FULL INTERVIEW: Alex Karp on AI, Job Loss, and the Future of Work

Well, we are joined by Alex Carp. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Whatever is comfortable for you, you can do hot.

Hold out here.

Keep your head on, it's cold.

I feel like this is an average day for you.

You're always on skin, very cold.

We should have done it.

Yeah, we need to get, we're close to getting skis.

Look, you know, we're supposed to do something physical.

It's starting to stare.

It's starting to stare.

Oh, I like this one.

Now I feel like a newscaster.

I feel like, oh, yeah.

This is good.

You're like eight feet tall.

People don't realize that.

Yeah, he's not standing up because it'd be like he's like captured for all of us.

Last time we talked to you, I think you were doing four minutes on the dead hang.

Oh, what's it up to now?

Five oh five.

Five oh five.

What about in the cold?

We need to have a special minute for that.

Five oh five.

For those of you who haven't done a dead hang, first of all, go do it.

Why is it important?

Well, there are very few things that are proxy indicators that are accurate for health.

Yeah.

It's like dead hang, farmers walk, body weight, and VO2, or the three ones that count.

Okay.

I don't think anyone really...

We've got one rep match bench press.

That's all I focus on.

Okay, well, he's not just like...

I feel like as long as I have a really impressive bench press, I'll live.

I got short but glorious lines.

Yeah, I don't know.

Do you say something about that?

Yeah, they sound...

Who wants to live a long, glorious life?

When you can live a glorious short life.

Yeah, I think that's what they tell you before they give you a bad salary.

A little bad salary.

No, that's like...

I think it's like yeah, it's hard to like...

My social life is so great, I only have a bot, but I enjoy it.

Yeah, it's kind of logic.

No, but no, it's...

Dead hang is important.

Dead hang is crucial.

Okay.

And you really need to go work on it.

Especially anyone watching your podcast is likely now performed.

Yeah.

You want to have something...

You know, you want to be able to do something with that outperformance.

Yeah, like dead hang.

Like, yeah, well, the dead hang may be a proxy indicator.

For all I think you could do with the outperformance, you know?

But, you know, that everyone is...

Yeah, not no one is like 6.9, you know?

You may not need a dead hang, but the rest of us...

Well, I can cheat because most of the ball of bars, you can't stand on the ball.

Yeah, that's right.

And I can hold forever.

You can't stand forever, yeah, that's right.

That's right.

But when you're not dead hanging,

what should people be doing with the new coding agents?

How important is it to learn to code?

How important is it to...

Look, there are two...

Everybody's worried about their future, but there are basically two ways to know

you have a future.

One, you have some vocational training, okay?

So it's like, or two, you're neurodivergent,

and when I say neurodivergent, I mean, broadly defined.

Like, your guys are sitting here.

You could have had a corporate tool job.

Yeah.

You could have been like, I don't want to pick on Goldman,

but like, just say, you know, like a job.

I applied there, they turned it down.

Okay, well, yeah, I did work it.

Oh, whatever, he was like, you could have a job

where you're like a copy to your fail.

It's like, yeah, no, actually, maybe they didn't know the right way to test.

Yeah, like it's like, yeah,

they were like, like, you know, hey, whatever,

I'm not picking on one or the other, I'm just saying,

you, you know, like, you are probably here.

You think you're here because of it, but it's actually,

you probably wouldn't be able to do that shit,

because there's like, it's the same thing.

Sit down in class and learn some bullshit.

Like, and you just regurgitate it.

Like, that's not a valuable thing.

If you are actually have insights into anything,

and you have real technical expertise,

like, you know, you can look at a company,

but you actually can look at it because you know

something about how these things work,

or something about clients work.

You know, then all the other stuff that used to be precious,

like being able to do low end coding,

being able to do low end lowering,

being able to do low end reading and writing.

I mean, this is like, I feel like Odin came down

and was like, I'm going to make the world just right for dyslexic.

It's like, yeah, Odin has come down from it,

or Lockhe has come down and said,

you know what, Carp, you suffered so much as a kid,

I'm just going to make the whole world.

Everyone else could suffer.

I don't want that.

It's like now, but it's really an inversion.

