
my head who fit, maybe not entirely into the Alex
cart mold.
Speaker 6 (44:10):
It's not a unique trajectory, is what you're saying.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
Yeah, I could look at my phone book right now
and tell you so. I mean, is there anything that
makes this person not just another rich guy who cares
about himself?
Speaker 7 (44:23):
No, there are, I mean, I think looks that I
will say this, I mean he is very good to
the people who work for him.
Speaker 6 (44:28):
He cares a lot about their happiness and their welfare.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Stark contrast to Elon, Well.
Speaker 6 (44:34):
That's it. I mean, it's kind of what you expect,
but it's not the norm with some of these guys.
Speaker 7 (44:38):
I mean, with someone like Elon, you are a widget
and you are very expendable, and that's the way it is.
Speaker 6 (44:43):
It's different for car.
Speaker 7 (44:44):
It a worker or a wife exactly, and that's that's
how it is. This is different, and he cares a
lot about what they think of him. So just on
a human basis, I think he's good to work for
he's good to the people who work for him. I
would also say this he likes being a billionaire in
terms of he likes being part of the club.
Speaker 6 (45:02):
He is. Never has more weight.
Speaker 7 (45:04):
I think it's also fair to say it never has
more money been wasted on someone than him. He lives
a very modest, almost ascetic life. He's got a bunch
of homes, but he doesn't spend much for most of
the homes. He does have a private plane. Now he
does no longer releases he bought. I'm glad to hear it,
because yeah, wealth is not a motivator for him. He
does not live lavishly in the circles he runs now
(45:27):
and he's surrounded by other rich people all the time,
and in those circles it's like sort of almost a
right of initiation.
Speaker 6 (45:33):
You have to just dump on the Democrats.
Speaker 7 (45:35):
And for a lot of these guys, it's basically because
they think they're being punished for their success and pilloried
for their wealth.
Speaker 6 (45:42):
He doesn't have that.
Speaker 7 (45:43):
I mean, his break with the Democrats has not been
because he feels like he's not being respected, not because
they want to tax him or he doesn't care.
Speaker 6 (45:52):
He really doesn't care about that stuff.
Speaker 7 (45:53):
It is on ideological ground, so that separates him from
some of the billionaire whiners, if you want to put
it that way.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Thank you so much, Michael for joining us.
Speaker 6 (46:02):
Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
No moment, Rick Wilson, Molly John Fast, what is your
moment of huckery?
Speaker 4 (46:14):
My moment of fuckery is off away from these shores
and overseas. It is not Venezuela, as many people would think,
even though I think to distract us, he might New
Caracas any day now.
Speaker 5 (46:23):
Wag the whoops, wag the nuclear dog.
Speaker 4 (46:28):
My molement of fuckery is that the BBC made a
giant mistake. They apologized to Trump for some editorial cuts
they made in some video from two thousand and twenty
one January sixth they apologize to him. Do not apologize
to Donald Trump for anything you do. If you wreck
his car, don't apologize. Don't apologize to Trump ever. It's
(46:50):
a sign of weakness. He will come for you now.
He wants to sue the BBC for five billion dollars
all this crap. Everybody in the media. When he says
he's gonna sue you, here's the response, Donald, go fuck yourself.
Stop it people. He can't win these cases. You can
give up, but he can't win BBC talking to you.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
That's right, Rick Wilson, thank you, my.
Speaker 4 (47:11):
Drunk Fast A pleasure as always, my friend.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds, and EMPTG says Trump's policies are not America.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
First, we have such a great show for you today,
the Lincoln Project Zone. Rick Wilson joins us to discuss
the Civil War in the White House and how Trump's
chief of staff may be heading for the door. And
we'll talk to author Michael Steinberger about his new book,
The Philosopher in the Valley, alex garp Pilunteer, and the
(00:34):
rise of the surveillance State. But first the news.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Some of the good news is on Thursday, government employees
will be paid again. They're paying out snap again. But
the bad news is a lot of people are about
to lose their food stamps permanently.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
It was you remember when Elon Musk danced around with
the chainsaw.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
I think about it every day. What I'm like, what
was the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life?
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, he was celebrating the reverse philanthropy that this administration
is engaging in. Brooke Rollins directed the us DA staff
during a record setting forty three days shutdown to continue
ushering states towards compliance with the Republican's signature tax and
spending law, which is projected to kick millions out of
the nation's largest anti hunger program. So here's what they're doing.
(01:24):
They're making it harder for you to get food stamps,
just like they're making it harder for you to get unemployment,
and they're making it harder for you to get medicaid.
The thinking here is that if they make it harder
for people to get these things, then they won't get them.
They'll just starve. Yes, that's right. And you want to
(01:44):
know why they're doing it, Jesse.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
I would love for you to tell me, please, please, just.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Doing it because rich people do not want to pay taxes.
That's literally why they're doing this. Yep, more Americans will
starve because Donald J. Trump wants to have his rich
friends pay list axes. And there you have it, all.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Right, my So I'm going to show how much integrity
I have where I'm going to tell you an embarrassing
journalistic editor I door knocked for one Bill de Blasio
on his first barrel cauepe page de Bungler.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
By the way, we didn't talk at all about Bill
de Blasio cheating on the good thing that ever happened
to him, Nomiki, constant justice for Nomiki. It turns out,
by the way, the Bill de Blasio, despite I, by
the way, have a long thought he sucked, but it
turns out that he is also a philanderer. So a
(02:37):
hearty fuck you to mister Bill de Blasio, in case
you're there, in case you're the five people who still
know who you are. Justice for Nomiki.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
So allow me to keep clowning myself. And I will
say so. I door knocked for many days for the
de Blasio campaign before he was elected mayor.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Let the record show I'm making a horrified fit.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
You are you also know this, So what I do
or knocked on it. What I kept hearing from people
was everyone's going to move out of the city if
he's elected. Rich people will leave the city. Do you
know what happened? That did not happen. And they said
the same thing about Zoramondanni. And now we have two
top real estate CEOs saying no one's putting their houses
up for sale, no one's leaving the city.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
You know, it's so incredibly stupid. This is so stupid.
