America’s Culture of Winning w/ Alex Karp and Jacob Helberg

Hey, Upstream listeners. Today we're releasing a conversation between Alex Karp and Jacob Helberg at the Hill and Valley Forum in Washington, D.C. earlier this year. Alex is the CEO of Palantir, and Jacob was recently announced as Trump's Undersecretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment. They discuss AI-enabled warfare, Palantir's unpopularity, what makes Silicon Valley culture great, and more. Please enjoy.

Alex, welcome back to Washington.

Very happy to be here.

So I want to start with taking you back a few years when I worked at Google during the unraveling of Project Maven, which Palantir proudly took up. You wrote while I worked there that the U.S. Marine serves while the Silicon Valley executives walk. That's wrong. You were one of the first CEOs to travel to Ukraine after the war, and you were the first CEO to be outspokenly on the side of Israel's right to defend itself after the October 7th attacks and held Palantir's board meeting in Israel after those attacks. Before we jump into some of the ways you've seen AI change the battlefield, help us understand why you've been so unambiguous on why it's so important to take a side in major international events.

Well, I'm happy to be here, and I think this is a super important event. You've been able to kind of— one of the real strengths of America that maybe it's harder to appreciate if you, you know, kind of grew up here is, you know, Americans kind of adapt and change and change for real. So, you know, you had like Silicon Valley 1.0, Silicon Valley 2.0. I tended to be aligned with Silicon Valley 1.0, which was to build useful things, often with the government, and then better the world by selling them to the rest of the world, primarily in America. And you had like a full alignment of American values, American innovation, deep thought, primarily done in California, primarily influenced by Stanford. And then you had, you know, this Silicon Valley 2.0, which You know, I think will go down as where you have so division, very few people got wealthy. So we obviously were against that. And now you have what I think is an emerging, especially in the venture class, you know, I historically have been one that would rage against Silicon Valley venture people. And my— I had all sorts of fantasies of using drone-enabled technology to exact revenge. Especially targeted in violation of all norms. But I would say that you see an emerging, especially in the venture and then defense tech area, where people are really coming together around some obvious truths that the West is a better way for us to live. That we have certain structural advantages. The embodiment of our way of doing things in products and companies is a fairer, better way of organizing and living. And that's primarily done by freak show, often entrepreneurs with the help and guidance of capital deployed by the venture community. It's always— yes, we were ahead of a lot of things and like to believe we're still ahead on a certain number of things. But I do feel like— and so like, I think a lot of companies now would rally around providing the government with the best technology that would not have when we did it. I, I think there's a whole term I hate, ecosystem of tech patriots. Quite frankly, I think we've embarrassed the hell out of people who took the other side and they look like idiots. So Silicon Valley does have an Achilles heel. It hates looking stupid. So, you know, we kind of helped there. It was— those bets were obviously stupid, even if you disagree with our morals, you really don't look smart advocating for values you obviously don't believe in while not standing up with the US government, which you either do not believe in because you don't realize that you, you know, you need the government to power and protect you abroad, or you're just manipulating people because the thin ideology that you can use to convince people you're good while getting them to work or protest for you for free is obviously no one— it's not convincing anymore. On Ukraine, is it? So we've been involved in a lot of these battles. I don't— Ukraine has been more It's like you have this divide between the elite and non-elite. I think the elite is very pro-Ukraine so that the courageous part was going and maybe getting killed. But I don't think the courageous part— there was a lot of courage in being pro because most people seem to agree with us even though they didn't want to go absorb the risk. Also, Palantir builds products that are actually products and actually work. And so that's an environment where your stuff has to work. Now, we had a huge advantage, and I did believe— and obviously, you know, I, I do think the kind of populist right that is very skeptical of Ukraine maybe should spend a little more time looking at the rules in prison, where it's like, even if they're right on the merits, which I don't think they will be wrong in, in, in the consequence of being violated Will be big for the West, and so, and you know, they they should think of more of it like they're in a car and they got to ride together, and car isn't always right, but it is your car. That's prison jargon. But any case, I think that that that is actually how the world works. I think living abroad also, I spent a lot of my life in Europe. Europeans really do do need to do more. And one on spending, but they also need to do a better job explaining how they see the world to America, which does organize defense. Israel, I would say, for I'm pro-West, so these things fall from that. Leaving the obvious fact that democracies should not be held to differentiating standards depending on the their apparent. Tribal affiliation. So I'm very against