Ep 153: Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar on Heretics, AI Weapons, and Rebuilding the Arsenal of Democracy

The reason we're going to win in whatever domain it is, is that we're crazy. Even we don't know what we're going to do when we get punched in the face. And I think that's actually an exceptional quality. You're the CTO of Palantir. So how do we give our service members that Ironman suit? How do I make them superhuman? You're the 13th employee. Most people were working at calendar apps. Here there was these 12 people who were like, yeah, we're going to solve problems in national security. Palantir was a bunch of heretics early on. We're not here to ring the next sale. We're here to transform the institution. that has led to a culture that is wildly focused on outcomes. What are shamisms? I describe forward-deployed engineers as people that metabolize pain and excrete product. I have to ask you about some of these magical AI weapons that clash between Anthropoc and the Pentagon. You need people making these decisions who are accountable to the American people. What made the Palatric culture unique? It wasn't actually clear that we're going to succeed at all, but I'd rather fail working on something this important than succeed on building something completely trivial and worthless. Sean Sankar is one of my favorite American innovators. He's been leading Palantir for over 20 years as its CTO now and built a lot of what the company stands for. He's a lieutenant colonel in the army. That's right after making a billion dollars and changing the innovation world. He's also serving in our armed forces because he loves America. He has a great new book out that's a bestseller called Mobilize. He's going to tell us about the crisis of the American industrial base, how to revive what made us great and how to prevent World War III. Let's hear from this patriot. Welcome to American Optimist. Really excited to have our friend, Sean Sankar with us today. Sean, thanks for joining. Great to be here with you, Joe. So Sean, you've been a key leader at Palantir. You're the CTO there. You're a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army. You have an awesome new book out, Mobilize. I think you're in town in Austin here. You're getting an award tonight. So you're the man of the hour. How's everything going? Look, it's going great. I think that I'm so excited about the kind of the vibe in the country right now, the opportunity to fix so many of the problems that we've been staring at as it relates to the defense industrial base, our national security, mobilizing the country. So I'm pumped. It does kind of feel like the world came our way a little bit, huh? Like from the last 20 years. Yeah. I think there, there's certainly a number of us who've kind of been seeing inside and outside of government, seeing like the trends of the world. I mean, part of the thesis of the book is if you really go back to 2014, you have the militarization of, you have the annexation of Crimea, the militarization of the Spratly Islands in 15, Iran with breakout capability for the bomb. You've had a pogrom in Israel, the Houthis holding Red Sea trade hostage, global trade hostage from the Red Sea. It's pretty hard to look at this and not think, perhaps we've lost deterrence. And as a country that spends a trillion dollars a year on defense, how is this happening? Why is this happening? I think there are a lot of lessons from our past. You go back to World War II, the early Cold War, the fundamental innovative American spirit that actually provided for our defense. Now we have a huge number of founders who've shown up to invest in the national interest. We have bold leadership throughout our military services to seize that opportunity. And I think this is the moment. I was really, really worried in 2015, 2016, where things were going. And I think a lot of us respond to that by jumping back in and getting our friends to jump back in. And it does feel like it's gone the right way the last 10 years. I agree. Well, let's go back a little bit before we dive into the book and pounds here. Tell us a little bit about your upbringing. Your father grew up in a mud hut in India. You and your family were nearly murdered in Nigeria. And how'd you make it to America? And what does this country mean to you? Yeah, my father was the youngest of nine kids. He grew up in a single room mud hut in South India. Dad studied pharmacy. And as a very young man, 22, 23 years old, he left India to go build the first pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Africa. This was in Nigeria. And dad was very successful in his 20s. You know, he built this factory. He ran it. While I was born in India, my parents were obviously living in Nigeria. When we were about three years old, when I was three years old, there was an armed robbery at the house. And there was five armed robbers that came in. They decapitated the dog. They pistol whipped dad. They threatened to kill him, threatened horrible things to mom. That was a really, that was a seminal moment for dad. We left all of our earthly possessions behind in Lagos and resettled in Orlando. But, you know, that, that dad from that point forward always had this counterfactual about the gratitude for life in particular, the gratitude for America that, but for this nation, we'd be dead in addition Lagos. And why America versus somewhere else or any other nation is, was there, was there a reason why America was the one? Well, of course, I think if you go, so I think there's, there's like this situational idiosyncratic factors, like dad had a childhood friend who was living in LA and had built a business selling knickknacks to theme parks. And this friend called dad up and said, Hey, I know this horrible thing happened to you. There's this place called Orlando. All the theme parks seem to be going there. You know, I need someone I can trust. But of course, I think the more strategic factors are the American soft power, you know, dad, despite never having been to America, had a fully formed conception of the promise of this city on the Hill from great Hollywood movies, from the export of the vision of the country. And so, of course, even he not having been here knew you'd be lucky to be here. You're the CTO of Palantir. You've made infinite money at this point. And you're a husband and a father. Yet last year, you joined the US Army Reserves. Why'd you do that? In part to honor dad's sacrifice. This country has given us more than we deserve to have. And I think a sign of a functioning society is that those who succeed in it are willing to invest their time, energy, money, resources, attention, and give