I can't even tell you how stupid it is. This
always happened. They always say this. So basically outspoken conservative
hedge fund millionaire Ken Griffin, who is a partner at
a wounin project, Ken is committed, and we'll have more
(03:43):
employees at three point fifty Park Avenue than Miami. Now,
by the way, we're going to say something nice about
a billionaire here. Ken Griffin has been one of the
very few billionaires who from the beginning has said Donald J.
Trump is a complete and utter fuck more on. I mean,
he hasn't quite said that, but he's criticized the tariffs
(04:03):
at the time when every other rich person was like,
thank you, sir, please enact more stupid legislation. Ken Griffin,
who donated to Trump and is in no way a
liberal lefty, he did in fact say that this was ridiculous.
And look, in a world filled with sycophans, the people
(04:24):
who say the real stuff are actually the good guys.
So in that way, I think that was good. But yeah, no,
New York is not going anywhere. There are going to
be millions and millions of feet of office space. I
don't know who's going to work in them, because there
are no more businesses, but you know, the data farmers
will all have their own beautiful data farms, and you
(04:48):
know New York is not going anywhere.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
I would really like to put this one to death
with the things that people should be laughed at when
they say because it's proven to never be true. Just
like that voters don't women in executive roles like governors
when we saw how well that went last week.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
I mean, I still think probably not going to be
able to elect a woman president, at least on the left.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
I think that there's a very interesting thing to be there.
But I think that what the myth is is people
carry this over as if it's governors too, And that's
a ridiculous, ridiculous statement.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Governors. I don't think it's necessarily true.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Yeah, they get the analysis wrong when they make it
about the executive choices being made.
Speaker 4 (05:28):
That's a ridiculous statement.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Yeah, especially conser Yeah, we have a dozen female governors
right now, or we will in January.
Speaker 4 (05:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Okay, So it's a Sunday, So that means Scott the
Scent has gone on a Sunday show, yes, my man,
and said something that seems to really really really really
make very little sense. But hear he's saying that Trump's
two thousand dollars tariff check requires a new law to happen.
Speaker 5 (05:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
By the way, first of all, there's no here. Here's
what happens on Sundays. Scott Bissent and his low affect
monotone go on a Sunday show and on that Sunday
show he be clowns himself in a way that Mega demands.
So he goes on there he says things that are
(06:17):
completely nuts. Here's one. So he's going to send a
tariff dividend check to most Americans. Here's how this is
going to work. It's not going to happen that this
is how it's gonna work. It's not because, first of all,
there's no way they can do this. I'd be very
surprised if the Supreme Court doesn't say the tariffs are illegal.
(06:38):
So we're already going to be in a nightmare scenario
where they're trying to undo tariffs that are undoable. I
think that we are in a moment of stupid and
I would say this, Thessent is trying to save his
job here, he's also trying to save the economy. Also,
(06:59):
the other thing that I think it's worth like pulling
back and realizing is the reason that Trump world is
cutting tariffs on food on a Friday night and having
Scott on the Sunday shows on a Sunday morning. It's
because they see these consumer confidence numbers and they're the
lowest in seventy eight years. I think that's right. They're
like these crazy low consumer confidence numbers and they are
(07:21):
seeing them and they're coming up into Thanksgiving and Christmas
and they are like, holy fuck, we just got slathered
in a twenty twenty five cycle. We are now into
holiday that's going to be fucking nightmare fuel. This is
what is known as panic. This is what is known
as an administration that is trying desperately to change the
(07:44):
subject and it's not working.
Speaker 4 (07:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
I would strongly agree, so Molli, I think one of
the things with analyzing Trump is we always look at
what he's truthing. It was interesting this weekend he's fixated
on Missus Taylor Green for obvious reasons. He did not
address some things in the Epstein files. Most notably, but
what I did think was the more ateristic thing that
is not being covered is how pist he is at
(08:08):
Indiana politicians.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Oh yeah, this is an amazing thing. So he wants
so one of the good things about Trump is he
has no idea what the fuck he's doing. So he
is trying to now redistrict because he thinks that redistricting
will mean you won't lose the House. But what I
don't think he understands, and what I think these other
(08:30):
Republicans understand, is that they can't redistrict seats that don't exist.
So if you have five seats and you spread out
the Republican votes, eventually you make yourself into a dommymander,
you say, and R plus ten becomes an R plus five.
And when you have a headwind of eight ten points,
which it's looking like you may, you end up with
(08:51):
the dummy Manders. And by the way, redistricting is already
going to be tough because it's anti democratic. And you know,
at this point, I mean effectively and a credit where
credit is due, my man, and I don't like everything
he does. I think ideologically we are not a match.
But there is a reason why this has gone so
(09:13):
off the rails, and it is Gavin Newsom. Because if
they had stolen those five seats in Texas, you and
I both know that he would have been like done.
I'm good, even though a traditional midterm where they get
slaughtered is thirty five seats. But if they had just
done those five seats, then I think we would have
(09:36):
ended up with like Trump going into the midterms thinking
he was okay. But because those California seats have now
gone to demes, though of course the Trump DOJ has
tried to fight it because it's gone to demes. I
think this is just a shit show. And Trump sees
five to five, you know, five from Texas to the Republicans,
five to California. I think there's a point in which
(09:59):
this just no longer makes any sense, and I think we.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
May have hit It sounds about right.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Rick Wilson is the founder of the Lincoln Project and
the host of the Enemy's List.
Speaker 4 (10:12):
Rick Wilson, Molly John Fast a little bird told me
you were in the Gettysburg of the Maga Civil War this.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Weekend, the district of Columbia where I ate dish next
to Todd Blanche and Borish Epstein.
