**Amit Kukreja:** Alright. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the channel. I'm here today with a very, very special guest, Michael Steinberger, to discuss "The Philosopher in the Valley," his latest book. Michael, thanks for being here.

**Michael Steinberger:** It's a pleasure to be with you.

**Amit Kukreja:** This is going to be a really exciting conversation because I have been a fan of Palantir for a long time. I've been intrigued by the company. A lot of my audience has obviously cared about the company. The company's developed a pretty significant retail shareholder base, and you essentially did a book on the life of Karp but also the story of Palantir. So I think there's a lot of different nuances to get into in terms of how this book even came to be and why you chose to write about this subject. I want to start with this question to get things rolling. You served as a wine columnist for the internet magazine Slate from 2002 to 2011.

And the interesting thing about wine, I'm not the biggest wine drinker, but from my friends who do drink wine, there's a certain spiritual way that people like to drink and analyze and smell, and there's all this nuance to the concept of wine. You wrote a book about someone who is very enigmatic, and one could argue there's a lot of psychoanalysis that comes to understand the philosopher in the valley that is Alex Karp. Do you think your 10 years of writing about wine kind of influenced how you approached writing about Alex Karp?

**Michael Steinberger:** It's a great question and I hadn't actually thought of that. It's interesting. He brings up my background with wine writing quite often. In fact, he says, he's made points that, it's just like, talking about, he'll reference, he'll say a grape, and he said, if you don't like, even if you don't like this particular grape, you seem able to write about it quite fairly. And I once wrote a piece expressing my disdain for Sauvignon Blanc. I don't think Sauvignon Blanc fans would think that piece was particularly fair. But nevertheless, Karp thought I was able to write about things with a certain even-handedness, putting my feelings aside. As for whether writing about wine was good preparation for this, maybe. I mean, wine is a complicated subject. There are a lot of dimensions to it. You're also dealing with something where people have strong feelings. It's a matter of personal taste.

And maybe in some way that I didn't quite understand, there was decent preparation for writing about someone as complex and different as Karp. He is something different on the global business scene, and there are dimensions to him that you perhaps don't find in other more standard CEOs. So I think there's something to it.

**Amit Kukreja:** Yeah. I mean, I think one of the reasons why a lot of retail investors became intrigued with Karp is because of how interesting he was, even when the company stock price was not performing. A lot of people like to listen to what he had to say. And one of the sort of major themes in your book is that you noticed Karp has a way to get other people to listen to him even if they don't agree with him. And that I think is one of the hardest things for any leader to be able to establish: the ability to get people to care about what they have to say because it forces some level of, "Hey, this person matters. Maybe we should take them seriously." In the business world, that could result in potentially billions and billions of dollars of revenue. Let's get into how you and Karp originally met. So, one of the main characters I would say of the book is Haverford College where you both actually went to the same class. There's only about 1500 students there, but you didn't end up reconnecting until decades later. Can you kind of tell the story of how you got to know him?

**Michael Steinberger:** Well, it's even more than that. We went to this small liberal arts school outside of Philadelphia. A class size of fewer than 400 people. We spent four years there and never once exchanged a word.

**Amit Kukreja:** Wow.

**Michael Steinberger:** That's a kind of achievement in itself. I have no idea how that happened. I think he was, he downplays how hard he worked there, but I think he worked pretty hard. I am quite certain the library saw more of him than it saw of me, which perhaps goes some way to explaining how he ended up a billionaire and I didn't.

But it's very strange because for instance my wife went to Bryn Mawr College, and Haverford and Bryn Mawr are very close. They're like brother and sister schools. Haverford's fully co-ed. It went fully co-ed in 1980, so a few years before we got there.

They still keep very close ties. My wife knew him. We had mutual friends. Somehow he and I just never connected, never exchanged a word there.

And so cut to all these years later. I had become aware of Palantir and had become aware of its CEO and, oh, he was in my class at Haverford. Interesting. And if I'd be lying if I said when I saw pictures of him that I was like, "Oh, I remember that guy," because that's just not true. Anyway, so I had become a writer for The New York Times magazine. I had moved on from wine and started writing about non-wine subjects for The New York Times magazine. And I thought Palantir would be a really compelling story. And it's important that we did not have any prior relationship because the magazine would not have assigned it, because that would have been a conflict of interest.

**Amit Kukreja:** Right.

**Michael Steinberger:** We met for the first time in 2019, an off-the-record conversation where he was kind of sizing me up and deciding whether he wanted to cooperate on a magazine feature. And we reminisced a bit about old times we never shared, and from that, he agreed to cooperate on the story for the magazine. And I reported that story through 2019 and into 2020. It was published in 2020, a few weeks after Palantir went public.

And then, it was a pretty comprehensive article. It was 9,000 words, which is a lot of words. But as comprehensive as it was, it felt like there was still a lot more to say.

I had spent a lot of time with him reporting the story, was very intrigued by him. I thought there was more to his story and more to the Palantir story. And so about a year after the article came out, I talked to him about the possibility of doing a book. I thought there was a timely and important book to be written about Palantir and went up to see him at his place in New Hampshire and we talked about it and he was on board with it. So that's kind of how this whole thing happened. And he agreed to cooperate.

Yeah, I think he cooperated for a couple of different reasons. He assumed at that point that a book would be written about Palantir and he thought it made sense to cooperate with a writer. He thought the Times magazine story was fair. He thought it did a good job of capturing who he was and how he thought about the world. So it made sense to cooperate with someone he had worked with before. And I think the other factor that interested him in having a book written was because, look, he had taken the company public and Palantir was a success story and he wanted to be recognized as the driving force behind that success. Because as someone who's followed the company as closely as you have, you know even to this day you see a lot of articles, the headline in stories about Palantir was "Peter Thiel's Palantir." And that was almost like a tic during the first Trump presidency. Almost every article was "Thiel's Palantir," even though Peter never had any involvement with the day-to-day workings of Palantir. He was chairman of the board, but it was Alex, it was Karp who was running the company. And I think he wanted—it wasn't a source of resentment for Karp—but I think he wanted to be recognized as the person who had built this company into the success story that it had become.

**Amit Kukreja:** He wanted a bit of the main character energy. There's a lot to dive into in terms of his past life, but at a high level, why do you think Karp wanted to be recognized as the main character, outside of the obvious—he's the CEO, he's responsible for the company actually getting to where it is on a day-to-day basis? But was there something deeper for why he wanted to be seen as that guy? Because now he objectively is that guy.

**Michael Steinberger:** Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think it's, yeah. Listen, you can't be lacking in self-regard when you are in a position like this. And I think certainly taking this company public, having a successful public listing was a huge, huge thing. And it had taken a long time to get to that point. And I think, just pure, and I don't want to say it's ego, but I think he wanted to have his success acknowledged.

