A melted community of stock pumpers and meme-makers obsessed with Palantir, the company founded by Peter Thiel and nursed to maturity by the CIA. In this episode we explore the history of Palantir including its work with ICE, the military industrial complex and various police forces. Then we dive into the PLTR subreddit where people are worshiping Alex Karp, the company's CEO, and encouraging others to invest in a company known for mass surveillance and using AI to enhance drone assassinations. Our guest is Katie Notopoulos, who wrote an article for Fast Company titled "How Palantir stock developed a weird, passionate, meme-crazy fan base".
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Katie Notopoulos: https://twitter.com/katienotopoulos
Article: https://www.fastcompany.com/90922821/palantir-stock-meme-crazy-fan-base
Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
http://qanonanonymous.com
Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 220 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Palantir to the Moon episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Julian Field, Liv Agar, and Travis View.
Hello friends!
Today we're going to be diving into a melted Reddit community of stock pumpers and meme makers obsessed with a very specific company known as Palantir.
Now, as some of you may already know, the word Palantir, and it's plural, Palantiri, comes from the Lord of the Rings, in which it refers to a set of stones used to spy on others from afar, see into the past or future, and even engage in manipulation and propaganda on a mass scale.
As Gandalf the Wizard once said, a palantir is a dangerous tool, Saruman.
Our corporate overlords are just so fucking lame.
Yep, it's, you know, it's sad.
So what kind of creep would name his company something so simultaneously nerdy and evil?
Well, no surprise here, it was friend of the show, billionaire, venture capitalist, and right-wing power broker Peter Thiel, who we previously covered in Premium Episode 151.
Since its founding in 2003, Palantir has come to be associated with a variety of dystopian horrors, mass surveillance, drone assassinations, and the tracking and targeting of immigrants among them.
So, in this episode, we'll be briefly exploring the history of Palantir before jumping into the online community getting carried away with PLTR, its publicly traded stock, with the help of our guest, reporter Katie Natopoulos.
who recently wrote an article for Fast Company entitled "How Palantir's Stock Developed a Weird, Passionate, Mean,
Crazy Fanbase."
So let's jump right in.
Palantir When Peter Thiel properly launched the company in 2004,
he was only able to nab one outside investor, In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central
Intelligence Agency.
Thiel received $2 million from the CIA and put up $30 million of his own through his VC firm, Founders Fund.
Two years prior, he had sold PayPal to eBay, making him a multi-millionaire.
Quote, It was a mission-oriented company.
I defined the problem as needing to reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties, he told Forbes a decade later.
Within about a year of filing for incorporation with the FEC, Teal had hired a CEO for Palantir, Alex Karp, a self-described deviant with a PhD in philosophy.
Damn.
Philosophy L. Yeah, I mean, self-described deviant with a PhD in philosophy?
Who are we talking about, Liv Agar?
I have a bright future ahead of me.
Yeah, this is where you differentiate yourself here though.
The two had met at Harvard, where they both attended law school in the early 90s.
By 2000, Karp had developed a reputation in wealthy circles as a savvy investor.
They apparently admired the way he had successfully leveraged his grandfather's inheritance.
That year, he founded his own venture capital firm to manage the investments of high-net-worth individuals.
From 2005 to 2008, the CIA helped Palantir alpha-test its software, and the company soon accumulated contracts.
It didn't hurt that rumors swirled about Palantir's software playing a role in locating Osama bin Laden, leading to his assassination by a team of Navy SEALs in 2011.
By 2013, the company's list of clients included, and uh, taking a deep breath here, The CIA, the DHS, the NSA, the FBI, various police forces including the NYPD and the LAPD, the CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, the Special Operations Command, the United States Military Academy, the Joint Improvised Threat Defeat Organization and Allies, the Recovery, Accountability, and Transparency Board, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Essentially all of the good guys and bad guys in QAnon?
Yes, exactly.
All Marvel, all DC, and good and bad guys.
By the way, the Recovery, Accountability, and Transparency Board was essentially a Joe Biden-led thing where they were trying to figure out people who were doing social security and benefits fraud, which recovered a quarter of a billion dollars total.
Very important.
I'm sure they spent less on that than they got back.
This is the very important stuff of figuring out if the poors are cheating.
If Trump had made that, it would be exactly the same, except it would be called the Cadillac Queen Board, basically.
Pretty much.
So that same year, in 2013, Forbes wrote a piece about Palantir, and more specifically, Alex Karp.
And here you're going to see the classic Forbes writing at work when describing a cool and quirky CEO.
A unique Palantir culture began to form in Carp's iconoclast image.
Its Palo Alto headquarters, which it called the Shire in reference to the homeland of Tolkien's Hobbits, features a conference room turned giant plastic ball pit and has floors littered with nerf darts and dog hair.
That's like the, uh, bitch you live like this meme?
