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ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. What's on the mind of the country's biggest, most influential and most innovative business leaders, founders and creators? You're in a very pessimistic place, Alan. You get to find out every Friday with me, Alan Koehler As I sit down with the people influencing the markets, the economy and the ideas shaping our world, I engage regularly, enthusiastically with the tech sector and some of these big players in AI. That's business with Alan Koehler on the ABC Business Daily feed on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcast. This podcast was produced on the lands of the Uabakal and Gadigal people. When you work in the news, you see a lot of things that give you nightmares. But there's one image that stays with me. It's the worst PowerPoint slide in human history. It looks like a plate of spaghetti and meatballs with hundreds of lines connecting every meatball heading. It was this incredibly complicated a PowerPoint chart. 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 an actual slide of the Afghanistan strategy last year and it was prepared by the staff to General Stanley McChrystal. This is a New York Times article. We have met the enemy and here's PowerPoint. Even the head of US forces at the time, General Stanley McChrystal, knew immediately how bad the sl. 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. Says in there that it is the inalienable right of every four star army general to use PowerPoint slides when communicating leaders who are going to use disciplined but very unregimented problem solving. Able to exercise mature initiative relying on only commander's intent, not detailed orders in multi colored 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. 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 three 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 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 du jour. Largely secretive, Palantir specialises in the shadowy practice of data mining. For most of its existence, Palantir flew under the radar. It was an extremely obscure US defence contractor that few people outside the industry had ever heard of. But in the last few years, it's kind of been everywhere. Special thanks to our sponsor, Palantir. What do you think your local coles has in common with the CIA? Well, they both use Palantir. Palantir has been the top performing stock on the entire US stock market in 2025. These days, Palantir is involved in everything from retail to military operations to immigration enforcement to space travel. From the global war on terror to space domain awareness, Palantir continues to a mission partner for the US and allied nations. 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 believe Palantir is a metaphor for the splendor and artistry and discipline necessary to build great things. What has made the west great over thousands of years. We are at the core of of making the obvious superiority of the west not just a moral platitude, but a factual reality. Our product is used on occasion to kill people. Okie dokie. 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 two 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're listening, 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 as New Yorkers came to terms with the 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. 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 was, think about information being like marbles in jars. The FBI has a jar of marbles, the CIA has one and the local police have one. Each agency controls their own information, their own marbles. Sharing marbles between them is incredibly complicated. This whole system keeps things secure, but it means they basically can't work together. And that problem was going to come into sharp focus for John o'. Neill. As he probed the World Trade centre attack of 1993, he became interested in one particular marvel he believed the CIA had, one that most counter terrorism experts at the time weren't paying attention to. I think if you ask 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 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 John o' Neill 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 sheikh's answers. Miller didn't know what bin Laden was saying, and the Al Qaeda leader's monotonal, measured delivery was deceivingly calm. It was only when the interview was finished and the producers sent the tapes back to be translated, 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 after a number of failed attacks on American sites 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 because bin Laden was an international threat, it was outside his remit. Chris Isham said that John started getting frustrated that he wasn't being taken seriously enough. I think that he felt that the Saudis were definitely playing games and that senior officials in the US Government just didn't get it. The problem was John didn't have all the marbles. He could only access the information the FBI was 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 jar which John had access to, there were a couple of concerning marbles. One was that a man with known connections with extremist groups had recently been arrested by the FBI while attending a flight training school in Minnesota. Another suggested a coordinated effort may be underway by bin Laden to send people to the United States to obtain flight training after a number of suspicious people were seen attending flight schools in Arizona. Two interesting marbles in the FBI jar, but not enough to get the full picture. Unbeknownst to John, over in the CIA's jar they had more data points. 