Palantir is Thriving Under Trump w/ Caroline Haskins

0:00 The Army, number one, then the FBI, then I mean the Federal Acquisition Service, that can go to a number of different agencies in practice, then the Air Force, then ICE, then like the National Institutes of Health, US Special Operations Command, et cetera, et cetera. The IRS is also on there, the Navy.

0:17 So obviously there's a pretty high emphasis on branches of the military and investigative agencies like the FBI and ICE.

0:42 Us made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Caroline Haskins. Caroline is a staff writer at Wired. At this point, you've probably heard of Palantir, the company that was funded by Peter Thiel and has benefited immensely as Donald Trump has come back to office.

0:58 But what does the company really do? I figured it was a good opportunity to have a deep dive into the company, to understand where it comes from, to understand how its product really works, and to understand any potential threat that it really poses to us, as its market value has significantly increased under the Trump administration, as it's pushing this ideology that the tech industry and the military need to work together closely to protect American power in the 21st century or however they want to put it.

1:27 To a certain degree, this company is able to fly under the radar because it sells its product for the most part to major companies and to governments and militaries. So it doesn't need to really make a pitch to the public. It doesn't need to sell itself to the public. It doesn't need to actually ensure that the public understands what it does.

1:44 And so even though it's hugely impactful, that has meant that a lot of people don't really understand it. And this week we're going to change that. Caroline has been reporting on Palantir for quite a while now. She has a really in-depth knowledge of this company, and she was the perfect guest to have on to really dig into this in depth.

2:00 And of course, this episode pairs really well with the episode we did a few months ago with Sam Biddle looking at this broader kind of transformation that Silicon Valley is doing, where these companies are pivoting to working much more with the military, you know, selling them AI tools, trying to create new weapons that they want to sell them.

2:17 The Palantir story is part of that, but it is also its own story, which is why I think it's worth dedicating a whole episode to exploring it. So I hope you enjoy this episode with Caroline. I certainly enjoyed chatting with her. If you do, make sure to leave a five-star view on your podcast platform of choice.

2:33 You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making Tech Won't Save Us every single week, so I can keep having these critical, in-depth conversations to help you better understand these tech companies and the way they're shaping our world.

2:46 You can become a supporter like Greg in Chicago, Barbara from British Columbia, or Manuel from Heidelberg by going to patreon.com slash TechWon't Save Us and signing up to support the show. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Caroline, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

3:01 Thanks for having me on.

3:02 You have been writing about a bunch lately, but one of the topics that it seems like has been pretty regular for you lately is of course Palantir, one of our favorite companies on the show. We had Sam Biddle on, I guess a few months ago now, to talk about like this broader kind of ideological shift that we're seeing in the tech industry where you're having these people like really embrace the military industrial complex and whatnot.

3:24 And Palantir is really at the core of that. And so I figured this was a good opportunity to maybe dig a bit deeper into this specific company because of the role it plays and the importance that it has had over the past little while in Silicon Valley. And so I was hoping we could start by just understanding a bit more about where Palantir comes from.

3:44 Like how does this company emerge in Silicon Valley?

3:47 Yeah, so I feel like most people started hearing about Palantir in the late 2010s, but it was actually founded in 2003, like not super long after 9-11. And one of the first things to know is that it got funding from NQTel, which is the tech investment arm of the US intelligence apparatus. And then some of its first clients included like the CIA, FBI, investigative agencies, things of that nature.

4:13 And that was sort of the basis of some of its early business. It started out with two little products. Well, I won't say little, but they eventually kind of grew and rebranded. But there was Palantir Finance, which has been described to me as just kind of upgraded spreadsheets, better ways of working with numbers and things of that nature.

4:31 And Palantir Government, which eventually grew into becoming more of a law enforcement investigative tool. But initially it was sort of for the qualitative side of government work. But, anyways, it sort of grew and expanded in the 2010s as big data took over and it could sort of sell itself as a solution for organizing people's data for companies that wanted to say that they're being smart about big data and machine learning and what have you.

5:00 And now they're one of the big names as far as government contractors under the Trump administration. So it's a big year for them, I guess.

5:10 I think it's Palantir. There were like these fraud detection softwares that they created at PayPal. And I feel like that kind of formed some of the beginning of like the PayPal software and the PayPal company. Maybe I'm getting this like totally wrong, but I feel like that I remember that being like part of the story somewhere.

5:27 And of course, a really key player there was Peter Thiel, which is why I'm making the PayPal connection because he's someone who who really makes his money at PayPal in particular. And you're having Palantir basically be founded, I believe, right around the time that he is kind of like coming out of PayPal and PayPal is being sold off and things like that.

5:44 What is Peter Thiel's role in this company?

5:47 I mean, Peter Thiel was one of the co-founders. And I mean, ultimately, Alex Carp ended up coming on as CEO. But I think an important thing to keep in mind is everybody knows that Peter Thiel has kind of an ideological framework that guides his investing. I mean, lately he's just in the news because he can't stop talking about the Antichrist.

