War Dot Com
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 22 March 2026
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why Palantir cofounder and CEO Alex Karp views working with Western militaries not just as a business opportunity, but as a higher calling.
Guest: Jacob Silverman, journalist and author of “Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley.”
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Podcast production by Evan Campbell, and Patrick Fort.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Good morning, everybody. |
| 0:07.3 | Palantir's Alex Karp is here, and we are going to get into it. |
| 0:10.4 | Alex, thank you for being here. |
| 0:13.2 | When I sat down with journalist Jacob Silverman, I wanted to ask him about an interview with Palantir CEO Alex Karp, |
| 0:20.5 | an interview from the New York |
| 0:22.2 | Times deal book summit in December. |
| 0:24.7 | Yeah, it is quite athletic. |
| 0:27.0 | He's moving constantly. |
| 0:30.9 | Jacob recently wrote about Karp, and I wanted to talk about this clip together, where |
| 0:35.8 | Karp is being interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin. |
| 0:38.9 | Karp is wiggling around in his chair. He is frenetic and braggadocious. |
| 0:45.0 | Every decision, palliature made. FTEs, going public, building products, enterprise, large |
| 0:53.1 | data sets, going to government, acknowledging American |
| 0:56.3 | superiority, being pro-Maritocracy, launching an AI platform, calling into question that |
| 1:02.3 | AI models would actually be able to perform without orchestration. Every single one, |
| 1:06.7 | every single, our ontology, every single one of those was viewed as stupid. |
| 1:13.2 | You know what? I actually have grown to appreciate about capitalism. |
| 1:16.9 | All the people who made the right decisions went broke are going out of business or now have to copy us. |
| 1:20.4 | Microsoft launches ontology. |
| 1:21.8 | Everyone wants to do FTEs. |
| 1:23.2 | Everyone basically copies me and Palantir. |
| 1:28.3 | When you watch Alex Karp in that moment, Jacob, what do you see? |
... |
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