He felt that his path to Silicon Valley was a very improbable one. So I think he recognized certainly that he had a very interesting story.

And Palantir was just a very unlikely success in some ways.

And so I think he just was eager to see that story told. He knew it was going to be told in book form by someone at some time. And so I happened to show up on his doorstep in New Hampshire and said, "Hey, I would like to take this on." And he thought about it and then agreed to cooperate.

**Amit Kukreja:** Do you think if you guys didn't go to the same school, he would have not cooperated?

**Michael Steinberger:** That's a good question. I think, listen, I think the Haverford connection... they weren't doing a lot of press back in 2019. So I think the Haverford connection—I don't know this to be absolutely the case—but I think the Haverford connection intrigued him enough that he was willing to take a meeting with me to discuss the story I was interested in doing for the magazine. I think the Haverford connection helped in that regard. I don't think it had anything to do with the book. Though Haverford figures very prominently in the book for reasons that Haverford may not entirely love. But I don't think it had much to do with the book, but it may have had something to do with his willingness to entertain the possibility of cooperating on the Times magazine story.

**Amit Kukreja:** Right. Okay. So let's dive deeper into Alex Karp and his early life and then we'll get into the transition to Palantir. So, there's two elements of the book that you highlighted pretty well, which was his biracial identity and his learning disability, which was dyslexia. I want to start with the biracial identity, and then we'll work our way towards the dyslexia. A lot of people in the Palantir community that I speak to don't even know that Karp is half black.

Many of them don't even know he's Jewish. And so, there's a variety of nuance to the concept of being interracial in and of itself. And then on top of that, adding the Jewish component to it from a religious perspective. What is your perspective on how Karp thought of himself being biracial? And how do you think that identity either propelled him or provided him a disadvantage over the course of his career?

**Michael Steinberger:** You know, I would say this. I think he understood early on that being biracial, being Jewish, being severely dyslexic, were not advantages in life. That's, there were strikes against him.

Racism was certainly a factor, though he says he never experienced racism itself. He certainly knew that it was a major factor in American life and just part of the world in which he lived. And certainly anti-semitism was a significant force throughout history. So he kind of understood early on that he had some strikes against him as he perceived it. And with Palantir, I think the thing you have to understand with him, and maybe it doesn't come across when he's on television or in his public pronouncements, but I think he's had a sense of vulnerability from a quite young age.

Because of his identity, he didn't consider it a burden, but just understood that racism and anti-semitism were factors in life, were things he might face in life. And I think there was a sense of vulnerability that has stuck with him to the present day. And with Palantir, I do think part of the motivation for getting involved with this company, for seeing this company through to success, was in some sense he was making the world safe for Alex Karp in his mind.

Right? I think that is a... it's a strange thing to say now about a guy who is a multi-billionaire, has a big security detail. It's like, what does he have to fear? But I think that sense of vulnerability has stuck with him. It propels a lot of the decision-making of Palantir, the fear that he has always had. And so I think this is kind of the way one might think about his biracial background and his identity, that it is integral to what Palantir became in a sense.

**Amit Kukreja:** There is a quote in the book from Karp saying to his brother that he focused more on the family's blackness and Karp focused less on it. Why do you think Karp focused less on it?

**Michael Steinberger:** It's a great question. Now, his brother, who gave me a lot of time, was very, very generous with his time and his thoughts and his recollections, and really laid out the family history. He said that in high school and in college, and college friends, people at Haverford who knew him, unlike me, substantiated this: he very much identified with his black heritage. His brother said in high school he was a young black man, and that continued through Haverford. He was very involved with the black student organization there. In fact, our senior year, he helped organize an anti-racism conference that was held at Yale University, I believe, and was quoted in the Detroit Free Press, which did a big article not long thereafter about racism on college campuses, and he's talking about how prevalent racism is and so forth.

So, it is interesting that he gets to Palantir and it's not until many years after the company started that he told anyone at the company that his mother was black.

And as you said, he tells his brother at some point, this is well into, he's now with Palantir, company success, and they have a conversation and he said to his brother, "You've dialed up the blackness and I've dialed it back." I did not offer any speculation in the book about why that is. I really felt, because this is kind of fraught terrain. It's matters of identity and how you think about these things. And I was very content to put this information in there and to let the reader draw his or her own conclusion.

**Amit Kukreja:** Well, I do think there is one part of the book where Karp mentions to you in your conversations that he is not going through the same types of pain that a full 100% you could say black man is going through, not biracial. And there's a lot of different nuance to that just in terms of how the world perceives Karp or how the world doesn't perceive Karp. And on top of that, based on how Karp has evolved over the years, even though I think this has been pretty true since he was a student, meritocracy is what he cares about a lot more than the sort of diversity, equity, inclusion standpoint. Do you think because of that he didn't want to be treated as someone better or worse because of his blackness, which is why he focused on just being the best versus being the black best?

**Michael Steinberger:** Well, I mean, he feels that he doesn't feel that he would be accepted by the black community as one of their own. I think that is one issue. And his experience has been different. I mean, he has said he has never felt the sting of racism. So it would be fraudulent of him to claim that he's had this or that he's experienced life the way other black people have experienced life. He just says that's not been my experience and he doesn't disavow in any way his black heritage. He says he's proud of it. And that it's important to him, but he also feels that if he went out there and said, "I'm black," and put that at the center of his identity, that the black community would not accept it, that it would be offensive to people. And so this is his explanation for why he's not centering it in his life in the way that his Jewishness is now very much centered. It's different and he, these are the reasons he offers. And as I said, identity is, particularly in this particular moment, it's a fraught topic and people are going to draw their own conclusions. And I'm really interested to see how readers react to this and what they make of it and what they make of his trajectory and the fact that his brother says in high school and in college he was a young black man and now it's the Jewish side that he emphasizes and the Jewish side that clearly matters more to him.

**Amit Kukreja:** Learning disability, how do you think... I mean, this guy got a PhD in neoclassical theory while having dyslexia. How did your conversations around that learning disability with Karp accentuate how you think of him as an entrepreneur, leader, ultimately founder?

**Michael Steinberger:** Well, he says, picking up from the conversation about identity, he says, look, dyslexia was the real hurdle in his life, not racism. He never experienced racism. Dyslexia was the real hurdle. And as he puts it, he's got a very colorful way of expressing himself. He said, "It [fucked] me, but gave me wings to fly."

