Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2025

Front Burner Transcript for June 17, 2025

Host: Jayme Poisson

JAYME POISSON: Hey everybody, I'm Jayme Poisson.

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

ALEX KARP: It's the most effective way for social change is: humiliate your enemy and make them poor.

ALEX KARP: The primary way to create peace in this world is to scare our adversaries when they wake up, when they go to bed, while they're seeing their mistress. Whatever they're doing, they're scared.

ALEX KARP: Uh, Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world. And, when it's necessary, to scare enemies, and on occasion, kill them.

JP: So you're hearing there from the CEO of a company that stands to be one of the most influential of the Donald Trump era. The man in that audio is named Alex Karp. The company that he leads is called Palantir. Now, depending on your interests, it's likely that you'll recognize Palantir for different things. The company, co-founded by billionaire Trump donor and democracy skeptic Peter Thiel, markets itself as a data analytics company. They're also known for creating systems used at the policing and military level -- technologies like predictive policing, for example. The kind of tech that can use private social media postings, among other things, to forecast crime. Palantir's technology has been at the centre of everything from ICE's accelerated deportation programs to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and to Elon Musk's DOGE project. The New York Times reported recently that the Trump administration has expanded Palantir's work with the federal government to essentially create a master list that would include the private information of Americans. What the Times says could give Trump untold surveillance power. Palantir has denied that reporting. Michael Steinberger is a reporter with The New York Times Magazine, although I should say that he was not involved with the Times reporting that I just mentioned. He is also the author of a forthcoming book on Palantir's CEO, The Philosopher in the Valley. And he joins me now to talk about the company quietly at the centre of modern American life, and what Palantir stands to tell us about the future of government and surveillance.

[Music: Theme]

JP: Michael, it's so great to have you. Thanks for coming by.

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: It's a pleasure to be with you.

JP: So Palantir has worked with the CIA, the Pentagon, the Israeli government, the NSA, to name a few, but also the likes of the UN World Food Programme and companies like Airbus. And how would you describe the work that they do?

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: Palantir produces software that enables organizations to make better use of their data. Software that can pull in huge streams of data, variety-- various forms of data, structured like spreadsheets, unstructured like video and text messages, and kind of pull it all together and allow-- and, and basically the software can find patterns, trends, connections that would take human analysts hours, days, weeks, or sometimes forever to find. It-- Yeah, essentially pattern recognition software in a lot of ways.

JP: The company has literally named itself after the seeing stone in the Lord of the Rings, which is something I didn't know until this morning.

SOUNDCLIP

[Clip from Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring]

GANDALF: A Palantir is a dangerous tool, Saruman.

SARUMAN: Why? Why should we fear to use it?

JP: And I saw that Bloomberg described the company as kind of like a spy's brain that, as you mentioned, combs through data sources. So like financial documents, airline reservations, cell phone records, social media postings. It finds all these connections and then it presents the linkages in these kind of colourful, easy to interpret graphics that look like spider webs. I know you've sat through a bunch of demos. Like, does that track, does that track to you?

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: Yeah, no, it does. I mean, you can get the results presented in a variety of ways. It's important to point out that Palantir does not take custody of the data that an organization has. It simply allows an organization to make better use of its own data. Palantir doesn't store that data, it doesn't sell that data. Um. You know, the software is equipped with pretty rigorous, um, privacy controls that that, you know, if they are used, um, you know, limit access to data to people who-- just on an as to-- a need to know basis. You know, on an authorized basis. So, you know, there are a lot of safeguards built into the software. One of the big questions has always been, well, it's ultimately up to the client to decide how rigorously they wish to enforce the-- to use those guardrails, you know. So, so that's always been an open question with Palantir. But um, you know, I think, you know, it's important to note that they don't actually control the data.

JP: Yeah. I want to get into that with you a little bit more as we go along here. But when did the company first begin to really emerge on the national and international stage?