Speaker 4 (10:26):
Oh my gosh, they could not have ever been doing
anything corrupt or dirty.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Well, they were with their families, so I would assume not,
but who knows. I also couldn't hear anything because it
was so loud, but I will say I am reminded
that the district of Columbia has about seven people who
live in it, and it is literally like being on
a cruise ship.
Speaker 4 (10:48):
Yes, it's like a country club in a mid sized town.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
It's the country club from Hell. Speaking of from Hell,
Susie Wilds, who is Donald Trump's chief of stab and
probably why Donald Trump is president today, a meaningful part
of it, yes, and she comes from Desanta's world where
DeSantis did something so stupid. I don't know what he means.
Speaker 4 (11:09):
Lady Lady macbeth, Casey DeSantis, right, Casey McBeth alienator. She
fired her and then publicly humiliated her in the press.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
And Susie Wiles went and made Donald Trump president as
Susan I was.
Speaker 4 (11:25):
Weighed carefully her options and said, how am I going
to fuck these people harder than they've ever been fucked before?
And she went back to Trump and all of this,
all these machinations of Ronda Sant's running for president, were
happening before he was even governor, and she blew up
their ten year plan absolutely train wrecked his presidential campaign
(11:50):
and was really one of the reasons Donald Trump was
elected because she would go to the big donors, the
serious people, not the crazies, and say I'm going to
control it. I can make I'll set up systems. We'll
let him go and play with parades and watch the
fighter planes fly over, and the grown ups will do business.
Speaker 5 (12:09):
But do.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
So what happen?
Speaker 2 (12:12):
So let's fast forward to Susie Wilds today. What is
happening with miss Wilder?
Speaker 4 (12:18):
Well, I will tell you the Magi are now have
They've looked at the last ten months. They've looked at
the steep decline in Trump's polling. They looked at one
disaster after another since ten days ago. On election night,
there's a rising drum beat inside the Maga world of
both people inside the White House who don't like her
(12:39):
e g. Stephen Miller, and of the MAGA influencer ecosystem
out there in the world. They're all looking for a
way to say no, this isn't Trump's fault, this isn't
Trump's bad decisions, this isn't a public assessment of Donald
Trump being a terrible leader in destroying the economy and
ZIP tying children in the streets and running police state
(13:01):
this small is it must all be Susie Wiles's fault
because she's the one who's secret. They call her like
swampy Susie. She's getting the nicknames. She's in that moment
right now. There's always an arc. I wrote about this
today in an article on my sub stet called Run Susie, Run.
And there's an arc with Trump. First, you're the essential person,
the highly respected Susie Wiles, you know, great chief of staff.
(13:23):
And then it's you get the responsibility of trying to
clean up the message, and you're always behind the elephant
with the smallest shovel in the world. Then in the
point where all his mistakes and fuck ups start to
accrete and they can't be cleaned up, it's like, well,
it must be her fault or their fault, whoever, whoever
the person is. And right now she's in the phase
where Trump is on the phone and people going, do
you think Susie's doing a good job?
Speaker 5 (13:43):
Once he does that, start the clock fucked?
Speaker 4 (13:47):
Yeah, Everything Trump touches dies at that point.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Here's a question for you. Stephen Miller wants Susie out,
But what is Stephen Miller. Doing that is like bankable
or good, nothing, nothing.
Speaker 4 (14:02):
It doesn't matter. Look, there are three reasons you want
to be chief of staff. Reason one is that you're
loyal to the guy. You came up with him as
a congressman, a governor, a president. Lifers. Trump has no
one like that around him, no one, not even this family. Right.
The second reason is it's the highest you can ascend
in the pairmid of political power in America without being
an elected official. It is the most powerful non elected
(14:24):
job in DC by far. And the third reason you
want to do it is once you're chief of staff,
the rest of your life, you're never on schedule to
or travel again. You are going You're on corporate boards
all over the country. You travel around the world to
give compensated speeches and beautiful resorts to very wealthy people.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Steven Miller is going to be on corporate boards.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
Oh no, Steven Miller will not. This is what Susie Wiles.
These are what Susie Wilds wanted. Steven Miller is going
to be in a fucking prison if I have anything
to do with it.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Well, he's certainly not going to be on the board
of American airlines. No, he is being like being like,
let's pepper spray babies.
Speaker 6 (14:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (15:00):
Yeah, So her position is tenuous now. A lot of
her people have been leaving DC. A lot of people
she brought in who were more sane, more rational people.
They're already out of the administration. They're like, I need
to spend more time with my family. My. Wow, you know, my, my, my, my,
My service here has been the greatest honor of my life. Sir,
But my, you know, I've got to.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Go mow my lawn whatever, right, lawn mowing is important, That's.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
What That's what I'm told.
Speaker 5 (15:28):
But but she is.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
She is not immune to the power of everything Trump
touches dies. And she's not immune to the power that
the MAGA influencer class has over Trump. And and I've
been keeping an eye on a couple of them. I
haven't seen her attack directly yet by lumersobiac all those
sort of people that you would start to you know
(15:51):
that Trump's made a decision by the time they start
attacking somebody, right, right, you're not there yet. But she is.
She is. You know, She's got this enough of the
smell of death around her that the vultures are circling
over her.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Head when this happens eventually. I mean, one of the
things Trump two point zero has done the Trump one
point zero has not done, is that he does not
fire people in this new administration. Right, people move, they
move to Greece, like Don Junior's girlfriend. They get moved around,
but they don't necessarily get fired. That I think he
(16:26):
thinks that will keep the leakers at bay. So this
would actually be a paradigm shift.
Speaker 4 (16:32):
Yes, it would be, And I will tell you it's
a paradigm shift because they are in a crisis that
they have not been able to break the cycle on
when the Epstein stuff first started. You and I had
this conversation. This is the first thing we'd ever seen
end a decade of watching this craziness that he can't
get under control. He may push it back for a
(16:53):
day or two, but it always comes back. Epstein is
the underscore of the soundtrack of the Trump presidency too.
