#288 Shyam Sankar - Are We Sleepwalking Into World War 3?

Thanks for having me, Sean. It's great to be back.

I love it. Thank you.

A lot's gone on. I've been advocating for the future of AI for the American worker. The American people are being lied to. I've been working on bringing back the bonds between industrial base and government, fixing the Department of Defense, empowering heretics. It's been a full 12 months.

I already have a spot in South Florida, so I'm set.

Yeah. It's important to be in a state where your reps rep you. Miami felt like the right home for us.

I haven't seen the latest. Catch me up.

My lived experience is that nothing crazy is happening. It's more like an iron man suit for the American worker. The American people are being lied to about AI: either doomerism or fantasism. Both are wrong because they assume no human agency. AI doesn't do anything; humans use it to do something.

The future of AI is being determined by our decisions. We can choose to use it for re-industrialization. We should listen to the people using the technology, not just the inventors. The example of the telescope: Galileo didn't invent it, but used it to discover planetary motion. The people we should listen to are the American workers.

It can be massively empowering. Kids need to know how to use the tool. Specific knowledge is valuable. They need to learn how to ride the bicycle. The American cowboy spirit is an advantage. Education should not restrict AI; let them use it and learn through experience.

The most interesting use cases start with deep domain knowledge. The real stuff is in the enterprise. For example, Panasonic Energy: apprenticeship from 3 years to 3 months with AI, leading to more employment. It's about human agency. On the consumer side, it's trivial.

Historically, government and military were last adopters, but not with AI. Non-computer scientists are inventing the future. It breaks hierarchy. It's great for the American worker, pulling power from middle managers. It addresses the legitimacy of institutions.

Jevons paradox: efficiency leads to more consumption. In healthcare, sepsis deaths reduced to zero. It's about eliminating drag, not replacing labor. For example, adding a third shift by reducing planning time. The key is reestablishing the connection between GDP growth and wage growth. The productivity dividend must be shared.

It's a continuous journey. Models have jagged intelligence. Some say we're already there for coding. It's about valuing taste. The challenge is that we could enter a new dark age if we lose knowledge. Someone has to know how things are made. The inductive path is reasonable.

Universal basic income. The idea that everyone gets an income because there will be no jobs. Lots of inventor types talk about it. But we should listen to the users. The Manhattan Project example: geniuses can be wrong about applications. Theodore Hall's actions led to atomic espionage. It's a lack of epistemic humility.

The most optimistic case is what's happening with the American worker. We run American Tech Fellowships, training factory workers, ICU nurses, potato farmers to build AI apps. One veteran reduced downtime by 50%, improved yield by 20%. It's about unleashing human agency. The American people have been gaslit about globalization. If you let them cook, it's eye watering.

Trust is earned. Example: I saw a clip of myself misattributed by Grok. It's about developing evals and understanding the model's capabilities. It's like a new teammate; you don't blindly trust them.

We're going to build a relationship together solving problems together and we're gonna see where you're really a rock star and where you can help me be more effective. Working backwards from the problems we have, that's a much narrower scope. It's like, hey, I make wires, you know, I'm a potato farmer, these are my problems. How do I develop trust in this domain with you where I'm the expert? I'm going to be a really good judge of whether the danger is using it where you have no knowledge. So you're a blank slate and by default might trust it way more than you should.

Thank you.

Yeah, great question, Derek. The first thing you have to understand is we don't collect any data, right? We're a software company. We provide our software to the government. So the only data that is going to be in the software is the data that the organization has access to. If you're a manufacturer, that's your supply chain, your production data, your customer orders. If you're the government, it's what you have lawful authority to have access to. Then there's the question of safeguards, which is where we think Palantir is the worst platform to try to abuse civil liberties because we have immutable audit logs, purpose-based access control, role-based access control, classification-based access control. If you misuse the data in the platform, first of all, all the controls prevent misuse. But if you try to circumvent these things and misuse it, there's an immutable audit trail of what happened. You are going to be caught. Now I can tell you anecdotal stories like there are institutions that don't want to work with us because sometimes those protections are too strong. Sometimes that's uncomfortable. Sometimes you don't want to know what the data or you already know what the data is going to tell you and you don't want protections that strong. But that's the core thesis. So you have to go back to the founding precept of the company, which is like you know politics is structurally zero sum. People just like to argue about who's right or not.

