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Another thing I can trace back to Peter is the idea of talent bat-signals. Having started my own company now (in stealth for the moment), I appreciate this a lot more: recruiting good people is hard, and you need a differentiated source of talent. If you’re just competing against Facebook/Google for the same set of Stanford CS grads every year, you’re going to lose. That means you need a set of talent that is (a) interested in joining you in particular, over other companies (b) a way of reaching them at scale. Palantir had several differentiated sources of recruiting alpha.

But doesn’t the military sometimes do bad things? Of course - I was opposed to the Iraq war. This gets to the crux of the matter: working at the company was neither 100% morally good — because sometimes we’d be helping agencies that had goals I’d disagree with — nor 100% bad: the government does a lot of good things, and helping them do it more efficiently by providing software that doesn’t suck is a noble thing. One way of clarifying the morality question is to break down the company’s work into three buckets – these categories aren’t perfect, but bear with me: Morally neutral. Normal corporate work, e.g. FedEx, CVS, finance companies, tech companies, and so on. Some people might have a problem with it, but on the whole people feel fine about these things. Unambiguously good. For example, anti-pandemic response with the CDC; anti-child pornography work with NCMEC; and so on. Most people would agree these are good things to work on. Grey areas. By this I mean ‘involve morally thorny, difficult decisions’: examples include health insurance, immigration enforcement, oil companies, the military, spy agencies, police/crime, and so on.

The critical case against Palantir seemed to be something like “you shouldn’t work on category 3 things, because sometimes this involves making morally bad decisions”. An example was immigration enforcement during 2016-2020, aspects of which many people were uncomfortable with.

I don’t believe there is a clear answer to whether you should work with category 3 customers; it’s a case by case thing. Palantir’s answer to this is something like “we will work with most category 3 organizations, unless they’re clearly bad, and we’ll trust the democratic process to get them trending in a good direction over time”. Thus: On the ICE question, they disengaged from ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations) during the Trump era, while continuing to work with HSI (Homeland Security Investigations). They did work with most other category 3 organizations, on the argument that they’re mostly doing good in the world, even though it’s easy to point to bad things they did as well. I can’t speak to specific details here, but Palantir software is partly responsible for stopping multiple terror attacks. I believe this fact alone vindicates this stance.

This is an uncomfortable stance for many, precisely because you’re not guaranteed to be doing 100% good at all times. You’re at the mercy of history, in some ways, and you’re betting that (a) more good is being done than bad (b) being in the room is better than not. This was good enough for me. Others preferred to go elsewhere. The danger of this stance, of course, is that it becomes a fully general argument for doing whatever the power structure wants. You are just amplifying existing processes. This is where the ‘case by case’ comes in: there’s no general answer, you have to be specific. For my own part, I spent most of my time there working on healthcare and bio stuff, and I feel good about my contributions.

by making the company about something other than making money (civil liberties; AI god) you attract true believers from the start, who in turn create the highly generative intellectual culture that persists once you eventually find success.

Palantir does data integration for companies, but the data is owned by the companies – not Palantir. “Mining” data usually means using somebody else’s data for your own profits, or selling it. Palantir doesn’t do that - customer data stays with the customer.

“It was one of the wildest, most intense experiences of my life,” said the actress Riley Keough, while her co-star Rosie Huntington-Whiteley added, “You could have made another movie on the making of it.” As for Hardy? “It left me irrevocably changed,” he said.

COLIN GIBSON (production designer) I was in Namibia in 2003 when I got the call to stop spending money. I don’t know whether [the studio] decided to reroute their money back to the Iraq war, or if it was the email I got from Mel Gibson’s wife asking me how many Muslims there may or may not be in Namibia and, therefore, how interested she may or may not be in the whole family coming to visit.

MILLER I had the same feeling about Tom that I had when Mel Gibson first walked into the room: There was a kind of edgy charm, the charisma of animals. You don’t know what’s going on in their inner depths, and yet they’re enormously attractive.

KRAVITZ When they cast me, I was brought to a room that I wasn’t allowed to leave, and I sat there and read the script. It was one of the strangest scripts I’d ever seen, because it was like a really long comic book. JOHN SEALE (cinematographer) I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, so I gave up. I thought, “They’ve been in preproduction for 10 years, let’s just go make it.”

KRAVITZ We would do exercises like writing letters to our captor, really interesting stuff that created deep empathy. I’m glad we had that, because it was such a crazy experience — so long and chaotic — that it would be easy to forget what we were doing if we didn’t have this really great foundation that we could return to. KEOUGH I thought it was amazing that George cared so much. It could have just been like, “This is a big Hollywood movie, now put on your bathing suits and get outside.”

THERON The biggest thing that was driving that entire production was fear. I was incredibly scared, because I’d never done anything like it. I think the hardest thing between me and George is that he had the movie in his head and I was so desperate to understand it. SIXEL It was very difficult for the actors, because there’s no master shot, no blocked-out scenes. Their performances were made of these tiny little moments.

HUNTINGTON-WHITELEY There was a lot of tension, and a lot of different personalities and clashes at times. It was definitely interesting to sit in a truck for four months with Tom and Charlize, who have completely different approaches to their craft. HARDY Because of how much detail we were having to process and how little control one had in each new situation, and how fast the takes were — tiny snippets of story moments were needed to make the final cut work — we moved fast, and it was at times overwhelming. One had to trust that the bigger picture was being held together

THERON In retrospect, I didn’t have enough empathy to really, truly understand what he must have felt like to step into Mel Gibson’s shoes. That is frightening! And I think because of my own fear, we were putting up walls to protect ourselves instead of saying to each other, “This is scary for you, and it’s scary for me, too. Let’s be nice to each other.” In a weird way, we were functioning like our characters: Everything was about survival. HARDY I would agree. I think in hindsight, I was in over my head in many ways. The pressure on both of us was overwhelming at times. What she needed was a better, perhaps more experienced, partner in me. That’s something that can’t be faked. I’d like to think that now that I’m older and uglier, I could rise to that occasion.

KRAVITZ We were behind schedule, and we heard the studio was freaking out about how we were over budget. SEALE The president of Warner Bros. flew to Namibia and had a gold-plated fit. MILLER Jeff was in a bake-off with Kevin Tsujihara about who was going to head the studio, and he had to assert himself to show his superiors that he was in command and a strong executive. I knew what he was going through, but it wasn’t going to do anybody any good at all. [Robinov could not be reached for comment.] MITCHELL He said, “The camera will stop on Dec. 8, no matter what you’ve got, and that’s the end of it.” We hadn’t shot any of the scenes in the Citadel yet, where the opening and closing book ends of the film are set, and we had to go into postproduction without them. It was almost incomprehensible.

SIXEL When we actually finished the film and it was a success, that was the best year we ever had. We’d repeat the stories of making the film to each other over and over again: How did we get to the other side? We still kind of marvel at it.

MILLER Not for a moment did we think “Fury Road” would be anything like an Oscar movie. SIXEL Half the time, I thought I was going to get fired off the film, and then I win an Oscar! How about that? We were just disappointed that George didn’t win, but basically, they were all his Oscars in a way.

MILLER When the ideas that you start off with are then comprehended by an audience at large out there, that’s ultimately what redeems the process for you. The Swahili storytellers have this quote: “The story has been told. If it was bad, it was my fault, because I am the storyteller. But if it was good, it belongs to everybody.” And that feeling of the story belonging to everybody is really the reward