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: The company can trace its origins back to PayPal, which Peter Thiel had co-founded in the late 1990s. And um. And I mean, and basically, PayPal had a-- in its early years, ran into a very significant problem: fraud. There were lots of fraudsters who were, um, siphoning off millions and millions of dollars, and it basically threatened to put the company out of business. And, you know, PayPal was generating a lot of data internally, and, you know, they had human analysts. But sifting through that data was just something that was, you know, there was just no way. There were just not enough eyeballs and not enough hours in the day to sift through all that data to find out, okay, where's the fraud happening, you know, and so forth. And so basically they devised some software that could, um, identify suspicious patterns of behaviour. And long story short, it ended up saving the business. The software was very effective, really good at identifying the the, you know, suspicious behaviour, which the human analysts would then, um, you know, they would look more closely at, at at the activities that had been flagged, and make a determination whether this was legitimate cause for concern or if the software had led them astray and so forth. And so basically it saved PayPal's business. Um. Cut to, you know, 2000-- early 2000s. You know, 9/11 has happened. And at some point, Peter Thiel, it occurred to him that perhaps the same pattern recognition software that had saved PayPal's business could be applied to the war on terrorism; could help the U.S. government identify suspicious patterns of behaviour that could lead to terrorist attacks; could help the U.S. government track down and kill terrorists or prevent terrorist attacks. And um. You know, he had this idea, he shared it with a couple colleagues, and this is how Palantir began.

SOUNDCLIP

PETER THIEL: Could one do something from a libertarian or civil liberties point of view that would still be, you know, tough on terrorism, and uh, and things like this. If the World Trade Center would erode civil liberties as much as it did in 2001, I didn't even wanna think what would happen if you had another terrorist attack.

HOST: Yeah.

PETER THIEL: And so you have to prevent it to uh, to stop, to stop more erosion. What Palantir does...

JP: I know there's this claim that Palantir was instrumental in the assassination of Osama bin Laden, and that it was their software that located him for the eventual U.S. strike. What do you make of the reporting around this? I know it's like also this kind of lore that hangs over [Michael chuckles] the company, right?

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: Yeah. Well, it's been very good for their business, I think. You know, it's, it's, um. It has not, it has not been conclusively established, let's put it that way. But, you know, it's, um. It was something that, you know, when this story came out, you know, they were still a fledgling business, and it gave them a lot of cachet. And the fact that we're still talking about it in 2025, um, suggests that the uh, the mystique has endured.

[music]

JP: Can you tell me a little bit more or a little bit about CEO Alex Karp's role? I know that he and Peter Thiel met as students at Stanford University, right? [PETER: They they--] But you have described... but you've described them as political opposites.

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: Yes. Well, they were classmates at Stanford Law School. They, um, bonded over their shared unhappiness with law school and over their love of political debate. You know, they went after each other pretty vigorously. Thiel was a libertarian, you know, kind of already a somewhat well-known figure. He had started a right-wing newspaper as an undergraduate at Stanford. And Karp was-- considered himself a person to the left. And they spent a lot of time at law school playing chess and interrogating each other's political positions.

SOUNDCLIP

ALEX KARP: You know, we've been fighting about politics since we met at Stanford. Um. You know, I always think that these things are a problem if it were like, if there's some kind of surprise, or if you're, if you're committed to only having friends that agree with you.

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: They formed a friendship there. After law school, Karp had no interest in pursuing a career in the law. He went to Germany to pursue a doctorate in social theory at Goethe University Frankfurt. So he spent a number of years in Germany doing that. And while Thiel was trying to get Palantir off the ground, Karp had returned to the Bay Area, to the San Francisco Bay Area. They reconnected. Thiel was um, struck by Karp's ability to-- he was a very persuasive figure. Karp was doing some fundraising for a Jewish philanthropic organization at the time, and he was really good at getting people to buy into ideas. And Thiel was struck by this and asked him ultimately to join this startup called Palantir.

