Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

March 5, 2025 - The David Knight Show

13:24

“Technological Republic”: Alex Karp’s Vision for Technocracy

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Let's talk a little bit about what is happening with the technocracy, where a lot of this And I thought it was interesting to see that Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, and of course long-term pal Peter Thiel, who is also one of the co-founders of Palantir.
	And you've heard me talk about this many, many times.
	Palantir was one of the first and is still the most probably powerful and politically connected of all these companies that Are spying on us for the government.
	It was there to collate information, all this geospatial intelligence that was there.
	He's now written a book, and he's doing a tour of media.
	And this is kind of...
	He went on with...
	Was it CNBC Squawk Box or something?
	I guess they're the ones that do that.
	I don't watch cable.
	But he goes on with him, and he's talking about how his leftist friends, which he really likes, he's a hardcore leftist Democrat.
	He says, I really want to see the Democrat Party not disappear.
	He's wringing his hands like James Carville over what is happening with the Democrats.
	But he thinks their problem is that they just won't bow to the smartest man around, which is Elon Musk.
	He said, they're not left, they're not right, they're not Democrat, they're not Republican, they're technocrat.
	Here is Karp talking about that aspect, and then we'll talk about his book, which is called Technological Republic.
	Or if they could call it the technate, or they could call it the technocracy, all those words fit.
	Here's Alex Karp talking about Doge and how the Democrats know what's good for them.
	They'll go along with Doge.
	There's two revolutions happening.
	One is transparency and one is AI. Okay, so why is it that we do not know where every penny of our money goes?
	Like, how do you explain that to people?
	And by the way, slightly more technically, what large language models do is they mean you can go into the contracts and see exactly what happened.
	So in the past, we couldn't do this.
	Now we can.
	The right response is, we want this to happen.
	We want to be involved in the dialogue.
	The real response is, it feels like The people criticizing Elon don't want it to happen.
	And this is going to destroy those people.
	Alex Karp, the book is called The Technological Republic.
	We want to thank you for being here.
	You can come back tomorrow.
	Yeah, can you come back every day?
	We'd just love to talk to you every day.
	Well, think about what he was saying.
	You had this transparency revolution.
	It's part of it, right?
	And what he means is that we've never been able to go in before and Datamine, the way they can datamine.
	That's what Palantir does.
	That's what all this stuff is about.
	And so to be able to go in and grab the information and collate it and make sense of it and everything, and that's what you should really be afraid of.
	That kind of transparency, because that's going to be there in every aspect of our life, whether you're talking about continually auditing us.
	For the IRS or for something else, or continually auditing our speech and our attitudes and our political and religious beliefs.
	That's what this has always been designed for.
	Geospatial engineering was the fastest growing part of the intelligence community from the late 90s when they started creating these social media companies.
	They started creating these internet companies and everything.
	They were operating for free for many years.
	Where were they getting the money to operate?
	And it gets so big?
	Well, they're being funded by the U.S. government.
	Through the back door.
	Through these venture capital firms that were also created.
	But of course the CIA had its own venture capital firm, but they had the rest of these intelligence people sitting on the venture capital boards that were there.
	And so this has been the fastest growing part of the intelligence community.
	James Clapper came up through geospatial intelligence.
	That was where he rose quickly and got to the top.
	But this is the concerning thing.
	They've been saving the data forever.
	Say forever, you know, for the last 25 or so years.
	Everything that everybody does.
	That's what these big data centers that they've got, the one that's in Bluffdale, Utah, that's in the middle of the desert, using massive amounts of energy, massive amounts of water, more than you would use water and energy for a city.
	They're using that to store the information.
	So they can then go back in and collate it.
	And, of course, that's not the only data center that they've got.
	And they don't worry about the carbon footprint of those things, do they?
	Or the water usage or anything else.
	And now he says, what this is going to be done in our technological republic, we're going to have transparency.
	That means the government can go in and see everything that you're doing, is what he's saying.
	Transparency is not good in that respect.
	Everything that's being done with Doge, going in and finding all of the details and sorting it out, that's all being done by AI. It's not just a half dozen people that are there.
	Yeah, they're directing the AI and they're using the AI. And that's how this tyranny is going to roll out.
	It's going to be artificial intelligence and this technology that is going to be under the direction and the use of a few people for evil means.
	That's what this is truly about.
	And so his book, The Technological Republic, it came out about two weeks ago.
	The reviews, people are very, very excited about it.
	From the Palantir co-founder and the economist, the guy the economist called the, quote, best CEO. And his deputy, it is a sweeping indictment of the West's culture of complacency.
	One of Financial Times' most anticipated books of the year.
	And I played for you a clip that he had a couple weeks ago when he was doing an investor thing.
	And he's talking about how much he enjoys it, how much money they're making, and how they get to come after the people they think are bad guys.
	And he says, and yes, we kill some of them.
	That's what we're looking for.
	That's what these people are going to be doing.
