Podcast Episode - Suze School: Understanding Palantir

On today’s Suze School, Suze is joined by Keith Fitz-Gerald for a lesson in Palantir.  We’ll learn what the company actually does and why it’s always better to invest by knowing the facts about a stock, versus only making emotional decisions.

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Podcast Transcript:

Suze: June 8, 2025. Welcome everybody to the Women and Money podcast as well as everybody smart enough to listen. All right, we have a surprise for you today

Let's go to Suze school. You know, obviously, over the past year or two, I have been recommending a stock by the name of Palantir, and that recommendation came from Keith Fitz-Gerald. Many of you are part of his One Bar Ahead group, and you all love it. You're all smart enough to do that, but many of you are also part of 5 with Fitz, which is his absolutely free 5 days a week update on what he thinks you should and should not be doing—just that simple.

Many of you have been mad at me. You've been so mad at me because how could I recommend a stock like Palantir, Suze Orman, don't you understand the destruction that they're doing to the United States of America and on and on and on. And so I thought, especially with the news, if you've been watching the news lately, it's been like, oh my God, Trump has tapped Palantir for possibly three projects, and immediately the stock goes down from like 130 all the way down to 119. Then the very next day it opens up at 124, 125.

Here's the thing you've got to understand: what is Palantir? Should you be mad at me that I recommended it? What should you understand about investing in stocks? When should you hold? When should you sell? What should you do, especially with a stock like Palantir, that truthfully everybody has made us more money than any stock that I'm sure you have ever had in your portfolio, 'cause remember Keith started to recommend to buy it when it was $7 a share, OK?

So I thought rather than me trying to explain it to you, that I would have the maestro himself, Mr. Keith Fitz-Gerald, on the podcast today, so that I could ask him questions on your behalf, and maybe you could get an understanding of why we recommended it, or I should say Keith recommended it, and why I believed in that recommendation so that I then started to recommend it to you. And how should you feel about things. So Keith, welcome to the Women and Money podcast once again.

Keith: Thank you so much for having me and to everybody who's spending a few minutes of their time with us today. What an honor. Appreciate it.

Suze: You know, it is an honor, Keith, because as many of the listeners know, I don't have guests on this show. I get people who write into me all the time and say, Suze, I have this expert on so and so. Can they be a guest on your show? And on and on, and I always write them back and say, Don't you listen to the Women and Money podcast? We don't have guests. It's just me and KT. That's it. But every once in a while, I really believe there has to be an exception to the rule. Especially with somebody like you, Keith.

Keith, just tell people a little bit about you and why I go to you when I really wanna know deep inside information, not insider, but inside your head about what's going on, not only in the stock market, but in the economy. So let everybody know just a little bit about you.

Keith: Oh my goodness, you are most kind, so. For right or for wrong, for better or for worse, I've been doing this since I was 15 years old, so 45+ years in global markets right now, and I love what I do. This is a big puzzle. Unfortunately, we've gotten a lot of stuff right over the years. Now we made some mistakes, but that comes with the territory, right?

But I'm what you see is what you get. I put my shoes on just like everybody else, and what people tell me, including yourself, is that I'm good at common sense, breaking it down, no $5 words needed because you know what, if you invest in optimism, the profits eventually follow. And if you can do that consistently, you have a framework, you can keep your emotions out of the equation, and we're all guilty of letting them in once in a while. But if you can do that, then you know what, you got a pretty darn bright future in front of yourself.

I'm married, got two grown boys. Live in the Pacific Northwest and travel the world because I love what I do and I love the people I meet, and I love the fact that innovation always produces profits.

Suze: And just tell people a little bit about how many firms you've worked for and how long you've been doing this.

Keith: Oh my goodness, sure. So I made my first trades when I was 15 years old, learning at the feet of my grandmother Virginia Mimi Gruner, who was widowed at a very young age and left with a tiny little life insurance settlement.

And she turned that because she became a global investor before the term even existed, and she got so good at what she did that she turned that little tiny settlement into everything she needed to live for the rest of her life and then some. She made sure I understood how money worked. She made sure I knew that the world was bigger than my garage.

So I started making my first trades. I was fortunate to get quite a few right that helped pay for college, for my living expenses, all sorts of things. I never looked back and I started in the late 80s at a firm called Wilshire Associates, which today is one of the pre-eminent worldwide consulting firms, trillions of dollars under advisement and consultation. I learned what worked on Wall Street. More importantly, I learned early on what really works for individual investors and importantly what doesn't work. And so I began to put two and two together and ever since, I've just been around the world, the global financial centers, worked with lots of big funds, small funds, big firms, small firms. Today I advise a number of advisors on security selection, market strategy, and in addition, we write One Bar Ahead for individual investors around the world.