back. I think that the micro reasons are like, this is the example I want to set for my children. I want to make sure that they have the same gratitude as maybe a generation removed from the visceral violence that we escaped. They should have the same gratitude that I had, that dad imparted in us. And I think, I'm not sure I had a lot of differentiated skills to give the army at 24, but I think at 44, uh, I've learned a thing or two along the way that I think can hopefully help the army go faster. You've definitely learned a lot to help the military as you've been doing for a long time. Let's go back to the early days of Palantir briefly. I guess you were the, you were the 13th employee when we, that's right. Lucky number 13. That's actually, that's, that's funny. Uh, you know, I guess our, our friend Gabe who ended up working there later and introduced us, uh, I remember recruiting you at, there's a restaurant, which you, as you seem to remember better than me. Straight cafe. Yeah. I know. This is a little Singaporean restaurant. Yeah. What was your initial impression of this company? Um, just incredible high agency. You know, it's like most people were working in kind of like bullshit calendar apps or something in the Valley at the time. And here there was like these 12 people who were like, yeah, we're going to solve problems in national security. And obviously given my family background and it, that tugged at my heartstrings. I was, I was kind of ruined. Like what, what could I work on that wouldn't feel meaningless after seeing the opportunity that you guys were chasing. And I think, you know, if you're being super candid, it wasn't actually clear that we're going to succeed at all, but I'd rather fail working on something this important than succeed on building something completely trivial and worthless. Was the team, was it uniquely talented? Is it just the mission driven thing was the thing that stood out by far? Well, both. I mean, the people, Bob McGrew, you know, I was like, these people were enormously talented. I was cowering my lack of intelligence in face of them, but also just like how, you know, you combine the talent with the orientation to the mission. It was charismatic. And so the mission driven side fit really well. You, you came in and actually taught a lot of us a lot about things. I guess you figured out yourself. You seem to know how to structure the business side and transparency and processes and all these things. Like where did that come from? Uh, you know, carp would say sometimes you have a superpower. Your superpower is defined by not what you're, you know, what you're particularly good at per se, but what, what you can do that other people can't do. And I think there's a journey of discovery and kind of organizing the team and getting us to execute and having this ruthless focus on working backwards from the customer's problems. That's kind of my jam. What made the Palatare culture unique or what still makes it unique? Like, tell us, I guess, I didn't remember this. I guess we made you live with Aki for a while. Yeah, I think there was some agency in that decision here, but it was, Aki and I were roommates for a very long time. Aki was the founding backend engineer. and um it was i wouldn't say that it we always had a great relationship we still do i i think aki and i like never saw each other at home we only saw each other at work because we were always at work but it was very convenient to to live like i think it was two walking blocks away from the office this was my policy that i don't peter's genius policy you pay people more if they live near the office yeah it works it works well we don't do that anymore do we no we don't at some point in palo alto we ended up competing against ourselves the subsidy went away because literally the whole radius was occupied by us. That's fair. That's fair. The intent doesn't matter anymore. I still think maybe it should matter for some offices, but I guess maybe it's too obnoxious too. That's the problem is that we were kind of like getting away with things. Now that I have a spouse, I probably would have done things slightly differently. It works for a certain phase. Yeah. It's like, it's like young people. It's a little different. I guess Alex Karp made the team a bet. They couldn't live in the office for a month, but that was more, that was more of the hedgehog guys. I think it was, but I mean, I think it's so uniquely the craziness of the counterculture it's like yeah so if you live in the office for a month fortunately we did have like a shower stall there but if you live in the office for a month i will i will ensure that there's like barbecue every friday in perpetuity uh and yeah i think i guess so um but you know andy i think actually pulled it off i love it he still comes over for magic like once a week here i just saw him so fde's for deployed engineers i think you coined the term uh i do remember thinking and talking about how it was like really key to get engineers out in the field and get experience but you kind of like branded and structured and like created the whole thing like tell us about this what are fdes i mean everyone now wants fdes like everyone in the valley it's very fun to see like this thing that we created just like everywhere now i can't say it was founded with perfect foresight but i think it really started with carp's intuition that part did have foresight which is um you know we are not going to build we're not going to succeed as a company by just having sales people interacting with the customer that actually there's a lot more to learn from the customer and you need the substance provider to be co-located with them. And then I think a series of things kind of happened in the early days where we would try to be a little more conventional. We'd try to give this offer to the customer and actually would not end up working, not because the software didn't work, but because of some underlying infrastructure problem where you had to like discover that actually to get the software to work, the whole stack had to work, things that were beyond your control. You had to take wildly more ownership. uh and then i think that the first real deployment which was like this 18 hours a day seven days a week for two weeks just to get it to work was like a really grounding experience that actually the only way to solve for the product that must exist is through back propagation you have to have really technical people sitting with the customer understanding figuring out what's the right product the ability to like mutate and ship that product and then like anneal those lessons back into the core product i often think about is