double standard, triple standard, quadruple standard. Like, you know, we're going to have a standard for us. Somehow our adversaries get a better standard than Israel. Makes no sense to me. Then you see the disaster, unforgivable, incomprehensible, logical extension of the double standard world. Manifesting itself on college campuses, where, you know, they've dedicated themselves, perhaps correctly, to an architecture of anti-discrimination, while dressing in masks and excluding the population that's been most discriminated for the last 3,000 years. And it's fascinating that they think that's a plausible way of organizing themselves. And, you know, I just don't think that we or I should tolerate that. At Palantir, we are very comfortable being unpopular. And, you know, I think we— one of the things I want to get done is encourage people to— there are times when you have to be unpopular, when, as an example, you know, somebody, you know, somebody who believes they're progressive is excluding a population from going to class with something covering their head and a mask. If I went to a university professor and said, I'm going to give you like the Rawlsian famous, you know, Rawlsian, if you know you were born without anything, how would you organize the world? If you did a Rawlsian test in a lot of these matters, I'm not going to tell you which group is being prevented from going to class. I'm not going to tell you which group has it. Has experienced a terrorist attack. I'm not going to tell you which group has had their country invaded. And I'll even give you— it is a group you do not feel comfortable with and do not want to hang out with. What would be your standard of justice? And at Palantir, we stand for that equal, as equal as possible application of the law in our products, in our culture, internally in our hiring practices and externally. And, you know, I'm pretty happy that, you know, because of— because we're publicly traded, because we're profitable, because we power a lot of the most important institutions in the world, because the countries that are known for quality or are known for engineering talent, i.e., Ukraine, Israel, buy our products because the US government— I'm proud— uses our product because of our success in US commercial. It's a little harder to ignore my voice and our voice. It's not that everyone at Palantir agrees with me, but you are— if you're building the initial product to get us off the ground, the product that is powering our commercial success, the powers, the products that power our Spec Ops work, these are embodiments of a cultural and particular way of seeing the world that I do believe is superior. Superior. And, you know, we have to defend the ability to defend the idea that some things work better, some things don't. We have an idea. And then again, I would say that's why this conference is so important. We do have an idea of things that have superior output and things that do not work. That's why we have the best tech scene in the world. 80— 70% of the top tech 50— top 50 tech companies in the world are American. 86% of their market cap is American. Why is that? It is the outgrowth of a way of organizing ourselves, building things that are an outgrowth of those values, building things that organize people from all different populations, from people with different views, different countries. The whole venture community, many of us in tech either were born abroad or came here, came back after long periods of time. Those— that system of building things is our sense and the embodiment of it. In companies that are disruptive because they can create value that is at least an order of magnitude greater than their current way of creating value. When it is aligned with our government, leads to prosperity, leads to dialogues that lead to new companies, leads to immigration of the people that will build these kind of companies. It excludes dysfunction. It excludes— it excludes ways of thinking that leave you being commoditized in your thinking. And I, you know, Israel, Ukraine, Maven are outgrowths of that philosophy. That's not particularly a one issue being different than another. And in almost all cases, Maven supporting, supporting the army, we were protested every day in Silicon Valley. What you mostly heard was, I kind of agree with you, but lots of people are going to yell at you. And maybe you shouldn't do this. And I would also say, you know, a lot of the people who think that way believe the other side can't win. If you don't believe the other side can't win, look at Columbia. There is literally no way to explain the investment in our elite schools. And then the output is a pagan religion, a pagan religion of mediocrity. and discrimination and intolerance and violence. So the other side can win. And this is one of the things we have to keep in mind in Silicon Valley is just because you're not, you know, we were all saying we won't hire those people, but you're not hiring them anyway. So it's not a sanction that works. They still can win. They're not hireable in Silicon Valley. They still can win. And it's something that, you know, and like the way we win is by producing products that are indisputably valuable, so valuable that you cannot ignore that they will change the game field, get the playing field, and reorient the playing field in ways to where we do even better. And that's true on the battlefield with our adversaries. It's true on the battlefield of our ideas. It's true on the battlefield of recruiting. We all recruit against each other. How do we win? Well, we're like, my idea is better than yours. My execution is better than yours. My, my company is a better place to be an individual. Your company, you know, that's, that's how you win.

