How did Palantir get so powerful? | If You're Listening

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]Brace yourself. I'm going to show you an aesthetic catastrophe.

[00:00:05]It's the worst PowerPoint slide in human history. It was produced by the US military in 2010 to illustrate the difficulties they were facing during the war in Afghanistan. When the public got a hold of it, it became a case study for how not to do PowerPoint.

[00:00:21]>> This is an actual slide of the Afghanistan strategy last year and it was prepared by the staff to General Stanley Mcrist. This is a New York Times article. We have met the enemy. And here's PowerPoint. And >> it was this incredibly complicated PowerPoint chart.

[00:00:36]>> Even the head of US forces at the time, General Stanley Mcristel, knew immediately how bad the slide was.

[00:00:43]>> When the staff brought this to Mcrist, this PowerPoint slide, he said, "When we understand that slide, we will have won the war." At the time, the US military's overuse of PowerPoint was an easy punchline for commanders when they were giving public speeches. It says in there that it is the inalienable right of every fourstar army general to use PowerPoint slides when communicating.

[00:01:04]>> Relying on only commander intent, not detailed orders in multicolored PowerPoint format.

[00:01:10]>> Marine Corps General James Mattis was fond of saying PowerPoint makes us dumb.

[00:01:15]>> I have a friend who runs Microsoft, by the way, and he doesn't like it when I say that.

[00:01:22]>> 10 years later, things hadn't improved much. Another Pentagon PowerPoint slide that showed the way different parts of the military were interconnected went viral in 2020. It also was an abomination of communication. But there's a reason the US military kept spitting out these awful diagrams. They were in the midst of a decadesl long battle to figure out how all the different parts of the armed forces could work together more efficiently.

[00:01:49]The interesting thing is in the last 3 years or so, it appears that one company has finally figured it all out.

[00:01:57]>> To maintain US and Western military superiority requires deliberate action and technological innovation. At Palunteer, we deliver secure, innovative, and scalable software solutions at speed.

[00:02:09]>> You might have heard of this company, Palunteer. It seems to be the evil multinational corporation dour. Largely secretive, Palenter specializes in the shadowy practice of data mining. For most of its existence, Palanteer flew under the radar. It was an extremely obscure US defense contractor that few people outside the industry had ever heard of. But in the last few years, it's kind of been everywhere.

[00:02:35]>> So, what do you think your local Coohl's has in common with CIA? Well, they both use Palunteer. Palanteer has been the top performing stock on the entire US stock market in 2025.

[00:02:46]>> Special thanks to our sponsor Palunteer.

[00:02:49]>> From the global war on terror to space domain awareness, Palanteer continues to be a mission partner for the US and allied nations.

[00:02:57]>> These days, Palanteer is involved in everything from retail to military operations to immigration enforcement.

[00:03:03]Up until recently, the CEO has tried to remain out of the spotlight. And perhaps that was for a good reason because since becoming more of a public figure, he's been saying things like this.

[00:03:14]>> We are at the core of making the obvious superiority of the West.

[00:03:20]>> Our product is used on occasion to kill people.

[00:03:23]>> Okie dokie. Despite its exponential growth in size and strategic significance, Palanteer is still a bit of a mystery to most people. We're going to spend the next two weeks on this company taking a look at Palanteer's origin story and how it's grown to be one of the biggest companies in the world. I'm Matt Beavenon and this is if you're listening.

[00:03:49]This story begins with a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City, but not the one you're thinking of. This one happened in 1993.

[00:03:59]As New Yorkers came to terms with a possible act of terrorism on US soil, investigators released the first pictures of the explosion site, leaving little doubt that a powerful bomb was the most likely cause.

[00:04:13]>> A van packed with 550 kilos of explosives was driven into an underground car park of the World Trade Center.

[00:04:20]>> The crater is 100 ft beyond where you're looking right now. It blasted a hole through three floors, killing six people instantly and injuring hundreds more.