like vector math you have four deployed engineers who are they kind of hackers they kind of dopamine hit in life comes from solving the problem never mind that this is a caricature but never mind that it's basically macgyver like duct tape and bubble gum yeah the point is you solve the problem on the other end you have the traditional product engineer and their dopamine comes out of building the thing the right way. And nevermind, it doesn't solve a problem anyone cares about. Don't you see how beautifully built it is? And so if you can figure out a way to get these things to move in tension, that's how you kind of sail upwind. We always called them backend engineers. And then the forward-flight engineers, I remember. What's the term now for the core engineers back home? Product engineers. Product engineers back home. And it's interesting because nowadays with AI, I guess it's easier to be more across the spectrum or do you still have the really strong distinctions. I think actually, so we still have the really strong distinction because it's like, are you accountable to your customer succeeding? Are you accountable to the product succeeding? Obviously you want both of these things to work. And so there's a question of, do you think you're going to get them to work by collapsing it to a single person who's accountable for both? Or do you think you're going to get to work by wiring up an elegant tension that you manage between the two? I think the thing that most people don't understand about this is it is an unstable equilibrium. So if you were going to pursue a strategy like this, It actually requires a dictator to sit between these two organizations to manage that tension, to make sure it's a productive tension, it doesn't get counterproductive, and to make the strategic calls along the way. There is like, I guess, what Karp would call a dialectic between the two, where there's like truths about what you need on both sides that you have to compromise between, huh? Then the personality conflicts here get very big. You know, the person who gets from zero to one thinks they're doing 80% of the work. Yep. The person who's getting from one to end thinks they're doing 80% of the work. Let's just say there's the first 80% and the second 80%. And as a consequence, they don't quite appreciate that you both need each other. Oh, yeah. Whenever something in tech's 90% done, it's like there's actually a lot more to do to actually make it work. What are shamisms? We talk about this now a lot. What does that mean to Palantir? I mean, I guess I've coined a few things over time that seem totally normal to me, but I describe forward deployed engineers as people that metabolize pain and excrete product. That's one that has gotten pretty popular here. But I think that's a good way of thinking about the role, really. Gamma radiation. So what's your theory of growth? Like, how do you, as an individual, expect to get better? I think too many of us have bought into this veal cow farm-like mentality of a linear ladder that you kind of climb that has perfect predictability. And I like to present an alternative theory, which is the Incredible Hulk. You know, how did Bruce Banner, the mild-mannered physicist, turn into the Incredible Hulk? It wasn't through progressive overload. It's not like he lifted a little bit more weight every single week. It was through a near fatal dose of gamma rays. Could have turned him 50% chance he died, 50% chance he turned into the big green monster. And I think that's a much, much more rewarding way to think about your own growth. How do you find yourself, take your, throw yourself off the deep end into situations you may not be qualified for and let that unleash the Hulk within you. A lot of people stop growing because they stop, they stop taking risks because they already see themselves as successful and they don't want to expose themselves anymore to hard things. Yeah. So many, so many. And they, you know, so much of it is also like there's weird social pressure. How do I explain the growth I'm having to my significant other or to my friends or to my family? You know, so I need labels. I need all these things that are actually truly anti-growth, but have the appearance of growth. And in growth, it often, you can only connect the dots retrospectively. It's very hard to know how will I grow from this experience, but you can know that if it's really hard and it's going to push you, you're going to grow in some way. Yeah. Definitely the hardest things in life, you guys end up shaping who you are and you hopefully in positive ways, if you react right. I want to ask about the business side because you've, you're a CTO, but you've run, you can still help run the whole business. You've ran the whole business for a very long time on the business side of Palantir, which is unique, obviously, because it's very technical. But you know, one thing that I found interesting is you became a lot more disciplined over time. So I think in the old days, we would like chase a lot of stuff. And then now you would just be very blunt and say, Oh, that sounds great, but here's why it's not going to work. And it comes across, I think to some people as cynical if they don't, if they don't know you very well, but, but, but it actually just palins or just learn to say no to like a ton of stuff. Tell me about this. Well, I think some of that is just experience. Like in particular, it's interesting coming from someone calling me cynical because I'm kind of a wildly optimistic person. Um, but you kind of figure out what are the conditions for success? You know, you think naively in the beginning, it's like, well, if the product's great, this is going to work. But then you start understanding there are all sorts of conditions that need to be true at the customer, how the customer thinks about the world, where they are in terms of understanding their own problems, the nature of the value you can add. How enduring is the value going to be? How well shaped is it to be? So it's actually the value itself you're going to add is really important considerations, even bother engaging or not. Yeah. I mean, I think the most valuable part of forward-to-point engineering that I don't think people understand is it changes what your reward function is. In a traditional software company, your reward function is, can I sell the software. You don't actually really have a visceral understanding of what, how much value does that software create? What could you do to make it more valuable? You only distantly observe that in attenuated way through renewals or something, right? But the forward deployed engineer often is actually doing the work before you have