JP: Mm-hmm. I know Karp has been described as an enigma. But also, you know, in some ways, he does sometimes both look and talk like a bit of a super villain in a [Michael chuckles] Marvel film or like a mad scientist or something. He has this kind of messy mop of hair. He often says outlandish things like he dreams of drones striking his business enemies. He often rambles on about the superiority of the Western world and the need to bring, quote, "violence and death to our enemies."

SOUNDCLIP

ALEX KARP: People want to live in peace. They want to go home. They do not want to hear your woke pagan ideology. They want know they're safe. And safe means that the other person is scared. That's how you make someone safe.

ALEX KARP: I think the West, as a notion and as a principle upon which it is executed, is obviously superior.

ALEX KARP: Love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts who've tried to screw us.

JP: Can you talk to me a little bit more about Alex Karp, his view on the world, and Palantir's place in it?

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: Well, he's very outspoken and very unfiltered, which has been-- you know, has made him a very appealing figure, certainly for television bookers. Um, [chuckles] because he's not a stereotypical CEO. Doesn't look like one, who doesn't talk like one. And he has, um, in the retail investment community, he has a great many fanboys -- not maybe quite at the level of Elon Musk, but approaching that -- who just adore him for his outspokenness, his bluntness. And what he is particularly outspoken and blunt about is the state of the world. I mean, he thinks that violence and chaos are the normal state of affairs, and that, you know, we in the West have enemies who want to destroy us, destroy our way of life. And, you know, he's got a very, very dark view of things and sees Palantir as a crucial element in the defence of the West and the defence of our way of life.

[music]

JP: The fact that they say that they don't store or sell client data, as you got into, that they don't spy on Americans, that they abide by robust privacy controls, how does the company square that position with the work that they've done alongside organizations like the NSA, for example? Or for-- as another example, Palantir was implicated somewhat in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when back several years ago, all this data was improperly harvested from Facebook to target voters.

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: Well, in that case... and the Palantir, the now former Palantir employee who was implicated in that, admitted that he was freelancing. But, you know, I think it's, it was certainly... it certainly called into question, if nothing else, the sort of oversight internally. Um. Because, you know, they work in very sensitive areas and that was a really, really bad scandal. You know, and one that may have had significant implications for the 2016 presidential election. So, you know, there have been controversies that have called into question just how ethical Palantir is, how much it adheres to the standards it has set for itself. And, you know, right now, of course, very much involved with DOGE, they're very much involved with ICE and with deportation efforts in the United States. You referenced at the top this report in the New York Times that-- being used to create a, essentially a surveillance apparatus in the federal government. Which they strongly disputed. It's, you know, caused a lot of anger at the company. They say it's just not true. But at the end of the day, it's up to the client how this stuff is used, how rigorously they enforce these things. And, you know, in the case of DOGE, in the case of ICE, in the case of the work that's being done in government agencies in Washington, the basic problem is here that, um, a lot of Americans don't trust the Trump administration [JP: Yeah.] with their personal data. You know, the reality is that a lot of this data was kept segregated historically for this very reason, because, you know, Americans give a lot of their data to the government. Canadians do the same thing. We give this over because we're required to, but also because we trust that it will be handled cautiously, that people who should not see our personal data will not see it. [JP: Mm-hmm.] And that trust was violated with DOGE. And to the extent that Palantir has been involved with that, it obviously raises concerns about what the company's doing.

JP: Yeah. What do we know, if anything, about how ICE is using the technology?

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: Well, I mean, they have a long-standing relationship with ICE that actually predates the first Trump administration. They were used by a-- it was started actually during the Obama administration. It was after a federal drug agent was murdered by a Mexican cartel, as I recall, and Palantir was brought in to help. And its software proved very effective at identifying the perpetrators and bringing them to justice. From that, a relationship developed; a contract was signed. And it wasn't very controversial until, you know, Trump won the presidency in 2016 and then began his harsh immigration crackdown after taking office.

SOUNDCLIP

HOST: Was there ever a time that you wished you had not done work for ICE?