You know it's like you get nowhere by just arguing to the nth degree. The question is how do we move the efficient frontier? If we go back to the post-9/11 world, everyone was like, what's more important, privacy or security? I don't know. As an American citizen, that sounds really stupid. I kind of want both. Why can't we have more of both? Who's working on the technologies that mean for a given level of privacy, I can have more security, or a given level of security, I can have more privacy? How do you bring more nuance to the question? If you can protect data in a more fine-grained way, if you can attest to the purpose with immutable audit trails, maybe you can have reasons to have access to data on a temporary basis. Maybe you can have condition-based access control where given what's happening in the world and a precept of human intelligence that's telling us about something, we're in a new regime for a limited period of time. Having a system that allows all that to happen, if you really go back to a pre-9/11 world, it was essentially binary. You either share all the data or none of it, which biased towards either gross violations of oversharing or not being able to connect the dots because people didn't share at all. That's insane. That's the position you don't want to be in. Now, the reason we tend to get attacked is we're living in the messy reality of the arena. If you're looking at this politically and you just want to argue about who's right,

It would be insane not to worry about it. I mean, I think it'd be insane not to worry about it. It's a little bit not deep enough thought to think that we're somehow the antidote to that. We're not the cause of it. And that's my really point. When you're in the arena, you're going to be criticized for doing it. Like, hey, you should, it's almost like a purity test. Like, you shouldn't be touching this at all. But I'm just saying, what's the counterfactual? Letting a bunch of historical legacy contractors who aren't as sophisticated with technology try to solve these problems. Who is leaning in and saying we want to make these institutions function better? That's the antidote to nihilism, you know. Make things work. That's also the American builder way. We're not going to get out of these problems through policy alone, through politics alone. We got to build our way out of these things. We got to build a better future.

Um and that's my really point. When you're in the arena, you're going to be criticized for doing it. [continued]

Uh, we got to build our way out of these things. We got to build a better future.

Amazing. Thank you. Little something. I gobbled these up last time, so I'm looking forward to doing that again.

Oh, man. There it is.

Oh, perfect. Thank you. Appreciate it. That's awesome.

All right, let's move into how do we prevent World War III? I mean, there is a lot of stuff going on in the world right now. There's not a whole lot of talk about China. That kind of took the back seat a little bit, but I don't understand why. But we got stuff going on in China, Russia and Ukraine still kicking off, Venezuela, Mexico, Mexico-US border, Gaza. What are you most concerned about? Well, if you think about it, Operation Spider, 12-day war, Midnight Hammer, the skirmish between India and Pakistan, Maduro. There's a lot going on in the world. Are these skirmishes like the Spanish Civil War? Are they the prelude to potentially something much bigger?

Sure feels like it. All these things are happening against the backdrop of China still. Even though in some sense China's taking a back seat, it is the driving force here. Who's buying the Iranian oil that keeps the regime going? What is the industrial base that's supporting Russia's war machine? These pieces are interconnected. The radical pace at which these things are happening underlines the precept of the book and a lot of what I've been talking about, which is to really prevent World War III, we need to have a strong enough deterrence posture to make sure our adversaries don't want to mess with us. Things like Midnight Hammer and Maduro are really the first things we've done that have restored deterrence. This sense of, 'Oh man, I have been underestimating the US.' And we have to continue that trend. The missing part is if you thought about it as a spear, the pointy end is really good, but the shaft of the spear needs work. That's the industrial base, our ability to link the factory floor to the foxhole. And just like we learned in World War II, large-scale protracted conflicts are about your industrial capacity. We outproduced our adversaries in World War II. Even Stalin was shocked at our productive capability. We have to recognize in the present moment through a series of bad policies since the end of the Cold War and an unfettered belief in globalization, we have put a lot of our capability in the hands of our adversary. It's not just weapons. We have roughly eight days of weapons on hand for a major conflict. We obviously need something closer to 800 days. Look at pharmaceuticals. Look at rare earths. Those go into weapons, but also into cars. Our entire global western auto industry will be brought to its knees if we don't have sovereignty over these things. With pharmaceuticals, 80% of our generics come from China. In a conflict, we're not going to be getting those things, and the American people are not going to have an appetite to have their 5-year-old suffer or potentially die from an ear infection that we think of as trivial today. We need to have our own sovereignty over these capabilities. That itself is deterrence. Having our own pharmaceutical manufacturing capability is deterrence. It's easy to get cynical about the defense industrial base, to see it as warmongering or fear-mongering. But we need to think about it as the core thesis of the book: national security is American prosperity. These are just two sides of the same coin. If you get too fixated on just national security, it's not an end unto itself. It's a means to underwrite the prosperity of the American people. We're a little bit out of balance there. Fortunately, a lot has happened in the last 12 months to address these things. There's been a huge amount of change in Pentagon acquisition reform, which sounds boring, but we got to throw away the process, not be a victim to the process, and do things that work. How about we just do things that work and get out of our own way?

