# The West weakens when it stops valuing its own culture

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/the-west-weakens-when-it-stops-valuing-its-own-culture/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Alex Karp](https://realalpha.app/builders/alex-karp/) · Alex Karp is CEO of Palantir. · Co-founded Palantir with Peter Thiel and has run it as CEO, selling data and AI software to governments.
- Host: [Chamath Palihapitiya](https://realalpha.app/people/chamath-palihapitiya/) · Founder & CEO, Social Capital · Led Facebook's growth team; his firm backed Slack and AI chipmaker Groq.
- Host: [Jason Calacanis](https://realalpha.app/people/jason-calacanis/) · Founder & CEO, LAUNCH · Early Uber angel; sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL; hosts This Week in Startups.
- Host: [David Sacks](https://realalpha.app/people/david-sacks/) · Co-founder & partner, Craft Ventures · PayPal's first COO, founded Yammer; White House AI & crypto czar 2025–26.
- Host: [David Friedberg](https://realalpha.app/people/david-friedberg/) · CEO, Ohalo · Founded The Climate Corporation, sold to Monsanto for about $1.1B in 2013.
- Show: All-In
- Episode: [Palantir CEO Alex Karp: Why the West is Destroying Itself, Data Empire, Skeptics, How to Win](https://realalpha.app/v/Y-IH7EVrBbQ/), Sep 9, 2025
- Moment: 22:19 to 30:45 of the episode (8 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/the-west-weakens-when-it-stops-valuing-its-own-culture/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/Y-IH7EVrBbQ/?t=1339

## Quote

> “the way you commit suicide in the in the West is you **stop believing that your particular culture** has something superior in it”
> — [Alex Karp](https://realalpha.app/builders/alex-karp/) at [25:21](https://realalpha.app/v/Y-IH7EVrBbQ/?t=1521) · All-In

## Takeaways

1. Karp points to Germany’s lost industrial and energy strengths.
2. He argues France and Germany have distinct strengths to build on.
3. He says meritocracy gives top performers a path to contribute.

## About this segment

Alex Karp argues that Western countries undermine themselves when they lose confidence in what makes their cultures distinctive. He links that loss of confidence to weaker meritocracy and economic decline.

From “Palantir CEO Alex Karp: Why the West is Destroying Itself, Data Empire, Skeptics, How to Win”, Sep 9, 2025. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/Y-IH7EVrBbQ/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[22:27](https://realalpha.app/v/Y-IH7EVrBbQ/?t=1347) to opening borders, declining fertility rates, and actual programs for assisted suicide in Canada, all of which may speak to the West's intention of committing suicide. Do you think the West generally is committing suicide? If so, why? What gets us here? I mean, you have to disambiguate America. Like, I walked around your audience. This isn't not an audience committing suicide. This is an audience fighting to win. And before I get to this question, and the one thing I would tell you guys is you're going to have to fight to win, because currently I'm one of the few people, other people on stage who speak up, you're going to have to speak up and explain to people why you have the right to win or it may be taken from you. And so you're going to have to, you're going to have to fight. And by the way, here I mean, I don't mean left-right here. Both parties need a little bit of kick in

[23:25](https://realalpha.app/v/Y-IH7EVrBbQ/?t=1405) the ass here. Like it's like, it's just, you know, we, we have a right to win. We need to win. And you have an individual right to fight to win in this country and it should not be taken away from you. And it could be if you don't stand up and tell people, no, your idea is ridiculous. And And I mean, the country, for those of you who don't know, I spent half my life, I wrote this PhD in Germany, and so it's a country, I know France reasonably well, actually.

[23:50](https://realalpha.app/v/Y-IH7EVrBbQ/?t=1430) But when I'm talking about Europe, Europe is obviously not Europe. You have East and West Europe, and Eastern European countries are very, very different than Western European countries. Denmark's very different. and the Nordics are very different, so, but generally when people in this country are in general talking about, you know, committing suicide, they're really thinking in their mind's eye, Germany. It's like, you have a country with, you know, arguably, you know, had, you know, pre-software AI, the best industrial base in the world, the best schools in the world, they have vocational schools, so like, you know, Germany, unlike, you know, they never neglected their working class, like, you have two different kinds of vocational schools in Germany, you have for like lower level and high level vocational training

[24:29](https://realalpha.app/v/Y-IH7EVrBbQ/?t=1469) in Germany puts you on the factory floor doing important things and you earn a real salary with real benefits your whole life and have rights. It has best healthcare, best life, and for those of you who embrace a lascivious lifestyle, by far the best, think about it. And so really the highest level of data protection, highest level of integrity, best position to win, and okay, suddenly you got, you know, the energy, they basically blew up the energy market, they blew up immigration, and they blew up essentially, you know, their tech scene.