And right now, you know, we saw basically what's estimated
to be about five percent of the materials that are
out there about Epstein RaaS this week, and it has
been a pure firestorm on this gun. He has been
(17:15):
taking a chaotic approach to handling it. You know, for
these people to spend all week trying to come up
with a plan, and they're going to say, well, we're
going to investigate Reid Hoffman and Bill Clinton and not
Donald Trump even his own people. The MAGA reaction to
this was like, come on, come.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
On, bro, my man read Hoffman, though, let us give
a little credit where credit. I have brother Hoffman extremely
crotchety and cranky with Reid Hoffman in any number of
different ways and criticized him ad nauseum, including sending him
a DM that said I'm very disappointed in you, which
(17:55):
is the way I Jewish mother American democracy. And yet
my man stood up to Trump said go for it. Fight, fight, fight,
That's the only way. And and by the way, I mean, look,
you know, tell you.
Speaker 4 (18:09):
And I wish, I wish we had more billionaires in
this country who would display the guts read Hoffman showed
this week said bring it on, fuck you, Yeah, I
will fight you. Let's go. Every time you show Trump
you're not afraid of him, they always take a beat
because they expect everybody to do what well a lot
(18:29):
of people have done over the over the over the years. Yes, sir, Yes, sir,
how many? How many make it better? Never apologize to
Trump always said go fuck yourself, get right back in
his face. Stick.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
That's the only way, only way. But I think it's
worth for a minute going back to this moment here,
because I actually think this is the end of MAGA,
and I want you and I'm going to tell you.
I'm going to tell you my theory, and they.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
Tell me your theory.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Why you think it's wrong or right or whatever. You know,
you and I we exchange theories, and you know all
I have for a long time. So my theory is this,
there are two things that are taking down MAGA at
the same time, but only one is visible. So one
is the Epstein stuff, right, you see, Marjorie Taylor Green,
(19:22):
Lauren Beaupert, Thomas Massey, Nancy Mace, Nancy Mayce. These people
are all like breaking with the party in a big way.
And supposedly there's like one hundred republic go into We're
going to vote for the discharge petition. Ye, big deal.
But the underlying reason why the MAGA is disintegrating is
(19:43):
because of inflation.
Speaker 4 (19:45):
Yes, these people are taking the economy in the face, right,
and they finally reached a point where they couldn't spend
it anymore, and they couldn't say, well, you know, I'm
sacrificing for the good of the country because Donald Trump
needs this. Now they're based at the point like he's
fucking us. Yeah, we're getting screwed. And you notice there's
(20:06):
an interesting and I think your theory is correct. Inflation
and economics are taking there cracking.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
They're the underlying right And why is.
Speaker 4 (20:14):
That, Molly, Because one of their most fundamental beliefs from
all the way back in twenty sixteen was that Donald
Trump was a masterful negotiator. He'd be great for the economy.
He's the guy who could solve all these economic problems
that the Libs have caused. Well, the Libs didn't cause them,
but what he did. What he did was shattered the
(20:37):
country with this tariff deal. And it is kept inflation
grinding away under the water. And it is not a
visible process. It's it's like it's like a disease and
it's eating away at them and they and they it's
hard to go into the grocery store and say, yeah, no,
this isn't a two hundred and fifty dollars bill for
five bags of groceries. It's it's an eighty dollars bill,
(20:57):
like Trump told me. It is because it's not true, right,
can't spin it.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
And we know that the inflation is a problem and
that Trump is saying uncle. And you know why we know.
Speaker 4 (21:08):
That because he's reversing the tariffs at nine o'clock on
a Friday.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Night as one does.
Speaker 4 (21:15):
He as one does. He's reversing the food tariffs that
have caused coffee and chocolated and meat, wheat and meat
and all this other stuff to.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Skyrocket because my man sees Thanksgiving around the corner and Christmas.
And even though he did explain to Maga voters that
you might get one dollar instead of three or eleven.
By the way, this is the problem with making a
billionaire president is that he's not you know, you get
(21:47):
one you know you'll only get one jet that I
think this is really seeing it come apart here.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
Look, I think, and I think there are there are
large things and small things that are shattering the coalition
on the economic axis. And if you look at all
the public polling and all the survey work that's out
there right now, everything in the economic basket, he's upside
down by between eleven and twenty seven points. Right on inflation,
he's down about twenty seven points across multiple polls. A
(22:18):
couple are worse, a couple are better, but the aggregate.
You you know, this is the same lesson gerald Ford
learned in nineteen seventy six. Inflation is a killer app
for voters. They will not tolerate it. Joe Biden and
Gerald Ford learned that lesson. Yeah, it was virus, but
by extension.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
I was just going to say, like, you can, you
can just pull back from like a year ago. Yeah, No,
it's true. I mean the but the great irony of
all of this, which I think should not be ignored,
is that this is caused by Trump.
Speaker 4 (22:58):
Every bit of this inflation under Joe Biden was coming down.
It was coming down swiftly. But I mean, look, was
everybody happy. Of course not. I wasn't happy.
Speaker 5 (23:08):
Nobody was happy. The Fed wasn't happy. That's why they
kept the brakes on.
Speaker 4 (23:13):
And that the reason Joe Biden ended up with inflation
was because Donald Trump had botched COVID so badly that
we had to juice the economy. In the beginning of
the Biden administration, and we paid for it on the
back end with inflation.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
I mean, I also think everybody had inflation and even
if you hadn't used the economy. Yeah, but I also
think Biden world was fad at messaging it, so that
got them to a place where everything was a shit show.
But this is a problem of Donald Trump's so making.
Now I want to talk about what's happening right now
(23:48):
in there are a couple of cities where Donald Trump
is pulling out the National Guard, indeed, but there are
a couple of cities warmer weather Donald Trump is sending
in ice.
Speaker 4 (24:03):
YEP, Charlotte is the new victim city.