a contract. You know, it's kind of, it's leading sales and you have a visceral sense that actually you're only going to get the sale if you're delivering value. And that allows you to keep chasing up the value curve here. And that, that, that has led to a culture that is wildly focused on outcomes. Are we, is like, does any of this work matter existentially? Like we're not here to ring the next sale. We're here to transform the institution. But then a lot of times, you know, you could add value and you know, the Ford flow engineer would make something that works really well for them, but you still, it's not, still not worth trying to sell it to them. Like what, what are some of the reasons why sometimes? You know, some of the problems at the institution require you to one, acknowledge that you have a problem and two, be willing to actually break glass, to recognize that you're going to have to restructure this. And just as a cheat code, you can think about it as we're usually incredibly successful with founder-led institutions or where the leadership acts as if they are founders because they have an ownership mentality over the entire outcome and are willing to reimagine everything in order to achieve the goal. I think a lot of this actually is very congruent with the military. Like you must win winning matters. And people are willing to re-examine particularly it's closer and closer you get to the fighting force. They're willing to re-examine literally everything in order to achieve that goal. And so finding commercial companies that have that same perspective is, is, is really important. I like the extreme example you gave. I was introducing a company, I won't say which recently that has hundreds of billions of, of cash and is very, very large company, but they're the financial operators and they're not really as focus maybe on, on, on existential problems that are companies because they're rich no matter what. Whereas the opposite would be like a mission to like save a pilot in the middle East or work with special forces. How would you put that? No, I think, I think that's well said. It's like, do you need to get better? You know, are you, are you waking up? Um, does every incremental improvement actually motivate you? Uh, and I think, you know, some companies are kind of running an autopilot. Uh, and, uh, I would say that there are the periods of extreme growth for us are always periods of extreme disruption in the market. You could say part of the reason the chat GPT moment was so valuable for us is it actually set an expectation with CEOs. Hey, wait a second. My software is supposed to work. You know, because if you, so many of this stuff's not, if you go back to COVID and supply chains, people have spent in the years leading up to COVID, they spent 5 billion, $10 billion on their ERP system. They were so proud of it. It was the greatest thing since sliced bread. And then it fell over like a paper tiger within a week of COVID happening. So go back to the earnings call. What were CEOs talking about on the public company earnings calls? Zoom, Teams, these were the IT investments that saved their business. What a condemnation of the software industrial complex that actually they couldn't build anything that was resilient to a reality that their customers were experiencing. In those moments, people become incredibly open-minded and their expectations become very high. And you now have purchase to deliver outcomes that they're going to appreciate. I love it. I want to get to the topics of the book and we'll circle back maybe to some of the military stuff we're doing because everyone's asking me to hear what we're allowed to say. But let's talk about mobilize a little bit. So between our support in Ukraine and the attacks in Iran, is our industrial base keeping up? What are the problems? Where are we right now? Look, I think the lesson of Ukraine is that we went through 10 years of production and 10 weeks of fighting. And if you set that in a historical context, that's a fire of alarm fire. So 10 years of stuff got used in 10 weeks. Yeah. It took us 10 years to make a quantity of materiel that we expended in 10 weeks. That's terrible. That math doesn't really work for very long, obviously. And so then you have to understand, well, like, how did we get here? What did it used to be like? We have these great memories of World War II where we just, in our mind, flipped a switch and converted auto factories to build war materiel. But that's not really what happened. What really happened is you had this Danish emigre, Will Knudsen. He was formerly the number two at Ford where he perfected mass production. Then he became the number two at GM. And Roosevelt, ahead of a consensus, remember the country was incredibly divided in the lead up to World War II. There were a lot of people who wanted to be isolationists. That's Europe's war. It's not our problem. We shouldn't get involved. Roosevelt figured out in 38 and 39 how to bring Will Knudsen in and start mobilizing for production. And we had the benefit of Lend-Lease, a moment where we were providing material to our allies. We ourselves were not fighting. But that 18 months, it required basically 18 months to build and retool factories to enable us to do this sort of stuff. You could argue that Ukraine should have been our lend-lease moment, not because regardless of your politics of how much support we should have had, we should have recognized we are incapable of producing at a rate for our own national security. And we got here through a frog boil, which I kind of document in the book, as a consequence of having won the Cold War. Because if you go back to 1989, not that long ago, when the Berlin Wall still stood, only 6% of major weapon system spending went to defense specialists, what we think of today as prime contractors whose only business is defense. 