The Path Forward: Combating COVID-19 with Palantir CEO Alexander Karp

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Transcribed by Celebrity#1609

D: David Ignatius

A: Alexander Karp

D: Alex, first I wanna ask you to begin by talking about the news that’s on every viewer’s mind,

and that’s the storming of the U.S. Capitol building yesterday. What are your own thoughts?

A: Well, you know, we began to build Palantir almost 17 years ago with a focus on strengthening

U.S. and Western institutions support democracy and make all of our lives better and by

reducing terrorism and increasing civil liberites and, you know, when I see what happened

yesterday and honestly when I watched the inflammatory tone of some of our elected leaders that

led to this, it’s quite concerning, and also depressing as a citizen of the U.S. and also someone

that’s been pretty actively involved in national security, and some of the more important parts of

protecting democracy it severely corrodes trust in the government, it damages the view that our

allies and very confident on allies have of the promise of American democracy. And I really

hope that all leaders of all parties get their act together. And there’s a disobedience, disagreement

that's crucial to our democracy, it’s what makes living in democracy so special but there's a line

where we begin trails that corrode the very institution that preserves this discourse and that line

was crossed. And those of us who play a crucial role in the enforcement of law especially need to

speak up and it's also something by the way, you know, the thought that America has to bolster

its defenses, if we're gonna have these kind of events it’s very hard to have strong national
security because the internal structure just won't support it and the charisma of the American

project will be tarnished and was tarnished by these events.

D: That’s a good description of the national security cost of what we paid for yesterday. Alex,

you’ve been a critic in many instances of Silicon Valley, it’s interesting, the big social media

companies, Twitter and Facebook, essentially withdraw their from Donald Trump, at least

temporarily, thinking it just wasn’t appropriate to make them available, what’s your own thought

about that, should social media companies be allowing this [unintelligible] of what courts have

found are false information by the President or should we say that’s enough, no more?

A: Well, you know, in general, first of all, Silicon Valley is in a difficult position because there’s

really been two phases from Silicon Valley, the first phase which helped us win WW2 which led

to our current freedom and liberty technology. Dual purpose technology primarily built for the

military repurposed for commercial utilization. And that Silicon Valley bolstered our nation. I

happened to believe the President crossed a really important line in this case and that we all have

to take, do what we need to do and we at Palantir would not support any actions of this kind. The

problem is Silicon Valley has become so divisive I worry that any action that they take might

end up bolstering these, this kind of [sic] transgression-like behavior however this what we saw

yesterday it’s a breaking point and for once I’ve been very critical of Silicon Valley as you know

we’ve moved our office to Denver I would say for once I’m largely supportive of Silicon

Valley’s actions.
D: That’s fascinating given the history we'll get into. Of your recent criticism of Silicon Valley, I

wanna ask you just one more thing Alex before we turn to Palantir and the specifics of what it

does. In the aftermath of the seizure, storming and seizure, for the time of the Capitol, the

Business Roundtable, very distinguished group of big American companies, some of the top

CEOs, Bradsmith, Microsoft, others, have issued a very strong statements, this Roundtable, have

essentially condemned what are called unlawful actions to challenge our political transition

.wWould you endorse these kinds of statements by the business leadership and join in the general

business insistence that we now proceed with an orderly transition of power?

A: Absolutely, and I would, I would think that look, there’s the business leaders as important

parts of our society, there are political leaders which are important parts of our society, there are

spiritual leaders that are important parts of our society, there are academic leaders that are

important parts of our society, and there are national leaders and former heads of services and I

think we're at a point with what happened where really everyone involved in the leadership

position needs to articulate what their position is I believe that we as business leaders also more

importantly just as people that may have influence because of accomplishments or who we know

take up a really direct open and firm stand. And I'm hopeful that if we're, you know, unified that

we’ll have a pretty significant impact on political leaders. You know I think just as a larger issue

and it's probably outside the bounds of what I should say but this, this is like there's a certain

monochrome of adult leadership necessary to run a significant organization of any kind, whether

it's a university, a newspaper, a church, a synagogue, a mosque, this is below that line and we

shouldn't tolerate it.

D: That is a strong statement and in my view not at all outside the line thank you for sharing it.