Speaker 5 (24:07):
But Charlotte why there is.
Speaker 4 (24:10):
A meaningful Hispanic population in Mecklenburg County, which is the
main county in the Charlotte area. A lot of them
are legal, but that doesn't matter to Ice. Their criteria
is not legal or illegal. Their criteria is brown or
not brown. I also think that they reached a point
where Chicago was not providing them with the visuals they wanted.
And Folks, if you don't believe me and believe us
(24:32):
that the MAGA media ecosystem is super coordinated, why haven't
you heard the word Portland in weeks.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Yeah, why haven't you heard?
Speaker 4 (24:39):
Why why is it that suddenly we're not seeing every
MAGA influencer, Bennie Johnson and all the rest, all the
way down the food chain out in Portland trying to
get on camera. Yeah, why not because it wasn't giving
them the picture they wanted. They were being mocked and
ridiculed by people in frog outfits. Fuck this, We'll go
to Chicago. And they went to Chicago and people were
(25:00):
going out in the streets with whistles and people were
coming out. There was one of these small towns they
showed up in outside suburbs outside of Chicago with a
population of four thousand people, and five hundred showed up
to protest ICE. They were getting the message like, fuck you,
arrest us all give it a shot. And so now
they're going to try for a different city and try
for a different set of visuals. And yes, it's a
(25:23):
lot warmer insurre than it is in Chicago. And a
lot of these proud boys and these goons that have
joined ICE in the last five minutes, they're not exactly
like Navy seal toughness levels.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
It is interesting to me that this crew that is
doing the arresting, so to speak, is headed by dog
killer and dog.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
Killer and fraud queen Christy nome.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Yes, who has in fact, now there's this new reporting
from Pro Publica showing that she did in fact self
deal or give you know, she's violated ethics so shockingly
this woman.
Speaker 5 (26:04):
Yes, So the.
Speaker 4 (26:04):
Strategy Group is the company that she used to build
all these maga ads, all these ice ads that she's in,
and they're all of her fully made up, beautiful old extensions.
Heir riding horses, trying to look tough, you know, wearing
body armor, the whole thing. I'm gonna I'm gonna flip
on the wayback machine for a second. The Strategy Group
(26:26):
for media and and and apparently also Chris Losovita. I
heard the other day. I read that somewhere they're cashing
in on this media buy to the tune of Milly
many many millions of the of the two hundred million dollars.
They're the people. The company was once headed by the
guy that sent Michelle Bachman the vibrator when she was
a customer. I don't know if you that's a way back.
(26:47):
That's a little probably a little too obscure, too much
of a deep but they are. The Strategy Group for
Media is truly batshit insane, and by a remarkable coincidence,
trisham Glaughlin, who is her who was nomes comms director,
is married to Ben Yoho, who runs what the strategy
group for Media? Wait, how did that happen? It's a miracle,
(27:12):
It's amazing.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
I also just think that Christy Nome is a like,
you know, when you think about this administration, you think
about like one of the things I think we learned
in twenty twenty five was that this is not going
to be forever. Trump is going to lose, he's going
to lose the House, he's going to lose the Senate.
(27:34):
He's not going to be president for the rest of
our lives. This is not how this is going to
go down at all. In fact, this is going There's
going to be truth and reconciliation.
Speaker 4 (27:45):
There's going to be oh yes, there will be.
Speaker 5 (27:47):
There's the lies.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
People are going to go to jail or let.
Speaker 4 (27:50):
Me say something a huge time. I will bet you
a dollar right now that Greg Bavino, the guy who
runs all these ice operations around the country, the guy
who shows up in the big hugo boss, you know,
Nazi style greatcoat. I will bet you a dollar that
guy goes to prison. He will be the Patsy and
Chrissy Nome and Steven Miller will go. He just misinterpreted
our orders. We were trying to stay within the and
(28:11):
it just it got out of hand.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
What about Tom Holman?
Speaker 4 (28:15):
Oh, Tom Holman's going to jail.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Cash in the cash in the bag, Tom, Yeah, bag
cave bag bag time.
Speaker 4 (28:22):
I think Pam Bondi's going to jail. I think Tom
Blank is going to jail. And I say this because
I think there's an increasing understanding among the Democrats who
are not the quickest on the uptake about the use
of power in this country. They act, yeah, you do.
I think even now they're realizing, if we don't hold
some people to account for the criminality of the things
(28:46):
that are going on right now, it will allow a
cohort of these people to survive out there like a
like a virus that's dormab more and come back and
come back and do it again.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Like JD. Van's like JD be president in twenty twenty.
Hat just kidding, you know, Guy's never going to be president.
Speaker 7 (29:03):
You know.
Speaker 4 (29:04):
The thing I love about Jennie Vance is the groper demo.
That is a very powerful demo inside the GOP. Now
he is married to a foreigner in their mind, and
she is an alien and a brown person, and therefore
they awaite the nuptials of Erica Kirk.
Speaker 5 (29:22):
And van Rick Wilson.
Speaker 4 (29:24):
Will come back, of course I will.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Michael Steinberger is a freelance journalist and the author of
The Philosopher in the Valley, Alex Carp Palenteer and the
Rise of the Surveillance State. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 6 (29:40):
Michael, Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
I want you first to explain what Palenteer does, because
I think we all sort of know, but we don't
exactly know, Okay.
Speaker 6 (29:50):
Valenteer is a data analytics company.
Speaker 7 (29:53):
They make software that helps organizations make better, more efficient
use of their data. It's used by a very wide
range of organizations, ranging from the CIA.
Speaker 6 (30:04):
To US Army to corporations like Airbus and BP.
Speaker 7 (30:09):
It's important to say what Penalt two doesn't do, because
then the name Palalteer has become virtually synonymous with surveillance,
and I have now helped make that so, because the
word surveillance is on the cover of my book.
Speaker 6 (30:22):
It is not surveillance technology per se.
