
The Technological Republic
Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West
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Narrated by:
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Nicholas W. Zamiska
About this listen
INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A cri de coeur that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies.”—The Wall Street Journal
From the Palantir co-founder, one of tech’s boldest thinkers and The Economist’s “best CEO of 2024,” and his deputy, a sweeping indictment of the West’s culture of complacency, arguing that timid leadership, intellectual fragility, and an unambitious view of technology’s potential in Silicon Valley have made the U.S. vulnerable in an era of mounting global threats.
“Not since Allan Bloom’s astonishingly successful 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind—more than one million copies sold—has there been a cultural critique as sweeping as Karp’s.”—George F. Will, The Washington Post
Silicon Valley has lost its way.
Our most brilliant engineering minds once collaborated with government to advance world-changing technologies. Their efforts secured the West’s dominant place in the geopolitical order. But that relationship has now eroded, with perilous repercussions.
Today, the market rewards shallow engagement with the potential of technology. Engineers and founders build photo-sharing apps and marketing algorithms, unwittingly becoming vessels for the ambitions of others. This complacency has spread into academia, politics, and the boardroom. The result? An entire generation for whom the narrow-minded pursuit of the demands of a late capitalist economy has become their calling.
In this groundbreaking treatise, Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska offer a searing critique of our collective abandonment of ambition, arguing that in order for the U.S. and its allies to retain their global edge—and preserve the freedoms we take for granted—the software industry must renew its commitment to addressing our most urgent challenges, including the new arms race of artificial intelligence. The government, in turn, must embrace the most effective features of the engineering mindset that has propelled Silicon Valley’s success.
Above all, our leaders must reject intellectual fragility and preserve space for ideological confrontation. A willingness to risk the disapproval of the crowd, Karp and Zamiska contend, has everything to do with technological and economic outperformance.
At once iconoclastic and rigorous, this book will also lift the veil on Palantir and its broader political project from the inside, offering a passionate call for the West to wake up to our new reality.
©2025 Alexander C. Karp, Nicholas W. Zamiska (P)2025 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“The Technological Republic provides a fascinating, if at times disturbing, insight into the reassertion of US hard power.”—Financial Times, “Best Books of the Week”
“Likely the only book by a business executive to feature three epigrams (one in German), citations from the Bible, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, and an outright attack on a market leader.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Equal parts company lore, jeremiad, and homily . . . The primary target of The Technological Republic is not a nation that has failed Silicon Valley. It is more cogent and original as a story about how Silicon Valley has failed the nation.”—The New Yorker
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Nvidia is the darling of the age of artificial intelligence: the company’s chips are powering the generative-AI revolution, and demand is insatiable. For all the current interest and attention, however, Nvidia is not of our time. Founded more than three decades ago in a Denny’s in East San Jose, for years it was known primarily in the then-niche world of computer gaming. In fact, the company’s leather-jacketed leader, Jensen Huang, is the longest-serving CEO in an industry marked by near constant turmoil and failure.
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Don’t Buy This Book Be Forewarned
- By Susan Hess on 12-25-24
By: Tae Kim
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Waste Land
- A World in Permanent Crisis
- By: Robert D. Kaplan
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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We are entering a new era of global cataclysm in which the world faces a deadly mix of war, climate change, great power rivalry, rapid technological advancement, the end of both monarchy and empire, and countless other dangers. In Waste Land, Robert D. Kaplan, geopolitical expert and author of more than twenty books on world affairs, incisively explains how we got here and where we are going.
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Climate / Population Alarmism in a Mask
- By ElovesK on 02-07-25
By: Robert D. Kaplan
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The AI Edge
- Sales Strategies for Unleashing the Power of AI to Save Time, Sell More, and Crush the Competition
- By: Jeb Blount, Anthony Iannarino
- Narrated by: Jeb Blount, Anthony Iannarino
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In today's cutthroat sales world, where sales professionals are constantly juggling multiple responsibilities and navigating a sea of relentless competitors, everyone is looking for an edge. What if that EDGE is found in a tool powerful enough to give you more time in your sales day, accelerate your productivity, and still leave room for the human touch that's vital to building relationships? Enter the game-changing world of Artificial Intelligence. Enter The AI Edge.