Like, everybody with like the normal shape skills

are dyslexics because like, the meaning,

the thing they can do that used to be valuable

is not so valuable.

The thing that they need to learn to do is like,

be more of an artist, look at things from a different direction,

be able to build something unique.

I think, and you see this on the battlefield,

like, it went in the most underappreciated things

about fighting a war, which is the,

I mean, there are basic core things civilizations do,

like build technology for war,

is every society fights differently,

every component of the society fights differently.

And when like, American is allies,

we do not even approach these problems in the same way.

What it makes America lethal,

more so than any currently country,

is like a combination of obviously the technology,

which we're super interested in

and believe or paying a huge part in.

But it's like 20 years of like,

operators figuring out what worked,

not what worked in a manual,

like what worked in reality.

Also, even selection, if you look at the selection of the people,

like you meet like tier one operators,

they don't look anything like what people would think.

It's not like the movies, they're like these,

like these, like this big and like,

you know, it's like because we have,

we have, we have, we have, we have,

specialized ways of doing that.

All that is crazy valuable.

As a proxy indicator,

people who are getting their news from you

are just likely to massively outperform.

People are getting their news from something

that's a regurgitation of you gotta vote

for one party or the other.

And then the real problem we have in society

is not your listeners or volunteers, customers,

or our partners is like,

well, what happens to everyone else?

Are they gonna lynch us?

Because like that's the real problem.

Like these products, like what we're building,

like our agents mean that like the most,

I mean, the most powerful people in the Democratic Party

are highly educated female voters.

And these technologies, like they love,

they, I mean like, yeah, I actually get along

with all these people on private

and there's a public dispute,

but like largely, I've talked to Dario Verne

and it's like, yeah, you love one company

because they're not pro-Trump,

that company's taking your job.

How are you gonna feel about that company

when you find it, you have no job?

What do you think the Republican party's gonna do

to products that do not support a military?

What do you think the Democratic party's gonna do

to products, even if you're voting for them,

that are taking away the jobs

of every one of your constituents

and saying, oh, people are gonna love you so much

and you're gonna be poor.

By the way, we love you so much.

We're gonna give you a little handout

once a month.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So apply that to the SaaS apocalypse narrative.

The enterprise SaaS, there's an idea that

the first jobs that we'll be taking

might be the enterprise software products

that exist, haven't really innovated, have locked in.

No.

Yeah.

If you, the thing that these technologies do

is they also make it harder to lie about,

this is part of the political run.

If something's not creating value,

or something's not working, or there's corruption,

you can't lie about it.

And nobody believes that all software companies

actually create value.

I mean, the famous thing that we all learned

was that we rejected, that you were learned

and people taught you,

it's like your software company is supposed to give

the client a feeling they're getting laid

while they're getting fucked.

Now, if that's how your products actually are,

you are, now it's you are gonna get fucked.

And this is gonna happen so quickly.

And the simple test for people who are looking

this is, does this product, or in our case,

we were never pure software.

We're actually a hybrid of humans, FDs,

augmented humans, so AIFDs, and then orchestration,

and then, and essentially what we would call primitives,

like taking the tribal knowledge of institution,

coding it into logic, and then using that

to be extended in LMS, okay.

But we don't have to explain that to our clients.

So there was always this,

oh, is Palantir a consulting firm?

Is it all just people?

Is there any real software?

I feel like that narrative went away.

Oh, no, no, no, they couldn't invest in us

because we were a service desk company.

Yeah, exactly.

And now it's like, but is actually having that service.

No, of course, no, no, no, it's not better.

It's crucial.

It's crucial.

It's crucial.

Like, all these places that made fun of us,

they're running around and trying to get FDs, of course.

Getting an FDE is like, yeah, it's like, yeah,

it's not as easy as it sounds

because you have to know how to manage it,

where to put the person, how to extract value,

and then you need all these products

that augment the FDE.

What are those products?

Ontology, foundry, FDE, AI, things that we've built.

So the value of the business

is not a monolithic code base that never changes.

It is the people.

It is the deployment is the relationships.

Is that how you're thinking about the business these days?

Well, actually, the way I'm telling you,

like when you walk around here, they only care,

they don't care about any of that.