It's like the the millhouse's dad who got divorced and is in the toy car bed.
Staffers, most of whom choose to wear Palantir branded apparel daily, spend so much time at the office that some leave their toothbrushes by the bathroom sinks.
Karp himself remains the most eccentric of Palantir's eccentrics.
The lifelong bachelor who Who says that the notion of settling down and raising a family gives him hives, is known for his obsessive personality.
He solves Rubik's Cubes in less than three minutes, which is not that difficult, by the way.
Anyone can learn to do it.
It's a procedure.
Okay, well, me and Travis... Actually, never mind.
Just me.
Actually, never mind.
We all relate to being on the spectrum.
Swims and practices the meditative art of Qigong daily, and has gone through Aikido and Jiu-Jitsu phases that involved putting co-founders in holds in the Shire's hallways.
Normal.
A cabinet in his office is stocked with vitamins, 20 pairs of identical swimming goggles, and hand sanitizer.
And he addresses his staff using an internal video channel called Carptube, speaking on wide-ranging subjects like greed, integrity, and Marxism.
Mmm.
The only time I'm not thinking about Palantir, he says, is when I'm swimming, practicing Qigong, or during sexual activity.
So we've got a real normal guy here who says stuff like sexual activity and has 20 pairs of identical swimming goggles.
Oh, and puts people in headlocks.
Having a family gives him hives.
Lifelong bachelor.
Uh, eye emoji.
Uh, etc.
So, fun stuff.
But dogs are welcome.
There's a ball pit.
It's the Shire.
I think you might be too repressed to enjoy.
Like, the fact that he's single is just, he's like, why, how would having children relate to getting more money?
Yeah.
I don't understand.
So, by 2013, Palantir had also accumulated a few ignominies.
In 2010, a company called i2 Incorporated sued them in federal court for stealing its code through a private eye firm to develop their own algorithm.
The incident was settled out of court a year later for $10 million.
Also in 2010, these so-called defenders of civil liberties were named in a document leaked by hacking collective Anonymous.
It was a plan to infiltrate and discredit Wikileaks using Palantir's software.
The proposal had been penned by Team Themis, three intelligence contractors that included Karp and Thiel's company.
Although the plan never materialized, it looked bad for Palantir, and Karp ended up disavowing all knowledge of it and apologizing for their would-be involvement, pledging the company's support for, quote, progressive values and causes.
Karp also suspended the Palantir employee involved in the proposal, only to rehire him later.
And one of the ways he does like kind of covers up his responsibility as CEO is saying that they have like a horizontal structure.
So everyone's encouraged to be like their own entrepreneurs and do their own things without too much approval.
That's great, though, right?
For plausible deniability.
Yeah, of course.
It's just a rhizome.
It's so funny.
It's like you try to make your your corporation sound more egalitarian solely for the purpose of diffusing blame.
Yeah.
And I mean, to be clear, basically, what they do is they put together software that helps aggregate a bunch of data and essentially, you know, target individuals like bin Laden or, you know, disadvantaged communities in LA through the LAPD, etc.
So they put together these kind of data analysis software that is then kind of enhanced by having a human eye, which they call forward engineers, these guys that they deploy into the field.
So they're kind of a half consulting firm, half software firm.
But, you know, you've seen the contracts.
You kind of get it.
In the same 2013 Forbes article, they detail some of the contradictions inherent to Palantir's whole shtick.
According to former employees, Palantir has explored work in Saudi Arabia, despite the staff's misgivings about human rights abuses in the kingdom.
And for Alcarp's emphasis on values, his apology for the WikiLeaks affair also doesn't seem to have left much of an impression in his memory.
In his address to Palantir engineers in July, he sounded defiant.
We've never had a scandal that was really our fault.
But was it kind of your fault?
I mean, it's incredible.
And by the way, this WikiLeaks thing has involved a plan to, like, literally put out disinformation and do, like, astroturfing to discredit WikiLeaks, like, submit, like, wrong intel to WikiLeaks and work on wedging Glenn Greenwald's support for WikiLeaks away.
And, of course, Karp ended up apologizing for all that.
And the plan was never put into action.
It was just one of those kind of sales pitches that they did with those two other companies.
The article continues.
Some former Palantir staffers say they felt equally concerned about the potential rights violations their work enabled.
Quote, you're building something that could absolutely be used for malice.
It would have been a nightmare if J. Edgar Hoover had these capabilities in his crusade against Martin Luther King, says one former engineer.
Which I do like the making it like a potential, like if this did go into the hands of the wrong people, but also Also, like, let's give it to, you know, CIA, FBI, NHL.
Well, that's the whole shtick, like, of today's intelligence agencies, right?
Yeah, our past doesn't look great, but our present?
Oh man, you should see the talent we've attracted.
They're much better than J. Edgar Hoover.
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