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 was never across that information. In mid-2001, he left the FBI partially out of frustration and took a high paid job in the private sector. Due to his experience in counterterrorism and security, he was offered a job as the head of security for the World Trade Center. He called his producer friend Chris Isham to tell him the news. Isham said, well, at least they're not going to bomb it again. Referencing the 1993 World Trade center bombing, John O' Neill responded, They'll probably try to finish the job. John's first day was Aug. 23, 2001. He died in the centre's south tower on Sept. 11, just three weeks into the job. The coincidence there is just unbelievable. You couldn't write, you couldn't 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 Osama bin Laden was able to kill him, 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 the way we were going with just, you know, ridiculous airport security checks and super intrusive surveillance all the time 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 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 stop more erosion. He was more in favour of the liberty side of John Oneills ordered liberty seesaw. Could one do something from a libertarian or civil liberties point of view that would still be, you know, tough on terrorism and things like this. He and his university buddy named Alex Karp started focusing on the data. The government already had plenty of information that they could use to prevent terror attacks. They just weren't using the information efficiently. Silicon Valley ought to be involved 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. 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 gather all the data points siloed within individual agencies and and make connections. It would allow humans to find needles and haystacks, 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. 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. Palantir, for example, effectively vectored Osama bin Laden's location. So how exactly 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 see a pattern in 100 things, but it's very hard for them to see a pattern in a million. The company embedded technical Experts inside classified U.S. 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 marbles in jars it worked like this. Rather than all the information being siloed in individual jars, Palantir set up a table where all the marbles from the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and other agencies could be poured onto and examined, allowing users to get a full picture by sorting information more logically and identifying patterns and connections. 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 DoD. According to their marketing, Palantir was all about organizing information in a way 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 figure out what was really going on. The result was software that kind of looked like my favourite type of video Game simulation games, stuff like SimCity, Transport Tycoon or Factorio. Using Palantir's software was like looking down on the world from above, with information displayed on a large, flat map you could interact with. When the military used it, it looked like Command and Conquer, with military assets, both friendly and enemy, displayed on a clickable satellite map. When it was used to manage logistics and supply chains, it looked like Factorio. When it was used by law enforcement agencies. Well, 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 deal with. But programming these maps, which Palantir calls the ontology, was slow, painstaking work. It involved writing incredibly complicated software and talking to a lot of different people, so they didn't want over emphasise the importance of any 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 was going to put Palantir's marble sorting technology into hyperdrive. Let's start with this language, AI ChatGPT. What is it? Great question. In 2022, people were starting to get excited about the potential uses of large language models like ChatGPT. You 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 had been building software that was to be used by humans, but the way they 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 roadmaps 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 don't need to look at the marbles on the table at all. They can just use aip, which sits on top of the marbles and looks at them for you, making connections far faster and more nuanced than any human could. Instead of handling a few marbles, it can handle millions all at once. To use it, all you have to do is ask it a question. AIP leverages large language models to allow operators to quickly ask questions. What enemy units are in the region? The human operator can ask AIP in plain English to deploy surveillance drones. Task the MQ9 to capture video of this location. The drone footage shows an enemy T80 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. 3. 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. AIP allows it all to be done as easily as asking ChatGPT to plan your holiday to Queensland. Not only can AI be used to operate the Palantir 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 Palantir had a lot of extra time and resources on its hands. So it started expanding. Previously, pretty much only the US Government could afford Palantir services. Now it's getting into everything. ExxonMobil is adding powerful new features by partnering with Palantir Technologies. What do you think your local coles has in common with the CIA? Well, they both use Palantir. Palantir as the platform for making cricket the number one team bat and ball sport in 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 Palantir to ask the right questions of the data all in one place. This rapid expansion in clients made markets extremely excited about Palantir's potential future profits. The stocks moved pretty ferociously here in the last couple of months. In 2023, Palantir stock jumped 167%. In 2024, it jumped by 340%. I think there's a golden path right now for them to mine. 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 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 since the capacity of Palantir has expanded exponentially since the advent of these LLMs, a lot of people are starting to think the company 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. And 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 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. This episode of if youf Listening was written by me, Matt Bevin and Kara Jensen McKinnon. Kara is also our supervising producer. It's produced by Adair shepherd and Pat Sunderland. We'll have our second episode on Palantir next Thursday, but on Tuesday, Cara's got a story to tell me about why the FBI and CIA weren't talking to each other in the late 90s. I don't know anything more than that, but she says this story is going to make my head explode. I'll see you next week, Ra.