6:06 But sort of from the get-go, Palantir has branded itself as being quote unquote pro-West and you know, pro-democracy. And I mean, famously, Peter Thiel has not been pro-democracy. He has said that that's not always the best way to go about things. But I think notably it's been trying to sort of embed itself within like the US government and its intelligence partners since the beginning.

6:33 So take aside his attitude toward governance itself, I think he has a pretty pragmatic view toward monopoly and market dominance. And I think that that's been Palantir's approach toward sort of being a solution for general IT problems that are had at you know, sprawling government agencies or really big companies, just a one-size-fit-all solution that you could theoretically, as I would hope for you to understand from the marketing, that you can just slap on top of everything, fix your problems, and I mean hopefully dominate the market.

7:05 I think that's kind of been the goal from the onset to be kind of a monopoly in terms of IT fixy tech solutions.

7:12 I don't know about you, but I'm always going on about the Antichrist. What is what is uh you know unique about that?

7:17 Yeah, and I did, I went on like a research dive the other month because I was like, what's the latest that he has to say about that? Apparently in the past, he's said that the antichrist could be seen as communism generally or certain types of political leaders. I'd have to look at my notes, but he's very passionate about it.

7:37 He tends to get pretty worked up when he talks about it.

7:40unknown Yeah.

7:41 I believe you're referring to the fact he's doing like a series of lectures, I think, on the antichrist. You know, totally normal thing to be obsessed about. And of course, he would probably position Xi Jinping as the Antichrist so that then is Donald Trump Christ? I don't know.

7:56 I think he has said that the US president could be a redemptive figure, like not Christ per se, but I forget what his exact terminology is.

8:04 But we'll just have to go to one of these lectures and uh find out for our ourselves.

8:09 I know. I wish it was like being live streamed or something. I would kill for that.

8:12 Yeah, someone needs to go in and like record it and then and then share it with all of us. You were talking about, and I'm sure we'll come back to this a little bit, how these notions of like, you know, we need to save the West, champion the West, all this kind of stuff was there from the beginning. That was something I was curious about, right?

8:27 I I was wondering like if this kind of stuff was really there early on or if that became like a justification later. But it doesn't surprise me that this has always been somewhat of the orientation. And I'm sure it's just become like stronger and more explicit and things like that over time.

8:44 Yeah. I mean, when I've talked to like people who were at the company in like the really early days, they sort of had the attitude from the onset. I mean, they weren't necessarily talking about the West, but they were talking about like saving the world, stopping terrorists, stopping child predators, solving the world's big problems, essentially being an ally of the US Department of Homeland Security and its missions, especially in the 2000s.

9:10 It's not as if that was translating to every part of the employee culture, but there was definitely an attitude of being allied with the government, but also like on the right side of history and not aiding in, I mean, in their mind and things constituting war crimes or malpractice.

9:26 Right. And I I guess at the time their focus as the enemy would have been more on like the terrorists, the jihadis and stuff, you know, if you think about the war on terror, and over time that has kind of shifted over to like now it's big, bad China and the communists are back and you know, blah, blah, blah.

9:41 Right.

9:42 And, you know, of course, like immigration and customs enforcement and things of that nature. But it's also worth noting that like a good portion of the company has always kind of exclusively worked on the side of just private businesses and have not touched anything that has to do with this government work.

9:59 So in their eyes, it could just be like, oh, I'm helping this solar company make sure that it's running its infrastructure okay. Like, as far as their personal experience go, they're not doing any kind of funny business that might make the news. So things do get kind of siloed. I mean, in part due to just like intelligence restrictions, because you can only have like a certain amount of engineers that are closely working with intelligence agencies in order to have those systems working.

10:27 There was definitely sort of like a righteousness in the employee culture kind of from the get-go.

10:32 Yeah. And I I want to come back to that piece about like the private business and and how the actual business side of Palantir works, right? But before we get to that, there's just a couple other things I wanted to ask you about. And, you know, when you're talking about that culture even early on, it stood out to me when I was reading one of the articles that you had written that the company actually like internally uses military titles and that kind of like military language when it's talking about things or or communicating internally and when it's crafting up like internal documents and things like that, which seemed quite quite distinct, right?

11:06 I feel like there's not many other Silicon Valley companies or or even like companies in the private sector where you would see very much of that, right?

11:14 Yeah, it's definitely not commonplace. I mean, I do think about one person who was describing this to me, and he was like, I actually liked it for convenience sake so much that I brought it with me to the next company that I worked at and then the next one as well, because people just sort of like it.

11:29 I mean, I could see the pragmatic benefit in something like bottom line up front, which is essentially like, I don't know, it's like the bullet points that Business Insider or Bloomberg does at the top of an article where they give like the little summary at the top before getting into the actual stuff.

11:44 But you know, you could alternative just say like T L D R, but like normal people. But also you don't normally say that in company emails. They also say for your situational awareness instead of just FYI. And they use like the NATO alphabet code names to describe different job titles. Like I would have to double check if I'm mixing this up, but there's I think Delta for forward deployed engineers, which is essentially just engineers that work with their customers.

