Palantir CEO Dr. Alex Karp on his PhD: “I went to Frankfurt and got a PhD in Neoclassical Social Philosophy, which is a fancy way of saying—a quick path to being unemployed.”

.@PalmerLuckey: American companies don't actually have engineers anymore. "American companies have been hollowed out." "We're not teaching engineers how to be engineers anymore." "We're not teaching designers how to actually design things to be manufactured." "We're teaching them how to be high-level design shops that put together a design package, that gets sent to the real engineers in China—and they actually figure out how to do the work." "People are turning into architecture astronauts." "They pick components, and they put them in a nominal layout." "But the real work of—how am I actually going to put this together? How am I going to build a manufacturing line to make this? How am I going to need to figure out how to do the one, two, three, four, five different revisions of this board to pass radio emissions and interference standards? That's all done in China. So they are the real engineers." Via @HooverInst

Alex Karp says Palantir will "take money out of our pocket" if it helps the US: "We are highly monogamous in our work." "The only thing we put above [a customer] is US national security." "We prioritize US war fighters over everything else." "When we believe or know that the US war fighter is in danger, we put the whole company against it."

Alex Karp says the reason Palantir is so unique is because of their willingness to be "non-mimetic": "When the whole world said software had to be worthless—we built platforms that worked." "When the whole world said you couldn't extend it with FDEs—we built FDEs." "When the whole world is saying build AI slop without an ontology that allows you to put truths into the ontology and produce actual results—we stuck to our guns." "And what did we get? We got these results."

“If there was a private company that had the same monopoly that USPS does, and they were using it to send 100lbs of junk mail to every American every year—there’s no way they’d survive.” “They’d be regulated out of existence.” — @PalmerLuckey with @joerogan