And what was very interesting, and I did not know this, but there have been studies and articles written, a disproportionate number of CEOs and successful entrepreneurs seem to be dyslexic. I don't know what the percentage is, but like Richard Branson for instance is dyslexic, the famed attorney David Boies, and then now Karp. And what we know and what Karp explained to me, and research has borne this out, there's a couple of things about dyslexics.

One, they can't process as much information in any given moment as other people, so they get by on less information. And that can lead to being able to act more quickly on the information they have. And that's certainly the way he feels. So he can make decisions, reach conclusions based on less information, which enables him to act more decisively, more quickly and decisively. And he thinks that has been absolutely integral to the success he's had as a CEO.

The other factor is, dyslexics, it is a disability and you need help from other people. You can't have this sort of... self-reliance is not something you can really have. And when you get into building a company, you have to delegate, you have to get other people involved. It's not this "me, myself, and I." I think with a lot of companies, particularly when you have entrepreneurs, you have founders, one would assume this is their baby. They are emotionally and financially invested in it, and it's probably really hard for them to delegate responsibility. And in the case of someone like Karp, he is used to having, because he needed help before, and so he's used to the idea of working as a team and of delegating authority and of drawing on the strengths of other people. It's something that he grew up with as a dyslexic. So, he believes that this has made him a more effective leader and has been absolutely integral to Palantir's success.

**Amit Kukreja:** Do you think that he almost sees it as a weapon that allows him to differentiate himself? I mean, Karp is someone who is not afraid to be different. He kind of really likes the fact that he's different. Do you think dyslexia makes him so different from a traditional academic that for him to survive in academia he had to work twice as hard, which ultimately implicated his life in Palantir?

**Michael Steinberger:** You know, I don't know about that, but I mean, I do know, obviously, just the fact that he had this learning disability and then goes on to... I mean, he crushes it at Haverford, he goes on to Stanford Law, and then he goes and earns a doctorate at Goethe University Frankfurt. I mean, with this disability, that's impressive. And as much as he downplays how hard he worked, I would imagine it was some herculean efforts at points because of this.

I don't know that how this translates to Palantir, but privately and with his colleagues, he will certainly say that dyslexia is a very, very big factor and one of the things that has differentiated him as a leader.

**Amit Kukreja:** Okay. So, let's get into some of the conversation on Palantir and then we'll get back to Karp himself. Let's start with this question and then we'll go from there. Do you think people in the general public have an unfair understanding of what Palantir's technology actually does?

**Michael Steinberger:** I think there are misconceptions. I mean, you know as well as I do that the name Palantir is now almost synonymous with surveillance. And I'm not helping that with the subtitle of my book.

**Amit Kukreja:** Which actually was a bit surprising to me. I didn't know that was going to be the subtitle.

**Michael Steinberger:** Well, you know, I will tell you, people at Palantir, Karp has seen the book, and other people have seen it and they're not thrilled about that. I think it is, they're not a surveillance technology company, but part of the work they do can enable surveillance. They can facilitate surveillance. Their software can help intelligence services with their work. And obviously, it was a company that was founded in part with an investment from In-Q-Tel, so I don't think they can really disavow the surveillance connection or concern that easily. But I do think there are some fundamental misconceptions. And one of the things I hope obviously with this book is that it'll clear up some fundamental misconceptions, such as, you see it all the time, people just assume that they collect the data, they store the data.

And it is obviously very important to get across that point to general interest readers, to the public, that that's not what they do. It is software that enables organizations to make better use of their own data.

And why this hasn't penetrated with much of the public, it seems? Well, I mean, listen, Palantir only in the last few years has it become something like a household name. People were at best vaguely familiar with it. And when I started writing the book, lots of people were like, "Huh? Who's he? What's Palantir?" That has changed obviously just in the last three years. Going from $10 a share to almost $200 will do that.

So there's greater recognition now. Is there better understanding of what they do? Maybe at the margins, but I think a lot of people still labor under the misconception that this is a company that collects the data, stores the data. And part of this is undoubtedly tied to Facebook, Google, I mean, which collect data. The business is, your data is their business.

**Amit Kukreja:** Well, that's the other thing. I mean, you talk a lot about in the book how Karp has the disdain for some of these consumer internet companies. Why do you think generally people are very quick to say Palantir is the evil boogeyman that's going to steal your data, not knowing that that's quite literally not what they do, but Facebook quite literally makes hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue per year. Why is there that dichotomy?

**Michael Steinberger:** Well, he recognized early on, he understood the nature of Facebook's business, the nature of Google's business. And he also saw that this could have very negative implications for Palantir. They could get lumped in.

He understood that there was just disaster waiting to happen, certainly with Facebook, and it did happen. Data was manipulated, data was scraped, and all that sort of stuff. So he understood the risks with this, and he also understood that any company operating in this area was in danger of being swept up in a generalized backlash against it. And so that was a very legitimate concern that he had vis-à-vis Facebook certainly, and Google as well. And so he went to great lengths to try to differentiate himself. And of course, this also fed his hostility towards Facebook, which he describes as a carcinogen and a parasitic business. He wanted to make clear that Palantir was different. Now, why does Palantir get singled out? Well, it's because of who it works with.

And there's no getting around that. You work with intelligence services. You work with ICE. During the first Trump administration, he made the point that Palantir was not the only tech firm working with ICE. And then the complicating factor there certainly during the first Trump presidency was Thiel.

I mean, he drew a lot of attention to Palantir. Would Palantir have been so controversial during the first Trump presidency if Thiel hadn't been associated with the company? Probably not. But again, it works with clandestine services, it works with law enforcement, works with ICE. So in that sense, controversy was inevitable with Palantir.

**Amit Kukreja:** Yeah, and you know, it's something that I've struggled with over the past couple years covering the company, and struggled in the sense of I've almost seen it as a challenge of correcting the people that would try to dunk on Palantir by saying they do this, they do that. And I'm like, look, I'm objectively not opposed to hearing a different perspective on what Palantir does or what they don't do. But as someone who's actually studied the architecture of the software, it just doesn't feel like that's necessarily what's going on here. Even with the NHS contract, that was a very controversial contract that they ended up achieving. You're seeing the results a year and a half later of backlogs being reduced. And so you start asking yourself, do these people in the UK care more about the narrative, or do they care more about having better healthcare?

**Michael Steinberger:** Well, and that's a great question. And in the book I talk, I mentioned, of course, the NHS, but look at the work that Palantir did during the pandemic.

And there's a lot of misconception which I've tried to clear up in that discussion about what went on then. All talk, no big contracts, and that this is somehow another sop to Thiel from Trump, and it was none of those things. And Palantir made an invaluable contribution to the effort to try to get some handle on the spread of the virus and then of course the vaccine rollout.