Suze: Everybody, that's Keith's brief history. To tell you the truth, it's far more extensive than that, but I'll let him be modest for right now. We have a stock, Palantir.

Most people don't even have a clue what Palantir does. So first of all, let's explain that to them. They just hear me say buy Palantir, and they do. They look at the symbol, they go, OK, and they don't know what they have purchased. Tell everybody what they should know about Palantir.

Keith: Absolutely, let's keep it really simple. So in the old days when you put together databases—stuff in spreadsheets and nice orderly linear columns—you got what was called big data, and firms like SAP and Oracle, the legacy names of the past, were great at organizing that stuff. But the problem that we've got in today's world is that the data has become chaotic. It's become multifaceted. It's become multidimensional.

We've got so much data—most people don't know this, Suze—but we've created something like 98% of all the data that has ever been created in recorded human history within the last five years. Now think about that for a moment. That is a staggering figure. The average person today encounters more information in a single issue of a newspaper than a person living in the 1700s would have seen in their lifetime. So this has continued to accelerate and the data continues to get more complex. As that happens, it becomes harder to work with.

Now that's where Palantir comes in. They take this chaotic data and all these nice, neat stacks of information that you can't otherwise access, organize, or even make decisions with—and they allow it to talk to each other. The byproduct is that clients who use it—whether it's commercial, corporate, or government—can suddenly make decisions using data they couldn't see before. They can become more efficient. They can increase sales. They can expand hospital beds, improve medical treatments, enable specialized care. There are thousands of use cases for what you can do with data now using Palantir's products that you couldn't do even a few years ago.

Suze: And why is it that people write me and tell me and yell at me for putting people's money and recommending Palantir? What are they misunderstanding or what are they understanding about the company that could be very dangerous to the safety of everybody in America?

Keith: Well, I would flip that around. There's a lot of misinformation out there, right? Palantir began with its roots in helping make sense of complicated data for the military and the intelligence community. So for a lot of folks, that is a tough pill to swallow because they don't want to associate necessarily with the military or with the thought that there's an intelligence group out there.

But they got so good at moving this data around, anticipating things, making decisions, that they began to expand into the commercial environment. So this idea that the company is suddenly miraculously surfacing out of nowhere is just patently false and incorrect. It's been around a very long time and it’s very, very good at what it does.

The other misconception that's out there, Suze, and why people are very upset, is because there was an article recently in The New York Times that is filled with erroneous information—dozens of technical errors in terms of how the process works, what their software does, where they go, the role they play. It's amazing. CEO Alex Karp was on CNBC earlier—Friday, I believe it was—and he said, “I'm dyslexic. The New York Times has so many errors in their article they may as well hire me to do a spelling bee.” I mean, it's just astonishing.

So if you take a few minutes to understand how the product actually works, this notion of fear, that it's suddenly surveilling Americans or doing all these other things, is not only patently false, it's not even built into the software's capabilities. Palantir—this will be a very controversial statement for a lot of people—but Palantir, if you wanted to surveil Americans or other people around the world, is absolutely the wrong choice.

In fact, it's probably the worst choice you could make if you're a bad actor, because all of the safeguards—determining who accesses information, how they use it, what they do with it, exactly to the data point what they touch—is auditable. It's transparent. It is built into the software platform, not as an add-on, which is how all the legacy guys did it.

Suze: A software—here we are. You say the legacy guys, how they did it—so explain to people why, and they should understand this, why Palantir also protects us here in the United States of America. It's not—listen, Palantir, I don't have to know much, but I do know that Palantir isn't built so that they can spy on all of us and they can know what we do. I mean, there are already companies out there that know everything that we do.

Keith: Well, the funny thing is people have voluntarily contributed to Meta and Instagram and all of these other things—TikTok. People worry about the Chinese or they worry about Palantir, yet in the same breath they go onto their Facebook account, or they go on their Instagram, or they dial into their credit bureau, or they get a mortgage, they have a credit card. It's such a contradiction.

The irony is extreme, because people are suddenly like, wait a minute, everybody's watching—when that cat got out of the bag 40 years ago. We are living in a digital world where if you use a credit card, if you go into a store, if you get on Facebook, social media—and even the people who are writing to you, the irony—the people who are writing to you and me and sometimes saying, well, what about Palantir? They're using technology that came from the military to begin with.