ALEX KARP: Absolutely! Completely!

HOST: You wish you'd never done it.

ALEX KARP: No. No no, you asked, 'Is there ever a time? Did I suffer?' Look, everyone in my family thinks voting for Biden is right of centre. I've had some of my favorite employees leave.

HOST: Over, over ICE?

ALEX KARP: Over ICE!

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: Again, because, you know, Palantir had this relationship with ICE. Um. And I think, you know, during the first Trump presidency, because, you know, Thiel's very strong support for Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign had inevitably made Palantir a lightning rod. [unclear] sense of suspicion. Thiel, um, had strong anti-immigration views. So, you know, for critics of the first Trump administration's policies, you know, Palantir was an obvious source of concern and target.

JP: And right now, do we know how the technology is being used in the agency's massive deportation efforts that are currently underway?

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: It's being used to facilitate deportations. To implement actions, you know, to remove people from the country. To the mechanics of removing people from the country.

[music]

JP: One of the more controversial endeavors that we haven't talked about yet is the work that they've helped to do in the world of so-called predictive policing. And can you, yeah, can you tell me more about how this works and how successful it's been?

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: Well, it hasn't been very successful in the sense that they don't have any relationships at the moment with any major police departments in the United States. They did. Um, the most notable and long-standing one was with the Los Angeles Police Department, which used their software as part of a program that I think could fairly be characterized as predictive policing. You know, basically trying to identify areas, neighbourhoods, streets, what have you, where crimes were, you know, likely to occur based on past patterns. And the police would use that information to try to prevent crime from-- future crimes from happening. The controversy with predictive policing, certainly in the United States, is that it is this algorithmically-driven policing, if you will. Um, you know, reflects, you know, human biases. That's the, that's always been the criticism, and reinforces, you know, in the view of critics, racially-based policing, you know, so that it's targeting minority communities disproportionately. And also that it was pulling a lot of innocent people into the police, the police dragnet. So for instance, I mean, you know, the software was taking in information from automatic licence plate readers. So, you know, if I'm driving down Sunset Boulevard, my car is being photographed and that information is being entered into the system. And even though the system has no reason to have me in there, I'm in there.

JP: Right now it seems like the company is involved in war.

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: It's a major defence contract in the United States.

JP: Yeah, I want to talk, I want to discuss that with you a little bit more, like the technologies on the frontlines of wars everywhere from Ukraine to Gaza. You know, what are they doing there?

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: Well, it's a variety of things. In Ukraine, well, they did give the Ukrainian government their software. Karp, in May of 2022, so just after the war started, went to Kyiv and met with President Zelenskyy. You know, quite a brave thing to do. I mean, it was... the war had just-- you know, the country's at war, and he went. He wanted to signal Palantir's support for Ukraine. And they ultimately opened an office there and supplied the country with their technology.

SOUNDCLIP

ALEX KARP: Hybrid war -- meaning software, plus low-grade munitions, plus heroism -- outperforms conventional war, which is one of the big lessons. And we've been in the background on this on the software side.

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: Technology is also used by the U.S. military. It's been used by multiple branches of the military. And it played a part in helping the U.S. military help the Ukrainians repel the-- try to repel the Russian attack. You know, it's... the software pulls in a lot of data. In that case, it was pulling in data generated by satellites, by cell phones, all sorts of stuff, and it played a significant role, as I understand it, in helping the Ukrainians withstand the initial Russian thrust into Ukraine.

[music]

JP: Is there a sense that Karp's politics, that the way that he sees the world's influences, you know, the priorities, a Palantir-- like just listening to him talk, he invokes war often, right? Like he talks about [MICHAEL: Mm-hmm.] the legacy of the Manhattan Project. He talks about this kind of clash of civilizations, like, in his framing about there being a hierarchy of nations, of which the United States is at the top. And so, you know, where, where does his politics fit into all of this? You've just written a whole book about him, yeah.