We'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. How deep do you go to seek out an answer to a question? Maybe you've spent hours clicking the source links on an obscure Wikipedia page, or maybe you're even the type of person who checked out the entire shelf on the topic at your library. If you're nodding along, then check out GiveWell, an organization that researches questions about global health and philanthropy, even if a satisfying answer might require years of reviewing studies, talking to experts, and over 300 footnotes. GiveWell has now spent over 17 years researching charitable organizations and only directs funding to a few of the highest impact opportunities they've found. Over 125,000 donors have used GiveWell to donate more than $2 billion. Rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save over 200,000 lives and improve the lives of millions more. GiveWell wants as many donors as possible to make informed decisions about high-impact giving. You can find all of their research and recommendations on their site for free. You can make tax-deductible donations to their recommended funds or charities, and GiveWell doesn't take a cut. If you've never used GiveWell to donate, you can have your donation matched up to $100 before the end of the year, or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter Econ 102 with Noah Smith and Erik Torenberg at checkout. Make sure they know that you heard about GiveWell from Econ 102 with Noah Smith and Erik Torenberg to get your donation matched. Again, that's givewell.org to donate or find out more. Hey everyone, Erik here. In this environment, founders need to become profitable faster and do more with smaller teams, especially when it comes to engineering. That's why Sean Lanahan started Squad. A specialized global talent firm for top engineers that will seamlessly integrate with your org. Squad offers rigorously vetted top 1% talent that will actually work hard for you every day. Their engineers work in your time zone, follow your processes, and use your tools. Squad has frontend engineers excelling in TypeScript, React, and Next.js ready to onboard to your team today. For backend, Squad engineers are experts at Node.js, Python, Java, And a range of other languages and frameworks. While it may cost more than the freelancer on Upwork billing you for 40 hours, but working only 2, Squad offers premium quality at a fraction of the typical cost without the headache of assessing for skills and culture fit. Squad takes care of sourcing, legal compliance, and local HR for global talent. Increase your velocity without amping up burn. Visit choosquad.com and mention Turpentine to skip the waitlist.

You've been so vocal about these big ethical and cultural issues, and I want to drill down on that a little bit more. But before we do that, I want to talk about something that's been a big topic of conversation in Congress, and that's on the power of artificial intelligence in the context of the military. You wrote in a recent op-ed entitled Our Oppenheimer Moment, and you said that we should be skeptical when the Silicon Valley elites, who for years recoiled at the suggestion that software was anything but our salvation, now let us know that we must pause vital research that has the potential to revolutionize everything from military operations to medicine. You said this is an arms race of a different kind and it has already begun. Can you help us understand why and how you think AI is so powerful for the future of warfare and why we should think about it as an arms race?