94% of the money for major weapon systems went to dual purpose companies, companies that were invested in our national economy, but also our national security. And we've kind of forgotten the stories of their involvement. Like Chrysler, yes, they make minivans. They also make missiles. They are the prime contractor on the Minuteman, the original Minuteman missile. Ford made satellites until 1990. General Mills, the cereal company, made torpedoes, an inertial guidance system. That sounds like crazy today, right? It sounds crazy. And you can say, why? Why is that even rational? Well, General Mills, the cereal company, had a mechanics division to make machinery to process grain. Everything they learned about building that type of machinery, they were able to repurpose it into machine tools and factory production that subsidize our national security. We lived in a world where every car, camera, and cereal box that an American bought was actually subsidizing the R against our national security And these you know national security is not an end unto itself It a means to an end And that end is the economic prosperity of America And so getting those things to be aligned, I think is really critical. And in particular in a world where so much of the R&D spending from the 60s was driven by the government, now the vast majority of the spending is driven by the commercial sector. You wrote that the Pentagon started breaking in 1961. What do you mean by that? We brought in a brilliant businessman, Robert McNamara, But I think one of the things we really got wrong is that McNamara ran Ford at an era when Ford was entirely supply constrained. The demand for cars was essentially unlimited. Any car that he made, they could sell. That is a distorting school to go to, right? It teaches you actually that the only thing you need to do is manage your supply chain, grind your suppliers, focus on efficiency, not on effectiveness. There was not enough competition. So actually the auto industry that McNamara learned all his lessons in, when it met Japanese competition in the 70s, got destroyed and had to reinvent itself. But the Pentagon didn't reinvent itself based on all those lessons of Japanese competition. And so it kind of started this steady process. You know, it would be intellectually dishonest to place all the blame on one person like McNamara. I think even just stepping back structurally, defense is a monopsony. You know, it's the opposite of a monopoly. Monopoly, you have one seller of a thing. And Monopsony, you have one buyer of a thing. It's the only buyer. And it's really hard to be a buyer if you really believe in the free market. It's the fact that you have so many disparate customers with so much signal. You get to aggregate it. You get to work against it. If one customer's low vision doesn't want to buy your thing, there might be 100 other customers who have the vision and do want to buy your thing. But in a world where you have one buyer, now you have this single point of veto. And I think our history would suggest, the fun part of writing the book was documenting it. I call them heretics and heroes. If you really look at the history of defense innovation, almost none of it happened because of the system. All of it happened. It's always the heretics who break the rules who do it, right? We can go all the way back to Winston Churchill. So Churchill, as the head of the Royal Navy. Yeah, World War I, before World War I. Yeah, exactly. Built the tank. How crazy that the British Army was like, I got horses. I don't need this tank thing. Go away. And he built landships as a rogue renegade effort. I love that he called them. It had to be landships. Of course. It wouldn't be in his job jar. It's one of my favorite books actually is when he writes about before World War I. And it's like, he just like fired all these bureaucrats and pushed everyone out of the way. I feel like it'd be harder today to have someone that strong able to push through, but it's needed, huh? Yeah. You build up, you know, the entropy of the universe is against you. You build up these bad practices. And I think part of his understanding is like, it's not an ad hominem critique. It's a structural critique. The other example I love is Andrew Higgins, this foul mouth, Scots Irishman down in Louisiana. He was a huge, anyone from Louisiana knows Higgins. You know, he was a boat builder. And in the, in the twenties, he observed how Chinese bootleggers were able to build these shallow draft boats, uh, to kind of outrun the policing. And he, and he used that to inspire his own book building. So Higgins, he built the boat. Um, the Navy wouldn't let him compete. Then finally there was a enterprising Marine first Lieutenant who got him in. He won the competition. Then the Navy tried to steal his IP and build the boats themselves. They couldn't, They couldn't even steal the IP. In the end, 92% of all boats in World War II were Higgins boats. 92%. The boys would not have landed at Normandy or Iwo Jima without the Higgins boats. I mean, you see this even in the Civil War. I have upstairs a Gatling gun with the patents from the 1860s, but they weren't used because people were ignoring them because they didn't think it made sense. The renegades would figure things out that don't always get in, I guess, until later. Yeah. And it's equally important to have the renegades inside of government. Some of the fun stories are like Higgins on the outside, but you had Admiral Rickover who built the nuclear Navy. When Rickover wanted to build a nuclear powered submarine, Oppenheimer himself told him, I don't think this is going to work. Imagine the chutzpah, like in the face of Oppie telling you this, you're like, no, I think you're wrong. I'm going to do it. And he did it in six years. I love it. I love it. What are some of the stories? Is there anyone with Palantir itself got to be a renegade and push something through? Well, the fun part was documenting for the first time Colonel Drew Cukor's story. So here you have this guy who grew up in Southern California, single mother, Mormon. He didn't have a lot of money, so he went to ROTC to go to college, joined the Marines, and he became the founding father of really Maven, the AI enterprise kind of marquee project. And kind of looking at the amount of bullshit this guy had to deal with. His nickname was the Iron Dome of Pentagon bullshit. This whole project started in the basement of the Pentagon, which is kind of the equivalent of a garage in Palo Alto, I guess, for these sorts of things. And now it is one of the most successful programs, but he suffered personal and professional slight IG investigations, all completely made up horseshit because the bureaucracy was threatened by the amount of success that he was really having here. And it's a great lesson of like what it actually takes to be a heretic, how much you have to be willing to sacrifice for the ultimate outcome at the expense of your career. It feels like there's so many stories of heretics, like with the airplanes from the 30s and 40s and with Lockheed's special groups early on. And like, how come they don't just like stop the bureaucracy from trying to kill heretics anymore? Like, why is it always like almost win and almost stop all these things? Well, that question you just asked is why I wrote the book. We have to remember that we need the heretics. We have them, by the way. It's not like we're missing them. It's like heretics require two things, the space for their heresy to