12:14 That's why they say forward deployed, which is another military term, just referring to like forward deployed troops, which would be, I mean, theoretically stationed toward like adversarial territory to try and ward off an adversary from attacking. I've been told that that just sort of naturally trickled down from the partners that they were working with.

12:33 But of course, it is a decision to bring that in internally. It's not as if every contractor with the government or the military just adopts everything that they're saying at a cultural level like that.

12:44 Would be funny if they did, but no, it's not something that we see very often. And before we talk more about the business itself, I feel like, you know, we've talked about Peter Thiel, but Alex Carp is the other key figure here, right? You know, the CEO of Palantir. He's obviously someone who has shaped the company a lot.

13:00 He is out publicly these days, like, you know, really championing that ideology that, like, you know, we need to protect the West, we need to be against China, the tech industry has been too focused on consumer products and not on military technologies and all this kind of stuff. What can you tell me about him and the role that he has played at that company over the years?

13:20 Going back like 10 or more years, he tried to sort of define himself as a classical liberal who wasn't necessarily tied to the Democrats or the Republicans. He said he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, I think. But he definitely wasn't someone to draw a line if the presidential administration were to go into a territory that didn't necessarily mark what he was voting for.

13:43 Because I think what is becoming increasingly clear that the rhetoric about being pro-West and pro-democracy isn't contingent on specific US policies. It's sort of just tied to whatever the US chooses to do, period. Which is sort of an issue that, like, former employees have pointed out, like, oh, I thought I was working for this company that's pro-democracy, but it's not drawing the line at seemingly fascist policies.

14:10 But in his mind, it's just about the West versus not the West, good versus evil. He's definitely been very happy on like recent earnings calls. I don't know if you've the video from the Q2 earnings call for 2025. He was like giggling and smiling a lot. It's been a very good year for him. But to be more specific answering your questions, he's been essentially the company spokesperson on its ideological mission.

14:37 And it feels very righteous about that. I mean, carp has said explicitly that it feels like they were treated like outsiders in Silicon Valley, at least it's investors, until this past year. I think they it kind of feels like a moment of actualization because people are sort of bending the knee to the Trump administration.

14:55 Definitely. And for for someone like Alex Carp and for Palantir very profitably. So I'm sure they don't mind. It's also at a time, of course, where you know you're seeing the kind of influence that they have at the Pentagon increase. So I'm sure that companies like Pallantier are getting more contracts in this moment.

15:12 Of course, you know, we'll talk about more broadly what they're up to. But for Alex Carp to be kind of giddy in the quarterly earnings call, I believe I saw an article in CNBC or something recently that Palantir was one of the tech companies that has really done the best since the beginning of the year, since the beginning of the Trump administration, I guess because it's perceived to be, you know, one of those companies that is really aligned with the Trumpian politics and and what they're trying to do, I guess, right?

15:37 Yeah. I mean, at least from the data that it's released, like to the SEC, the growth in its government contracts has just like continued to go up, especially now. But that's not to say that they didn't do extremely well under Biden and the Democratic administrations. Like they did this work with it, with government agencies, with immigration and customs enforcement, with other agencies, it never really went down.

16:02 I mean, just look at Doge alone. A lot of the people who were hired to sort of help with that effort were alum from either Elon Musk companies or Palantir. And just having sort of updates that I check every day on like new government contracts that Palantir is getting, it's is pretty widespread. It's been doing pretty well for itself.

16:23 And the numbers that it releases kind of reflects that.

16:26 Yeah, definitely. And so, you know, I feel like people hear about Palantir, and they probably think this company is collecting a ton of data on the public. This company is aligning with the military and with these kind of right-wing governments in in ways that we don't like. But I feel like for a lot of people, there's not a good awareness of what the company actually does and what its tools and its software and the products that it sells like actually do.

16:55 Can you break that down a little bit for us? Like, what does Palantir actually provide to these clients that makes it such an attractive company to do business with?

17:04 First, to address like the public piece of it, like it isn't necessarily surprising that people don't have like a widespread good handle on what it does. Because I mean, Palantir, first of all, doesn't exactly have an obligation to communicate to the consumer because it doesn't sell a consumer-grade product.

17:20 It's selling to these giant companies and agencies. I mean, someone could see, oh, I know that Palantir is working with ICE. Oh my God, I'm watching all of these arrests ramp up over the past couple months. Does that mean that Palantir is selling data to ICE? Maybe. And that's like not true, but it's not unreasonable that someone would think that.

17:42 To get back to what it actually does, I mean, the company isn't exactly the best communicator at this, but probably one of the simplest ways to put it is that if you picture like the entire data stack, the amount of tools that a company might use to organize its data pipelines, you know, put these numbers in this place, track orders, store files about people that were arrested.

18:06 I'm I'm sort of combining use cases here from like companies and like ICE or something like that. But the idea is that if you have something that's really old, you have a bunch of different systems, you might even have stuff that are that's used in different programming languages, you can't get everything to work together and it's really slow.