Well, I mean, but before, first of all, you know, again, there's like a business truism where you win where you're superior. And, you know, our adversaries are as good or better at hardware than we are. They are not like— we have no Chinese, Iranian, or Russian competitors. None. I've never even met one. So that it's like, you know, I think Congress and in general the American people, because there's a whole— as I said, often a feeling of malaise because somehow, you know, our political choices look very crazy. And so it— you, if you just look at what's going to happen, first of all, in the enterprise context, commercially, you're going to see a change in GDP vis-à-vis— now, I think the rough math of GDP was France, you know, had roughly this between '61 and '91, very similar GDP growth to America. It was like 164% there. I think it was like 180-something in America. And then what is the GDP growth going to be in Europe the next 30 years? What is it going to be in America? You can, you can solve a lot of problems with growth where, you know, if you're kind of going— you have zero growth or going— that you can't solve the problems. And then there, when we talk about AI, of course, there's like large language— there's large language models that some of that's very hard to use in the US government. There's algorithms which are already having an enormous impact in ways that people in this room know, but apparently we're not allowed to discuss publicly. And you see on the battlefield, and that's why there's just a very strong demand internationally to buy these products, but also in America. You also have this thing where AI has convinced administrators, CEOs, important people that software-enhanced weapon systems, software in general, actually has to work and can work. And that it's kind of the precursor to using AI is pen testing your enterprise software. In many cases, you get kind of a failing grade, but where you don't get a failing grade, you can accelerate. And there's a general sense, well, we have to do this. The single biggest problem for America is accelerating the implementation of these systems in the US government. And the US government has gone a lot further than other countries in doing this. But, you know, it's a very large system. This is an incredible cultural change. You just, it's not like you did your hardware culture moving to software culture, that's automatically gonna work. And if you, part of the problem you're having in Europe is you have hardware cultures trying to be software cultures. And that does, that's very, very hard to do. So what should the US do? We should implement something where a certain percentage of our software, of our DOD dollars, have to be spent on software that's either been proven on the battlefield or proven commercially. And if it's been proven in both spheres, you get a bonus. If it's been proven in neither, it's a high hurdle. And simple changes like this, meaning the software actually— like when Ukraine and Israel buy software, what do they do? They test it. They see if it's working. They want to know, can I write on top of this? What do— all the various things you would need in enterprise software. They test it. We need a lot more of that, and we need a lot more control of the spend. I think there's a pretty significant movement to do that, which is why the demand to be here has been so great besides your incredible leadership. And then there's like also giving the U.S. kind of like, you know, we the the sense of reality, which is, you know, if you took the people you had in this room. And you divided it into 10 quadrants, each one of those quadrants would still be better than the tech scene in any other country in the world. Any other country in the world. You have Israel's number 2, it'd still be like, yeah, that'd be one of your 10 quadrants. So this is a country that dominates in tech. It's just, again, 86% of the market cap of the top 50 are US companies. It'll probably be 96% at some point. So how do you get enterprises. And, you know, we do see a difference in commercial. We didn't give last quarter's results, obviously, but the quarter before we grew 70%. And we are— we are— we have a nascent and terrible sales force. We still grow at 70%. Now imagine what a real sales force could do with those results. So—

and so why do you think American culture— what is so unique about American culture that has led the United States to be a place that embraces heterodox ideas And do you see lessons from Silicon Valley tech companies, cultural lessons for the DOD and government institutions to apply Silicon Valley first principles in order to do a better job at bringing innovation into defense?

Well, first of all, you know, we are a very Calvinist culture. So Calvinism, if you judge with most cultures assume that if you've been successful, you've done something wrong. Calvinism assumes if you did something successfully, you are likely blessed by God. Now, we have a secular derivative of that, but that's certainly the Silicon Valley vibe. Second of all, you know, we are actually— we really do have to fight to make sure we stay and embrace some version of high transparency, high meritocracy. There, there is no other culture in the world. And I spent half my life in other cultures that is as at ease with let's share information, let's build something. Those things have been talked about a lot. I think one other thing that is talked about less, we are a culture of self-defining culture. So in America, if you want to join a church, synagogue, or mosque, you can decide what that will look like. Doesn't work that way in Europe. You have a, you know, the state decides for you. So when you want to decide your culture of Palantir or whatever your company is, you can self-define roughly within the context of the law what your culture is. And that's— so we're a believer culture. We actually build things based on belief. And then obviously you actually get to keep, by and large, the proceeds of what you've done. So if you're in China or Russia, you might have done all those things and you still end up like, you know, in trouble if you speak out. The, the, the, the— what we can teach the rest of the world, and definitely I think the DOD and others have learned and are embracing by and large, but obviously we should accelerate, is how do you build a culture that is flattened? Is it one of the big issues you have in large institutions? You have multiple, like, you know, like you have 1,000 layers of hierarchy. You have this especially in France, where, you know, where in fact you really need to have small teams of radical transparency where the best idea wins and gets resources. And fighting against like larger structures that hide inaccuracies, especially inaccuracies around the assessment of tech, is probably the most important thing an enterprise can do. And it's hard for large organizations to do this. And that is what actually you have to learn. Last not least, you know, kind of slightly self-serving, but, you know, tech is incredible and American tech is Maximally tolerant of any personality if you're delivering. You know, I'm like a hyper inexplicably dyslexic outsider. Nobody in tech cares. I would defy you to find someone in tech who would not hire me at this point. Now, in the beginning, without Peter, I would not have been hired. But now anybody would hire me and simply for maybe for the wrong reasons. It's it's we are uh. You know, we are just— we will— in fact, tech will learn to like— there's a famous story where 2 people didn't invest in Google and then, you know, they, they met each other like, yeah, we got to learn to invest in people we don't like. And this is a really profound story actually, because American, especially California tech, will learn to embrace things they didn't like before if they deliver it. They'll just completely recalibrate like, oh yeah, that was unlikable. That's the likable— that's the feature. We like it. Find more. And that ability to embrace something that you would have rejected and fully embrace it, build a structure around it, hire the person, put them in charge, give them capital— that is a truly unique thing. And it really only exists at scale in this country.

