Brace yourself. I'm going to show you an
aesthetic catastrophe.
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. This is actual
slide of the Afghanistan [music]
strategy last year and it was prepared
by the staff to General Stanley
McChrystal. Listen here, Thomas.
We have met the enemy and he is
PowerPoint.
>> It was this incredibly complicated
PowerPoint chart.
>> Even the head of US forces at the time,
General Stanley McChrystal, knew
immediately how bad the slide was. When
the staff brought this to McChrystal,
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 four-star
Army general to use PowerPoint slides
when communicating relying on only
commander's intent, not detailed orders
in multicolored PowerPoint format.
Marine Corps General James Mattis was
fond of saying, "PowerPoint makes us
dumb." I have a friend who runs
Microsoft, by the way, and he doesn't
like it when I say that.
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 decades-long
battle to figure out how all the
different parts of the armed forces
could work together more efficiently.
The interesting thing is, in the last 3
years or so,
it appears that one company has finally
figured it all out. To maintain US and
Western military superiority requires
deliberate action and [music]
technological innovation.
At Palantir, we deliver secure,
innovative, and scalable software
solutions at speed.
You might have heard of this company,
Palantir. It seems to be the evil
multinational corporation de jure.
Largely secretive, Palantir specializes
in the shadowy practice of data mining.
For most of its existence, Palantir 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. So, what do you think
your local Coles has in common with CIA?
Well, they both use Palantir. Palantir
has been the top-performing stock on the
entire US stock market in 2025. Special
thanks to our sponsor, Palantir. From
the global war on terror to space domain
awareness, Palantir continues to be a
mission partner for the US and allied
nations. These days, Palantir is
involved in everything from retail to
military operations to immigration
enforcement. 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. We are at the core
of making the obvious superiority of the
[music] West. Our product is used on
occasion to kill people. Okay-dokey.
Despite its exponential growth in size
and strategic significance, Palantir is
still a bit of a mystery to most people.
We're going to spend the next 2 weeks on
this company, taking a look at
Palantir's origin story, and how it's
grown to be one of the biggest companies
in the world. I'm Matt Bevan,
and this is If You Listen.
This story begins with a terrorist
attack on the World Trade Center in New
York City,
>> [laughter]
>> but not the one you're thinking of. This
one happened in 1993. 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.
A van packed with 550 kilos of
explosives was driven into an
underground car park of the World Trade
Center. Now, 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.
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'Neill. He'd
always wanted to be in the FBI ever
since he watched this imaginatively
titled TV show back in the 1960s. The
FBI
A QM production.
The people behind the 1993 attack were
religious extremists from Pakistan, and
John was instrumental in their capture.
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. If you have a
lot of order, there is very little
liberty.
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.
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.
As John O'Neill 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.
I think if you asked most terrorism
experts in the mid-1990s, well, what
about this man, bin Laden?
Most people in the mid-1990s would have
said, "Ah, yes, the financier, the
terrorist financier." In 1998, ABC
America reporter Chris Isham, a personal
friend of John O'Neill, trekked for 10
days across Pakistan to interview the
leader of a little-known extremist group
called Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden.
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. But Chris Isham and his friend
from the FBI
>> [music]
>> 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 shake's
answers. Miller didn't know what Bin
Laden was saying, and the Al-Qaeda
leader's monotonous, 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. Hmm, maybe not as
harmless as he seems.
When he saw this interview, John O'Neill
became fixated on Bin Laden.
He was sure that the US was due for
another domestic attack, and that Osama
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 John started
getting frustrated that he wasn't being
taken seriously enough. He felt that the
Saudis were definitely playing games and
that that that the
senior officials in the US government
just didn't [music] 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. John,
because of his aggressive posture, his
aggressive nature,
his
willingness to go forward
when it may not be politically correct,
I think a few people were just
uncomfortable
with John's aggressive style. In the FBI
job which John had access to, there were
a couple of concerning marbles. You can
see those 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.
They also had another blue marble
that suggested a coordinated effort may
be underway by Bin Laden to send people
to the US [music] to obtain training
after a number of suspicious people were
seen attending flight schools in
Arizona.
Two very interesting blue marbles, but
not enough to get the full picture.
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'Neill 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.
>> [music]
>> He died in the center'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, write 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.
It's It's just amazing.
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.
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 um surveillance all
the time, you know, wasn't really making
us safer. This is tech billionaire Peter
Thiel, 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. If the World Trade
[music] 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 to stop to stop more erosion. He was
more in favor of the liberty side of
John O'Neill's ordered liberty seesaw.
Could one
>> [music]
>> do something from a libertarian or civil
liberties point of view [music] 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.
>> [music]
>> It wasn't using the information
efficiently. Silicon Valley ought to be
involved in in in fighting terrorism and
protecting our civil liberties. Thiel
and Karp founded a company called
Palantir, named after Saruman's
all-seeing glass ball from Lord of the
Rings. A palantir is a dangerous tool,
Saruman.