So you know, the irony is really something. Every company has its own set of gremlins. And as an investor, you've got to come to terms with that. Because are you looking for the future, or are you looking to build upon the past? If you're looking for the future, profits are where you want to be. If you're looking for the past, then you know what? Move 500 miles from the nearest military installation, go off the grid, start churning your own butter, get some sticks you can whittle at midnight—it's going to be a very different world. You can't go off the grid anymore.

But a company like Palantir—here's the real part, and this is the part that most people don't understand, particularly in light of this New York Times article—is that the fear is, oh my gosh, suddenly everybody's watching us. Well, personally, looking at this from a much bigger perspective, which is what I do, because I do investing—I don't do politics, I don't do personalities. I’ve got to figure out where the money is going. That's my job as a market strategist.

And what I know is that there are bad actors out there. There are terrorists, there are the Chinese, there are the Russians, there are a dozen other folks who, if they could, would push a button and eliminate the United States of America and consider it a good day's work, OK? Palantir is helmed by an unabashedly patriotic CEO who is firmly, unequivocally in defense of America and Americans. So I would rather have him out there with Palantir protecting this country, knowing full well that the Chinese and Russians and others are desperately trying to develop their own versions of Palantir to be used against us.

Suze: Just to make it very simple for all of you, you want to know what freaks me out, everybody? That KT and I are having a conversation, and we're talking about—let's just say surfboards. Let's just say that's true.

And all of a sudden, we look on our phone and we look at Instagram or we look at Facebook or whatever, and there are all these ads about surfboards all of a sudden up there, advertising to us. So you have to realize, if you're using Siri, if you're using Alexa, if you're using this little phone, it is listening to you all the time and everything that you are saying.

You walk by a store on the street and all of a sudden you get an ad that says, oh, want to come in? We have a sale. It's like, how did they know that I'm even walking by that particular store?

So you have to not be so freaked out when all of a sudden a major company is doing contracts—possibly—with the government. They've been doing contracts with the government for a long time. But when all of you see the name Trump is targeting Palantir to do something, you automatically think, oh my God, that’s it, it’s going to be the worst thing.

And what you also have to understand—and Keith, tell them—doesn't that mean just because Trump is targeting them to do something that they're going to do it? Isn't that true?

Keith: Well, that's very true. And so we have the 1974 Privacy Protection Act, which is in play, and it's very robust. And our architects of that law did a very good job. So it's not a matter of the President is out there to target you. What he actually said—and this is important—

Because a lot of folks either can't get past Trump, or they just can't get past Palantir. Take Trump out of it. Take Palantir out of it. Imagine you're sitting in that office, right? And if you know that all of these threats are out there—there is not a leader in the world who would not employ the best software he or she could buy to protect his or her citizens. That's the crux of the argument.

And so if we look at this again—take Trump out of it. Like him, dislike him—I don’t take sides. I do money, not politics. So if you take him out of it, the question to ask is: would a sitting president, would a leader in any country around the world, not take steps to buy the very best software they could find to help protect their citizens and their nation?

And the answer is unequivocally yes. They would absolutely try to protect their citizens and their nation, because that's what they were elected to do. That’s part of the job. So my piece, when you look at it coldly, clinically—OK, fine, it is Trump, it is Palantir—but if you look at the framework of the 1974 Protection Act, you look at what the Palantir software stack actually does, how it works, who controls it, and the audit trail involved—

Then the question becomes, where does this actually fit within our government? What the President actually said was, I want to build a commonly accessible, more efficient, more cost-effective database instead of relying on antiquated, outdated systems that cost taxpayers billions of dollars, result in hopeless inaccuracies—from agencies A to Z in our government. Everybody knows they're inefficient.

So this is an attempt to protect Americans, make our government more efficient, potentially move us into the next century. And again, take Trump out of it. What does this software actually do? What could we get? What would go right?

Imagine calling the IRS and actually getting an answer. Imagine having Amtrak work the way it was supposed to. Imagine the post office being more efficient. Imagine your medical records, your tax records, the HIPAA Act, privacy—all of these things suddenly working the way that they were intended in a pre-digital age, but in a digital age. How cool would that be?

Suze: You know, the truth of the matter is that Palantir—correct me if I'm wrong, Keith—had a lot to do with helping us during COVID and the pandemic and all of these things. So all of you, take out—not all of you, but those of you who have been so angry at me—you take out one thing and you blow it up and you're mad at me.

