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

**Sophie** (0:01)
Call zone media.

**Robert Evans** (0:06)
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history and today. And this is a today episode. We're covering a guy who's not dead yet, so his bastardry is still ongoing. So you should consider these episodes, the first two parts of our episodes on Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir. And to talk to me about Alex and Palantir, I have the great Zarin Burnett. Zarin, you work on Ridiculous Crime, a great iHeart podcast and also very special episodes. Thank you for joining us today.

**Zarin Burnett** (0:40)
Thank you for having me. Thank you both, Robert and Sophie. I'm really stoked to be here.

**Robert Evans** (0:44)
So what do you know about Palantir and Alex Karp?

**Sophie** (0:47)
Yeah, what do you know? But before we get to that, tell us a little bit about your shows real quick.

**Zarin Burnett** (0:51)
Okay, Ridiculous Crime is a show similar to yours where we tell each other stories and one person doesn't know what the story is going to be. So me and my co-host, Elizabeth Dutton, we have a show that the tagline says is 99% murder free and 100% ridiculous. So it's true crime stories without the murder. And they're always pretty insane.

**Robert Evans** (1:11)
Well, lots of murders today.

**Zarin Burnett** (1:14)
Yeah, so it's a nice change for me, change of pace. And then very special episodes. The other show I do is kind of like a magazine style audio show. They're like little movies where we kind of do feature stories that often take place in the recent past, sometimes very far along time ago. And they have hosts interaction sometimes with the actual people. Sometimes it's just participants who are eyewitnesses or experts, authors. You get the idea.

**Robert Evans** (1:41)
Well, awesome. That sounds great. We love another podcast idiot format show, which is the term that got developed. Yeah. What do you know about Alex Karp and Palantir?

**Zarin Burnett** (1:52)
I know more about Palantir than I know about Alex Karp. Every time I read about him, he pisses me off. So I kind of have liked to keep him at arm's length approach. I'm forced to know about him.

**Robert Evans** (2:01)
He's a real skinny athletic guy with curly hair.
Yeah, curly hair that looks a little bit like in the explosions that he helps to facilitate. And he does Tai Chi a lot while standing around and talking to people. Like one of his, the things interviewers and his colleagues will note about him is that if you're just talking with Alex during a meeting, he'll periodically just start doing Tai Chi. That's a way, I think, cause his ADHD, like I think it's a self-managing method.

**Zarin Burnett** (2:27)
Sure, it's his stemming, he needs to move the energy around.

**Robert Evans** (2:29)
Right, right, right. We all have a thing that we do. For some of us, I would say honorable, God-fearing, decent people, we just pick drugs, Alex. Just take drugs, you know? But he's gotta do his fucking Tai Chi or whatever, keep his heart rate low, I don't know. Anyway.

**Sophie** (2:44)
I chose gardening.

**Zarin Burnett** (2:46)
Oh, that's a good one. Gardening and drugs is a fantastic one.

**Robert Evans** (2:50)
It's very easy to mix your gardening and your drugs if you know what you're doing.
So this week, we are going to be talking about, Alex is one of the more immediately dangerous subjects we have ever covered. I've talked about periodically, I'll have one of these modern bastards. There's a lot of guys that I think are awful and dangerous. There's not a lot of them that I think are like really formidable. And Alex is really formidable. He is not a stupid man. He is not a foolish person. He is a planner and a thinker. And unfortunately, he's quite good at what he does. I've said similar things about Peter Thiel.
Thiel is also kind of losing his mind lately. Like if you think back to our episodes on the anti-cry stuff, I'm hearing a lot more disordered thinking from Peter than I previously had. I think Alex is still kind of got a gimlet eye on the straight and narrow. He knows exactly what he's going for and what he's building. And I think that makes him very frightening.

**Zarin Burnett** (3:42)
He's got that Kissinger level focus.

**Robert Evans** (3:44)
Yeah, yeah, he kind of does. And obviously Karp is best known for his work as the CEO of Palantir. Most people don't really know much about what Palantir does. It's usually described as a data broker that works for a bunch of different intelligence agencies and also large corporations. That's not truly accurate, Palantir. Data broker isn't exactly the right thing to call them. What they really do is provide methods for large organizations to analyze and draw conclusions from data that they already have and are gathering. But because of the agencies they work for, a lot of that data is used to, for example, plan a series of airstrikes on Iran.