A big part of the book, I spend time talking about the historic figures who threw away the process, who rebelled against the system and actually delivered the capabilities we need. I think that's a really important narrative because honestly, everything that's ever worked was against the system. It was despite the system, not because of it. Having the courage to look at the American industrial base, whether it's Isaiah with Valor, people trying to build nuclear reactors now, the heterodox thinking is not coming from the big companies. It's coming from the founder figures, the crazy youthful energy of invention that has always characterized the American soul.

They're capable of it, though. I mean, huge credit to the department because if you went back even 10 years, none of these people existed. It's not because we didn't have them in America. It's because there was no business case. No one was going to buy. Now you have the department leaning in, recognizing that a maverick like Dino is not a problem. He's the solution. How do we make more bets?

One of the things I spend time in the book is understanding how did we get here? How do we go from having the most amazing industrial base in World War II and the early Cold War to one today that is capable of building a small number of truly exquisite things? And they are exquisite. Probably my colleagues who are innovators would get upset at me for giving the primes credit, but they're not boneheads. They actually do a number of things incredibly well. I think they are a victim of the system that has been pushing cost-plus contracting, pushing risk onto the taxpayer instead of these companies, reducing the reward for taking risk. It almost doesn't make sense to take risk. The way I like to encapsulate this is every country including Russia and China have turned their back on communism except for Cuba and the old DoD. What you're seeing with the new DoD is recognizing that doesn't work. Let's go back to winning again. Winning matters. What does winning look like? It looks like innovation, something that powers the rest of the American economy. This is not some muscle that's atrophied in America. It's a consequence of being the sole superpower since the end of the Cold War. We didn't have to tolerate the crazies anymore. You go back to figures like Hyman Rickover, John Boyd. These are famously difficult people. The most talented engineers I have are difficult humans. You tolerate them because that's what winning requires. Reattaching yourself—I talked about Theodore Hall, who was a traitor in the Manhattan Project, and his brother Edward Hall, the inventor of the Minute Man missile. Edward Hall was famously a pain in the ass. But Schriever protected him because he recognized that this guy's a pain but he's a genius. Edward Hall famously pulled out his service weapon on British soldiers who were doing a shitty job repairing aircraft. He held them at gunpoint until they did the job right. The British hierarchy got pissed, but he said, 'I was right. I'm not going to send my men back out in a plane that these guys are doing a shitty job on.' That's a fearless figure. I'll suffer consequences for doing what's right. It takes a bit of crazy, but that's what winning looks like.

The grave risk we have is—let's strike the very foundational precept. After World War II, America at our expense rebuilt Japan and Germany. I think we might have been the first victor in a conflict of that scale to realize that peace and prosperity in the world depended on rebuilding these countries, making them democratic, free, open, and successful. Most of the electronics industry in Southeast Asia was an intentional decision by us to take manufacturing from the US, send it there. Yes, we had the benefit of cheaper labor, cheaper goods, but it was also a way of developing their economies, creating stability and prosperity and influence. The challenge for us with the CCP is their goal is not simply to be prosperous. If that was their goal, there would be no tension. It is also for America to fall. I'll give you an anecdote. It is within their prerogative to decide if they want to buy our soybeans or not. That's a business decision. I don't begrudge them. But it is not a business decision when you smuggle in agricultural funguses so we can't grow soybeans. And that's happening. In the agriculture domain, we're in a full-on conflict. The reintroduction of New World screwworm, a livestock parasite that infects living livestock that started in Central America. Most credible sources believe it was reintroduced by the Chinese. It didn't just reemerge. If you talk to farmers and ranchers in America, they all know this came from the CCP.

It's been going on. In the agriculture domain, we're in full conflict. We've had a few cases where we arrested someone flying in from China who had smuggled the agricultural fungus in their shoe. We caught that ball in Vegas last week. Then there were the cell phone farms in New York City. That was Chinese too. There's a huge question about the penetration of the homeland. If we go back to something that happened in the last year, Operation Spiderweb was the Ukrainian operation where they used containerized drone carriers. The drivers just look like commercial shipping. You're dropping off a container somewhere in Russia. It could have furniture, toys, corn. But this container suddenly pops open. 117 FPVs drop out in multiple locations across the country. These drones are commanded and controlled over LTE networks by pilots sitting in a basement in Ukraine, taking out the strategic bomber fleet. 20% of the fleet was taken out. Many were fueled, ready to go, carrying cruise missiles. They exploded in big spectacular ways. It has a bigger impact than it seems. These things are out of production since the end of the Cold War. The assets on the tarmac were the best, most available. The rest have maintenance issues. Each drone costs maybe $600 to $1000 at most, and you think about the tens of billions of dollars of damage. In the 12-day war, Operation Narnia, the Israelis built covert drone factories in Iran. They manufactured and launched drones that took out air defenses, enabling more layered effects. Now we should look at our homeland and understand how at risk we are. How many containers are coming from China? How easy would it be to get something in? You think about our high-value bases. This is the underlying concern with why the Chinese are buying all this farmland near our bases. We have a lot of surface area to protect. There's a protection element and a deterrence element. Maybe we can't close all these doors. We should try, but we need to have the counter-reaction capable of being so costly and painful that no one wants to fight.