What they care about is you transform my business

in three months.

It would have taken three years

and I would never have happened.

Now that's what they care about.

Now then there's a question of how do you do that?

And that is a concatenate artistry.

Select client, select where you would start.

Select ways in which, at innovate in ways they would not accept.

Innovate in places they do not understand

you should innovate.

Learn to manage these very complex, by the way,

it's not just culturally complex, it's tribal knowledge

and much of that tribal knowledge is in rules

that they have to apply because they're all sorts

of rules about manufacturing, hospitals,

or rules that are applied that they're not saying they apply,

laws, all sorts of regulatory things on top of all that.

All that has to happen very rapidly.

So you would need, and without going into details,

I'm in the middle of every single one of these discussions

in almost every breakdown.

It's like people do not understand how institutions work.

They don't understand how the software would work,

they don't have the LLM would work,

they don't have the product that would actually work

in that environment and they still, at the end of the day,

are not saying we're going to charge on value.

How do institutions work?

Why is it that we get these genius models

that are 160 IQ, they can solve incredible math

and they're not just like everywhere all the time?

What is slowly coming up?

I mean, the simple version is, they're 160 against A test,

but the test isn't, it's a compact nation,

the simple math would be, it's 160 on one test,

but you've got to pass differentiated tests

over a long period of time, so it's 1000 tests.

So de facto, by the 50th step, it's zero IQ.

But then there's also, there's also, yeah,

I mean, it's insane.

Like, no, I love when I hear about all this,

it's going to replace and then I get to our clients

and they're like, could we have more?

We don't even have the capacity.

It's like, it's a surreal thing.

Like, would you guys like to be FDs?

Because we need some help.

If you're in the audience, completely seriously,

and you're aligned, broadly speaking,

with America is a great country,

enough to agree about anything else.

And you're out there and you're technical or just smart.

Apply, we need you.

Okay, America is a great country,

put aside Democrat, put aside Republican,

is democracy the correct formulation

to decide the future of AI.

Should the American people be voting

to decide that be handled by private companies?

Now, America, well, it depends, like, yeah, great.

So in the war fighting context,

the Department of War has to be the arbiter

of what gets deployed.

But as a citizen, I vote for the Department of War.

Exactly, yeah.

Okay, but I'm just saying,

so I want to split domestic and foreign

because we in this country have God-given rights,

literally given to us by a higher being,

this right-of-free expression,

which we're exercising all the time

and is very important to us.

There's a second amendment, which I exercise.

I shoot very well.

I would encourage you guys and other people

to listening to avail yourself of this second amendment.

Yes.

It was not, it is there to protect ourselves

in case the First Amendment fails.

That's the reason it's there.

There's a fourth amendment,

which is essentially we have a right to privacy.

Okay, we have those rights.

Aversaries trying to kill us in Iran

do not have those rights.

And I don't believe, I've never believed,

in extending our rights to foreign countries

that are adversarial to us.

I don't even really believe,

I don't like, you know, in Germany,

where I lived half my life,

they don't have a First Amendment.

They don't believe it.

And by the way, they've never believed in a First Amendment.

They have other rights.

That's great.

I'm not going to dispute that,

but I want our rights here.

In this country, if you're going to tell the American people

you're building what is clearly a dangerous technology,

it's dangerous because it will likely take your job,

especially if you're white collar.

So if you're voting, you know,

you're highly educated.

Have you flipped on that in the last like six months or so

because I think the last time we talked,

your general mindset was like high agency,

highly productive people will be able

to continue to leverage the tools to deliver value

with an organization.

Yeah, I think if you're neurodivergent in high agency

and you're highly educated, that's great.

But if you're not neurodivergent

and you're like lawyer 14506, that's a problem.

Okay, but let me get to this in their length,

but it's okay.

On domestic stuff,

we have rights that are not subject to majority rule.

Like the majority can vote against us

having forth amendment rights.

I want that litigated at the Supreme Court

because we are not, our constitution is not about majority,

it's actually about the rights of the minority

and it's our right.

All I bet you three of us have opinions

that are very much in the minority.

That we want to be able to say,

at least in the privacy of our own home, right?

