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

**Robert Evans** (0:01)
Causo Media.

**Robert Evans** (0:05)
Welcome back once again to Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the worst people in all of history and our subject for this week is one of the worst people today too, Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir. And here to talk about this one of the worst people is one of the best people, our friend Zaron Burnett of Ridiculous Crime and Very Special Episodes. Zaron, welcome back to the show.

**Zaron Burnett** (0:29)
Thank you for having me. I love being here. And even though we're talking about Alex Karp, this has been fantastic.

**Robert Evans** (0:34)
Yeah.

**Robert Evans** (0:36)
Old Alex. Yeah, that's what Jurgen Habermas said, something along those lines once. Aside from Alex, it was great.
It is interesting, the two of them, because we finished in the last episode how he's seeking the kind of approval and endorsement of this legendary academic, Habermas, and kind of doesn't really get it. Jurgen's very polite to him, but Alex goes back home without that. And he's not immediately quitting academia. He's actually finishing his dissertation after he moves back to San Francisco for a while. And he still kind of has ambitions of maybe becoming an academic in Germany. But I think ultimately this clash kind of kills those, or at least makes it a lot less attractive when some other offers come by. And one of the things that's really interesting to me about that is he and Habermas have kind of the exact opposite journeys in life. So we've just talked about Alex, who grows up in this very left-wing home, in a very left-wing neighborhood, and is raised very left-wing, and has turned out to be on the side of all these reactionaries providing spy software. Jürgen grows up in Germany in the Nazi era. He's in the Hitler Youth.
He achieves a high level in the Hitler Youth, and he's running anti-aircraft guns at the end of the war. He very narrowly escapes getting drafted into the Wehrmacht before the Americans take him in his town. And obviously, he was a kid during, like it's not really his fault that he happened to grow up, he was probably like one when the Nazis took over, and the rest of his life he fought against fascism. But they have very opposite journeys in a lot of ways, and I do find that kind of interesting.
So when we last left, our definitely not a hero, Alex had run into a stumbling block and returned home to the West Coast. Well, not home to the West Coast, but returned to the West Coast. He seems to have liked that more than the place he had grown up. So he moves back to the Bay Area. He takes a job with the Jewish Philanthropy Partnership, and he shares an apartment in the Bay with his brother, Ben, while he puts the finishing touches on his dissertation. And so you can see he's not certainly not rich at this point. You don't usually wind up living with your brother if you've got a lot of spare cash. And he's working a job that's going to give him like a pretty probably comfortable working class life, but nothing crazy. And he's still really thinking he might want to return to Berlin and continue having anonymous sex, right? That still seems pretty good to Alex at this point in time.

**Robert Evans** (3:00)
Do we know what Ben Karp ended up doing with his life?

**Robert Evans** (3:04)
Yeah, he becomes a novelist.

**Robert Evans** (3:06)
He lives in Tokyo. He's a successful author. Yeah. So they're both successful.
But not a weird little guy like this.

**Robert Evans** (3:13)
Not running Palantir.

**Robert Evans** (3:15)
No. Yeah. Yeah. It's always interesting when that happens.
Yeah.

**Zaron Burnett** (3:22)
Like, what happened here? Where was the disconnect from one brother to another?

**Robert Evans** (3:27)
It's about to really hit. So at this point, yeah, he and his brother are together still too, right? They're living in the same place. What changes this ultimately is Peter Thiel. Peter obviously has started PayPal.
Or is in the process, he's getting PayPal off the ground. He's become rich and he comes back into Alex's life, he's coming back in and out of the bay. I assume he has several houses, but he at least keeps one home in the area. And he and Alex get together and start talking again.
And they start doing like, talking about politics and their lives and their opinions like they always had. Now, at the same time as Peter's kind of reconnecting with his buddy, Alex, he's also starting to experience something with PayPal, which is that they're trying to deal with fraud, right? PayPal's got like a shitload of fraud problems happening. And they develop a fraud detection system called EGOR, which is like an acronym for something that works really well. I've told this story before over the years on the podcast and the Peter Thiel episodes. And EGOR works so well that not only does it help PayPal deal with their fraud program, but it provides information that leads federal prosecutors to take down a number of scammers who are part of organized criminal groups. And so Peter starts thinking, oh, should I be like selling software to law enforcement and like federal spy agencies and shit? Is there like a market in that? Because it seems like we may have stumbled upon something like this machine learning stuff that we're using could also help with these other problems. So Peter and some of his top guys, it's not just Peter. He's got some coders he really trusts that are also kind of brainstorming all this. And they start to wonder like, maybe there's a way to make purpose built systems that can help law enforcement or whoever carry out similar kinds of investigation to spot criminal activity or even maybe just inefficiencies in a business. And I'm yada yada-ing a lot of the mental development process here. But this train of thought initially leads Teal to provide some funding to get a company called Palantir off the ground. And at the very first days of Palantir, Alex is not a part of it, right? He's not initially in the group of guys that are trying to start this company.