**Amit Kukreja:** It was quite literally Deborah Birx saying we need help.

**Michael Steinberger:** We need help. It was nothing to do with Trump. As someone, a Palantir executive, said to me in the context of another issue during the first Trump presidency, he said, "Trump wouldn't know how to spell Palantir." Maybe he does now. But again, there are these narratives, and narratives sort of take hold. I mean, for instance, just stepping back, we talked earlier, it's still referred to as "Thiel's Palantir." You still see almost always in any article about Palantir "secretive."

But, you know, they were very open with me, gave me access to anyone I needed. Karp gave me extraordinary access. But, you know, I think you take a look at the website, there is a hell of a lot of information on their website. You can learn a lot about Palantir by just going to their website.

They were more tight-lipped in the past, and they are still tight-lipped about some things. There are things they can't talk about, work with the clandestine services and so forth, and some of the military work. But I think the "secretive" description really no longer applies. But again, these things just kind of take on a life of their own. And one of the points I think I've succeeded in conveying in this book and I hope I've conveyed is that, look, it's a complicated company. It's involved in so many different things. There are things you should be concerned about. There are things they can be criticized for, but any fair-minded account of what this company does must also acknowledge that there are things that they have done that have been enormously beneficial, and the pandemic was one example of this. And then, the reaction in the UK, I think it's a lot of this is bound up in the controversy over Thiel. He didn't help in that case. He goes and gives a talk at the Oxford Union, as I recall, and says that Britain's attachment to the NHS is a form of Stockholm syndrome.

That did not win over many people in the UK. So, and more recently, of course, in the UK, there's been real pushback because of the support the company's given to Israel.

But this is something they have to, this is an ongoing challenge for Palantir. Sort of, how do you get people to acknowledge the good work, even if there are other aspects of what the company does that they regard as not so laudable and that do cause controversy.

**Amit Kukreja:** I think we would both agree, and I think Karp has said this many times, that if Palantir was in the hands of the wrong people, the software and technology is so profoundly incredible and useful and powerful that it could be used in a myriad of bad ways. Do you think that also implicates the mystique around the company, that if the software was in the wrong hands it would be used in such bad ways that people are almost expecting and hoping that the software continuously stays in the allies of the West, as Karp would say, so that the software at least has a broader north star than the hands of Russia or China?

**Michael Steinberger:** Well, yeah. I mean, I think what was interesting, it was clear to me when I was doing the story for the Times magazine back in 2019, 2020, and I think it persists to this day, there's been like two conflicting narratives about Palantir. Is this all-powerful, dangerous as hell technology? And there's other, certainly when the company was going public, you saw a lot of stuff expressing skepticism about just how good it was, that people saying, "Oh, it's just basically a lot of smoke and mirrors."

Usually the answer to these things is the truth is somewhere in the middle. Actually, the truth is probably it is pretty powerful software. The way I've described it is it's got the efficiency of a wood chipper and the malleability of Play-Doh. I don't know if people at Palantir would use those exact analogies, but from talking to customers...

One customer told me it's like looking into the Matrix.

Yeah. Those who use it swear by it. And they think it is just heads and shoulders above anything that they can get elsewhere in the market. And so it is powerful. And I would rephrase it slightly, and there's no avoiding politics, but I would say, one of the lessons that I think a lot of people took from the first Trump presidency was... and I think this second Trump presidency is different in some ways, but the lesson was for many people that technology this powerful could be a very useful tool in the hands of an authoritarian regime. And that's not, I'm not commenting on Trump so much as just as a more general comment.

This would be a very powerful tool in the hands of an authoritarian regime. Karp's retort, if he were part of this conversation, would be like, "Look, we've got these privacy controls, we take civil liberties seriously." And they do, that is absolutely true. But as you know, it's the end user in the end who decides how rigorously to use those privacy controls, to use those guardrails.

And there have been instances where stuff has been abused, and it has nothing to do with Palantir. They sell their software, they don't monitor how it's used, certainly not on a daily basis. So there is risk, and Karp has been very upfront about this. And they've not sold to some... they didn't sell to Saudi Arabia. The Obama administration expressed some interest in having them sell the technology to Saudi Arabia during the Arab Spring because there were fears about the stability of the Saudi regime.

They chose not to do it because of Saudi Arabia's human rights record, and Karp did not want to contribute to any human rights abuses. So they do, in the past, have turned down potential customers because of concerns about how it might be used. And I think that is always the danger with technology that is this powerful, that whether it's on the corporate side or the government side, there is the potential for abuse and for a lot of abuse. And there's a lot of personal data that flows through their software in different places, whether on the commercial side or in the government space. And one has to be very alert to these risks, and they are, but at the end of the day, it's the customer who decides.

**Amit Kukreja:** So, let's just transition into the political conversation because I think this is also really important. You just said that the Obama administration was thinking of telling Palantir to sell their software to Saudi Arabia and Karp said no. Which implies that they've been working with the US government for a long time. They were working with the Obama administration.

Uh, from my understanding, Obama 2.0 deported more people than Trump 1.0, but Palantir gets a pretty bad rap, especially in Trump 1.0. Why do you think a company that has worked with the government, whether it was a Democrat or Republican in office, is now being seen as the evil authoritarian use of Trump's fascism?

**Michael Steinberger:** Well, you know, it's a complicated question. I would say going back to the first Trump presidency, listen, as you noted, the relationship with ICE began in 2014 under Obama.

It wasn't controversial then, and Obama was deporting a lot of people. I think it was Trump's rhetoric and I think it was some of the stuff that was done, the child separation policy, that did not sit well with people. So, there was stuff that was done under Trump that was different than what was being done under Obama. So, that's one thing. But I also think, look, you can't downplay the Thiel effect. Peter Thiel was Trump's biggest supporter in Silicon Valley and probably the biggest supporter in the business community in 2016.

And he was not a popular figure, and so a lot of this was seen through that prism.

**Amit Kukreja:** Yeah. So, so it was a bit more narrative than reality because if they're doing the same work and yes, there are some things that are different, but people want to now associate Palantir with evilness. It's more so their disdain for Trump, you would say?

**Michael Steinberger:** That's a big part of it though. I mean, I will also say that they, because they didn't want to be associated with Trump's immigration policy, they emphasized early on that we work with HSI. We're not working with the other side, enforcement and removal. And so they were saying that publicly, and then that distinction kind of collapsed because HSI was involved in some raids and then they said, "Yeah, Palantir software is playing a part, but it's a very minimal part." So, I think they sort of hurt themselves there a bit by just disavowing any connection with the immigration crackdown when in fact the software was playing some role in it. And again, however everyone feels about immigration, how everyone feels about undocumented people, from my point of view, there was stuff done during the first Trump presidency. I mean, separating children from their parents, and a lot of kids, a lot of families haven't been reunited still. That's a hard policy to defend.