And so that they're real issues.

I'm super sympathetic with restrictions

around the use of these products in a domestic context,

even though it's funny.

People out there, every conspiracy theorist thinks,

yeah, it's insane.

I'm the only one.

Conspiracy theorist, you may hate this,

but there's one person protecting your rights

to be a conspiracy theorist that actually

has a seat at the table and that person is me.

You may not want to hear that truth,

but it is fucking true and maybe do a little more reading

before you pontificate on your absurd

and obviously you'll have formed

in many times stupid opinions.

Okay, so because you're attacking the person

who's protecting you, idiot, it's like fucking so stupid.

Dude, dude, use one of the bots to correct your opinion.

It's like, I'm being attacked online now.

It's like, Dr. Carp is anti-progressive

because of my whole life.

I'm just telling you the truth,

these things are gonna take your job.

Okay, so then, but in the war fighting context,

and it's the primary justification for these proxies

has to be it's, they're two relevant powers now,

us and China.

This is a half, half not world.

It's going to be either us or them,

it's basically deciding the world order.

Because like these other countries,

I mean, India will get involved,

maybe the Arab, non-Arab Middle East,

but currently on the trajectory we're on now,

there are two places where these things are being developed

and deployed, it's us or them.

But I'm not particularly, you know,

I'm not out to hurt China,

I'm just out to, I think we should win.

I'm not trying to hurt them.

And in that context, you can't say,

we're not gonna do X, Y and Z.

I mean, I give you examples, but like,

there are data sets that are publicly available

in the US market that should,

I don't think should be used against you and me

in law enforcement context,

more than with the help of, say, AI agents and anthology.

Yeah.

But if you don't use it on the battlefield,

you obviously, Iran's gonna use them.

Wait, you don't think they can go online

and buy those products?

Yeah.

And by the way, without going into somewhat class of idea,

those things are in combination with other things,

lethal.

Like, a lot of people who want to hurt America

on the battlefield end up dead

because of our ability to aggregate

and then figure out what's going on

in the battlefield before they can figure out

what we're doing.

And so like, I am very much in favor of it

for moral reasons, but I'm also in favor of,

is like, I don't know how else you explain

this to the American people.

We're gonna take your job.

We're gonna take away, you're gonna

eviscerate your ability to have money and power,

but that we're not gonna defend you on the battlefield.

It just seems like, yeah, well, they're gonna,

you know, it's actually gonna happen

that nobody believes me in tech,

but there's gonna be a movement in this country

that gets very strong, very quickly

to nationalize these things.

First, it's gonna be, take away our money,

the billionaires of people.

You may not have heard that.

Super evil.

And if you take away their money,

it'll help poor people.

That's really important to understand.

Making rich people miserable is the only way

to help poor people.

That's obviously true.

Say, once you've learned that,

the next thing you're gonna learn is,

we have to nationalize it.

They're gonna, they're gonna quote you on that.

Well, they're gonna quote you on that.

Well, so, so, I mean, it sounds like you're,

you're closer to Dario on, you know,

potentially 50% of early stage white color job loss,

like you're aware that there's a risk,

at least everyone's aware of it.

You're aware of it.

Well, what do you see as the solution?

Well, first, we just have to,

I mean, well, I mean, the obvious thing is,

okay, we can't have any migration here.

Like, how are we gonna create more jobs?

Like, it's like, you have to,

the problem and fairness,

not that people wanna be in the business

of being fair to policy leaders,

but that we are dealing with technologies

that will determine the policy decisions.

So you can't just pretend they're not happening.

Like, step one is, like,

we, it's going to be hard,

but possible to make this society work,

given that transforming it requires these technologies.

Like, I really like the people who are here.

They're not here because they like me.

Like, maybe they're here for my jokes,

high quality in some cases,

but it's like a long trip and we're here

and I'm the only one who likes this weather,

is great weather.

I brought it for you, but they're here

because they've seen their business being transformed

and this is happening in America more than a,

so we have to win those battles,

but the costs are gonna be very high.

And so you have to work back from,

okay, the costs are gonna be very high.

We can't put oil on the fire.