Let's talk a little bit about Palantir and what it does. You often like to stress what it doesn't do. It

doesn't own data, it's not in the business of sharing data, but it is in the business of analyzing big

data. And maybe you could just explain to us what this technology that Palantir applies to data is

all about. When somebody retains Palantir, becomes one of your customers, what are they

buying from Palantir?

A: Well, what they're buying, there’s what they're buying and there's what they're getting. What

they're in the end buying is a result based on their data, so that they can make a decision not that

we can make a decision and how they make the decision comes down to their level of technical

acuity. Some people use ML at the final mile, some people use data analytics, but what they're

actually buying is a platform built years before it was needed that would allow you to replace, or

in some place, some cases replace parts of your platform, that you would need to answer

seemingly simple questions. So as an example if you have hundreds and hundreds of data sets

and you have to ask a simple question of how many people can fit into this hospital in this

neighborhood. You've got to integrate all those data sets before you can ask and answer that

question. And then you have to have a series of software products and you may have three of the

software products but you don't have 14 of them. And so what Palantir does is we essentially

collapse the time needed from the time you realize that your infrastructure is not working to the

time you can ask and answer the question. And we did that by essentially predicting that times

before five or six years out before we built the product would be very different than when we

built the product. So, our product is used to maintain airplanes to help people drill for oil and gas

in the national security context. It powers most, most of the police intelligence work in Europe
and because of its data protection, but what you're really getting is an ability to replace or

augment the software products you have overnight, or within the context of a couple weeks, so

that you can ask and answer context and questions in a critical context either in the commercial

or the government context. And that that's that's how we ended up being the engine behind most

anti-terror institutions in the West and a number of the largest economic institutions in the west

and why Palantir is in 35 countries helping to mitigate the disaster incurred in the wake of the

Covid pandemic.

D: And before we ask you about how you apply this Palantir approach to understanding data to

current healthcare problems, I want to ask about Palantir’s origin story which as you said is in

the counterterrorism CT area. It's said sometimes about Palantir in print that your technology was

useful to the Obama administration and to the CIA under Leon Panetta in the hunt for Osama Bin

Laden. Let me just ask you, is that true?

A: Well you know Palantir, I mean it's one of those questions obviously when you run a

company like mine you're never allowed to answer, but what i can tell you is,you know,

Palantir’s stopped, disrupted some of the largest terror attacks you've never heard of and many of

the anti-terror events you read about are in fact the result not of Palantir but of the incredible

people that use Palantir all over the world.

D All right, well, we'll stick with that as an answer let's turn to the covid nightmare which is

something causing death and destruction around the world today and the way in which Palantir is

working with the department of Health and Human Services I think also with operation warp
speed to try to help get better analytics Alex as we look at the development of vaccines we're all

just extraordinarily pleased by how fast that that happened but as we look at the distribution

process seeming to break down we throw up our hands again what would Palantir be able to do

to help us, help HHS, in this period going forward? Distributing vaccines, getting the country

healthy again, preparing for the next pandemic.

A: Well, Palantir is involved globally in, it's the two places where most prominently involved in,

the U.S. and U.K. but a number of other countries. In allowing people who are doing the

planning to understand exactly what's happening on the ground, distribute PPE, so, for example,

which hospitals are overutilized? Which hospitals have capacity? Which hospitals need PPE?

Which ones have too much? which ones have too little? So, and that's and then on vaccine

distribution, most notably in the U.S. and the U.K., the Operation Warp Speed which uses

Tiberius, it is built on top of Foundry, uses…

D: Foundry is your basic Palantir infrastructure so our viewers won’t understand that.

A: Sorry. And what Foundry allows them to see and decide is they, it's essentially a dashboard

unifying the hundreds of data sets that make up the production of vaccines, the distribution of

vaccines up to the state level. So how many vaccines are produced, how many can be shipped,

and where do they go. The central issue in America, less so in England because they have a

centralized health care system is the delta between vaccines that are delivered to the state and the

actual doses that arrive in people's arms. And so we have a serious issue with that in America as

I think commonly known and was discussed by your guest yesterday that there's a roughly, a 12
million, 12 million delta between the vaccines the roughly 17 million vaccines delivered to states

roughly 5.4 administered. Palantir here brings those vaccines to the states and then there's a

question is what we as a society can do to resolve that problem. Now you know one of the things

that makes America particularly interesting and complicated and great is that States have a lot of

rights and they use local, they use local ways of distributing each one has a different

infrastructure. What I'm hopeful will happen especially once we get past these incredibly

discouraging and impressive events over the last couple days is the new administration will also

be in a position to have better discourse with states, states will begin to develop best practices.