exist and a little bit, a modicum of protection from the top to enable that to happen right here. And so you see a little bit of protection. Yeah, exactly. I feel, I feel like this is like every company needs to do this for their most talented people. Cause the, cause the organizations always reject the talent and your job is leader to keep them. Like we were, I mean, Palantir was a bunch of heretics early on, right? It's basically like, like, I felt like I was like the leader of a bunch of heretics and we were just like beaten by the mainstream people for years and years and years. And so it's really fun. We're now, it's very funny now to be attacked is like this, like in military industrial, like leaders now, cause we were just like beaten by the bureaucracy forever as these outsiders like do you still feel like an outsider are you an insider now because you're lieutenant colonel and palantir is winning like like how does is your mindset changed constitutionally i'm i'm gonna always feel like an outsider i always i always feel like i'm the heretic looking in maybe i relish that role a little bit which is why it appeals to me um but but absolutely in the beginning of palantir really like we tried to go through the front door and very much got you know the front door was not an accessible door so disrespected so disrespected it. Like people just wanted us to die. We, and I, I, there's a positive piece of that. You know, you carry that chip on your shoulder to like earn your place every day. And you recognize your product has to be 10 times better than the alternatives. And you know, there's like a fire in your belly from it. Um, but it was, yeah, it's, it's, I think it's, it's motivating. It's motivating to know, look, why should it be easy for us? It wasn't easy for any of these guys. And so chapter 11, you said factory is the weapon. What's your framework for reviving manufacturing. I'm always, I'm working on this in a few ways. We're starting to scale up some things. I still have a lot of work to do. How are you thinking about this? You can kind of break down like, what are the laws of physics and what are the laws of man? And ideally our factories are marginally, if, if, if, how do we break down the laws of man that are constrained in the factory? How do we qualify this part? How do we do this? This is just the way we've done it. You know, a re-imagination of these processes. I do think, you know, I'm a one trick pony in the sense that I think of everything starts with the people. And if you look at, I don't think it's fair to say that America is not great at manufacturing, like the, look at SpaceX, look at Tesla. Like we have modern manufacturing marbles. They just think about manufacturing differently. And so how do we bring a kind of software continuous iteration, co-locating R and D with production mindset, a bias towards vertical integration to really get after these things, squeezing out the deadweight loss that happens through what I think is the legacy of globalization of like, Hey, we're going to just really like push out our supply chains. We're going to optimize on cost instead of innovation. That's kind of the precursor starts with that. Then recognizing the Ukraine example is really important because what we got wrong to summarize it would be, we thought the stockpile was the deterrent. It's not the stockpile. It's the ability to generate the stockpile. And this is what the frog boil that happened, which is like, well, how many of these weapons do we really need? We're not using them. Maybe we can have a little less, a little less. Let's make it a little more fancy. Let's make it more exquisite. Well, now that it's more expensive, we can afford even less. And you kind of got into this doom loop and a recognition that frankly, in World War II, the Germans were superior engineers. We just could produce more and that counted for a lot. And they produced small, exquisite quantities. So today we look like the Germans and the Chinese look like we did. Which is why we got to fix that in 100 exit. Well, we're working on it with Saronic and others. Are you seeing any companies in particular you're working on, you're excited about for scaling up manufacturing? Well, I think a lot of the new entrants are going to have a huge role to play. Hadrian, Saronic, Andrel. But I also think like reinvigorating the existing industrial base is a huge part of this. We have a huge number of smaller, very small, they're not even medium-sized enterprises. They're small businesses that make parts. They're coming up on a succession challenge where the owner is a sole proprietor type thing or limited partnership, and it's going to need to be transitioned. You need kind of outside capital to reinvest in the machine toolings and modern processes. So I think we're going to have to get both of these things to work. Certainly, we're going to need a high-low mix. Our exquisite stuff is exquisite. As we see with Epic Fury, this stuff really works. The real problem is that we don't have a hundred times more of it. And we're going to need to invest in scaling the low end of this as well to kind of fight the future war. A few more questions on defense. If you were in charge of fixing the culture of the Pentagon to protect heretics and to make sure we're scaling all this stuff up, what are the number one or two things you'd focus on? I think culture follows from execution. And Bill Perry, who was a deputy secretary of defense during the last supper and subsequently the secretary of defense, he had this fork in the road where he could think about, I could try to either fix the system or I could make sure that stealth and GPS happen by going around the system. And he chose the latter. And I think that's the wise move, which is like, how do you deliver the incredible successes that motivate the next generation of heretics that set the path for those who are willing to see it? Because if you try to fix the system, you're going to lose. You're going to get bogged down in trench warfare. And, you know, I think you got to fix it through inspiration. Isn't this always a problem though, that it's never worth fixing these really hard problems. The government just as we just always just go around them. And so this thing just gets nastier and nastier and more and more broken. I think that is a problem. I think that what I would offer you though, is like, can you fix the system by literally trying to fix the system or do you have to fix the system by getting parts of it to work? Kind of like eat your way through the elephant. Yeah. I always thought we should just fire a ton of the core and just build new things around it but that's apparently not