Is the CEO of Palantir the modern-day Dr. Strangelove?

(Well... no. But he still freaks me out.)

Yesterday, I recommended a podcast episode where Daryll Cooper of Martyr Made gave a great interview that I liked a lot. Today, however, I want to share an interview that disturbed me greatly.

It was Bari Weiss interviewing Palantir CEO Alex Karp on her podcast “Honestly” to talk about his new book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.

Weiss was a major mainstream journalist for several years and has successfully made the transition to today’s alternative media landscape, gaining popularity and notoriety for being a leftist who disagreed with some of the woke and identitarian excesses of the modern left.

She’s also a neocon. This is relevant because of the nature of the interview.

Karp co-founded Palantir with libertarian-leaning Peter Theil, but doesn’t share his political views, describing himself as a socialist and a progressive.

More importantly to this podcast, Karp calls himself a “techno-nationalist” and thinks (quoting The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel P. Huntington) that “the rise of the West was not made possible by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.”

The man lives his ideals, too. Palantir is a defense contractor selling the US government a wide array of intelligence (data analytics/surveillance) tools used on the battlefield — well, we hope they are only used on the battlefield.

And, of course, one assumes that these services are rented out for use in the Middle East and Eastern Europe and God knows where else.

The future looks very bright for Palantir as well. The price of it’s stock has been on a tear since last year, soaring from the low $20s to the mid $90s even during this turbulent, tariff-rattled, massively uncertain market moment we are suffering right now.

As I look through the list of products and services Palantir is rolling out (they are on the Wikipedia page I linked to), I am highly disturbed. I hope I don’t see things like that rolled out in US. Cynic that I am, I fear they already have been.

Anyway, in this interview Karp said something that really bothered me. Or rather, Weiss paraphrased the book’s thesis in the lead up to a question (and Karp didn’t push back at all) saying, “The Manhattan Project was the high-water mark of the marriage between tech and government.”

This statement frames his book’s thesis, which is that Silicon Valley has lost its way, and that the future of America and the West hinges on its finding its way back — and fast.

Karp seems to believe that technology’s primary purpose should be to serve the state’s military interests. Any resources frittered away on the tom-foolery of satisfying the demands of customers in a free market are wasted resources.

Or maybe he wouldn’t go quite that far. Maybe us proles can have a sliver of the product of technology’s bounty, but the thrust of the effort should be to serve the state. Karp despairs that Silicon Valley’s brightest minds and most earnest efforts have been “unmoored from a broader national project”.

This bothers me to no end, as you can imagine.

Of course, The Manhattan Project was an amazing feat of scientific theorizing and engineering brilliance. And I’m certainly glad the US developed “the bomb” first rather than Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime — or Stalin’s Russia.

But to think that this was “the high-water mark” of the use of technology in society? The creation of the (at the time) most lethal bomb ever devised?

That’s insane.

And even more worrying, this man is pushing this insanity in a best-selling new book and has made himself into a billionaire running a company that sells weaponry (digital and otherwise) to governments.

I reject this man’s thesis. I find it very disturbing. Oh, and in a huge circular call-back to yesterday, I bet student-of-history Daryll Cooper would agree with me.

Anyway, it is an interesting conversation and I think you should all check it out. If you do, notice how many basic errors in economics this billionaire makes. Enjoy!

Naturally,

Adam

PS: A look back through time will help one see the reasons why I feel this way. Check out Liberty Classroom to have your intuitions sharpened as mine have been!