18:24 You don't necessarily have to go in, do surgery, and fix all that. You can essentially just put this on top, plug everything in, and then sort of if you picture just plugging in a light system or something, it's able to get the outcomes that the customer actually needs without doing all that. And since it's supposed to be one tool that's replacing a lot of different ones, that's why it's a lot more expensive.

18:47 So if a company is trying to do kind of micro improvements on how well it's utilizing its own customer data to sort of make corporate decisions, they might only buy one or two products. But the idea is that Palantir can fix the entire thing, which is sort of why it's difficult to find one product or one company to compare it to.

19:09 Because when I've talked to like former employees of the company, whenever I said, like, who is Palantir's direct business competitor, or what is a directly competing product to Gotham, which is what's sold to government agencies and police, or Foundry, which is what's generally sold to private companies.

19:27 I mean, they all had different things that they said. Like some people said Google, one person said IBM. People obviously mentioned like Databricks and Snowflake, which are different sort of tools. But to talk about Databricks and Snowflakes just really quickly, I mean, those are definitely more oriented toward technical users.

19:45 And obviously, it's you can definitely take better advantage of a tool like Foundry if you're like a coder or something like that. But you don't necessarily need to code in order to sort of see what you need to see in terms of like an actual user interface when you're locking in.

20:01 I guess basically like other companies operating in this space would provide more niche tools or tools that are more oriented toward technical users who need to know how to code or something like that to really get what they want out of it. But say what Palantir is providing in its platforms to these clients is much more comprehensive, combining a lot of different use cases and making it so that you can just be a regular user and kind of go in and start engaging and start understanding all of this data that you know you have basically put into the system.

20:31 Is that right?

20:32 Essentially, yeah. I remember I was talking to one person who's a former content strategist, so he helped work on the marketing and stuff like that. And he pointed out that, you know, if you're putting together a PowerPoint presentation or something, you aren't necessarily making it for the engineer or the IT manager in the room.

20:50 You're doing it for the C-suite or the people who are in charge of making these really big purchases. I think that kind of speaks broadly to what kind of agency or company Palantir appeals to.

21:01 It also really stood out to me like when you were talking about the data as well, right? And when I was reading that in some of the stuff that you've written, where like, okay, maybe you have this big organization and they have some new data streams, but they also have a lot of data in like old systems that would need to be updated or transferred over in order to feed into some different kind of tool.

21:23 And they could invest and kind of get that done and so that they can use something different that might be a bit cheaper, or they can just have Palantir come in and Palantir's system will like basically take all these different streams of data and figure out how to get them into their platform for you.

21:39 So then you don't need to worry about it. Like that seems quite appealing for those kind of like really big clients, clients that are kind of longstanding have been around for a long time. If you're thinking about a government or also like a major corporation, I guess you can see how that's appealing, right?

21:53 Yeah, definitely. One thing that has come up, at least in what customers have said about using Palantir, is that it saved them a lot. Of time. It's not that they technically can't do all of this on their own with the right engineers and the right people, but it might take months. It might actually take years in some cases.

22:09 But the idea with Palantir is that you can actually just kind of put this on top, do this little band-aid and have things going in like days to weeks within getting started with it.

22:20 It makes a lot of sense. And you mentioned Gotham earlier. There's also this tool called Foundry. What are the different audiences that these platforms are targeted toward? And do they work distinctly from one another, or is it just different brandings for different types of organizations?

22:36 People have said that they actually are relatively similar tools that work with different types of information, but of course they are specialized to kind of work with that information. So if you think about what Gotham is supposed to be taking in, picture you're a government agency and you have all of these different case files that are shared with you from local police, from state police, from fusion centers.

23:02 Then you have your own data about arrests and things of that nature. Then from corrections, you have like booking information of all these people. This is all sort of disparate and spread out. And let's say you want to do one search for a specific type of name or characteristic, like a date of birth or having a tattoo, but all of these things are super spread out.

23:23 The idea is that you could use Gotham to not only extract people, but also make social connections. Let's say you're a law enforcement agency that subpoenas Instagram and gets all of this information about like their DMs, who they're following. The idea is that they would be able to make like social webs and then be able to see.

23:41 I mean, allegedly, because the the LAPD like famously tried to use this to inform its gang database and gang enforcement, but that obviously can lead to misidentification and people getting roped into situations that they weren't involved in. But essentially it's focused on people. As opposed to foundry, it's generally a lot more operations-based, numbers-based, not necessarily.

24:06 I mean, yeah, it's not, it's just, it's not designed to make social webs. It's more about just like generally improving the efficiency of like your business or something and being able to see everything where it's supposed to be and things of that nature.

24:18 That makes a lot of sense. But I guess if you really wanted to, you could get all the data on your employees and uh see how they relate to one another.

24:25 Jeez, yeah, that'd be convenient.

24:27 Yeah. Do we know how the extent of the use of these softwares? Like, you know, obviously you were saying that Palantir has had a really good first part of this year so far. It's doing really well. It's been a lot around for a long time. We know obviously that government is using these tools and different agencies, and we know that we have heard of them being used more and more internationally as well.