appropriate there's a chesterton fence question there too though you know what oh yeah what do we need that we don't know we need and so i think a lot of it comes down to people there's so many tens of thousands of people doing things that don seem necessary to me am i crazy uh it we not as efficient as we could be my the only pushback i have on that is we built 154 different airframes in world war two I think probably 10 of them really mattered Yeah. So part of, part of what's gotten us to this situation is a fixation on an efficiency over effectiveness. Like you, it's a pathing question. You have to get to effectiveness first, then you can work on just build the most effective things around it. And don't worry about trying to take it, take it apart. And yeah, it's very much like we manage everything as if it's a one to N thing when sometimes there's a zero to one thing and those things have to be managed differently. I guess I'm probably better at zero to one anyway. I should just do more zero to one things around it and not worry about this giant mess in the middle. Oh, is the Royce or Angie? Yeah, well, I think the zero to one things as they scale end up replacing and fixing it, right? Like it is easier to fix and lead with momentum than, yeah. I have to ask you about some of these like magical AI weapons that we're using right now. I know you can't tell us everything, but this has been interesting to watch the war from afar. And I think Israeli fighter jets supposedly in the first 20 minutes hit 500 targets. And obviously, Palantir was involved very much in helping take all the data and decide things there. What are you allowed to tell us about how these things work? Unfortunately, not a huge amount. But I think what you could say, there's a way in which there's nothing new under the sun. It's just the OODA loop. You know, John Boyd's Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. And whichever side is able to go through the OODA loop fastest is the side that's going to win. And so you can think about the application of AI to the doctrinal targeting process as about providing an advantage to cut through the fog of war and to be able to apply effects to your adversary before they understand even what's happening and respond to it. A way of tying national intent to the targeting and fires process. Uh, and I, I would say Epic Fury is a leapfrog in capability, but I think it also shows that there's another 10 X, a hundred X to go that's illuminated by what's already been done here. So as, as AI improves and as the infrastructure improves, we can actually do an even much better job next couple of years. Oh yes. Sorry, enemies better not screw with us. That's deterrence. And that's the whole point. That is the whole point. Let's look ahead. The clash between Anthropic and the Pentagon over the cutting edge AI is obviously a preview of some of these kind of tough questions. You can imagine AI is a hundred times better and there's people working on it and it's interesting questions around like what you want the government to do or not. You have obviously some of the very best minds in the private sector these days working on this. It used to be those best minds were in the government. So it's kind of more aligned. Like how is this dynamic going to function where the best minds are outside of the government, but then having to work with it and might have different opinions about things? Well, one of the things I really hoped helping stand up to attachment to a one, you know, how do we build more of a bridge between Silicon Valley and the department. So Diptasticity 201 is what you're serving as a lieutenant colonel. That's correct. Yeah. And I think part of it is like, we have to walk many miles in each other's shoes to understand these things. You know, I think there's a lot of historical analogs that suggest if you, you know, if you really believe in democracy, you need people making these decisions who are accountable to the American people. They're elected or appointed and accountable to elected officials. If you go back, the analog I like historically is thinking about Theodore Hall. Theodore Hall was one of the youngest scientists in the Manhattan Project. He joined the project at 18 years old, right out of Harvard, genius physicist. He had an older brother, Edward Hall, who was actually the inventor of the Minuteman missile. But there were two types of traitors in the Manhattan Project. There were those who were committed communists, like Klaus Fuchs, always a spy, got him to the program. Theodore was not that sort of traitor. He was naive. Theodore thought, look, I'm a genius at physics. So I must be a genius at geopolitics. And in his conception of the world, the only way to have world peace was for two countries to have the bomb. So without any penchant for communism or even an ill will towards America, he thought this was his moral duty was to walk into the Soviet trade mission in New York in 1944 and give them secrets to the bomb. But what happened was not world peace. Every death since 1949 from communism, which is the year the Soviets got the bomb, you could say that blood is at least partially on Theodore Hall's hands. And so I think we live in a world where many smart people struggle with epistemic humility. What are the limits of my knowledge? How do I have some humility around that? Because the alternative, you could say Theodore Hall was essentially tyranny by tech bro. He decided global policy and it had huge consequences. On the other end, there's a true, deep commitment to democracy, even when it feels uncomfortable. How do you think about the future of warfare with AI and like prosecuting war without humans in the loop? I mean, obviously there's things where right now you're like, if something's incoming, you're going to want the AI to target it and destroy it for you. And I'm learning a little bit about this from Sironic and other companies I'm involved in. If you have hundreds of ships having a war and China has hundreds of ships and they're reacting in real time with AI, you're probably going to want to react in real time with AI too. And you're going to probably want to give more leeway in response in order to, in order to beat them. Like there's ways you have to use AI there. And then it goes kind of higher and higher up, like for targeting, for example, and for, you know, at what point should human be in a loop or not in the loop? And it's, it's a, it's, it's interesting as Congress probably has some opinions on this and they're trying to figure out how to regulate it. And, and like, obviously, you know, we're probably not ready for AI to be making certain high level decisions, but