I think FDA, there's all sorts of SNAP benefits they give out and there's all sorts of things they're working with. And then some of the data might go through NGOs and then the NGO data might be in Treasury. So you need to have something that hooks up and talks to IRS and Treasury about what the NGO's reporting, and then see what the SNAP data set you're supposed to be giving based on what the NGO doing, and then see if it matches and see if it's legit or not. One I'm really excited about right now is hopefully doing that with CMS, with Medicaid, because a lot of the Democrats hooked up all these NGOs to the most money in the country, which is in medical healthcare entitlements. And so they hooked up hundreds of billion plus to their NGOs to their friends, right? We saw this, this is public. The California Democratic leaders got $20 billion for their green NGOs. Georgia, Stacey Abrams got what, $2 billion to give out free appliances to inner city. The whole thing's a joke, right? It's all just like money laundering to their friends. And they got addicted to this money from the Obama administration. That's when they first started doing this.
And so now you say they're addicted to the money. They want as much as possible. What's the most money in government? It's healthcare entitlements, right? That's by far the most money in government. So of course they start hooking up some of like Medicare, Medicaid to the NGOs. And then I think we have to watch all the data at the NGOs really carefully using IRS, Treasury, see the data at CMS for like what they said they were supposed to be doing. You're going to find tons of fraud there.
Right. So, all right. So, since you brought up Palantir there, so one of the things that you said to me about Palantir last time was that in some ways the success of what Palantir and companies like it accomplishes is that people think we don't need it because there are things that you guys are doing to stop certain levels.
Oh, yeah. When you stop terror and things like that, then we don't hear about it. So everyone's like, 'Oh, everything's fine.' However, under the hood, a whole bunch of stuff happened.
So, so once again, what is Palantir? It's like two separate, it feels like two separate talks. You gave me attack, you know?
Actually, interestingly, the DNA of Palantir came out of the anti-fraud work at PayPal, right? So, the Chinese and Russian mafia were stealing massive amounts of money from PayPal. I think it got to like seven or eight million a month back when that was a lot of money, right? Still, I mean it's still even whatever, even maybe it's an accounting error now, but that used to be enough. It destroyed all the competitors to PayPal basically because if you opened it up enough that anyone could send money and steal from it really easily, then it wouldn't work. And if you tried to ask them for enough information, no one wanted to use it. So it was this really hard problem. We figured out how to build all these investigative tools at PayPal. I was an intern there, I get no credit for PayPal, but I learned from this area. And then we partnered with my roommate Stephen, who I'm seeing down here in Florida, and Peter Thiel, and I brought Alex, and we built this thing. And we applied it after 9/11 to the government. And the idea was how do we build platforms that solve the really hard problems to allow you to use all the data the government gathers. It was almost $40 billion a year was being spent to gather data then, but they couldn't use the data. They weren't allowed to see things. Like if they'd had Palantir, it would have been very easy to stop 9/11. That was the whole point. And then the goal was to build it to catch all the terrorists.
Because in essence you guys are looking at all of the patterns and communication.
And you're also just allowing people who might not have a computer science degree themselves, who might work for one of the parts of the government. There's a million analysts in the government in different parts of the CIA and NCTC and FBI and NSA and the DIA, right? There's all these places where people's job is to look at data and stop the bad guys, and they didn't have the right tools. They didn't have the right permissions. So, how do you build the best possible technology for them to do that? And it turns out we had to solve a lot of very hard technical problems to do that. And then a lot of the problems we solved that kind of built these ontologies and made the information work together, it actually made it so you can apply AI very easily on top of the data. So Palantir was in a really strong position. You could say it's lucky as well. Had a lot of talent, but it was lucky that when AI came along, it was able to then take that and help companies, help governments use this new AI stuff.
How do you, I asked Peter the same thing when he sat in that chair, but how do you balance your libertarian-ish ideas with that you're working with the government when it comes to data and people's private...
So I think a lot of people don't realize that Palantir was founded as a civil libertarian company, right? So Palantir was replacing systems that were just taking all the data and letting anyone access whatever they wanted. So if you say without Palantir, what was there before us? It was these systems without tracking, they weren't tracking things, didn't have audit trails, couldn't watch the watcher, didn't have really clear rules about who's allowed to see what, weren't enforcing the law. And Palantir was a way to bring everything in a way that enforces the law and to make sure you're only allowed to see what you're allowed to see. And you know, the law changes, Palantir changes what you could see. But that, you see what I'm saying, like more sophisticated technology actually enforces civil liberties, which people don't get. We actually had a civil liberties group in the company that we launched in like 2006, 2007, and we were explaining like here's how we're going to make it so you can catch the bad guys and follow the law and stop letting people break the law.