[00:04:30]For some time, it wasn't clear who was behind the attack. As many as 19 groups have claimed responsibility for the explosion, but the mystery of who really did it remains unsolved. One of the FBI agents involved in the investigation was John O'Neal. He'd always wanted to be in the FBI ever since he watched this imaginatively titled TV show back in the 1960s.

[00:04:53]>> The FBI, a QAM production.

[00:05:00]>> The people behind the 1993 attack were religious extremists from Pakistan, and John was instrumental in their capture.

[00:05:08]He became obsessed with researching Islamic extremism and quickly became an expert on the growing threat of terrorism on American soil. As he continued rising through the ranks of the FBI's counterterrorism department, he was cognizant of the importance of balancing the need to keep people safe with the infringement on their personal privacy.

[00:05:30]>> If you have a lot of order, there is very little liberty.

[00:05:34]And if you have a lot of liberty, there tends to be less order. And this great experiment that we call the United States of America has a perfect blend of ordered liberty.

[00:05:46]>> Ordered liberty, a balance between government surveillance and individual freedom. In the US, the government surveillance side of the seesaw is populated by lots of different intelligence agencies. There's local police and the FBI keeping an eye on people domestically and the CIA keeping tabs on potential threats abroad. But in the 1990s, that system had a serious flaw. Each of those agencies gathered their own data. But sharing data between them was complicated. To understand how bad the data sharing situation was, think about it like this. Imagine the CIA, FBI, and local police are represented by individual jars. And each piece of information they gather is a marble. Each agency handles its own marbles. If the FBI wants to check out the CIA's marbles, they have to go through a complicated process of requesting specific ones. They have to know what they're looking for. And as you can see, the opening of this CIA bottle is very narrow. It's not easy to get an individual marble out.

[00:06:50]As John O'Neal probed the World Trade Center attack of 1993, he became interested in one particular marble, one that most counterterrorism experts at the time weren't paying attention to.

[00:07:03]>> I think if you ask most terrorism experts in the mid 1990s, well, what about this man Bin Laden? Most people in the mid1 1990s would have said, "Ah, yes, the financier, the terrorist financier." In 1998, ABC America reporter Chris Isham, a personal friend of John O'Neal, tked for 10 days across Pakistan to interview the leader of a littleknown extremist group called Al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden.

[00:07:30]>> He sat down um on this kind of bench covered in red fabric and put a blanket kind of over his knee. It was like sitting at story time with an old uncle.

[00:07:41]>> But Chris Isham and his friend from the FBI shared a growing interest in this old uncle in the Pakistani wilderness who during the interview seemed pretty harmless. Bin Laden's handlers wouldn't allow anyone to translate the shakes's answers. Miller didn't know what Bin Laden was saying, and the al-Qaeda leader monotonal, measured delivery was deceivingly calm. It was only when the interview was finished and the producers sent the tapes back to be translated that they learned what this seemingly harmless man was saying. We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. They are all targets. We predict a black day for America and the end of the United States.

[00:08:27]>> H maybe not as harmless as he seems.

[00:08:31]When he saw this interview, John O'Neal became fixated on Bin Laden. He was sure that the US was due for another domestic attack and that Assama bin Laden would be the person to do it. He tried hard to raise the alarm within the FBI, but it was outside of his remit. Chris Isham says that Jon started getting frustrated that he wasn't being taken seriously enough.

[00:08:54]>> He felt that uh the Saudis were definitely uh playing games and that uh that that the senior officials in the US government just didn't get it. The problem was that John didn't have all the information. He couldn't see all the marbles. He could only look at the FBI's intelligence that they were gathering domestically, not the stuff the CIA was gathering in the Middle East. His frustration began to compound.

[00:09:21]>> John, because of his aggressive posture, his aggressive nature, his uh willingness to go forward when it may not be politically correct. Uh, I think um a few people were just uncomfortable with John's aggressive style.

[00:09:39]>> In the FBI jar, which John had access to, there were a couple of concerning marbles. You can see there's two little blue ones in here. One blue marble is that a man with known connections to extremist groups had recently been arrested by the FBI while attending a flight training school in Minnesota.