	In this groundbreaking treatise, one of the tech's boldest thinkers and his longtime deputy offer a searing critique of our collective abandonment of ambition.
	The new arms race of artificial intelligence.
	Government, in turn, must embrace the most effective features of the engineering mindset.
	That have propelled Silicon Valley's success.
	Boy, this is a technocracy in a nutshell, isn't it?
	You've got to embrace this.
	You've got to become like us.
	Government needs to be technocrats, right?
	It needs to be a technocracy.
	That's what they're saying throughout all of this.
	Now, some of the comments on Reddit in response to this, well, a little bit more about the review here, this review.
	This book will also lift the veil on Palantir, I don't think so, and its broader political project from the inside, offering a passionate call for the West to wake up to our new reality.
	Our new reality?
	That they're in charge.
	That they can see everything that we're doing.
	Yeah, welcome to your new reality.
	First comment here.
	Person says, I just threw up a little bit.
	I don't want to tell you what these a-holes don't want to confront.
	That's whether or not the copyrighted stuff that they're using to train their AI is covered under fair use doctrine.
	Yeah, all their AI stuff is all based on theft.
	YouTube, that's their thing as well.
	They are stealing this stuff from people.
	So one person says, basically, What they started off with was a tool for intelligence agencies to scrape and to assemble personal data from individuals from different sources, like pulling your Facebook profile and connecting it to your Google Maps data, etc.
	Then, because of money, they thought it's a good idea to sell this to regular companies.
	There were some cases that caused a stir when managers abused the access to info that they basically had to spy on the private life of their employees.
	I tried to dig this up as I'm writing it and I can't find much about it.
	Very sus.
	These companies are making fortunes because they're making stuff no one with a moral spine in their body would consider to build.
	Peter Thiel is a libertarian who will stop at nothing in the pursuit of money and power.
	It should come as no surprise that the CEO of his company is right up there with the other tech nutjobs.
	And I wouldn't even call him a libertarian, right?
	One of the things that I thought was a good expression, of course, the Libertarian Party has now thrown out the non-aggression principle, but it was always, I do not support the use, the initiation.
	I do not support the initiation of force or fraud to achieve social or political goals.
	Well, they do support the initiation.
	Of force and fraud.
	They'll kill people.
	They'll befraud people.
	They'll steal to get what they want.
	So, do they spell out exactly what ideological confrontation they think is necessary?
	Because they refer to that as ideological confrontation.
	What confrontation do they think is necessary in the book?
	Or are they still nervous to say out loud that they think they inherently deserve to be rulers?
	And that they think eugenics is good, actually.
	Well, it's even worse than that.
	Because it's beyond eugenics.
	I mean, we're talking about transhumanism.
	We're talking about post-humanism.
	I mean, they're not trying to breed good humans.
	They're trying to breed the humanity out of us.
	Trying to merge us with machines.
	And that is Palantir.
	And that is Teal and Karp and Elon Musk.
	And you notice how, even though he's, well, I really like the Democrat Party, but they need to get with the program.
	They need to understand that we're going to rule them.
	They need to understand that Elon Musk has got tools that they can't comprehend, and he's going to control them.
	They better not oppose him.
	This is essentially what he's saying.
	So, Technology in the American Republic.
	The Technological Republic.
	The subtitle of the book is Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.
	Now, I'm not sure what he's saying about soft belief, but I think they've gone soft on any principles.
	They've gone soft on any principles of the West, Western civilization, Western civilization's Christianity and the principles that were there.
	Writing the artificial intelligence wave, Palantir's stock price soared about 370% over the last 12 months, and about 60% since the beginning of the year.
	This is one of the reasons why he was so gleeful as he was talking about killing people that got in his way.
	Karp has an unusual background for a tech billionaire.
	He's a graduate of Haverford College and Stanford Law School where he met Peter Thiel.
	He also earned a Ph.D. in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt.
	In 2002, he completed his dissertation in German.
	The formidable title of which, translated, is Aggression in the Life World.
	The extension of Parsons' concept of aggression by describing the connection between jargon, aggression, and culture.
	Seems like he's a kind of aggressive person.
	He also...
	He's aggressive.
	He wants to know everything that you're doing.
	He wants to map you out.
	He's proud of the fact that he kills his enemies.
	All that stuff.
	He says in the book, we can and we must do better.
	Do better than what?
	Do better than the society that we've got.
	We've got to do better than the Constitution.
	We've got to do better than individual liberty.
	We've got to have technocrats ruling us.
	He says, the software industry should rebuild its relationship with the government and redirect its effort and its attention to constructing the technology and the AI capabilities that will address the most pressing challenges that we collectively face.
	It is an existential thing for us to have AI that puts us in charge of everyone and everything that can be weaponized against the people in this country and can be weaponized against other countries as well.
	So this is their arms race that they're pushing.
	As one person sums it up, trust me, I'm a technocrat.
	That's right, boys and girls.
	There's a post-election sale on silver and gold.
	Trump euphoria has caused a dip in silver and gold.
	It's time to buy some medals with fiat dollars before they come to their sense is.
	Go to davidknight.gold to get in touch with the wise wolf himself, Tony Arterburn.

▲