24:50 I know that they're used in Canada, in the UK, and I'm sure well beyond. But do we know like the extent of that and and in the private sector? Like if a lot of Fortune 500 companies are already using this? Like, do we have an idea of that?

25:02 Yeah, I mean, to look at the government side, at least from the time that it started working with the government, if you're to look at specifically the numbers of contracts that it has with different agencies, it actually goes, I put together a little list, I checked like the Army, number one, then the FBI, then I mean the Federal Acquisition Service, that can go to a number of different agencies in practice, then the Air Force, then ICE, then like the National Institutes of Health, US Special Operations Command, et cetera, et cetera.

25:31 The IRS is also on there, the Navy. So obviously there's a pretty high emphasis on branches of the military and investigative agencies like the FBI and ICE, but pretty widespread. And then on the corporate side, you can really picture like any type of company. If you go to its white pages, one of the ones I was looking at recently was like Heineken Beer, General Mills.

25:54 It works with like different car companies. It's, I think it made a partnership with one of those sort of startups that tries to instrumentalize all of that data that like cars are collecting about where it's going and speed and things of that nature to sell to insurance companies, energy companies, oil and gas.

26:11 It's really it's hard to it's hard to like really hone in because in the private sector, it's not exactly specialized to like one part. It's pretty widespread because it's kind of a generic thing that you can picture any type of large company could theoretically get something out of, I guess.

26:28 I guess it's like basically everywhere. And and you wouldn't know because, like you were saying before, it's not consumer-facing, right? You know, it's not trying to promote itself to the wide public. It's just trying to sell itself to businesses and to governments and make its money that way. So it doesn't need to go out and say, champion, this is how many companies are using our software or whatnot.

26:46 I'm sure they have internal PowerPoints that they use for sales purposes where they're making that pitch to clients, but like they don't need to say that to you and me.

26:54 No, it's true. I will say they have started doing this thing. It's like a development program where they have like a version of boundary that essentially Palantir Superfans can use like upon request. But that's kind of like very different from your average tech company that might be like giving you ads day and night on Instagram or something like that.

27:14 One thing I think about is back during the COVID pandemic, one of its big partnerships was with, I forget what the UK calls it. It's like the National Health.

27:22 The National Health Service, the NHS.

27:24 Yeah, National Health Service. And it was essentially used to sort of control and manage, okay, which hospitals are near like these kinds of vulnerable populations, like the elderly. But yeah, essentially try to manage how many COVID vaccines are going where and if that's distributed equitably. And that could be something that a healthcare worker that's not necessarily working with data all the time would have been able to see as far as like a dashboard and people who are in charge of making orders and managing that.

27:55 I'll probably have to pretend to be a uh Palantir super fan now so I can get access to Foundry to organize Tech Won't Save Us. It's gonna be my new project.

28:03 You probably could.

28:04 Yeah, I just wouldn't want to pay for it, you know? Um Yeah. You did mention that the company, you know, when you were talking about this like Delta team, right? And and you have these employees who are, what is it, forward deployed or or whatever.

28:16 Yeah.

28:17 What are these Palantir employees or or yeah, what like when they're contracted out to these companies? Like, what would they actually do in say a government agency or some Fortune 500 company or whatever who has them there? Like, would they be there like for an ongoing period of time, or is it just to like set up the service?

28:33 Or I guess maybe it depends on the actual needs of the client.

28:38 Yeah, I mean, talking to people, because at first I was like, are you just there to help set things up and get things according to customer specifications? And that is like where a large part of the labor goes, but they are supposed to help do sustained work, whether it's like troubleshooting a problem or saying, like, oh, we actually have this new need.

28:59 I think they have, you know, like a day out of the year that's really specifically focused towards doing outreach and getting the latest information from these companies. I forget what it's called off the top of my head. But it really is designed to be sustained engagement, you know, to the point that generally like someone could only be working with one company and that could be their entire job and their entire day.

29:21 It's sort of like a combination of like a client relationship manager and an actual engineer, because there is a lot of like people facing people interaction. So I think that's important when you think about its work with government agencies, like with ICE. It's not as if it's just saying, here's Gotham and walking away.

29:42 It actually has been building customized versions of its more public-facing tools that are specifically oriented to serve what it's asking for. Like it recently got another $30 million to try and allegedly build a software to track people that are self-deporting from the US. And it does not specify like how this would happen, what data from ICE it would be using.

30:06 None of that is specified, but like it is designed to be working closely with the customers that it's working with.

30:13 Yeah, that that makes sense, right? That that's a way that you kind of keep the contract and keep them using the software if you make it more useful to them. You know, you talked about this relationship to ICE. We know that ICE and Palantir have had a relationship for a long time that has obviously grown since the return of Donald Trump to power.

30:30 What have we seen with the way that the Trump administration and that different parts of the government are working with Palantir in this moment? How is it benefiting from the return of Donald Trump to the White House?

30:42 So I'd say that there are probably two wings to look at that with. One is for just renewals of existing contracts and adding a lot of dollars to those existing contracts. So ICE would be a good example of that. I think the $30 million payment for this recent system is actually the largest payment that it's ever made to Valentier, at least according to like the federal database.