[00:09:57]They also had another blue marble that suggested a coordinated effort may be underway by bin Laden to send people to the US to obtain flight training after a number of suspicious people were seen attending flight schools in Arizona.

[00:10:12]Two very interesting blue marbles, but not enough to get the full picture.

[00:10:19]Unbeknownst to John over at the CIA, they had more blue marbles. The CIA knew that a number of high-profile al-Qaeda operatives were attending planning meetings in Malaysia and intended to travel to the United States. John O'Neal never saw all the marbles. In mid 2001, he left the FBI partially out of frustration and took a high paid job in the private sector, head of security for the World Trade Center.

[00:10:46]He died in the cent's south tower on September 11th, 2001, just 3 weeks into the job. The coincidence there is just unbelievable. You couldn't write you couldn't, you know, right about it. I mean, that's from the guy that identified Osama bin Laden as a villain that he was and then the fact that that Osama bin Laden was able to kill him.

[00:11:11]It's it's just amazing.

[00:11:15]Now, if you were around back then, you'll remember that there was understandable concern that something like this might happen again. A lot of changes were made to try and make people feel safe from terror attacks. And a lot of those changes were quite annoying.

[00:11:31]The sort of sense I had was that uh the way we were going with just, you know, ridiculous airport security checks and uh super intrusive u surveillance all the time, you know, wasn't really making us safer. This is tech billionaire Peter Teal, who has some complicated opinions about how the world should be run, which we'll get into in the next episode of our series. But let's just say at this stage he wasn't a fan of the government trying to intrude into people's lives in the name of trying to stop terrorism. He was concerned that if there were another attack along the lines of 9/11, the government would try to become even more intrusive.

[00:12:09]>> If the World Trade Center would erode civil liberties as much as it did in 2001, I didn't even want to think what would happen if you had another terrorist attack. And so you have to prevent it to uh to stop uh to stop more erosion. He was more in favor of the liberty side of John O'Neal's ordered liberty seesaw.

[00:12:27]>> Could one do something from a libertarian or civil liberties point of view that would still be, you know, tough on terrorism? He and a friend named Alex Karp started focusing on the marbles. The government already had a lot of the information it needed to prevent terror attacks. It was just spread across all these different jars.

[00:12:48]It wasn't using the information efficiently. Silicon Valley ought to be involved in in in fighting terrorism and protecting our civil liberties.

[00:12:56]>> Talon Cup founded a company called Palanteer, named after Saraman's allseeing glass ball from Lord of the Rings.

[00:13:04]>> The Palanteer is a dangerous tool.

[00:13:06]Saraman.

[00:13:07]>> Now, naming your naent tech company after a tool used by the very bad guy trying to take over Middle Earth is an interesting decision, but we'll again get to that a little bit later. As far as Alex Carp and Peter Teal were concerned, the company was designed to break open all the jars of marbles, spill them out onto a flat surface, and make sense of whatever came out. It would allow humans to find needles and hay stacks, so make the data intelligible to you and me, which it's not. And by doing that, it would allow them to find bad people trying to destroy our society and could be used also to protect civil liberties by making the data sets transparent.

[00:13:44]Palanteer's first investor was the CIA.

[00:13:48]It's been widely reported, though never officially confirmed, that in 2011, Palanteer played a key role in processing information which led to the killing of Osama bin Laden in his secret compound in Pakistan.

[00:14:01]>> Palanteer uh for example effectively vetoed Osama bin Laden's location. So >> how exactly does it work?

[00:14:11]For the first decade of Palanteer's existence, basically nobody knew who they were or what they did. They didn't even start posting on social media until 2015. A person can see a pattern in 100 things, but it's very hard for them to see a pattern in a million.

[00:14:27]>> The company embedded technical experts inside classified US intelligence operations and facilities, trying to access as many different information sources as possible and figure out how they relate to each other. Sticking with the marble metaphor, it worked like this. Think of this plastic box as Palanteer.