If we look at Spider and 12-day war, we have to assume other countries are doing this. It's so cheap and asymmetric that we have to worry. A lot of the investments the Chinese have made since the end of the Gulf War are not to defeat America at large, but to figure out our strategic choke points. If they can interscept us, defeat us in space, defeat us here, it takes out the whole chain. That's their concept of systems warfare. Air defense is hard. How are you going to defend against a thousand drone swarm? There are ways people are investing. We're doing it. But we haven't done it before. We need to reestablish deterrence and capability. We'd be foolish not to think that people are going to go look at asymmetric cheap ways. We should be thinking about the same thing. One of the great ideas implicit in Brandon and the expat is that we need to create lots of problems and dilemmas across the first island chain. We should be able to launch from anywhere. Are you going to be able to hold continuous custody of those targets as the adversary? Are we going to be able to outpace your magazine even if you're great at production? Can we go after a systems warfare perspective of taking out the least amount of things that cause the most pain, so you say, 'I don't want to fight'?

[sighs] Let's take a quick break.

All right, Sean, we're back from the break. Let's talk about the Colonel. Colonel Kukor. So, one of the cool things in the book is we tell the story of Colonel Drew Kukor, a Marine infantry officer, sorry, intelligence officer, who was really the father of AI in the modern Department of War. The journey is exceptionally interesting because I think a lot of the heroes and heretics I talk about are from the past. Here we have one in the present. Looking at how much bureaucracy he had to fight. His nickname in the department was the Iron Dome of Pentagon bullshit. The amount of pain this guy went through to birth it is truly incredible. I think it's important because today people can look at Maven, which I think is the most consequential operational use of AI anywhere in the world, and think, 'Oh, it was always going to be.' But really, it started as a rogue project in a cubicle in the B-ring of the Pentagon. Even before then, what motivated this Marine intel officer to go after this? With Colonel Kukor, you have a very interesting personal story. This guy grew up in Southern California, single mother, a Mormon, dirt poor. When he ended high school, he had a fork in the road: go to trade schools or join the military. ROTC scholarship, went to college, joined the Marines. I think it was roughly 2012, he had a catastrophic experience where he was on a helicopter trying to land on Mount Sinjar to evacuate the Yazidis who had fled with ISIS pursuing them. A young Marine thought he saw RPGs and waved off the helicopters from landing. This guy was probably 24 hours in, blurry-eyed. It turned out there were none. Because of that, hundreds of Yazidis were sex slaves, tortured, lost. That was an initial catalyst for him. He got a fixation on computer vision: it could have told me whether there was an RPG or not. Why are we having a blurry-eyed Marine make that determination? How do I get better tools for the operators? This has huge consequences in terms of human life. So when he had the opportunity to start Project Maven, it was a rogue AI effort in the Pentagon. The Pentagon has this myth that nothing good should come out of OSD. Everything needs to come from within the services. It's very parochial. This was a centralized protected effort that everyone tried to kill over and over again. Kukor was an amazing blend of an operator who understood acquisition and technology. It's the triple threat. He had deep experience from his time in the Marines: the government instinct to try to invent everything internally is going to fail. Let's go out to Google, go out to the leading technology companies in America and ask them to help us solve this problem. It was a heretical approach that led to lots of pushback, lots of shit. Under his leadership, we had the famous 2017 walkout where Google said they were leaving Project Maven. They didn't want to work with the department. To Google's great credit, that's not their position anymore. They're very much in the fight. They're all in.

Um

Yeah. No, we should get to that. This man was so successful. All the services didn't really want to adopt this. Like most good things in the military, you start with JAC people who just want to get things done. They have very little religion and outcomes are the only thing that matter. In 2017 it started there very successfully.