That's what software could do, and what we obviously be willing to do, is to help them

administer the policies they develop more accurately quicker. One of the things that's super

interesting about software is it allows you to compress time. So, you know, we what which

should not be possible distributing we need to get roughly 300 million vaccines to America to get

hit hurt immunity is something that will only happen if we unify as a country and we use the best

technology, especially software available because the amount of vaccines per day is just

surpasses what we would normally be doing as a country. The the British distribution has certain

attributes we don't have because they're just more centralized and so they're… but in any case

what we're doing is providing a dashboard so that every single person involved in Operation

Warp Speed can actually track distribution, how much is being produced, where is it going and if

there's any disruptions between manufacturing and final handoff to the state.

D: So let me ask you a question that goes to the heart of what we're talking about here with

vaccines. Ask it to you as a data analyst, not a in a political sense, is it going to be possible to

have an orderly system for distribution of this vaccine or future vaccines and future healthcare
crises if we don't have in America a somewhat more centralized system so that we just have

better cleaner data and we know what's going on well?

A: Well, you know another way of answering your question is just [unintelligible], which I

would say which I think is unfortunately obvious, this will not be the last pandemic. And so you

know one of one of the things that's made American software companies dominant in the world

is that we look at the mistakes that we've made, that we're making, we try to figure out what they

were. We're fairly non-judgmental about them and we iterate so that the next time around were

dramatically more effective. Assuming that this will happen again, there's a whole series of

things we need to put in place. I mean just fatalities we all know but they're so large we forget

this is right now 361 some americans have died, that numberwithin the next couple weeks is

going to surpass the number of people that died in World War II, this is already a hundred times

larger terms of human life than what was inflicted upon us in 9/11. This is something that we in

the West cannot afford to address in a way that's better than this time. And so what would need

to happen now, there are lessons both in building software companies and doing cyber security

that are quite helpful first of all you need an unbroken chain between attribution. Where did the

pandemic begin? How did it begin? Under what conditions did it begin? That data has to be

something that is shared freely and examined internationally not just by America both so that we

understand it and as credibility that data has to be immediately shared with vaccine producers.

We probably need to figure out a way to use the most advanced computational technologies. We

have most advanced software practicalities to accelerate vaccine production and approval, as you

know, is a super important issue in America and broadly in the West. You have in all western

countries something like 30 percent of the population unwilling to take a vaccine. That's not just
an American issue by the way. It's roughly the same numbers in France, higher in France,

roughly the same in Germany and in England and to get here at immunity you need to get

probably to 80 percent. So we have a legitimation crisis on vaccines that is not primarily

technology and it can only in my view be solved by providing transparency in the actual

approval and after it's administered because otherwise we [unintelligible]. Another super hard

thing that we have to look at is: we do not want to pretend, or obviously attempt, to change the

basic way in which we live in order to get pandemics under control. And that makes vaccines

ever even more important because if you're going to expand civil liberties and fight pandemics

you're going to have to do that with vaccine and increase legitimacy. Software, the way in which

vaccines are developed, and honestly more credible political leadership, can actually make a

huge difference in that problem, but you really need all three. Because if the vaccine is delivered

too slowly then you have compounding math working against you. If the vaccine is delivered on

time, but people don't believe they will take it, you can't get to hurt immunity. And then in

democracies we need to convince people not force people. And so those, by the way, the element

of obviously analytics, data integration, ML, AI, will play a role in that whole chain, but they

play a role primarily in two ways: one, acceleration of time, and two, creating transparency. By

the way transparency is a specialized issue, specialized concept in software because you both

create transparency of what's happening in the data, but you can anonymize the people involved

in acquiring the data. And so that's obviously necessary in correspondence with our generally

held civil liberties.

D: Let's turn to an issue that has been a central one for you in an ongoing debate. You've had

really, with your colleagues, in Silicon Valley, and that's your feeling that in terms of values, that
there's a kind of breakdown between what you see in the Valley and what you think is is

appropriate in your S1 filing that accompanied some of the paperwork associated with going

public. You said “we seem to share fewer and fewer of the technology sectors values and

commitments”. You went on to say “we've chosen sides and we know that our partners value our

commitments”. And by chosen sides you mean you really chose sides with the United States,

your country, and with Western democracies as a group. Do you feel that other Silicon Valley

companies have failed to do that? And what advice would you give to the Google employee

who's uncomfortable working on project maven or some other Pentagon project to try to

convince him that that's a mistake?