31:04 But then there's the other part of it, which involves like some of the work that Doge started doing, which was specifically trying to link data that was coming from the IRS and that's theoretically supposed to be siloed in very specific ways to protect people's privacy and combining it with certain voting records from different states like Florida, and using that specifically for immigration enforcement.

31:30 It's not exactly that, it's building a master database. That would be a wrong way to put it. But I think the way that like my colleagues put it in their piece is that it's a mega API where you're able to sort of just operationally take data from the places that you need it in order to, if you want to find someone who, according to IRS data, is not a citizen, like theoretically you would be able to do that.

31:55 Yeah, because I remember there were these stories that and like concerns, right? That Doge was trying to go into these different departments of the US government and basically get access to their data and then eventually have a platform where it was going to bring all of those different sources of data together.

32:13 And of course, you know, that Palantir would possibly be the one who would be creating that platform. Do we have any like notion if that is something that is actually happening, or is it more focused on this kind of IRS data?

32:25 Speaking specifically to like what Palantir is involved in, like we know that it has been involved with like helping making the so-called mega API for the IRS. And in terms of combining data from other agencies, you know, again, a lot of people from Doge have ties to Palantir. I don't want to make like sweeping claims that it's been helping with every single one of these efforts to bring data into one place.

32:50 But it definitely has been playing like a leading role in some of these efforts to put data into a place that's accessible by one person or a few people that bypasses a lot of the protections that were originally put in place.

33:03 I guess you can understand the concerns there too, right? Like all this data right now is siloed, and especially if you have an administration like the one that is in power right now, but even at any other time, right? That making it so much easier to identify these people, to get information on these people, like there is a potential threat that's associated with that.

33:23 Yeah. I mean, there's a reason that all these different agencies are required to put out like privacy impact assessments and be super clear about what they have, how they're using it. And obviously, even the ones that they still put out, like for instance, from from ICE, from CBP, they do leave a lot of to the imagination that obviously requires like FOIA requests and different kinds of reporting to try and get clarity on.

33:45 But I mean, the whole point, especially with IRS data, was that people who come into this country and are still sort of going through the legal system, working through paperwork, they can still participate in the US economy and not be completely shut out. But part of the purpose of, you know, combining this data, and then earlier this year, I think it was, I think it was the Social Security Administration or the IRS, but they effectively made it impossible for a lot of people to continue to participate in the economy by marking them as like dead, essentially, in federal databases.

34:20 That all to say, like zooming out. There's a reason why all of these things are typically siloed, which is to protect from theoretically a centralized agency being able to do whatever it wants with it or access whatever it wants. And I mean, it's definitely a valid concern.

34:37 I was in Denmark recently and I was talking to someone there about the way that their government works. And she had lived in the United States as well, and so had that experience too, right? It was kind of like I came back to Denmark and the government just kind of knows everything about me because all of the data is like in one place, so they could easily like sign me up for all the public services and like all those sorts of things, and it was like super convenient.

35:01 And then you think on the other hand, how like in North America, I'm not super familiar with the American system. I know it's split up, but in Canada as well, it's like not everything really talks to one another. And it was just interesting to me that like over there, I guess you know, maybe it's the degree of social trust, maybe it's just the way that things were designed like earlier on, that like everything is already just together, and of course it would be, and why wouldn't it be?

35:24 And then over here, it's like these things are separate, and we need to ensure that's the case for like privacy reasons, and we can't trust that it should all be brought together. And it's just fascinating to see like I don't know how how different places can approach this in in different ways. But also, like when you see the way that the American government acts, you can kind of like sympathize with not wanting it to have everything so easily available on people.

35:48 Yeah. I mean, you could see how like something like Doge, which brands itself on efficiency, could just make the argument that having all this data separated is creating unnecessary friction, it's making things slower, it's making things more bureaucratic. And that's true to a certain degree, but it's also like there was a reason why we put together all these privacy acts and freedom of information acts, et cetera.

36:10 I mean, a lot of it was in the wake of Watergate when trust and government was at an all-time low. And there's a reason why they have to be, they have to have logs generally for who is accessing what, where data is going, not having data with personally identifying information being downloaded onto private servers of government employees.

36:30 There's a reason why all this stuff exists. And when these protections start to sort of like wane away, it's understandable that people don't feel amazing about that.

36:39 Oh my God, of course. I completely understand it, right? But as you've been saying, Palantir is getting a bit more focused now because of the relationship with the Trump administration, because of, you know, the right-wing politics, because it is championing this notion that the tech industry needs to be defending the West and working with the US government in order to do that and working with the military.

37:00 And that has resulted in more kind of public focus on that. And I know that you were recently at a conference where they were, you know, kind of presenting and kind of presenting their tools, and they did not take very kindly to you and other journalists being there. Can you talk to us a bit about what you experienced and how you saw the company kind of acting?