Now, naming your nascent 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 Karp and Peter Thiel were
concerned, the company was designed to
break open all the jars of marbles,
spill them out onto on surface, and make
sense of whatever came out. It would
allow humans to find needles in
haystacks. So, make the data
intelligible to you and me, which it's
not.
>> [music]
>> And by doing that, it would allow them
to find bad people trying to destroy our
society
>> [music]
>> and could be used also to protect civil
liberties by making the data sets
transparent. Palantir's first investor
was the CIA.
It's been widely reported, though never
officially confirmed, that in 2011
Palantir played a key role in processing
information which led to the killing of
Osama bin Laden in his secret compound
in Pakistan.
>> [music]
>> Palantir, uh, for example, effectively
vectored Osama bin Laden's location. So,
How exactly
>> [music]
>> does it work?
For the first decade of Palantir'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 [music] see a pattern
in a hundred things, but it's very hard
for them to see a pattern in a million.
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 [snorts] marble metaphor, it worked
like this. Think of this plastic box as
Palantir.
Rather than everything being siloed in
individual jars, Palantir 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. 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.
>> Fighting ISIS, stopping human
trafficking, supporting money laundering
investigations. Working with the special
forces, law enforcement, the DOJ.
According to their marketing, Palantir
was all about organizing information in
a way that humans would find more
intuitive. 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,
find a pattern there,
circle that, connect that,
and kind of figure out what was really
going on.
Using Palantir 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
Palantir 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,
Palantir's military and law enforcement
software, was different from its
logistics software, which was called
Foundry.
But then something came along that put
Palantir's marble sorting tech into
hyperdrive. Let's start with this
language AI chat GPT.
What is it?
Great question. In 2022, people were
starting to get excited about the
potential uses of large language models
like chat GPT. It can create custom
code. It can create entire books that
are written from scratch that are not
plagiarized. It can write essays. Wow,
that really is amazing. But at Palantir,
they were quickly coming to a
realization.
They'd been building software that was
to be used by humans.
But the way they'd built it was also
perfect for large language models. We
were pleasantly surprised to see how
much the world we had been building for
met its moment with LLMs. Palantir's
chief technology officer, Shyam Sankar,
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. 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 could incorporate LLMs into our
software to provide a whole new series
of experiences. They developed something
called the Palantir AIP, which stands
for artificial intelligence platform.
AIP
is your
AI operating system. 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.
We start with a military operator
responsible for monitoring activity
within [music] Eastern Europe.
>> To use it, all you have to do is ask it
a question.
>> What enemy units are in the region?
>> The human operator can ask AIP in plain
English to deploy surveillance drones.
>> Task the MQ-9 to capture video of this
location. The drone footage shows an
enemy T-80 main battle tank. Then the
operator can ask it to look at what
options are available in the area to
destroy that tank. 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.
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. No man makes a perfect
plan, Keith. AIP allows it all to be
done as easily as asking ChatGPT to plan
your holiday to Queensland. Of course,
Matt. I can help you plan your holiday
to Queensland. You're going to have such
a great time. Not only can AI be used to
operate the Palantir software,
>> [music]
>> 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 Palantir had a lot of
extra time and resources on its hands.
So, it started expanding. [music]
Previously, pretty much only the US
government could afford Palantir's
services. [music]
Now, it's getting into everything.
ExxonMobil is adding powerful new
features by partnering with Palantir
Technologies.
>> Today, we're in the world of customer
[music] service focusing on AIP customer
service engine.
>> So, what do you think your local Coles
has in common with the CIA?
Well, they both use Palantir. With
Palantir as the platform for making
cricket the number one team bat and ball
sport in [music] Europe. I have to say
the European cricket network has got to
be the most out of pocket of Palantir's
clients. With our entrepreneurial
intuition, we can now use [music]
Palantir to ask the right questions of
the data all in one place. 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
Palantir's potential future profits.
>> stocks have moved pretty ferociously
here um in the last couple of months. In
2023, Palantir stock jumped 167%
[music] in 2024, it jumped by 340%.
I think there's a golden path right now
for them to monetize
>> [music]
>> 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
McChrystal was considering during the
war in Afghanistan.
It was designed to help keep the balance
that FBI agent John O'Neill thought was
so important. 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.
If you have a lot of order, there is
very little liberty.
And if you have a lot of liberty,
there tends to be less order. But a lot
of people are starting to think that
Palantir 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. The Palantir
surveillance state.
>> Palantir is a definite CIA front
company. There are more conspiracy
theories swirling around about Palantir
than any other Silicon Valley company.
>> Peter Thiel and his company Palantir are
some of the most evil forces on our
planet conspiring against the American
people.
>> Palantir is like a surveillance and
predictive policing firm.
>> Palantir, 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. We have dedicated our
company to the service of the West and
the United States of [music] America.
Palantir is here
to disrupt and when it's necessary to
scare enemies and on occasion kill them.
And we hope you're in favor of that. 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. And we hope you're in
favor of that. We'll see you then.
>> [music]