It's like, you know, it's like, well,

getting jobs for all Americans is gonna be hard

and people maybe who become Americans,

but it's like you have to have different policies

around migration, you have to different policies

around how we train people.

Like, currently, if you're a young kid in high school

and you're neurodivergent,

they're literally changing into your chair

and feeding you medication

so you can have skills that are not valuable.

Yeah.

Like, it's so, it's like,

and then we'll probably over time have to have

like a discussion of like, yeah,

if you go into this career, you're not gonna have a job.

Like a really honest discussion about that.

These are the places where you will likely have a job.

And yeah.

What, you know, it seems like we, as a country,

we'll probably head down a more European path

where it is becomes very, very difficult

or near impossible to let people go.

Do you think that's correct?

So you mean in China, in Germany,

it's much harder to lay someone off?

And that does impact, I mean,

that does impact the growth of companies.

But I think many Germans would argue that's probably.

Yeah, you know, Germany's, I mean,

I'll answer your question.

Germany's interesting place.

I did this thing in German,

where I basically told the truth,

which you're not allowed to do in Germany.

It's like, you know, it's kind of really bad situation

and the economy sucks, the migration things,

the complete disaster and the energy situation

is like compounds everything.

And I got thousands of people literally saying,

thank God someone's told the truth.

And there are a lot of people like you guys,

young people, building things that feel hampered

and are correct to feel hampered.

I think the American version, if we're not careful,

is not gonna be the German version.

I think it's gonna be hang the rich.

I think it's gonna be not protect everybody else.

I'm gonna be like, look, this is too dangerous

and we're gonna hang the rich,

but not really help the poor.

And in fairness to the German version,

like, you know, German, like health insurance,

insurance, all that stuff, it works.

Like I was poor in Germany for like a decade.

And like I had the best life on the planet.

Like it was like being poor in Germany

is like being better than being rich here

and so on some days.

Basically policies that lift the floor, re-education, train.

Well, you want to do what we could do here.

We, the things we could adopt from Germany are,

Germany has three high schools, two are vocational.

One is academic.

It's better education.

Better, programmatic, vocational, vocational.

It also has a bad, like a weird vibe here.

Like vocational training in Germany is very technical.

Like the people building the cars at BMW

or even in the French version Airbus,

like very complicated jobs.

They didn't go to college.

They went to a very, very high-end high school.

And they come out without any debt.

And that stuff is really valuable.

So if you want to, you have to completely transform

our educational system and go very young

into like training people to do things.

You also need to change our testing system.

Like different forms of intelligence

are all of our tests are built around things

that were valuable in the industrial revolution.

It's like you want to pull out all the dyslexics,

all the neurodivergence.

Everybody who can't sit or needs to build

or wants to build have to go into a separate slot of like,

yeah, we should have gotten you before.

You got turned down a Coleman.

And like said, this is like, that's a waste of your time.

You could be building something important.

And what else goes, it would be a part of the good outcome?

Well, the most important part of the good outcome

is we show our adversaries, you can't fuck with us.

And we're the best way of the best military in the world.

I hope I believe we're doing that right now.

On the good outcome side, we go around.

And then on the commercial side,

we go to all these high infrastructure,

hospitals, manufacturing, all these things,

complicated infrastructure.

And we AI enhanced all of them.

So the products are legitimately the best more.

And we rebuild manufacturing in this country.

A big problem for us, including on the battlefield

is our manufacturing just is not up to where we have to be.

And that, by the way, requires rescaling humans.

And we're doing this all over the place.

I mean, the guy writing a lot of the scripts

for the target of these people,

they're like high school college grads,

the people building batteries,

and all these things using our products.

These are high school college grads.

There's a lot of opportunity there.

But one of the things I told the Germans,

and I would say to us is I was like,

in Germany, you have to call it a crisis.

We do need like, this is a crisis moment.

America is in tomorrow.

It's not going to look like it looked at all.

Or we're going to have radicalism on right or left.

The problem, the danger is if we don't do these reforms,

you are going to get the pitchforks.

Because then the only solution people are going to have

is, well, let's go after the unlikable rich people

and tech, especially AI tech.

And then, but then what can work is, yeah, close the borders.