And it's not Palantir's role to defend it, but if you're in any way implicated in that, you're going to take some slings and arrows too. So, but I also think, and Karp, we had a lot of conversations back in 2019 about this, and he made the point that other technology companies were working with ICE and yet they weren't being protested. The program that was directed at Palantir wasn't being directed at others. And, on the one hand, he took it as a backhanded compliment. He's like, it was sort of a tacit acknowledgement that the software was really good, but it also really pissed him off because they were singling out Palantir. And I think part of it is because Palantir worked with the clandestine services, made no bones about its enthusiasm for working with the government and in areas that kind of gave people some concern, but also again, a big part of it was because of Peter Thiel.

**Amit Kukreja:** Well, so I've heard Karp over the past year start to stress the idea that, on the topic of immigration that we're speaking of, border control matters and having a safe and secure border is the fabric for the sovereignty of your country. And he compares it to what's going on in Germany and things that we're seeing and how it's not necessarily the best thing for the West. An article came out on Axios a couple of days ago that was titled "Karp has gone full MAGA." And Karp responded to this by saying the person who wrote the article, who also wrote the book, is filled with TDS, even though you're a good person. So, so, so just straight up I want to ask you the question. You're talking about immigration and borders and if Karp was in this conversation right now, he would say, "Well, a healthy border really does matter and that's not political. That's just like, hey, do we want illegal immigrants taking away jobs?"

Do you have TDS? And did that impact how you write?

**Michael Steinberger:** All right. I'm not going to avoid your question. I'm going to get to your question, but the first thing I would say is like, look, his views have evolved on this issue. You go back and look at the stuff he said to me and others during the first Trump administration. He said to me, "I am totally in favor of the demographics of this country changing if it's changed through legal immigration." No issue with that. His views have evolved on that. He believes that the 2024 election was a vote to keep the demographics of the country the same. And hence he has no qualms now about supporting ICE. He did have some qualms during the first Trump presidency and in fact said that if he had known what was going to happen, he might not have signed the contract with ICE. So his views have evolved. When he says Trump derangement syndrome, I think part of this is because in the book I'm dredging up stuff he said about Trump when Trump first became a candidate in 2015, and Karp said some pretty harsh stuff. He made very clear he was not a supporter. And it's now, Trump is president now again. And the way it works is the first rule of business in Donald Trump's Washington is don't piss off Donald Trump. The second rule is do what you can to ingratiate yourself with him.

**Amit Kukreja:** But to push back on that real quick, one thing that I've spoken to about other tech CEOs, some of them have, I've spoke to one CEO privately who's CEO of a company worth $120 billion, and he told me the Democrats gave up on everything he cared about, which primarily was rooted in crypto and AI. And this is a guy who's a lifelong Democrat.

But for him to advance his business to one day become a trillion dollar company instead of a hundred billion dollar company, he needs to be on the side of the people that are sensible around crypto and AI. And what we've seen with the Genius Act over the past couple months, we have some really meaningful crypto regulations that are not the Gary Gensler anti-crypto. Do you think it's not Palantir evolving to keep their business in the right space, which of course that plays a part of it, but Karp realizing that the Democrats just aren't ready to evolve?

**Michael Steinberger:** Well, I think, and listen, I'll be curious to see how my book gets reviewed, if it gets reviewed in sort of progressive journals because I'm fully expecting there'll probably be harsh reception in some places that I was too fair to Karp. These are people who don't really like him, don't really like Palantir, don't like billionaires. But I think and I hope that it'll be read with an open mind because when you go back, Karp said this to me in 2019, one of our conversations is quoted in the book, he said, "Look, I don't think people are against immigration, they're not happy with illegal immigration. They don't like scenes of chaos at the border. And either you take their concerns seriously or they're going to turn to politicians who do take their concerns seriously."

And I would think that, I'm a progressive. I don't mind saying that. That's where my sympathies lie. And I would say, looking at, we're now in the second Donald Trump is president again. And I think it'd be sort of hard to argue that he was wrong about that.

We've got two elections now. And if you weren't happy with the first Trump presidency, the border was an ongoing issue and now you've got a second Trump presidency.

**Amit Kukreja:** And the second one was a mandate given the swing states that he won, I think.

**Michael Steinberger:** Well, he did. He won a significant victory. I think it's less of a mandate to people, but he won. And it's very clear that voters, polling now clearly indicates that people are not really happy about how this is being done now, but the views on immigration seem a little more subtle. It's not that people are against immigration, but they don't like scenes of chaos at the border. And Karp back in 2019 said, "You got to take this stuff seriously. If you don't, you're not going to like what happens." And I think it would be very hard for anyone who's fair-minded about it to say, "Well, he was wrong about that." And so, I don't think crypto or anything like that is of concern to him. What's paramount to him are national security, the border clearly, and he believes... we can get to October 7 later, that was a very big factor in his thinking. But I think his evolution politically certainly goes back to the first Trump presidency. He's saying, "You got to take this stuff seriously or the voters are going to turn to people who do." And instead of listening to him, people are protesting Palantir. And so he was quite perturbed that his fellow progressives had turned on Palantir, had turned on him, had made them out to be these evil figures. And so that pushed them away. And then there was the stuff that happened in New Orleans, which I talk about in the book. There's a lot of controversy about their work with law enforcement, and a lot of that controversy was probably overblown because they didn't really do that much work with municipal police departments in the United States. It wasn't a very successful effort for them, and now they're not working with any municipal police departments in the United States. It's a very complicated issue, as Karp himself said. There's a history of racialized policing, a lot of concern about data-driven policing. In New Orleans, though, New Orleans had an epidemic of homicides, and 90% of the victims were black, 90% of the perpetrators were black.

The truth was in the data. Palantir gave the software to the city free of charge to help try to reduce the murder rate. And the whole thing erupted in controversy because Palantir was accused of facilitating predictive policing that was unfairly targeting minority communities. And this really incensed Karp because in his view, this was a case where they were unequivocally on the side of good.

Yeah. And not the people who were potentially benefiting from the use of Palantir software in the city, but from progressives who were far removed from the neighborhoods in New Orleans that were seeing all this carnage. Those people made us think about this. And so that was another thing that really sort of alienated him from the Democrats or started his move away from them.

**Amit Kukreja:** So, as he's moved away from like full-on progressive, which he was his entire life, and he has acknowledged that, you've acknowledged that, the title of that article was "he's now gone full MAGA." So the question then comes down to, has he as a progressive gone MAGA, or have the progressives like yourself have a massive case of TDS that aren't seeing reality? Who's right here?