Speaker 7 (30:24):
Their technology can be used by clandestine services and law
enforcement to facilitate surveillance. It makes their jobs easier, but
it's not survevance technology per se. And I think there's
another misconception about pala Twer that needs to be addressed
as well, which is they do not collect data, they
do not store data, they do not sell data. So yeah,
(30:46):
because people, you know, it's a name that does give
people the creeps, it does make people very nervous, and
so I think it's important to establish what they don't
do as well as what they do do.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
But they do scrape data, right.
Speaker 7 (30:59):
They don't data, But what happens is so for instance,
they're working with ice snap Ice is scraping data. Data
is fed into Palenteer's software platform. So just to you know,
give an example, So ICE could be pulling in at
social media feeds, and then they also have telephone records,
they have automatic license plate reader information. All this data
gets fed into Palenteer's software platform, and that platform then
(31:24):
the data is integrated and the software finds patterns, correlations, connections.
It's it's network analysis essentially, so you know, it's not
palenteered doing you know, getting this data. It's palenteer enabling
name them, these organizations to make faster, better use of
their data. And in most cases that's just in most
of the work they do. It's you know, yeah, fifty
(31:46):
percent of their work is on the commercial side. It's
just helping companies make their operations more efficient. So it's
nothing that should cause anyone to lose sleep. It's the
work on the other on the government side, you know,
with intelligence services and obviously with ICE, that is reason
for concern.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
Okay, say your eyes, you've got social media feed for
this person, you've got their driver's license. What is the
secret sauce of Hellent does to make those connections. It's
sort of like an AI search.
Speaker 6 (32:15):
I would put it this way.
Speaker 7 (32:16):
It operates with the efficiency of a wood chip or
it pulls in a lot of data very quickly and
finds answers in that data, evidence in that data.
Speaker 6 (32:25):
Very very quickly.
Speaker 7 (32:25):
Because basically the problem is, you know, you can think
of it almost as a digital detective board. So you
think of like, you know, any procedural you see, you know,
the guy standing at the detective standing at the board
playing connect the dots. That's what the software. That's what
this software does. The company began for the was started
for the purpose of helping the United States government fight
the war on terrorism, and the idea behind it was
that you could create technology, build technology that help human
(32:49):
analysts that the CIA foil plots, for instance, by pulling
together information for them and making connections doing the kind
of network analysis that would take human analysts days, hours, weeks,
possibly forever to do. And so this software really speeds
up that kind of work. It's a very powerful tool.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
So Alex Carb talk us through how you got involved
in writing this book on him.
Speaker 6 (33:11):
Well, I grew out of a story I did for
the New York Times magazine. I'm right. For the New
York Times magazine.
Speaker 7 (33:15):
I did a story about carbon Palatude was published in
twenty twenty. There's an even more interesting backstory. Though he
and I went to the same college. We were college classmates,
we did not know each other in college.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
What college did you go to?
Speaker 6 (33:26):
Haverford College?
Speaker 7 (33:27):
Okay, and if you know anything about Haverford you will
know how bizarre it is that two people were in
the same class at Haverford and never exchanged the work.
Because it's a small school, it's like fifteen hundred people total.
Somehow we managed to pull that off. We never exchanged
the work, which is why I was able to do
the story for the New York Times magazine because there
was no relationship, therefore no conflict of interest. He I think,
(33:48):
was a bit more diligent about a schoolwork than I was.
I suspect the library saw a lot more of him
than it did of me, which may go some way
to explaining why he ended up a billionaire and I
did not, but be that SMA.
Speaker 6 (33:58):
So that's kind of the backstory.
Speaker 7 (33:59):
So I did the story for the New York Times magazine,
and as comprehensive as that story was, and it was
about nine thousand words, it was a long magazine feature,
I felt that there was a lot more to say.
Karp is a very distinctive figure in the business world.
This company is obviously one that generates a lot of controversy,
causes a lot of concern for people, and so that
gave rise to the book. He was willing to cooperate
(34:20):
and gave me actually pretty extraordinary access. So I think
it's an unusually rich portrait of someone who really is
at the center of He's a defining figure of this moment.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
So he believes that Talunteer could be like IVM.
Speaker 6 (34:35):
As I said. It was started to help the US
government combat terrorism.
Speaker 7 (34:38):
It was a very political company from the start in
that explicitly political agenda.
Speaker 6 (34:42):
Wanted to serve the US government and make the West stronger.
Speaker 7 (34:46):
So from the start they decided they would not do
business with the Russian government, the Chinese government, or any
Russian or Chinese owned entities because they saw those two
countries as fundamentally adversarial to the United States. While serving
the government, working with the CIA, working with the US military,
they are allo developing a trying to develop a robust
commercial business, and many years later, now in twenty twenty five,
they have both. They are huge in government and they
(35:07):
are huge on the commercial side. Is that like McKenzie
Airbus for instance, so they Airbus began working with him
in around twenty fifteen twenty sixteen. Airbus had a production glitch,
was coming out with a new plane, a three fifty,
and there was a production glitch. But as you can imagine,
the assembly line for a commercial jetliner is a very
(35:28):
very intricate thing, and they couldn't figure out where the
problem was. They brought in volunteer company dispatched five software
engineers to Booz, France, whereas Airbus is located, and within
a matter of days they had detected where the breakdowns
are happening on the production of the assembly line and
it ended up saving the company a lot of money.
And now Palneer is basically the de facto operating system
(35:50):
for Airbus. Around fifty thousand Airbus employees a day use
the company's software.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Why is this story so explosive.
Speaker 6 (35:58):
Well, what's interesting.
Speaker 7 (35:59):
He's he's a very different sort of CEO, not a
standard issue CEO.
Speaker 6 (36:03):
He speaks very candidly.
Speaker 7 (36:05):
He says exactly what's on his mind and says so
in a sort of a very unscripted way. So he's
a very striking presence on television, and a lot of
what he says is controversial, I mean, his view.