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A showcasing of what could be
- By Ck1 on 04-12-25
By: Jeb Blount, and others
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The Eurasian Century
- Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern Century
- By: Hal Brands
- Narrated by: Tim Fannon
- Length: 11 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Hal Brands argues that a better understanding of Eurasia's strategic geography can illuminate the contours of rivalry and conflict in today's world. The Eurasian Century explains how revolutions in technology and warfare, and the rise of toxic ideologies of conquest, made Eurasia the center of twentieth-century geopolitics—with pressing implications for the struggles that will define the twenty-first.
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Worth the read.
- By Chip Eckert on 02-24-25
By: Hal Brands
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Money, Lies, and God
- Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy
- By: Katherine Stewart
- Narrated by: Patricia Rodriguez
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Why have so many Americans turned against democracy? In this deeply reported book, Katherine Stewart takes us to conferences of conspiracy-mongers, backroom strategy gatherings, and services at extremist churches, and profiles the people who want to tear it all down.
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Powerful and Important work.
- By Frank Nance on 02-28-25
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The Closing of the American Mind
- By: Allan Bloom
- Narrated by: Christopher Hurt
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In one of the most important books of our time, Allan Bloom, a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago and a noted translator of Plato and Rousseau, argues that the social and political crisis of 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis.
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VERY IMPORTANT WORK!
- By Douglas on 06-29-10
By: Allan Bloom
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Co-Intelligence
- Living and Working with AI
- By: Ethan Mollick
- Narrated by: Ethan Mollick
- Length: 4 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Something new entered our world in November 2022—the first general purpose AI that could pass for a human and do the kinds of creative, innovative work that only humans could do previously. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick immediately understood what ChatGPT meant: after millions of years on our own, humans had developed a kind of co-intelligence that could augment, or even replace, human thinking. Through his writing, speaking, and teaching, Mollick has become one of the most prominent and provocative explainers of AI.
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great intro book marred by poor narration
- By Amazon Customer on 04-14-24
By: Ethan Mollick
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The Thinking Machine
- Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip
- By: Stephen Witt
- Narrated by: Stephen Witt
- Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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In June of 2024, thirty-one years after its founding in a Denny’s restaurant, Nvidia became the most valuable corporation on Earth. The Thinking Machine is the astonishing story of how a designer of video game equipment conquered the market for AI hardware, and in the process re-invented the computer. Essential to Nvidia’s meteoric success is its visionary CEO Jensen Huang, who more than a decade ago, on the basis of a few promising scientific results, bet his entire company on AI.
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So good, it read like a movie, I bet it becomes one.
- By Amazon Customer on 04-12-25
By: Stephen Witt
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Chokepoints
- American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare
- By: Edward Fishman
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 17 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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It used to be that ravaging another country’s economy required blockading its ports and laying siege to its cities. Now all it takes is a statement posted online by the U.S. government. In Chokepoints, Edward Fishman, a former top State Department sanctions official, takes us deep into the back rooms of power to reveal the untold history of the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy, in which America renounced the gospel of globalization and waged a new kind of economic war.
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An economics textbook disguised as a thriller
- By Jesse Spevack on 03-26-25
By: Edward Fishman
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The Sirens' Call
- How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource
- By: Chris Hayes
- Narrated by: Chris Hayes
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, “With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.”
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Thoughtful and captivating
- By Nancy on 02-02-25
By: Chris Hayes
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Gambling Man
- The Secret Story of the World's Greatest Disruptor, Masayoshi Son
- By: Lionel Barber
- Narrated by: Keong Sim
- Length: 12 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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As Wall Street swooned and boomed through the last decade, our livelihoods have—now more than ever—come to rely upon the good sense and risk appetites of a few standout investors. And amidst the BlackRocks, Vanguards, and Berkshire Hathaways stands arguably the most iconoclastic of them all: SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son. In Gambling Man, the first Western biography of Son, the self-professed unicorn hunter, we go behind the scenes of the world’s most monied halls of power in New York, Tokyo, Silicon Valley, Saudi Arabia, and beyond.
