Episode Details

Palantir was not born in a garage. It was commissioned by the CIA director who oversaw 9/11, brokered by the neoconservative architect of the Iraq War, and handed to Peter Thiel and Alex Karp as a private commercial replacement for the Total Information Awareness Office after Congress shut it down in 2003. In this episode, Matt Ehret walks through what Palantir actually is, who built it, who it serves, and why a company that named itself after the all-seeing eye of Sauron now manages the intelligence, policing, banking, and military systems of most of the Western world. He also examines Thiel's Straussian philosophy, his belief that freedom and democracy are incompatible, his obsession with the antichrist he claims to fear but appears to be building, and the fact that his Palantir UK CEO got the job after the interviewer stood up and recited an Oswald Mosley speech from memory. From the inside, it looks like a tech company. From the outside, it looks like something else entirely.