Speaker 6 (36:15):
I mean to kind of unpack the Alex Karp story.
Speaker 7 (36:18):
So he is biracial, He's Jewish, severely dyslexic, grew up
in Philadelphia. As he tells it, he understood at a
fairly young age that he had some strikes against him
because he was biracial, because he was Jewish, because he
had a learning disability, and this gave him a sense
of vulnerability that he has carried into adulthood. And you
(36:39):
could say that in a very real sense, Palenteer exists
in part to make the world safer for Alex Karp.
He obviously thinks it's making the world safer for many
other people, but he has this sense of vulnerability.
Speaker 6 (36:50):
He also has a quite dark view of the world.
Speaker 7 (36:53):
I mean, he thinks that humanity is just naturally given
to violence and disorder. There's never been this sort of
techno op demism with talent here. It's always their elevator.
Pitch has always been, you know, in a very dangerous world,
we can maybe make the world a little less dangerous. So,
you know, he and his view is, you know, we
have adversaries. We should kill them before they should kill us.
And the way he expresses this very colorfully, very acerbically,
(37:15):
obviously unnerveous people, as in some of the nature of
their work.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
It's interesting because it's like, I'm dyslacks of Jewish of adhd.
I mean, I still felt like I was pretty much
born on second base.
Speaker 6 (37:28):
Yeah, well, I think, you know, he took a different view, like, how.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Would the world be unsafe?
Speaker 7 (37:34):
Well, you know, I mean anti Semitism is a very
real factor in the world, discrimination against African Americans, right,
I mean.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
That makes sense. But he's a kid of doctors, he is.
Speaker 6 (37:44):
But then part of this is tied up in his job.
Speaker 7 (37:46):
That he felt that his parents, mean, they loved him,
but he felt his parents and I talk about this
in the book he's got bad parents, No, not bad parents,
but does he felt like they were sort of underachievers
in a sense that they didn't know how to navigate
the world in some way, and that he does. And
but he felt because they did know how to navigate
the world in a sense, they couldn't really protect them.
So he has the sense that he is vulnerable, that
(38:10):
others cannot protect him. And you know, listen, we're talking
now about a guy who's worth fifteen sixteen billion dollars
has a large security detail. But I think it's a
really important part of understanding who he is and how
he thinks about the world.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
No, I think it's important, and it's totally fascinating, And
so many of these tech billionaires have a sort of
similar Greshtald right.
Speaker 7 (38:32):
They all seem to be variations on a similar theme.
And of course Karp, like a number of these others,
has found his way to Trump. But his story is
a more interesting one in some sense because he's always identified.
In the early days of Pound here he identified as
a neo socialist, and which made an interesting contrast with
his co founder Peter Teal, who was famously libertarian.
Speaker 6 (38:52):
This is before Teal moved to the far right.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
Is this before these people turned out to be who
they were exactly?
Speaker 6 (38:57):
So Teal identified as a libertarian.
Speaker 7 (39:00):
You know, they met at Stanford Law and then reconnected
some years later, and Teal brought Carp in as a
co founder of Palenteer and eventually made him CEO. But
you know, it was always this sort of interesting dynamic
because Teal was to the right, Karp was to the left.
Speaker 6 (39:13):
That kind of served as a shield for.
Speaker 7 (39:15):
Palenteer, because you know, even if people didn't think well
of Peter Teal's politics, then you had this guy. Alex
Karp is self described progressive, but he's not.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
A progressive anymore.
Speaker 7 (39:24):
Well, you know, I think he sometimes he still describes
himself as that he has positions on some issues where
you could say, okay, that could be categorized as progressive.
Speaker 6 (39:33):
I think he's in favor of universal health care.
Speaker 7 (39:35):
He does talk about inequality in this country in a
way that there is more than just lip service. But
then he's always had views that you know, would sort
of fall outside of the progressive mainstream. He is opposed
to affirmative action, has always been opposed to it. Are
in Second Amendment enthusiast. He has moved away from the
Democrats and the left. I think he would say that
the left left him. And the book chronicles this because
(39:58):
it takes you through the first Trump present and see
when he makes very clear that he does not like Trump,
and he said so very publicly and including to me.
Speaker 6 (40:05):
He does not like him.
Speaker 7 (40:06):
He disagrees with them about it pretty much everything, including
immigration policy. At that time, I mean pallenteers working with
ICE at the time, it was a source of great
controversy internally and externally.
Speaker 6 (40:15):
The company was, you know, its offices were being protested.
Speaker 7 (40:17):
Karp does not particularly enjoy that period, but he also
makes clear he says, look, I'm not in favor of
open borders, but I have personally no problem with the
demographics of this country changing. But you know, then you see,
you know, over time his views begins to change. I mean,
he said to me this to me in twenty nineteen,
and during Trump's first presidency, he said, look at the voters.
Clearly have an issue with chaotic scenes at the border
(40:39):
and with illegal immigration. He said, if Democrats and progressives
don't take those concerns seriously, voters are going to turn
to people who do, And he said that had happened
in twenty sixteen, and of course here we are in
twenty twenty five and Trumps president again. Even though he
spoke very critically of Trump during Trump's first presidency, he
was already beginning to feel alienated from the left and
(40:59):
that accelerated during the Biden years and and kind of
reaches it's daneumund if you will. With October seventh and
the protest on campus, and he was maybe the most
outspoken CEO, and he saw it a symptomatic you know,
he in his view, you know, the protesters had completely
erased the line between anti Zionism and anti Semitism, and
(41:19):
he saw it as part of a larger rod on
the left.
Speaker 6 (41:21):
And now he's on board with.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
Trump, So he's in Israel voter largely.
Speaker 7 (41:27):
Well, that's a big issue for him. I'm in Palenteer
has been very involved in Israel. They sold their software
to the Mossad and the mid twenty tens, after October seventh,
the idea wants the software. Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence
service in Israel wants it and it. Pound has an
office already and at this time in Tel Aviv, they
got so many people coming in to get trained on
(41:49):
their on their software that they have to rent a
second floor of the building.