But all right, let's say you're like KT, OK? Sure. And Keith experienced this the other day. KT hears the news, we're watching CNN. Immediately she looks at me, she says, "Sell it."

Now, as all of you know, KT and I have a whole lot of Palantir—tens of thousands of shares, OK? Now KT has half and I have half. And I said, I'm not selling my half. She says, "Oh, I'm—I want to sell my half." So she doesn't ask me, and she sends an email to Keith saying, what should I do?

All of a sudden Keith calls. First of all, not quite believing that it's KT—'cause I don't think KT, Keith, has ever called you before, has she?

Keith: Well, I wanted to make sure it was really her because, to our point about digital fraud, it could have been an imposter, right?

Suze: And so KT now is convinced. She doesn't care. She wants to sell. She doesn't want to have anything to do with this stock. She is dead set against it.

And so Keith is explaining all this to her. So I want you to imagine that maybe one of you out there listened to us when we started to say buy it at $7, buy it at $10, buy it at $15—'cause my average cost basis in it is $22.

So I said to KT, now imagine you're KT. I said, KT, if you sell just—let's say—5,000 shares, do you realize the capital gain that you're going to pay here? Because it's a 100% gain for you, KT, on 5,000 shares. You're going to lose 20 or 30% of that to capital gains tax anyway. So are you aware of that?

And she just kind of looked at me. Now by this point, Keith is on FaceTime with us. So of course, I handed her over to him. And at first, she was right—dead set against listening to either of us. Don't you agree?

Keith: Right, she was, yeah, she was like, "No, I'm selling," and I'm like, you are not selling. And now we're arguing about it. But here was the bottom line—and I'll have Keith tell you what he told KT. Take out the fact of the capital gains and all of that. But the question becomes: when do you hold the stock that you are vehemently against? You believe—in fact, you don't believe a thing that we've just said to you here on the podcast. You think Palantir is evil. You don't like what they're doing. What should you do at that point in time? And Keith, what would you tell them?

Keith: Boom. If you are absolutely dead set and you want to sleep, and this is driving you bananas, then you know what? Sell it and don't look back. But make peace with the fact that this company is going to go on without you, the future is going to arrive whether you like it or not, and that you're going to miss out on tremendous profit potential going forward.

Because investing is not about looking backwards. One of our cardinal rules is you keep your emotions out of the equation. So if you can come to terms with the facts, with the potential, with the way this is moving, then by all means hang on to it. Stocks like Palantir are truly unique. They are the only ones in the world doing what they do. They are going to change our future, change the trajectory of humanity.

And what we know from history is that every company has gremlins. But those companies like Palantir that truly change our future are worth hanging on to—if you can stomach doing so.

Suze: So, all of you, I just want you to know I have trouble with Musk. I just do.

And I know that Tesla is one of these stocks that Keith loves. You love this stock.

Keith: Oh, I do. He drives me bananas, but I love the stock.

Suze: Yeah, but I just want to tell all of you I had a very big position in Tesla, but I sold it all, Keith. Now I understand very well that I probably will miss out on a whole lot of money being made in that one stock. However, there are other stocks that I can equally buy and make money—maybe not as much money, maybe possibly more money—but for me, I couldn't stomach owning that stock.

If that's you, when it comes to Palantir, what I would tell you is: sell it and don't look back. But don't have regrets when you look at it and you see it skyrocketing, as Tesla has done since I sold it.

You can't have regrets. You have to be firm in your conviction as to why you are selling it. And if you value yourself more than money, then sell it, if that is your feeling. If it's not your feeling, don't let somebody make you feel guilty about it.

This podcast really is about you getting in touch with your emotions. 'Cause remember, I've said to you over all these years that fear, shame, and anger are the three internal obstacles to wealth.

Keith, what else, as we're bringing this to an end, do you want to say?

Keith: Investing in optimism is always more profitable and confidence-inspiring than cowering in fear. And how you define that is uniquely up to every listener on this today. What's right for one person is different for another. But that's how you share information. That's how you learn. That's how you adjust your opinion. Because companies like Palantir force you to have a conversation with somebody in the mirror. And as long as you're listening, there's an opportunity there.

If you shut it off reflexively, then you know what? That's bench-level thinking, third-level stuff—don’t even mess with it.

Suze: The main thing I want to say—first of all, thank you, Mr. Keith Fitz-Gerald. Thank you.

And until Thursday, when Ms. Travis joins us again for an Ask KT and Suze Anything podcast, remember: there's only one thing I want you to remember when it comes to your money, and it's this—people first, then money, then things.

Now you stay safe. Bye-bye.