Trae (Trey) Stephens

You have to have some sort of software infrastructure that allows you to store data, search data,

explore data, analyze data, structure investigations around that data that are shareable with other people.

And these are things that in any normal world, you would be like, yes, we want our war fighters to have the best tools that they can to do the job that we're asking them to do.

And so I think a lot of the hysteria philosophically is really troubling because basically what people are saying is that we, a democratic society,

have elected representative government to make decisions about how we should, make decisions around the policies that we want to enact to protect our society in the national security context, but we don't want them to have the best tools to do it.

We would rather them have crappy stuff that barely works, that we have to hold together with duct tape.

And so I think a lot of the the concern about Palantir is really You know people expressing a concern around around democracy They're saying I don't believe that the American people can make good decisions about policies and therefore I don't want our federal our civil servants to have the tools that they need to actually

you know, enable the policies that we as a democracy have decided that we want to go after.

So it's kind of troubling.

No, I mean, the media has a lot to do with it.

In the early days of Anduril, there was kind of a profile that was written about the company.

And the headline of the story was something like, Anduril is enabling a surveillance panopticon or something like that.

It's like, this is just not helpful.

That's not what we're doing any more than it was what Palantir is doing.

No one at Palantir is like...

you know, sitting down at their desk and like looking up text messages that their girlfriend sent or something like that.

It's just like, that's not what's happening at all.

But I think we're like programmed for hysteria.

And, you know, I do think that this philosophical challenge is very real, that it's really expressing a distrust in democratic institutions.

And that's a cultural problem that exists way beyond the scope of what Palantir is being asked to solve.