Keep them closed.

Start doing huge evocational efforts.

Change how we test aptitude.

Like so we have an accurate diagnostic

of where you could be slotted.

Be ruthless and like, you know,

it's like in certain, find out new ways to test

and do ruthless testing and slotting.

And then also go around to universities

and just, I mean, you know how,

when you like, you want to smoke a cigarette,

it's like, this cigarette may be harmful to you.

Maybe we should be putting that in universities.

This university, this, this your university

is harmful for your investment, you know, I'm libertarian.

You want to go to university?

This student debt may be harmful to your future money as well.

For your personal life, explain to someone

you got to have $1,000 in debt, $1,000 in debt.

I mean, maybe if you're 69, you can get away with that.

But the rest of us have to provide.

That's funny.

Help me square this idea.

You were talking earlier today about

people misunderstanding your business.

And yeah, what's it like to read about your business?

Oh, I mean, first of all, it's,

I mean, the part, I hate it.

But then the part I love is,

and it's like your value is pretty directly convergent

with people's inability to understand what you're doing.

Yeah.

It's like all these technologies

are potentially commodifying everything.

Yeah.

Okay, so if you are a business that is, you know,

not services, not product, but both,

but also works on tribal knowledge on data

and every single business you make is individual.

And so, yeah, that's a crazy valuable business.

This is in a lot of industries where if the broader business

community doesn't understand your business,

you might have a short report,

but you'll have a way less competition

because people aren't copying you.

Because they don't understand a fight.

It's impossible to copy certain, like,

and we all, we neglect this, like, you know,

almost, like, you even see it culturally,

like luxury products dominated by the French,

watches dominated by the Swiss,

currently certain kinds of war fighting dominated by America.

And it's like, it's very hard for people to eviscerate

these cultural advantages, and our products augment that,

which makes it, you know,

augments the differentiated specific

over the generalizable.

And that's where literally all the value's going to go.

And this is going to be like a waterfall.

And that's the problem with a lot of software companies

that it's like product A, B, C, T.

But then when you read it,

it's like one of the more depressing things

that you guys probably confront,

but it's like a market, huge market opportunity for you.

It's like, where are the experts?

Like, it's like, you know, it's like, you know,

you hope and pray, like, I'll tell you the funniest thing

about my life now, and people internally know.

Now, almost every day, I'm like, wait a minute.

I'm the adult in the room here.

It's like everywhere I go.

It's like, it's like, wait a minute.

I like, and it's like, it's like,

and it's so, it's surreal when you read about these things,

but it used to really frustrate me,

but now I kind of just think, well,

like I can't believe we're still viewed as crazy.

It's like, everything we're doing is the only thing

that's where I mean, like, I don't want to,

like, spend a lot of time on our baller,

essentially baller numbers from last year,

but it's like, you know, clearly our shit works.

Clearly nothing is working at that level.

And you would think they would take,

like, I don't know, 10 minutes and think,

okay, well, the thing I believed,

and I thought it would work, didn't work at all.

This thing I thought would be seen

is like a rule of 127 when like, no one,

like 40 is considered like, but they don't,

and then, yeah, but it's sometimes frustrating, honestly,

the hard part actually is, I kind of view it

as a feature internally, we get these bright eyed kids,

so it's so funny.

I mean, we get the best people in the world,

but you know, just like I was probably a 21,

they're very romantic, it's like,

but why does the adult not understand this?

It's like, but the adult expert tells me,

it's like, I don't know when you guys had to drop the shoe

moment and you realized that like,

the adults are like, you know, on crack or something?

Like, yeah, last question.

Would you rather have 10 million dollars

or access to chat GPT in 2012?

It's a viral question, it's going viral right now.

I have to choose one of the other ones.

I mean, okay, I'm just, I don't think it needs,

I don't think it's hard to answer, I don't think it needs to be.

But I can have my social life in grad school.

There we go, that's on your pitch.

How about a new pick?

We just have to ask you, it's like, you know,

it's like, great, I'm going to take something I valued.

Oh, okay, yeah, the most valuable thing.

Social life in grad school.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

Thank you, that's a great time to have you.

We'll talk to you soon.