[00:14:48]Rather than everything being siloed in individual jars, Palanteer had the capacity to empty all the marbles out like this and then sort the marbles more logically and identify patterns and connections. So, it meant that the CIA marbles could be connected with the FBI marbles here. And it meant that the NSA marbles could be mixed in as well, sorted, organized. Gee, they have a lot of marbles.

[00:15:24]>> Like really what it is is creating a unified view over lots of disparate data sources which don't otherwise make sense together. The reason they had so little public presence is that they really only had one customer, the US government.

[00:15:38]>> Fighting ISIS, stopping human trafficking, supporting moneyaundering investigations, >> working with the special forces, law enforcement, the DoD.

[00:15:46]>> According to their marketing, Palanteer was all about organizing information in a way that humans would find more intuitive.

[00:15:54]>> Humans are incredible at insight. It's just surfacing the right information for them to see. They were effectively creating an enormous self-updating PowerPoint slide which could be used by humans to find patterns.

[00:16:09]Find a pattern there. Circle that, connect that, and kind of figure out what was really going on. Using Palanteer software was like looking down on the world from above with information displayed on a large flat map that you could interact with. An ICE official said it's basically like a Google's map interface where you can look around the United States. You can zoom in on targets. You then click on an individual person and it brings up their name, a photo. We'll get into how it's being used for immigration enforcement in our next episode, but looking at it dispassionately. It's clearly impressive software, way better than the PowerPoint nightmares they used to have to deal with. But programming these maps, which Palanteer calls the ontology, was slow, painstaking work. It involved writing enormous amounts of code in incredibly complicated software and talking to a lot of different people so that they didn't overemphasize the importance of one particular data source or ignore another one. It also didn't entirely solve the marble jar problem because each industry needed information laid out in different ways. The systems didn't talk to each other perfectly. For instance, Gotham, Palanteer's military and law enforcement software was different from its logistics software which was called Foundry. But then something came along that put Palanteer's marble sorting tech into hyperdrive.

[00:17:36]>> Let's start with this language AI chat GPT. What is it? Aha, great question.

[00:17:42]>> In 2022, people were starting to get excited about the potential uses of large language models like Chat GPT.

[00:17:50]>> Can create custom code. It can create entire books that are written from scratch that are not plagiarized. It can write essays.

[00:17:57]>> Wow, that really is amazing.

[00:17:59]>> But at Palanteer, they were quickly coming to a realization. They had been building software that was to be used by humans. But the way they built it was also perfect for large language models.

[00:18:11]>> We were pleasantly surprised to see how much the world we had been building for mets moment with LLMs.

[00:18:17]>> Palanteer's chief technology officer, Shyam Sanka, said that LLMs, large language models, weren't just great at reading their data maps, but needed their data maps in order to be reliable.

[00:18:28]>> It's like, wow, you actually cannot unleash the value of an LLM without these things. They had purely by luck spent 20 years building a system that organized data in a way that could be intuitively read by the new wave of AI systems. And it was laid out in an ideal way for the AI system to produce reliable information. By January, it was quite obvious that we needed to tear up all our road maps and get excited about how we can incorporate LMS into our software to provide a whole new series of experiences. They developed something called the Palunteer AIP, which stands for artificial intelligence platform.

[00:19:07]>> AIP is your AI operating system.

[00:19:12]>> Now, individual users didn't need to look at the marble map at all. You can just use AIP, which sits on top of the marble map and looks at it for you, far faster than any human could.

[00:19:24]>> We start with a military operator responsible for monitoring activity within Eastern Europe. To use it, all you have to do is ask it a question.

[00:19:32]>> What enemy units are in the region?

[00:19:34]>> The human operator can ask AIP in plain English to deploy surveillance drones.

[00:19:39]>> Task the MQ9 to capture video of this location. The drone footage shows an enemy T80 main battle tank.

[00:19:46]>> Then the operator can ask it to look at what options are available in the area to destroy that tank.

[00:19:51]>> Generate three courses of action to target this enemy equipment. Send these three options to my commander for review. Our commander selects a course of action. Approve course of action three.

