How did Palantir get so powerful?
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How did Palantir emerge in the aftermath of 9/11?
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You're in a very pessimistic place, Alan.
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This podcast was produced on the lands of the Wabakal 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 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 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. 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 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.
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 be 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.
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