And this is something that appeals to, I mean, if you are a high up person at the company and you know that you need to get some sort of product, let's say you're not super technical, this is exactly the kind of rhetoric, visuals, et cetera, that might appeal to someone.
Lauren Goode: It seems like secrecy is also embedded in the origins of the company. One of its early investors was in QTEL, which is the CIA's venture capital arm. And two of Palantir's cofounders are pretty well-known. Peter Thiel, we've talked about a few times on this show, and Alex Karp, seem like they have intentionally wanted to position the company as a government and military partner, which, like we said earlier, inevitably comes with some secrecy.
Michael Calore: We need to take a break now, but when we come back, we're going to dive further into those founders that you just talked about, Lauren, and we're going to break down how their vision of a techno state has shaped the company, and what it can mean for our collective future.
Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. Before the break, WIRED's Caroline Haskins was telling us all about Palantir services, and how the company actually works with data and the software that it sells to organizations. But it's through looking at two of Palantir's cofounders, particularly Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, that the company's identity starts to come into sharper focus.
Peter Thiel almost needs no introduction. We've talked about him on the show before. And besides being one of the cofounders of Palantir, he used to be part of the so-called PayPal Mafia, and has gathered widespread attention for his support of the current administration and other GOP candidates. Alex Karp is the current CEO of Palantir, and he co-founded the company alongside Thiel and a few other people in 2003. So from the start, what vision did they set up for the company?
Caroline Haskins: I feel like maybe a useful way into that is to talk about some of the internal jargon that Palantir uses. I mean, even just externally, the name Palantir actually comes from Lord of the Rings. It's this idea of an all-seeing stone that can look across vast expanses of land in the present, or go into the past. So the whole idea of that is to provide a product to that is seemingly extremely powerful and can go wherever you would need it to go. But then I guess internally, I think employees have really adopted this attitude that they are solving the world's most difficult problems and making the world a better place.
So, they've kept with the Lord of the Rings language, even just talking amongst each other. Employees call themselves internally, since really the early days of the company, they've called each other hobbits. To the best of my knowledge. I'm not sure how popular this phrase is these days, but a motto that was circulated internally was Save the Shire. So it does get back to this idea of, we're trying to save the world, we're trying to make the world a better place, we're trying to catch terrorists. We're trying to do these really difficult things that make the world a better place-