**Michael Steinberger:** Well, I mean, listen, what he would call, what he would describe in the book as TDS, I think there's, I think it's slightly exaggerated. I would say it's pro-truth, not TDS, but that's, you know, opinions may vary.

**Amit Kukreja:** That's what a person who has TDS would say.

**Michael Steinberger:** I think he, listen, he would say a couple of things. He's not a neocon. He takes pains to emphasize he's not a neocon, but like the neocons of the 60s and 70s, he would say that he didn't leave the left, the left left him.

So there's that. I would say that he, during the first Trump presidency, he made very clear he did not like Trump. He did not want Trump as president. He made his disapproval loud.

**Amit Kukreja:** He even endorsed Harris to an extent, I think.

**Michael Steinberger:** Yeah. Well, he did. If you're a company that does business with the US government, and they do a lot of business with the government, you sort of have to get on board here. But in contrast to some other tech executives, I won't name names, but you know who I'm referring to, the opportunism kind of drips off them like sweat. He found reasons to get behind it. It's not just because you have to, but there are things that he approves of now. He is now a hardliner on immigration. And I talk about that extensively in the book, and he's much more in line now with Peter Thiel's view.

He's changed his mind about it, not just because he sees Trump's second election victory in 2024 as a vote to keep the demographics of the country the same, but he also sees it through the prism of October 7th, what happened in Israel, the outbreak of what he saw as an outbreak of anti-semitism on college campuses. And before October 7th, he saw immigration as a toxic issue for the Democrats. After October 7th, he also sees it as a toxic issue for American Jews.

This is a part of the book that I think is going to generate a lot of conversation and a fair amount of controversy.

**Amit Kukreja:** Yeah, I think let's just transition then to the Israel conversation here. So, I thought this was a pretty nuanced part of the book. Obviously, Karp is Jewish and he saw the atrocities of October 7th, equivalent to, you know, 50,000 people in the United States.

He's always been explicitly Jewish. He never hides away from it. If someone asks him, he'll talk about it.

And this brought back the sense of, "Well, we've always said never again, and now it's happening."

At the same time, you have some quotes in the book that says Karp wouldn't mind if Netanyahu, let's just say, wasn't the president, given there might not be a full alignment between everything the Israeli government has been doing in Palestine. So, I guess the question here is we'll just start it off with what do you think happened on October 7th that really got Karp to take out an advertisement in the New York Times and say we stand with Israel?

**Michael Steinberger:** Well, I think this gets back to the point I made earlier. The key to understanding Karp is this sense of vulnerability that he's had from a very young age.

And again, even with the wealth he has amassed, even with his vast security detail, he still has this sense of vulnerability. And October 7th, this pogrom in Israel, shook him, as it shook many Jews. It was the largest killing of Jews since the Holocaust.

He always knew that anti-semitism was a powerful force in the world, that Jews were vulnerable, but this really, in a way that not in his lifetime, not in mine, brought home the danger. And again, do not discount the fear factor for him. This is essential to understanding Palantir.

As he told me way back in 2019, his fear drives a lot of what makes this company what it is. And so this was just a huge event for, a seismic event obviously for the world, huge for Palantir, and on a personal level, just a major, major event for him and something that shook him to the core and galvanized him in all sorts of ways. And he was very outspoken about what happened from the start and was frustrated that other people weren't speaking out.

**Amit Kukreja:** Why do you think that pissed him off so much?

**Michael Steinberger:** Because he thought that they were being cowards. That he believed that many of them agreed with him 100%, but just didn't, as he said, they didn't want to be screamed at by college kids. They didn't want to be screamed at by people who were unhappy with Israel. And so they just wanted to keep their heads down. And that's obviously not the way he does things.

He doesn't keep his head down. And in this case, he certainly didn't, but it irritated him. And I think the chapter on Israel is the sort of real key to understanding how he got here because this is where you see him not just wrapping his mind... I mean, he's pretty convinced that Trump is going to win. So this is 2023, 2024, we're having these conversations. He's pretty convinced that Trump is going to win. But this is where you start to see him like sort of getting on board with Trump.

He is all but saying that he thinks a Trump victory would be better for Israel and that American Jews would be safer under Trump. And I think that's where you kind of see it. There's this conversation we have, it's like a week or two after October 7th. And the thing, one of the other things you have to understand about Karp is he likes to argue.

**Amit Kukreja:** Intellectual sparring really matters.

**Michael Steinberger:** It is, but like at Palantir, it was like from the start, there needed to be an open discourse. You need to have people need to be able to speak candidly, frankly, push back hard, even against the CEO. As Aki Jain said to me, Karp's view was you should be able to tell even the CEO to go [fuck] himself. And that was, out of this very intense hothouse atmosphere, people batting around ideas, pushing back hard against things they thought were wrong, you would develop superior products, and that ultimately proved to be the case. But he just likes to argue.

It's who he is. It's how he grew up. A very animated household. His cousin, Matt Johnson, tells me he used to hear them arguing. He'd be over there for dinner, he walks out and he'd hear them from the sidewalk arguing. Karp and his parents and his brother. So, this is just how it is. And we're having this conversation in his Washington office. It's like a week or two after October 7th. And this was interesting because another thing about him is he's very persuasive, very convincing, speaks with utter conviction. But in this case, it wasn't like me he was trying to convince. He just says, "I don't think Donald Trump's a fascist. I don't think he's anti-semitic. I don't think he's a bigot." And all this stuff. And there was nothing I had said. It was just more sort of him just sort of, I felt like he was just sort of working his way into like saying,

"I can get on board. If I have to get on board with this, I can." And I do think I certainly now, I know that he thinks that Trump is, having Trump as president is better for Israel in his view, better for American Jews.

**Amit Kukreja:** Another geopolitical event that was pretty massive and you discussed in the book was Ukraine, Russia.

Karp was one of the first CEOs to get there. I actually didn't know the story about Poland and he had to go through all these different... I didn't know how that happened, but he got there. He got to meet Zelenskyy. And then for a while, he wasn't allowed to publicly say that their software was the reason why Ukraine was putting up a fight. But then one day he said, "Screw it. We're going to let the world know." What was your take on his admiration for the Ukrainian people and for making sure their software was at the forefront of Ukraine?

**Michael Steinberger:** Well, I think, listen, from the start, Palantir said it was about defending the West, not just the United States, about defending the West. And it's interesting because from the start, they said there are two countries we're not selling this to. We're not selling it to China and we're not selling it to Russia. And think about that, because you're talking about a company that starts in 2003 and you're telling potential investors, "Oh, we're not going to sell in China," the largest emerging market. And Palantir was a tough sell to begin with. That didn't make it any easier, I'm sure. And so those were like sort of bold, slash crazy calls. Russia less so, but certainly China. Now, of course, it's been vindicated.