[25:05](https://realalpha.app/v/Y-IH7EVrBbQ/?t=1505) And it's like, and now it's like very hard to ask and answer the question, what is the future? And as a kind of sideline diagnostic, and like Peter and I, who they should be calling every day on Speeddale, like they spend every day talking about us, for those of you who are German, you'll know like every single day three times a day is Peter's Darth Vader and I'm Lord Sith it's like and like meanwhile they should be calling us the way you commit suicide in the in the West is you stop believing that your particular culture has something superior in it like yes Germany screwed up a lot of stuff in World War II but to believe that there's nothing special, unique, and uniquely valuable about German culture is insanity. It's like complete insanity. And there's nothing wrong with saying you're proud to be German. Like in German, you're

[26:01](https://realalpha.app/v/Y-IH7EVrBbQ/?t=1561) literally far right of center if you're like, yeah, it's been stolt, stolt, just design. That will put you like, like I'm proud to be German. So like, like, like there are even at Palantir, one of the crazy things about Palantir is how German we like we we take everything to like every question to like the nth degree and then re-catenate the thing before we make a decision every single person at Palantir. So you know I get that you know Germany has this problem to some degree with being able to look in the mirror but what about France and Britain right they won World War II why what what's why are they pursuing the same policies? Canada. And the policy we're talking about just to be clear is just allowing an extreme amount of immigration well i'm trying to i'm trying to actually i'm trying to ask if there's a thread that connect declining but again

[26:51](https://realalpha.app/v/Y-IH7EVrBbQ/?t=1611) the jump off place here is for very different and very non-connected reasons they all decided there was nothing special about their culture right and and like and again france's would be even better example because they have a much better narrative they actually had a resistance it wasn't as big as people say, but it existed. France, you know, the crazy thing about LLMs is it should have been built and, I mean, the whole center of gravity should be in France. Like, the two best math cultures in the world are Russia and France. And, like, we hire ad nauseum from France. So, but France, they gave up on two things, and France actually might even be the better example. If you, in France, for those of you who are in French, France is religiously focused on meritocracy. So they have this one school you have to get into, it's all about math, and the reasons about

[27:40](https://realalpha.app/v/Y-IH7EVrBbQ/?t=1660) math is the socialists in France decided that having like verbal, high verbal IQ is a class-based thing. And so they religiously into meritocracy, and the whole definition of it is mathematical aptitude. France is complicated, you have far right, far left in between. Somehow, and in other countries, like, it's very hard to articulate in France why you think French culture is better than any other culture in Europe, from a French perspective.

[28:10](https://realalpha.app/v/Y-IH7EVrBbQ/?t=1690) And then, for example, concretely, if you want to build a product, if you build it in France, it should be absolutely mathematical and aesthetic. If you build it in Germany, it's going to have to be conceptual and manufacturing-based. You're going to have a different tech scene, a different way of organizing it. And then last, not least, and this is the thing we have to fight for the most, they become anti-meritocratic.

[28:33](https://realalpha.app/v/Y-IH7EVrBbQ/?t=1713) So, like, if you're in Germany or France and you're the best of the best of the best, you're going to wait 30 years before you have a real job. Why? Because... Why did they become anti-meritocratic? Well, there's, again, the people out there protesting or the people, the faculty members at Berkeley have taught them to protest. The... Yeah. A lot of strays for Berkeley. Well, we can pick on Stanford.

[28:58](https://realalpha.app/v/Y-IH7EVrBbQ/?t=1738) The Chancellor will be in a few hours. But they equate morally losing in the real world with winning immorally. And it seems like a crazy way to think because in the end everyone loses. Is that Christian value? And I ask this because I heard someone have a talk about this where the moral spectrum used to be strong and weak. cavemen, the strongest would survive and the weakest would die, and that was how we measured what was right and what was wrong. And then what became right and wrong was this notion of good and evil, turn the cheek, compassion, et cetera. I mean, there are many, many different schools of Christianity, and so even in this case, like Lutheran Christianity and Catholic French Christianity are basically not correlated. They're both Christian. What's special about America was Calvinism. Like, we are the most Calvinist culture in the world, and actually,

[29:57](https://realalpha.app/v/Y-IH7EVrBbQ/?t=1797) the protesters are anti-Calvinism. What does Calvinism mean? Calvinism celebrates success. De facto, almost everybody in America that is, whether you're Jewish, Muslim, Christian, the underlying backdrop of America is this Calvinist view. And the anti-Calvinist cultures of Europe, Lutheranism, other kinds of cultures, they do equate, like, you know, behind every great success is a great crime, is a famous Voltairian classic. And we don't have this in this country.

[30:28](https://realalpha.app/v/Y-IH7EVrBbQ/?t=1828) If this slips, you basically end up in a situation where everybody who is succeeding or is perceived to be in a group that is disproportionately succeeding ends up on the firing wall. And