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Degenerate Gambler
- By Lisa M. on 02-05-25
By: Lionel Barber
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The Coming Wave
- AI, Power, and Our Future
- By: Mustafa Suleyman, Michael Bhaskar - contributor
- Narrated by: Mustafa Suleyman
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organize your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy.
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Click bait
- By Buyer on 09-11-23
By: Mustafa Suleyman, and others
What listeners say about The Technological Republic
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- Not Dick Hausler
- 04-02-25
Incoherent ramblings
Feels like they believe we all need to think the same things (religion or morals or pride in the same thing so we can work towards something better) while constantly complaining that because society has become so unwilling to be dominated by single-minded megalomaniacs we are all doomed if we don’t follow some Stepford level sameness that such leaders promote. It never occurs to them that we all see the world differently. Somehow they think that because individuals in society can loudly complain about what makes those individuals uncomfortable, it’s like some sort of oppressive domination by fashion.
I know it’s an important piece of social engineering expression to know about, but picking random quotes from great thinkers as it does to support their blinkered perspective is at best tiresome and at worst … I won’t say.
Overall 🤨😾😡
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- plsponge
- 04-10-25
What is the point of this book?
I listened to this on audible while walking the dogs every morning. I have no idea what the point is? Lots of big flowery words in every sentence?
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- Russ K.
- 04-05-25
Good listen
Like the prescription to cure the nihilism and narcissism of Silicon Valley and the US as a whole
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- Manne Palan
- 03-03-25
Brilliant and thought provoking!
Alex Karp is a man of keen intellect, who in today’s world, has a unique view on the responsibility our best technology companies and brightest engineers have to our nation state. It is a view that is/was not very popular in the valley, but that does not stop Alex from meticulously making his case. His success in building Palantir on that very notion, has many waking up to the idea that service to our nation, might just be good business as well. Good for you Alex! Count me in as someone who greatly admires your work.
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- A. Gai
- 02-26-25
Silicon Valley Lost its Way
Fascinating thought piece lamenting the focus of our greatest tech minds on solving little commercial problems while refusing to support America’s military - whose success is the foundation of Silicon Valley itself and whose continued success is a necessary condition for America’s future including the future of that part of America just south of San Francisco. Thought provoking book, a good contribution to our collective exploration of where we go next.
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- Timothy J. Sipe
- 03-07-25
My expectations were too high
Good book. Agreed with many of the perspectives. However, my admittedly high expectations of finding some novel perspective or overwhelmingly persuasive argument were let down.
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- MGM
- 03-17-25
Very insightful!
Quick listen, excellent points and very straightforward and most of all insightful. Should be a mandatory listen for all college grads
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- Anonymous User
- 02-19-25
Dr. Alex Karp is a trailblazer!
The future is ours if we seize the opportunity to lead unapologetically. The US tech industry used to be partners with the US government to stay on the cutting edge of technology. Somewhere within the last few decades, Silicon Valley betrayed the very government that allows them to enjoy the benefits of being in a capitalistic society.
In return the big tech companies focus their efforts and intellect on technology applications for consumers of frivolous social media platforms and applications instead of the future of global dominance in AI technology in all aspects of western society. If joint effort takes place, US tech and government can seize this opportunity to build and maintain AI supremacy.
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- Anonymous User
- 03-05-25
Lacrimosa
My name is Ozymandias. Look upon my work and despair.
Important read for those who agree the flame of the west must be preserved.
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- Philip C Gossett III
- 03-30-25
Amazing Perspective
I found this perspective outstanding and learned a lot from it. Karp is a patriot who isn't afraid of the cancel culture mob. In my opinion, other tech companies should volunteer their services to keep America safe. Instead, they take their freedom for granted and feel entitled to security. National security should always be their top priority. Karp understands where the future is heading.
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