there's other ones that have to make or we lose. And like, how do you, how do you see this? Yeah. Well, I think there's a lot of complexity and nuance to the issue and you have to kind of slice it in layers. First of all, we've had autonomous weapons since the seventies and eighties. Now you think about like the Aegis system that defends a carrier, uh, when it senses an incoming threat coming at the speed of a missile, it's firing off to protect the ship. And you don't have the time for a human to do many of these things. Wouldn't make sense for a person to have to say, yes, the ship's already hit. Yeah, exactly. Then you can kind of even look at something like a weapon, uh, a weapon that you fire from a fighter jet. Well, it's your radar system that's telling you that it's detecting an adversary and you as a human have weapons release, but then it's also the guidance system that's going and closing that kill chain. So there's a lot of this that's actually happening already by computer. So I would posit that this is more of a difference of degree than kind. And because we're miscategorizing it as a total difference of kind, we kind of have some deranged conversations around it. And so we need to have a risk-based decision of like, what is the risk to our force? You know, nobody is trying to jump the shark and have killer robots. It's really like, how do we have something that doesn't advantage the adversary's OODA loop over ours and mean that we're showing up to a gunfight with a knife? And so you have to measure the risk as you go. And I think you're going to have to feel your way through that, right? And I think much to the department's credit, they want the frontier labs, they want everyone who's really smart about this to have a seat at the table and to help work through it together, but recognizing that policy has to be set by policymakers. To play devil's advocate, because I agree with what you said and I 100% agree we have to stay ahead of our adversaries and use AI for these things. To play devil's advocate, there's some people on the outside who don't know this stuff as well. They see maybe there's some keratik inside of the Department of War who builds a program that does create some kind of thing that you might call a killer robot and maybe breaks the rules. And then all of a sudden you have something that is very scary and causing problems. I mean, it sounds ridiculous when I say it, but people are worried about this. Like, what should we be talking about? Like, how are we going to protect people for this not to happen? Well, if you're concerned about that, like, why aren't you worried that someone in a garage is going to create a killer robot? You know, I think the probability of that happening is really no different. So then that becomes almost like a technical question, not a matter of will. You know, it's like, it's just not how weapon systems are developed. Like, you know, you'd have to believe that there's a conspiracy where a rogue actor can go do something like this in an organization the size of the department. And I think it fundamentally underestimates the moral fiber of people who are in our uniformed services. These are people who take the law incredibly seriously, who work very diligently, who have put their lives on the line to defend the nation, to defend all of us. And I think we owe them the benefit of the doubt in this capacity here. We trust the bureaucracy to stop crazy things from happening in some ways, which is ironic, but it's true. I guess, yeah, I've always- I trust people. It's not the faceless bureaucracy that I'm trusting. It's like, these are Americans. These are exceptional human beings. They care about what they're doing. This is their craft. They're not YOLOing it. If you have some cartoon caricature of who they are, okay, fine. Maybe from the degeneracy of the last 30 years of media that always paints the ultimate bad guy as the corrupt bureaucrat or the corrupt military official, but that's not reality. and I think they deserve more from us. Yeah, I think like a random PhD student in a garage is probably more danger with AI than anyone in these that we were serving within the department of war. I don't disagree. Yeah, and it's actually interesting taking the other side of that. It does seem like recent wars, thanks to AI, thanks to new technologies are actually a lot safer, like a lot less death. Is that a trend you'd hope? Are we gonna see that going forward where hopefully Americans lose a lot less lives based on this technology? Yes and no. So yes, in the sense that like, yes, this is an empirical trend. I think 70 million people died in World War II from all causes and effects. You know, that's not even a quantity we can contemplate today. You know, like hundreds is we struggle with, right? The part that's, you know, is like the part, I don't buy the idea that these sorts of robotic weapons are going to somehow mean that humans don't have to do the fighting. You certainly want the robots to draw first blood. You want them to serve as a deterrent. But the will of the nation to actually win and prevail in these consequences is always going to come down to brave humans willing to put themselves in harm's way when the moment calls for it in order to prevail. So it shouldn't let us off the hook of the moral weight and the consequence of what it means to actually fight a war, which is why we're a peace-loving nation who does not want to fight a war. We want to prevent the wars from happening. We want to prevent adversaries from having so much leverage over us, like a nuclear bomb, that actually peace is no longer possible. Well said. So Sean, we started this podcast to push back against cynics and the doomers. What's the best case for an optimistic future for America? What do we need to get right over the next decade? Well, I've always said, I think America's greatest risk is not homicide, it's suicide. And so I think reminding ourselves of what we have in common and reigniting the national spirit for innovation and excellence. We are a great nation. There's no nation who has more to be proud of than we do. And that is ultimately the case for optimism. I'd say, you know, one more maybe off the wall comment is in the end, the reason we're going to win in whatever domain it is, is that we're crazy. You know, even we don't know what we're going to do when we get punched in the face. And I think that's actually an exceptional quality. It speaks to the plasticity and adaptability of the American mind and how we innovate. Alex always told me I'd be very successful if I didn't get arrested from a bar fight. I guess that's a good note to end on. Thanks, Sean. Thank you, Jeff.