Alex Bores

speaker

694 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 21 Apr

Alex Bores’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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The Ezra Klein Show · Why Are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores? · 21 Apr 2026 podcast

So I really wanted to be a lawyer, but every lawyer I spoke to told me not to be a lawyer.

Take time off in between, make sure that's what you want to do.

And so I went to a economic litigation consulting firm called Cornerstone Research, where we were preparing expert witnesses for trial.

And so we were doing economic modeling and playing with data, but I was interacting with lawyers all the time.

So building a skillset, but could see what they were doing.

And I found I really enjoyed the economic modeling.

I really enjoyed playing with data.

And also to that ideology, as I'm growing up, I'm a Democrat.

I believe that government can and should be a force for good.

But that also means we take on the burden of proving it.

And so I was a young believer in, I probably wouldn't put it in these terms back then, but expanding government capacity and making sure government's actually delivering.

And Palantir in 2014, right, in the Obama administration, was about how can we expand government capacity while protecting privacy and civil liberties.

And so at the time, it felt like very much the natural fit.

The Palantir story that was told to prospective employees...

and Alex Karp would do this a lot, was that he most feared fascism, that he had just finished being a German philosophy student and he was most afraid of fascism developing.

And fascism happens when government fails to provide for its citizens and they start blaming someone else for it.

And people then feed that hunger and that hatred.

And he couldn't do anything about the latter, but he could do something about government failing to deliver.

And so the reason that he wanted to do Palantir was after 9-11, after this real rise in a feeling of being unsafe, could we build the systems that would allow government to make people feel safe, but build it in such a way that was protecting privacy and civil liberties?

That was the pitch.

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