But that took a long time. And he and his colleagues saw both Russia and China as fundamentally adversarial. And certainly when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, that was confirmation, as if anyone needed it, that it was fundamentally adversarial. And he believed, as many people said at the time, that this was a fight for the free world versus tyranny.

And part of the appeal for getting involved with this, I believe, and it's quite clear, the Trump years were hard. They were hard for Palantir. They were hard for him. The war on terrorism, the software had been used in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the whole thing had sort of become a shitshow. The war on terrorism was mired in controversy, Guantanamo, all this sort of stuff. So, you've got that, and then you've got obviously all the domestic controversy during the first Trump presidency, ISIS and so forth. Here was a case finally, okay, Trump is gone, and here's a case where Palantir is unequivocally on the side of good, Ukraine. And so, that was a huge relief for him.

Something he wanted to call attention to. Took great pride in it. But of course, yeah, they've got to be circumspect. This is another source of frustration because so much of their work is in the shadows. I mean, clandestine services and so forth, counterterrorism. And it's, this has been said forever, ever since 9/11, we rarely find out about the terrorist attacks that were thwarted.

It's just not shared with the public, and rightly so. But he said to me, it's been a 20-year frustration that a lot of the essential work that Palantir was doing couldn't be recognized because it was taking place in the shadows and that's where it was supposed to remain. So, Ukraine happens. I'm with him right after the invasion. And he is now doing these letters to shareholders, to investors, timed to coincide with each earnings report. And they're writing a letter, and the letter finishes, "Palantir software, Palantir technologies in the fight in Ukraine."

And that had to be edited out. "In the fight," yeah.

"Fight for the West."

"Fight for the West," exactly. And again, just sort of reinforcing this frustration he felt. And so what happens a couple of months later? He goes to Davos. Because if you remember, Davos was canceled in January of 2022 because of COVID. So, they held it in May. I'm with him there, and there are Ukrainian officials all over. A number of Ukrainian officials there, and he meets with them, and they're obviously supporting, Palantir is supporting Ukraine. And some officials said, "Would you like to come and meet Zelenskyy?" And Karp says to me, "I'm thinking about going to Kyiv." And I'm like, "Okay, that's great." And I'm thinking, you know, when things quiet down. Next week, he's there.

And he wanted to show his support. He found, he really, really liked Zelenskyy. The meeting was just, he really felt a kinship with him. So, it was a way of saying to the world, "Palantir's involved," and of getting the credit that it couldn't claim for all those years it was working on counterterrorism and in the shadows and stuff, never getting the credit he felt it deserved.

**Amit Kukreja:** At its core, you know, Karp talks very philosophically about an ontology because it is a philosophical term. In fact, one of the reasons I got into Palantir is because I studied philosophy in high school and ontology, continental philosophy, Immanuel Kant, like I recognized that term for so many years and then I'm looking at Palantir. Like they describe their data as an ontological structure of a system.

How do you think Karp has more broadly taken philosophical ideas and connected them to the business to the point where a shareholder letter comes out every quarter written with all these quotes from German philosophers. Some people are turned off by it like, "Dude, just give me the numbers."

Someone like me and a lot of other retail investors are like, "Oh my goodness, he's speaking in a way that's almost profound, almost like you would study these letters in a hundred years in Harvard school."

How do you think about the philosophy in the business in and of itself?

**Michael Steinberger:** Well, I think it's an important part of it. I mean, listen, no background in computer science, and yet, there was this overlap with ontology being part of it. The way that the engineers thought about organizing data and constructing a worldview, it wasn't that big of a leap for him.

As it might have seemed. And you talk to some of the software engineers who were there from the early days, Aki Jain for instance would say that the way he wrote, the way he thought, even if they were sort of talking different languages, there was a sort of technical structure to the way Karp thought and talked and wrote that resonated with them. They could see something very similar to how they thought about things, how they addressed problems, how they tackled things. So internally, there was a certain overlap there that made it possible for him to connect with these people and they with him.

That might not have been apparent. You just kind of look at this and say, "How is this guy going to run this company? How's he going to talk to these software engineers?" And so they were not from completely different worlds. And obviously, he comes from this background in the humanities. I think it was very helpful for Palantir in the sense that he could think through the implications of the work on a broader scale than a bunch of young software engineers. It's important to point out that we now talk all about privacy, civil liberties. Those were very important discussions when Palantir came along because of course it was after 9/11, after the Patriot Act. These are real concerns. But this was a couple of years before the iPhone is introduced, before this explosion in personal data. So these guys are really ahead of the curve in some ways. And Karp was very alert from the start to the risks and to the importance of creating this powerful software, but we need to do it in a way that can protect privacy and civil liberties.

And only a philosopher would have that much of a focus at 35 years old. To think about these broader implications, to understand that, and to be able to talk... Karp has this idea that there's a technological solution to the problem posed by the technology. You could actually embed in the software these controls. And as he put it, it's like this sort of Hegelian solution. So these two seeming opposites, and you kind of come to a synthesis where you could actually produce software that would allow the analyst to get the information they need but at the same time protect the data of millions of innocent people who should not be pulled into the dragnet. And that was his idea. And I think the idea that he thought about this as sort of this Hegelian solution, maybe it's a little simplistic, but I think that's kind of how he thought and where you might see the philosophic background coming into play from early on. He is a credentialed scholar. He worked for a time with the most celebrated living philosopher, Jürgen Habermas.

And certainly in Europe, this was a big deal. I remember talking to Tom Enders, the former CEO of Airbus, and he was just like, he was talking, he and Karp had gotten to know each other at Davos, and then Palantir comes in to help them with a production glitch with the A350, and that's the beginning of the relationship. And Enders is just like, he's talking about, he said it was one of the best decisions he made at Airbus to bring in Palantir, but we're just talking about Karp. He said, "Yeah, I knew he studied with this very important philosopher. It's a huge calling card in Europe."

It it seemed to, it made him a source of great intrigue not just to other CEOs but also European press.

**Amit Kukreja:** Do you think that he loves the success? He loves the not the financial rewards, but rather the people like me that ended up buying in early and made a name for myself and like financially changed my life. Do you think he loves that part of the story? Do you think he wants that to keep going? And do you think he also loves that the analysts, the professionals that got it wrong are so wrong that he looks so right and it almost is this like victory of a lifetime that he proved them wrong.