[00:20:03]>> Until pretty recently, executing this kind of operation would have required big maps being rolled out on tables and little wooden figures pushed around on top. Phone calls right up and down the chain of command.

[00:20:15]>> No man makes a perfect plan. Keith >> AIP allows it all to be done as easily as chatbt to plan your holiday to Queensland.

[00:20:23]>> Of course, Matt, I can help you plan your holiday to Queensland. You're going to have such a great time.

[00:20:28]>> Not only can AI be used to operate the Palanteer software, it can also be used to design it. What once took software engineers years of observing operations and writing code now takes weeks. This rapid increase in efficiency meant that suddenly Palanteer had a lot of extra time and resources on its hands. So, it started expanding.

[00:20:52]Previously, pretty much only the US government could afford Palanteer services. Now, it's getting into everything. Exxon Mobile is adding powerful new features by partnering with Palanteer Technologies.

[00:21:04]>> Today, we're in the world of customer service, focusing on AIP, customer service engine.

[00:21:09]>> So, what do you think your local Coohl's has in common with the CIA? Well, they both use Palunteer. with Palanteer as the platform for making cricket the number one team batten ball sport in Europe.

[00:21:21]>> I have to say the European Cricket Network has got to be the most out of pocket of Palanteer's clients.

[00:21:26]>> With our entrepreneurial intuition, we can now use Palunteer to ask the right questions with the data all in one place.

[00:21:32]>> Well, if they can sort out the FBI and CIA's marbles, they can probably handle the European cricket networks. This rapid expansion in clients made markets extremely excited about Palanteer's potential future profits.

[00:21:46]>> The stocks uh moved pretty fer ferociously here um in the last couple of months.

[00:21:50]>> In 2023, Palanteer stock jumped 167%.

[00:21:54]In 2024, it jumped by 340%.

[00:21:58]>> I think there's a golden path right now for them to monetize what we view as potentially a trillion dollar market opportunity. It's become one of the fastest growing companies on Earth with clients all over the world, including government contracts in lots of different countries. And it's basically just a glorified version of that PowerPoint slide General Mcrist was considering during the war in Afghanistan. It was designed to help keep the balance that FBI agent John O'Neal thought was so important.

[00:22:28]>> And this great experiment that we call the United States of America has a perfect blend of ordered liberty. He wanted to make sure that the seesaw didn't go too far one way or the other.

[00:22:39]>> If you have a lot of order, there is very little liberty.

[00:22:43]And if you have a lot of liberty, there tends to be less order.

[00:22:47]>> But a lot of people are starting to think that Palanteer is tipping the balance towards order and away from liberty. Ladies and gentlemen, this is scary. This is us moving towards what China is doing to their citizens. People are really quite scared of this company.

[00:23:02]The Palunteer surveillance state.

[00:23:05]>> Palanteer is a definite CIA front company.

[00:23:08]>> There are more conspiracy theories swirling around about Palunteer than any other Silicon Valley company.

[00:23:13]>> Peter Teal and his company Palunteer are some of the most evil forces on our planet conspiring against the American people.

[00:23:20]>> Palanteer is like a surveillance and predictive policing firm.

[00:23:25]>> Palunteer, an organization that is run also by a Zionist psychopath. And that's because even though it really is just a very fancy PowerPoint slide which makes intelligence, military, logistics, customer service, and cricketing operations more efficient, its leaders have decided to create a kind of weird public image.

[00:23:47]>> We have dedicated our company to the service of the West and the United States of America. Palunteer is here to disrupt and when it's necessary to scare our enemies and on occasion kill them.

[00:23:59]and we hope you're in favor of that.

[00:24:02]>> So, I think it's important to spend some time talking about this guy, Alex Karp, and what he wants to do with his company that now controls so much of the world's data. But we're not going to do it today. We're going to spend our whole next episode on it.

[00:24:17]>> And we hope you're in favor of that.

[00:24:19]>> We'll see you then.