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: Yeah. Well, the first thing to understand is that, I mean, it was a company founded with a very distinct agenda, a political agenda. It was a company founded-- I mean, their idea was they were going to defend the United States, helping to defend United States, and the West more broadly. And so from the start, it was Palantir's policy not to sell software to the Chinese government or any Chinese companies, nor to sell to the Russian government or any Russian companies. So, you know, and at least with China, I mean, that was a pretty bold move back in the early and mid-2000s, in the sense that China was a booming market, you know. And I think, you know, a lot of potential investors looked at Palantir and said, you're going to forsake the world's preeminent emerging market? [chuckles] But I would say now that those decisions have been, have been validated in the sense that, you know, I mean, the view at Palantir from its inception was that China was an adversary, Russia was an adversary. That was not by any means the consensus, you know, in 2005, say. And I think now it certainly is. So always a political agenda with the company. And as I said before, Karp has a pretty bleak worldview. And this goes back a long, long time. He just thinks that violence and anarchy are sort of the natural state of affairs. And as he put it in one earnings call a couple years ago, Palantir was built for bad times. [JP: Mm-hmm.] You know, the idea here is that this is a company that, you know, they're not promising us a utopia, they're just... it's software that can make-- maybe make the world a little less dangerous. That's their pitch. And certainly his views have hardened. And, you know, I... October 7th for instance.

JP: Yeah. Well, I mean, certainly Palantir has come under sharp criticism for its work with the IDF in Israel, right? And Karp has been critici-- people have confronted him quite a lot about that.

SOUNDCLIP

PROTESTER: Palantir kills Palestinians with their AI and technology!

ALEX KARP: Oh.

PROTESTER: You are killing my family in Palestine!

ALEX KARP: Yeah. And, you know--

PROTESTER: What kind of person are you? How do you sleep at night?

ALEX KARP: Well, if you--

PROTESTER: Shame on you!

JP: He's pushed back pretty aggressively, hey?

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: Well, he has pushed back aggressively. I mean, it's a company that had a relationship with Israel before October 7th. That relationship has deepened. There's also been, it seems, some misreporting or misinformed reporting about what exactly they've been doing. But by the same token, Karp clearly makes no apologies for what they're doing.

SOUNDCLIP

PROTESTER: Your AI and your technology from Palantir kills Palestinians!

ALEX KARP: Mostly terrorists. That's true.

PROTESTER: No! It's not [inaudible]...

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: He believes that Israel, the defence of Israel is integral to Palantir's mission of supporting the West, and, you know, and something that he also takes very personally. He is Jewish, and, you know, he-- it's part of the identity that he feels very strongly about. And so for both personal and I suppose ideological, political reasons, supporting Israel was, um, supporting it loudly was his inclination from the start.

JP: Michael, I don't know if you've seen this, but last week, Task & Purpose, like the outlet Task & Purpose, [MICHAEL: Yep.] reported that a number of tech executives, including from Palantir, have been sworn into the U.S. army [Michael laughs] as lieutenant colonels. And did--

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: Shyam Sankar, who's the Chief Technology Officer at Palantir, and also Bob McGrew, who was an early engineer at Palantir and then went to OpenAI. Yeah, they were all part of this cohort that was sworn in.

JP: Huh. Does that not strike you as unusual?

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: Well, there are lots of things about this moment that are unusual. [laughs]

JP: Yeah.

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: And, you know, I would say this: Palantir has become a major defence contractor. And, you know, Palantir makes this argument, all these defence tech startups make this argument, but there are also a lot of, you know, defence experts and people in the Pentagon who believe that, you know, the future of war is going to be very different. It's going to be autonomous, semi-autonomous weapons. It's not going to be these heavy armaments that have traditionally been made by the traditional defence contractors. And so there is a real revolution afoot in the defence industry. And Palantir's at-- the vanguard of that and looking to remain so. And so, you know, you had over the weekend Donald Trump's army parade in Washington, and Palantir was one of the corporate sponsors.