37:17 This was really weird. This was like a couple of months ago. I was at a conference in DC for the special competitive studies project, which is the like think tank that Eric Schmidt put together of Google Fame. But Palantir was one of the main sponsors of the event, which essentially means you have like a gigantic booth at the very front of this conference hall that has company branding, different little room areas and TVs with project demos and little chair areas that people go to the front of, sometimes like Palantir users, sometimes actual engineers.

37:50 And they go and essentially say, okay, this is how you use Foundry for this, this is how you use Gotham for that. So I was sitting in one of the chairs and I was watching a couple of presentations. I didn't ask any questions. I was just taking some notes on my phone. I took a few pictures. And then I stepped out for a few minutes and came back.

38:08 And one of the people at the booth said that I was not allowed and that if I if I came in or tried to come back, that they would call the police. And I was like, why? And they predictably they didn't say why. But it's definitely a lot more on the defense in recent months. If you follow Palantir on X or like other social media platforms, you might have seen that the New York Times published an article that wasn't incorrect about how Palantir works, but some people who were responding to what the article was saying kind of miscontruded like some certain parts of it.

38:40 But Palantir just blamed the New York Times on the entire thing and released like several blog posts really lambassing the publication. They didn't do anything wrong, really. But yeah, I don't know. It's definitely having a different attitude with the public. I think in part because it's it's having this moment of success.

38:58 And ever since it went public in 2020, it's had this increasing group of fanboys that monitor the stock price and take like a lot of gamification type joy in that and watching the stock price go up and feeling a sort of identification with the brand. I think it feels pretty emboldened right now, which feels like it's sailing on smooth waters and it can afford to be a little bit more confrontational with people that it doesn't like, people and organizations that it's not like taking a like into at a particular moment.

39:28 Interesting to like treat the uh Palantir stock like the Tesla stock or something like that, you know, with these fans kind of watching it and kind of gross. It is pretty wild to hear of that experience though, right? You know, to hear how the company is responding even to like a journalist being at a conference where obviously journalists are going to be and that they don't want people like you anywhere near what they're doing or paying attention to it or seeing how they're presenting themselves or anything like that.

39:55 Like seems like they're quite, you know, obviously protective of how they're looking, but obviously acting hostile in order to try to protect that image or or the one that they've crafted, right?

40:05 It feels like they're historically pretty defensive and increasingly defensive toward journalists or people that it perceives to be critics, whether that's just random people online that take issue with its work with ICE and its work with the Israeli military, which I haven't I should have probably brought that up earlier.

40:25 But as a company that tries to align with US allies, it's not necessarily surprising that at like early 2024, it's sort of increased its roots within the Israeli military and has been providing help to a degree that, I mean, they haven't really specified publicly, but one can imagine that if it's providing help to the military, it's aiding in what's going on there.

40:44 It's not surprising, right? You know, we've seen Alex Carp obviously defend and champion what the Israeli government is doing to Palestinians, you know, the genocide that it's carrying out over there. And, you know, we have seen reports that their software is being used in some form or another, but I I think it's still pretty like uncertain as to exactly what it's doing.

41:04 But again, given the stance that Alex Carp and obviously that someone like Peter Thiel would have taken on it, it's not surprising to see that they would be aiding in what's happening over there.

41:12 Yeah, carp has been really strange about it. I think he's called like college protesters like pagans and stuff like that. I mean, I there's a lot to unpack there with the whole, I don't know if that was a Christianity angle or what. But yeah, there's a very defensive position and and he takes like a lot of issue with people that use the language of genocide, and it's yeah, there's kind of a refusal to engage with that directly whatsoever.

41:36 I mean, we know that the IDF is using AI-powered tools in order to identify targets and take out buildings and families en masse. We don't know if Palantir is playing any part in that, but it's certainly, I mean, we can surmise that it's a part of the chain that allows that to happen.

41:54 Yeah, I was in um Ireland recently and there were recent reports on how basically Israel is storing data in Microsoft's data centers in Europe that are enabling the genocide, and its data centers are in the Netherlands and Ireland. And the people I was talking to there said, like, it seems to be that they have really like gotten even more sensitive about security around the facilities since those reports came out, because now people know directly that like in that big building full of servers is probably data on Palestinians that is being used to like wipe them out by the Israeli military.

42:30 And like it's wild just to stand in front of a building like that and know what's in front of you. You know, you talked about that kind of public profile, and obviously one of the things that we have seen at companies like, say, Google or Microsoft in recent years is you know, some portion of employees kind of speaking out publicly about what their employer is up to, whether it's in relation to Israel and Palestine or just working with the military or ICE or or anything like that more broadly.

42:58 Have we seen much of that with Palantir? Or is it kind of expected that if you're going to work with a company like this, you kind of know what you're getting into?

43:07 This year, there was sort of a turning point because I mean, I've been reporting on Palantir for years now, and it's always been extremely hard to get current or former employees to say anything about the company or the work they did or the work it does. But earlier this year, there were 13 former employees who signed a public letter that was calling out the work that Palantir is doing, both for the administration in the in the service of fascism and against what it interpreted to be the values.

