The Philosopher in the Valley Quotes

“I fantasized about being norm-conforming”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“that’s he”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“A few months after the London earnings call, a viewer asked CNBC’s Jim Cramer for his thoughts about Palantir. Cramer recommended selling the stock if it got back above $10 and said, “They are just not a company that I think can be relied upon. When they appear on TV, they make me feel like it’s just a big joke and I’m not in on it.” Following Palantir’s third-quarter earnings call, in November 2022, another viewer asked Cramer about Palantir. Cramer cut him off before he finished his question. “Sell!” Cramer bellowed. He then chastised Karp for using obscenities during earnings calls. “By the way, you don’t curse, especially when you’re doing lousy. Hey, maybe you can”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“Scott Galloway, the influential podcaster and a New York University professor, slammed Palantir as a “shitty” business and said it had “all the calories of Facebook (scaled sociopathy) with none of the great taste (profits).” He later told CNN that Palantir was “crap being flung at tourists to the unicorn zoo.”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“Adding to the frustration was the sense that most of his colleagues were either blind or indifferent to the damage Google’s algorithms were doing. “I was in this world of really smart people who were mostly oblivious to this stuff”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“Stanford graduate who had double-majored in philosophy and physics”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“But when I interviewed Thiel at his office in Los Angeles in December 2019”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“Some software companies specialized in front-end products—the stuff you see on your screen. Others focused on the backend”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“From its inception”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“To land a position at Palantir”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“Exceptions were made”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“Karp had no use for the Beckettian “fail better next time” ethos because there was no guarantee that there would be a next time”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“There was nothing utopian about Palantir; if anything”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“From the start”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“a program whose purpose was to use the most advanced technologies on the market to build what amounted to a massive dragnet that could help protect the country from terrorism. It was called Total Information Awareness”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“9/11 was”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“At some point—he can’t recall exactly when—it occurred to Thiel that PayPal’s anti-fraud algorithms could perhaps be repurposed to help the government thwart future acts of terrorism.”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“In response”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“Girard was best known for his theory of mimetic desire”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“the question that Karp wanted to explore—what turns ordinary citizens into perpetrators of genocide and accessories to mass murder? And Karp’s timing was fortuitous”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“The philosopher Jürgen Habermas was arguably the preeminent European public intellectual of the postwar era”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State