I want to end on this topic of culture. When you look at elite university campuses across America and you see unrest and protests and Students at these very prestigious institutions openly chanting pro-Hamas slogans.

Do you worry that Iranian, pro-Iranian, pro-North Korean? I mean, you got to imagine this. You got people pro— like, like there's one clip someone sent me. The person was embracing North Korea. It's like, great. I mean, we really should have a philanthropy to send. I go, we're going to do an exchange program. Exchange programs sponsored by CARP. A little couple months in North Korea and a nice tasting flavored bark. So you see how you feel about that.

Do you worry that our culture is going sideways and in the wrong direction in some way?

Well, obviously, that's more than sideways. But I mean, that's like, this is like, well, you know, I look, obviously, that we can talk endlessly about what happened there and what went wrong. And I'll get— it is actually important for people who are— to speak up. And if you want to kind of like try to understand what's going on there, it's very hard. It's actually very hard. And I do think there's a weird way in which if you veer from basic tenets of liberalism too far left, right, or in this case, it's kind of like a Heideggerian form of Marxism. You regress to basically the ideology of our ancestors about 1,000 years ago, which is what I think is actually happening there. And they don't see the contradiction in their behavior of writing papers about microdiscrimination and then excluding the longest existing minority overtly. They literally don't see the contradiction. I would say we have a problem on our side that we need to speak up. You know, they also believe that everything they're saying is sensible and convincing. Like, part of their frustration is like, we're so convincing, but no one's listening. But on our side, we have to explain to them how idiotic and non-convincing this is. And we need to do it in public. And so, you know, it's, it's, I think it's, I would say it's game time for every— if you agree with what I'm saying, it's game time for you. Because you can no longer get away with just saying, oh, that looks really, really regressive. But you know what, you actually have to call it out in whatever form you want to call it out, because they actually think what they're saying is sensible. They really believe most intelligent people actually agree with them, and everybody who doesn't agree with them is somehow bought off by some huge machine. And while we may know that's idiotic, very few people are actually saying, hey, this is crazy and we're going to fight against it. And you— we just have to. The times where you could just not speak out, not say anything, pretend this was some crazy view of somebody, that those times are over. If you want this to stop, you have to actually begin to be more vocal inside your company, outside your company, and in whatever form you kind of can make yourself feel comfortable with.

Alex, thank you for doing this. Let's give a warm hand for the CEO of Palantir.

Upstream with Erik Thornberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and cognitive revolution. If you like the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store. Hey everyone, Erik here. At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from our AI and investing cluster of podcasts, To shows that drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, investors, and influencers, like Econ 102 with Noah Smith. We're launching new shows every week, and we're looking for industry-leading sponsors. If you think that might be you and your company, email me at erik@turpentine.co. That's erik@turpentine.co, and let's partner together.