**Michael Steinberger:** Yeah. Well, I think he certainly feels very vindicated and he is happily spiking the football these days and he's not going to stop. He's had a, he is down on institutional investors for many, many years. This goes back to the rough reception he received on Sand Hill Road when going out to try to raise money for Palantir and basically they all said no. So that kind of gave him some hostility towards institutional investors that then carried over to Wall Street analysts certainly after the company goes public. And listen, the stock was not doing well.

The company hadn't turned a profit. You're 18 years in and it still hasn't turned a profit. And so, it's not like the skepticism was totally unfounded, but he felt that in contrast to people like you, Wall Street analysts didn't understand Palantir and were never going to understand it, and he was done trying to explain it to them. So there is this victory lap that he's sort of on now and he feels vindicated and he's not going to stop dunking on them for a while yet is my guess. But I would also say that I think he believes that Palantir's best days are still to come.

He's in his late 50s now. He's keeping up this crazy schedule. And yeah, it's easier for him in a sense because he doesn't have a wife and kids and so he can live like this, but it's still a pretty backbreaking schedule. He's rarely in the same bed more than one or two nights at any time, on the road constantly.

But I think it's because he loves what he does. This company is his life's work. And I also think because he believes the best is still to come for Palantir and he wants to be there for it. As much as he likes to be out on the cross country skiing trails, I think he thinks, it's 20 years to get to this point, he feels like the best is still to happen and he wants to be there for it.

**Amit Kukreja:** Last question for you, Michael. Again, thank you for all the time you spent with me today. I saw this last night and I was, well, I don't know if I should say thank you, but my mom was definitely pretty happy about this. I didn't know my name would be in the book.

**Michael Steinberger:** It's there. It's there.

**Amit Kukreja:** It is there in the epilogue. And what you wrote is exactly correct. When you arrived that afternoon in December, Karp and I were in conversation.

And so first of all, it was just really cool for me to see my name get immortalized in a book like this. And so I do thank you for that. That means a lot. And I guess the only reason I was there for you to even write about that situation is because the company has embraced the retail investor.

**Michael Steinberger:** You're obviously the best known among retail investors of Palantir, those who have gotten on board with Palantir, those who have become Karp fanboys, if you will. You are the best known and sort of symbolize... I mean, because this is a really important part of the story.

**Amit Kukreja:** Which was going to be my question by the way, why do you think the retail investor embraces Palantir? That's my last question.

**Michael Steinberger:** Well, because I think they find him to be an authentic figure, a figure of... they find him entertaining. He's very funny. You see him on TV, he just says what he thinks. So there's the authenticity factor. And he would say that they understood the Palantir story in a way that analysts didn't. They understood in a very simple way: This is the company on the side of the United States and the West, and they wanted to see it succeed and were willing to put their money where their sentiments lay.

And believed that the company would succeed and bought his explanation for what the company was doing, where it saw opportunities.

And at a time when institutional investors were skeptical, Wall Street analysts were very skeptical, there was this community of retail investors who said, "Papa Karp," "Daddy Karp," all that sort of stuff. And he liked that. He found that very endearing.

And more importantly than just the ego gratification, it was the fact that there was this community of investors who bought the story.

And who said, "Okay, yeah, the stock's at seven or eight now, but I think it's going up." I think there is something to this. Companies that, organizations that use the software swear by it. I mean, you guys knew in a way that, when you've got 40,000 people at Airbus using the software on a daily basis, the product is legit.

And even if Wall Street analysts were discounting that or just not giving it the weight it deserved, there was an investment community that understood that that's a pretty significant achievement and that spoke not just to the quality of the software, but to the potential for this technology. That if it was that integral, if it had become that integral to a major corporation and if it was that integral to the US military, that there was a lot of upside here.

And that it was worth putting some of your money in at $7, $8, $15, $25...

$100.

Exactly. So I think that was a big part of it. And obviously, you emerged as someone who got on board in a very public way. And you see it with the earnings call. It's the retail investors he wants to hear from.

He'll throw the mic to a few Wall Street analysts, a few investment bank analysts, but it's the retail investors. And he says now, when the company got into the S&P 500, he releases that video and he said, "This belongs to two groups: Palantirians and our retail investors."

Right? That's, obviously the professional investment community is now very heavily in the stock and they've bought the story, but he has clearly not forgotten who bought the story when it was a harder story to buy.

**Amit Kukreja:** All right, Michael, last question for you. What do you want people to take away from the book over the lifetime of people reading it?

**Michael Steinberger:** Well, I think there are a couple different things. I think it's a really interesting business story. And you can see the importance of this as a business story not just in the fact that the company has this massive valuation now, but in what it has spawned. The number of companies that have come out of Palantir, and you can also see it in the explosion in interest in defense tech. Palantir paved the way for that. So now everyone talks about defense tech, the pivot to patriotic capital, which is quite literally the spawn of Palantir.

Palantir's impact cannot be overstated at this point. You see other companies now, other tech companies embracing the forward deployed model. OpenAI and others, it didn't begin with Palantir, but they sort of reinvented this role. And now you see other companies saying, "This actually makes sense, sending engineers out to work with clients and finding out not what, can your business be bent to our software, but can our software be bent to your business?"

It seems kind of fundamental, but Palantir paved the way for that. So, it's a quite amazing business story. And of course, the most amazing aspect of the business story is the fact that this guy with no background in business, no background in computer science has successfully led this company to a $400 billion valuation. And that's a remarkable business story. I think you can also say that on the business political front, if you want to understand the moment we're living in, this is a book worth reading.

Palantir is at the center of everything right now. You think about the things that have dominated the headlines over the last 10 months. Doge, ICE, Israel, AI.

It's in all of this. It's at the center of everything. I think if you want to understand this moment, you need to know something about Palantir. And you cannot understand Palantir without understanding this very idiosyncratic and complex figure at its helm, Alex Karp. So I think, you know, it's better to be lucky than good. And I think the timing is really good for this book. And then I would just say that his evolution politically, whether he's gone full MAGA or three-quarters MAGA or what have you, this has been a very interesting evolution. And one of the stories of this moment is how Silicon Valley turned to Trump and its embrace of Trump this time.

Karp's part of that story, a major part of that story, but I think his journey there is a lot more interesting and a lot more revealing than perhaps some of these other figures. And I think, if you want to understand the moment we're living through, I think this book, if I can say in all modesty, is a good way of doing that.

**Amit Kukreja:** I love it. Michael, thank you so much. It means the world for you to take some time and talk to the audience, an audience that has been captivated by the Palantir and Alex Karp story for the past five years. Deeply, deeply, deeply appreciate it.

**Michael Steinberger:** Listen, thank you very much for having me on. It was great to talk to you.

**Amit Kukreja:** Awesome. Thank you, Michael. Appreciate it.