Speaker 6 (41:52):
And he very publicly stayed.
Speaker 7 (41:53):
I mean, you know, a couple of days after, maybe
a week or so after the massacre, at the October
seventh massacre, Pound takes out a full page ad in
New York Times saying Palanter stands with Israel. He goes
to Israel and early two thy twenty four holds a
board meeting there. Teal is there they meet with Netan Yahoo.
Wasn't reported at the time. I reporting it in the
(42:13):
book for the first time because no one wanted to
disclose that they had met with net Yahoo. But so
I'm reporting it the first time of the book that
they actually met with Netanyahu. When they were there. So
he has been a staunch support of Israel. They have
pushed back quite furiously against claims that their software has
had any hand in AI driven targeting in Gaza. They said,
that's not the case. But they've been involved with other
stuff in Israel, and he makes no bones about that. So, yes,
(42:36):
Israel matters greatly to him. He is very upset about
anti semitism un left in the right, but he's been more.
Speaker 6 (42:42):
Focused on what he sees as anti semitism on the left,
and this is part of what has driven him away
from the Democrats.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Yeah, so what did you learn from this guy?
Speaker 7 (42:52):
Well, I mean, there are all sorts of things you
can learn from him. I mean one, I mean, like,
he's an interesting figure in that he has a very
improbable story here as a business story, and this is
a guy who grew up in a staunchly left wing household,
ends up no background in computer science, no background in business,
and ends up as the CEO of a company making
software that the principal aim of which is to help.
Speaker 6 (43:15):
The national security state. And he turns this into a
half trillion dollar colossus.
Speaker 7 (43:20):
I mean, the company is just remarkably successful now, So
it's an amazing business story. And what's interesting about Karp,
whatever you think of his views, is he puts them
out there. There is an authenticity, a candor that is unusual,
and I think that is quite striking. And I would
also say, look, there are legitimate reasons to be fearful
of Palenteer, fearful of.
Speaker 6 (43:39):
The use to it.
Speaker 7 (43:39):
It's being put So I would say this, I mean,
because people say, like, how.
Speaker 6 (43:42):
Scared should we be now of Palenteer.
Speaker 7 (43:44):
I would say this in the context of our current moment,
because again, it's the end user who decides how they
use it.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
I feel like I know so many really rich guys
who grew up with liberal intellectual parents who decided that
anti sem was the greatest danger of facing Americans today.
I can think of five people off the top of
my head who fit, maybe not entirely into the Alex
cart mold.
Speaker 6 (44:10):
It's not a unique trajectory, is what you're saying.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
Yeah, I could look at my phone book right now
and tell you so. I mean, is there anything that
makes this person not just another rich guy who cares
about himself?
Speaker 7 (44:23):
No, there are, I mean, I think looks that I
will say this, I mean he is very good to
the people who work for him.
Speaker 6 (44:28):
He cares a lot about their happiness and their welfare.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Stark contrast to Elon, Well.
Speaker 6 (44:34):
That's it. I mean, it's kind of what you expect,
but it's not the norm with some of these guys.
Speaker 7 (44:38):
I mean, with someone like Elon, you are a widget
and you are very expendable, and that's the way it is.
Speaker 6 (44:43):
It's different for car.
Speaker 7 (44:44):
It a worker or a wife exactly, and that's that's
how it is. This is different, and he cares a
lot about what they think of him. So just on
a human basis, I think he's good to work for
he's good to the people who work for him. I
would also say this he likes being a billionaire in
terms of he likes being part of the club.
Speaker 6 (45:02):
He is. Never has more weight.
Speaker 7 (45:04):
I think it's also fair to say it never has
more money been wasted on someone than him. He lives
a very modest, almost ascetic life. He's got a bunch
of homes, but he doesn't spend much for most of
the homes. He does have a private plane. Now he
does no longer releases he bought. I'm glad to hear it,
because yeah, wealth is not a motivator for him. He
does not live lavishly in the circles he runs now
(45:27):
and he's surrounded by other rich people all the time,
and in those circles it's like sort of almost a
right of initiation.
Speaker 6 (45:33):
You have to just dump on the Democrats.
Speaker 7 (45:35):
And for a lot of these guys, it's basically because
they think they're being punished for their success and pilloried
for their wealth.
Speaker 6 (45:42):
He doesn't have that.
Speaker 7 (45:43):
I mean, his break with the Democrats has not been
because he feels like he's not being respected, not because
they want to tax him or he doesn't care.
Speaker 6 (45:52):
He really doesn't care about that stuff.
Speaker 7 (45:53):
It is on ideological ground, so that separates him from
some of the billionaire whiners, if you want to put
it that way.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Thank you so much, Michael for joining us.
Speaker 6 (46:02):
Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
No moment, Rick Wilson, Molly John Fast, what is your
moment of huckery?
Speaker 4 (46:14):
My moment of fuckery is off away from these shores
and overseas. It is not Venezuela, as many people would think,
even though I think to distract us, he might New
Caracas any day now.
Speaker 5 (46:23):
Wag the whoops, wag the nuclear dog.
Speaker 4 (46:28):
My molement of fuckery is that the BBC made a
giant mistake. They apologized to Trump for some editorial cuts
they made in some video from two thousand and twenty
one January sixth they apologize to him. Do not apologize
to Donald Trump for anything you do. If you wreck
his car, don't apologize. Don't apologize to Trump ever. It's
(46:50):
a sign of weakness. He will come for you now.
He wants to sue the BBC for five billion dollars
all this crap. Everybody in the media. When he says
he's gonna sue you, here's the response, Donald, go fuck yourself.
Stop it people. He can't win these cases. You can
give up, but he can't win BBC talking to you.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
That's right, Rick Wilson, thank you, my.
Speaker 4 (47:11):
Drunk Fast A pleasure as always, my friend.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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