43:39 Of course, someone like Carp would argue that it's sticking with its values, but they were saying we didn't join this company to create software that aids in killing people and arresting people en masse and organizing drone strikes. 13, you could look at that and say, oh, that's not really a large number.

43:54 That was what Palinger's arguing point was. But people did say, like people who signed the letter, that there were I mean, there were more people that could have signed on, but I mean they were afraid of potentially violating an NDA that you have to sign when you when you leave the company. And it wouldn't necessarily like violate that NDA.

44:11 Like seemingly it wouldn't. I'm not a lawyer, but there is this atmosphere of fear involved and a sense of loyalty to the company. Whenever I asked people who work there about just their time there and their colleagues, even people who look back with a form of regret in terms of their time there and what the company is doing right now, they speak with a lot of respect about their colleagues, talking about how smart they are, talking about how good it was for how the community was, how nice it was for their careers.

44:41 Like there's seemingly a lot of like mixed feelings, like seeing the reality of what the company is doing and then reflecting on their own experience, which might have been individually positive. But yeah, again, this year it seems like there's kind of a turning point in terms of what people are willing to say publicly.

44:57 That's good to hear, at least, you know. And it's understandable that they might be a bit worried at times. We can see how Peter Thiel has certainly used the legal system and been able to hide himself if you're thinking about like Docker and Hulk Hogan and things like that. Bit different when you're thinking about Palantir employees, but still, right?

45:12 Before we close off, I had one more thing to ask you about, which is maybe on a little bit of a lighter note than the types of things that we have been talking about up until now. And that is, of course, this is once again another one of those companies associated with Peter Thiel that is named after something from the Lord of the Rings or like the world of Middle-earth.

45:32 Listeners of the show will know very well that I am a big nerd and love Lord of the Rings. So it always kills me to see this fascist kind of taking this thing that I that I love and using it in this way. And yes, I know he's not the only one. I know that there's a plenty of fascists who who love Lord of the Rings.

45:48 But talk to me a bit about that angle of this, like what it actually refers to in the meaning of Palantir. But if there's any other ways that like this obsession with Lord of the Rings, this use of this name kind of works its way into this company as well.

46:01 I will admit that I have not read the Lord of the Rings box.

46:05 We need to change that.

46:07 Yeah.

46:08 You're like, no.

46:09 I've read The Hobbit in like eighth grade, but then I didn't like follow through with the rest of the series. But anyway, from what I've from what I've surmised, Palantir is based off of like Palantiri from the books, which are supposed to be these stones that both see across like large distances in the present, and then they can also see into the past and the future.

46:29 So if you're someone who's trying to create and market a technology, I mean, it would be great to imagine this stone, you know, imagine like a screen that you literally look at and it tells you anything that you want to see, because that's how it wants to sell itself, is this kind of magical solution that can sit on top of everything and tell you, tell you what you want to know, what you want or need to hear.

46:51 But this was something that I kind of wrote about in my most recent piece about Palantir. If you're on the user end and you just think you're getting this objective version of events, like let's say you're an investigator that's looking at immigration files or something like that. You could think that you're getting someone's whole life story with all the context that you need, but the reality is you're you're not.

47:13 You're getting a selection of materials that this agency just happens to have access to. You could think that you're making a by the numbers decision on how many vaccines are going to go here or there, but there's probably bits of information that you are missing just inevitably, you know. If you have a tool that is sold to you as sort of this magical solution, the kind of human interpretation and the human flaws that are built into just any tool that people build and use, it can just kind of create a dangerous situation where you feel like decisions are naturally flowing from what you're looking at and leading you to natural conclusions, which there isn't one natural solution to anything on earth,

47:56 probably. So I don't know. I think that that's just something to consider with Palantir with tools like it. You were like, this is a light topic, Lord of the Rings. And not to bring it back to serious, but but yeah, just figured I would mention that.

48:08 That's the reality of this subject matter, unfortunately, right? And I think, like, I think your point is is a really good one too, right? And you know, we have seen the way that algorithmic decision making and that systems that are, you know, not Palantir systems, but things that are designed in a certain way have been used to great harm in, say, welfare systems or immigration systems or healthcare systems, right?

48:30 Because you're getting a certain picture of the information and just trusting that, of course, the computer would know what is accurate, what is right. And so if you're getting this kind of like seemingly comprehensive picture of something that is going on, but actually it's missing all these data points that you're just not thinking about because you know, maybe there's not a specific box that says this is something that's there and we just don't have the data for it or something like that, then that can certainly influence you in certain directions, right?

48:54 So I think uh your point is really well taken and it's it's an important one to have in there and for people to consider about these systems. Caroline, it's been great to have you on the show. I think this has been super informative. I think the listeners know a ton more about Palantir now. And even if they had some misconceptions before, they know more about how it works and why it's still good to hate it and that it's an an evil force.

49:17 So thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it.

49:20 Yeah, no, it was great chatting. Yeah, thanks for having me.

49:25 Caroline Haskins is a staff writer at Wired. Tech Won's Save Us is made in partnership with the Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Tech Won's Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own.

49:43 Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.