SOUNDCLIP

[Instrumental rock track playing]

ANNOUNCER: Thanks to our sponsor, Palantir.

[Instrumental rock track continues]

JP: What do you make of the argument -- really, one of the primary concerns here -- when it comes to Palantir and those like them, is this idea that the work of government is being outsourced to private industry, to billionaires, to CEOs that are not beholden to the same kinds of checks and balances [unclear] Congress. What would you make of that argument when applied to Palantir?

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: Well, I think it's, I think it has to be seen in the context of this moment. You know, I think most people would agree that anything that can make government operate more efficiently is not a bad thing. You know, if you can make government operate more efficiently and at less cost to taxpayers, that seems to be a desirable outcome. If Palantir makes software that can make the government operate better. And we've seen examples of this. I mean, Palantir's software was instrumental in helping the United States try to come to grips with COVID-19. They were brought in to help, and um, you know, the people overseeing the federal government response initially were operating sort of, you know, just kind of like the fog of war. They just couldn't get good data. They couldn't pull all the data together. We've got this, you know, kind of crazy health-care system in the United States where, yeah, every state has its own things, every state does things a little differently. And they could not get, you know, sort of that global view, and Palantir helped them get it in a matter of weeks. So, you know, you look at something like that and you say, okay, well, this is, this is a pretty good thing, and so forth. But, you know, I think it's in the context of this moment that it, you know, that it's problematic, because again, DOGE acted in a way that it may have been illegal for one thing.

JP: And just to come back to Palantir and to Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, I guess, as well, um, because they have a lot of agency in what they choose to do with their technology and how it's used as well. I'd just be curious, you know, to ask you this straight as someone who has just spent all of this time writing this book, like, what is Palantir's ultimate vision for the future? What version of America or of the West do they want to manifest, does Karp want to manifest? What kind of world does he, is he working to create here? Or are they [unclear].

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: Well, that's a really good question. It's a complicated question. I mean, you know, if you... Peter Thiel has expressed, you know, views about, you know, politics and democracy and, you know, and what his end game, what his end game here is. I don't know. It's a lot of--

JP: It's not-- It's actually not democracy, it sounds like.

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: Well, he's not a-- he has made clear that he is not a fan of it. That, you know, he thinks it is incompatible with freedom, by which he means economic freedom. There's a lot of speculation about, you know, what his end game is here. And he's not running the company. He's not involved in the day-to-day operations. He's the chairman of the board. He and Karp are close friends, and Karp very much values his input. Um, I don't, I can't speculate about what his end goal is here. You can read what he's written and draw your own conclusions. Um, Karp, I think, sees-- you know, he thinks that Palantir, he earnestly believes that Palantir can make organizations more efficient and therefore stronger, and this is true. The government level is true. At the corporate level:

SOUNDCLIP

ALEX KARP: We are in a software-defined world, and the nation that leads software is the USA. And then, so then what does that mean for all institutions? What it means is institutions have to actually live up to their core, their core mandate. So a country has to have a border. The educational institutions have to work. The military actually has to be scary. You actually can have things function in a way where the outputs are much greater than the inputs.

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: And I believe, you know, and he said this very clearly, that, you know, the determining factor on the battlefield is software. And even more so now, it's going to be, you know, the country that dominates in AI. And then, so he thinks of the-- he sees the world, he sees the United States and the West as being challenged by, you know, countries that reject our way of life, that do not want to live the way we do. He thinks it's an existential danger. And he believes that Palantir is playing a critical role in ensuring that the United States and the West are triumphant in I think what he sees as, you know, as... a new Cold War, if you want, or maybe, you know, something that will be tantamount to World War III. I don't know.

JP: Michael, this was really interesting. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

MICHAEL STEINBERGER: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

[Music: Theme]

JP: All right, that is all for today. I'm Jayme Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.

For more Front Burner transcripts, please click here.

Palantir's big data, AI long game - Transcript

Social Sharing