A: There's a series of super important questions there. Just starting from the beginning, this

country and a lot of the norms that we cherish were built on economic prosperity and part

powered by our ability to develop technology that was useful for individuals. Not just useful in

making a couple of a small number of people on the west coast, rich. And so that you have a, I

would call, Silicon Valley One, which was the Manhattan Project, a lot of the technologies that

are even powering this call. So computer technologies, internet technologies, those were built by

the military and shared with humanity, both for America and the world's good. Consumer

internet, you can debate it back and forth, it's very hard to define what utility it has and I do in

part blame it for creating an enormously tribalistic America where people are ever more

convinced that their ever narrow opinion is the only one that matters, and that combined with

like i think great economic disparity in part because we're not investing enough in technology, I

think is responsible for some of the problems we have today, not all of them, and in no way

excusing the current behavior of the last couple days. So then I do think Silicon Valley has to ask
very simple questions and that I don't think everyone has to agree on the answer, but like, what is

your value proposition, actual value proposition to the average person in America and among our

allies in the world? Then you asked another set of questions which is a super subtle question, and

we have the same question at Palantir, but an employee, that for whatever reason, doesn't feel

that their valuable effort should support the military. And that that's a completely legitimate

opinion that should be part of the discourse. I would only say to that employee, as importantly to

the leaders of these companies, your company is worth hundreds of billions of dollars in part

because the U.S. government and the West protect your right to engage in international economic

behavior. You live in a system, you drive streets on our streets and we are prospering

disproportionately. And there's a, you know, you can't live in a country and not support it. Last

not least, I would point out to that employee that, and again without being, you know, there's no

you can't force someone to work against their conscience, but you can remind them America has

very serious ,very very competent adversaries that have a very different view of how the world

should work, and very different views of human rights and economic justice than most people in

America. And we are living in a world of complexity where we may need to defend ourselves.

Last not least, I would try to engage in a discourse around: What do you think the consequences

are going to be? Technologists realize that technology is non-linear, so that it's much more, AI’s

much more like a private maven, is working on, is much more like a nuclear bomb than a

machine gun, and if one side has a gun, and the other side has a nuclear bomb, the side that has a

bomb will often decide that their way of seeing the world is the way of seeing the world. And I

don't believe America is perfect. I've written a lot of critical things about the West and America

in my former years as an academic and I still believe some of those critical things. But I believe

that a world order that is defined by, broadly speaking western democratic norms, the rule of
law, fairness, separation of church and state, a general concept that things will be adjudicated in

the court that will be followed, is a better system than a system that doesn't have those things and

a country which does not have the equivalent of software nuclear warfare because its best people

won't work on it is a country that will not be able to have engaged in dialogue of equals on these

very important issues. Last not least, what I would say to the head of Google or whomever i was

talking to, is you know that America has the best software production in the world. You also

know that if we do not work on it, the people who are the very best, that countries that are not as

good at this will win. We have the best people, does not end the best companies, it does not mean

we will have the best military technology if none of us work on it. And by the way it's worthy of

remembering this is not even an option in any other country, and not just in America. No French

company can opt not to work with the French government, it's not, and there are reasons for this

and I think one of the things and as some of your viewers know I gave to Biden and one of the

things I'm hopeful about is that there'll be a less politicized environment. And a lot of these

problems are actually only solved where people, a wider swath of people are willing to actually

say we don't agree on some issues but we do agree on these issues and we're actually going to put

our technology, our spirit, our efforts together and actually do something that can work. And in

the national security context, especially technologists who know this is a non-linear situation

need to be involved because they understand, this is the whole reason their companies are

dominant. Because you can't compete with a world-class software company if you're not world

class.

D: So, Alex Karp, I want to thank you for the broadest ranging conversation on subjects that

really matter, a lot of what we're just talking about now goes the question of the United States
and China, I'll ask you to come back, I hope before long and talk about how the Biden

administration is doing with some of these technology issues but thank you for joining us today

on Washington Post Live.

A: Thank you for taking this afternoon.