It grew, who it came over to the conventional side with 18th Airborne because there were a bunch of JOAC operators who became in charge of these conventional units and it started automating the targeting cycle. It's like we could go, at the time it was 12 minutes which is impressive. Now it's closer to 2 minutes or less from detecting a target to putting fires on the target.

And it kept expanding. You could think about that as a very narrow slice of the problem which is in the foxhole. But how do you integrate that back to supply? How do you think about what shots are worth taking based on my resupply timeline, based on my magazine depth, based on the effect it's going to have on the enemy? How do we get so good at this OODA loop that our adversaries can't compete? So, I'll just say that he delivered something truly exquisite there. But along the way, he was dealing with [__] after [__]. People who were threatened by his program would file IG investigations. The best one was always anonymous, of course, that this Marine officer was accepting bribes. He had stashes of money at his house. He was housing illegal aliens in his basement.

You know thing after thing. So NCIS actually went out to his house. Again, this is a devout Mormon, four kids, 1,400 square foot house in Northern Virginia. No basement in the house, mind you. In the NC yeah, there are two cars, each with more than 100,000 miles on them. If anything, the NCIS officer left thinking, "How are you making this work?" But these things matter. They came after his rank. They tried to demote him to lieutenant colonel. And you think about how crazy you have to be to just keep pushing through all that [__], all these people coming after you, to deliver something that is going to be a foundational capability for the military. And I think that's the sort of arc we see, whether it's Hyman Rickover or Boyd or Colonel Drew Cukor, that's the sort of commitment you see to the nation. And I think one of the common themes for these heroes is really that during their immediate lifetime, they get [__]. It's only later on when history is written, when people can look at it with clear eyes, that they get lionized. We recognize their immense contributions. And it gives me a little bit of satisfaction to know that all those people who filed those IG complaints will be anonymous to history. No one will ever know their names. They will not be remembered, but everyone will know that Colonel Drew Cukor's sacrifices created Project Maven.

We were living in a weird period. One, you definitely can't discount Trump derangement syndrome. So there's that part of it as an overlay. But we're living in a weird period coming out of GWAT, still in GWAT, where we had no great power competition. There was no sense of threat to the nation. You know, you were over there fighting and people were going to the mall.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the great power

Yeah, exactly. We weren't organized around it. We weren't mobilized. And so this kind of left people this kind of existential angst of like what is America for? Are we even good? Are we the good guys? What's the counterfactual? A lot of these things you really understand because are we perfect? Absolutely not. Are we better than any alternative out there for the world? Yeah. As someone whose alternative was being dead in a ditch in Lagos, that's never been a question in my mind. And I think there's a certain complacency when you don't have to deal with that. I think the Ukraine war was a big turning point where people realize, like, wait a second, Russia just decided to roll their tanks across the border one day. You mean like this rules-based international order just doesn't maintain itself? It was a stark wake-up call. So then people I think have, and I wouldn't say it's perfect uniformity in Silicon Valley, but I think people kind of recognize like oh maybe everything I'm able to do is a consequence of the prosperity and freedom that this country has given me to be able to do these things and that these things aren't free. They're not a given. There is a world where these things should be taken away from me. And that's driven a lot of alignment. There's a lot more to go. And this sort of epistemic humility of the people who invent the tools, the people who use these tools, neither alone are going to have the full answers. This is a big part of why I wanted to join Detachment 2011 and have been such an advocate for it. How do we build the bridge between our leading technologists and our defense department again where our technologists have exposure to the problems? They understand not just the problems but the people. Our uniform service members are better than we deserve. Now, is what we're providing them good enough for what they deserve? And I think that's the missing part of the equation. The American industrial base that's distinct from the defense industrial base used to be completely invested in our national security. You know who built the Minute Man, the prime contractor on the Minute Man, Chrysler. It was a very different world. I think we need to get back to it. It doesn't have to be perfect. This is not forced. It's not like the Chinese system where it's civil military fusion. You must do this or else. But you want to do this. I want to live in a world. I want to be an advocate for an America where we understand the necessity for investing in this thing to underwrite our economic prosperity.

Yeah, the idea really is like we have a bounty of unique technical knowledge in this country. Most of it is in Silicon Valley or thereabouts. Some of it's in El Segundo. And then the military structure, of course, you kind of grow through the ranks. It's very hard to be inorganically inserted in there. And these two worlds are pretty separate. And we'd be much better off if these worlds had more of a network where you could collaborate on things together. And I know that sounds amorphous, but this is literally what we did during World War II. In World War II, we direct commissioned 100,000 people as officers in the army. Some of them were from Hollywood and they were in charge of making media and content and communicating to the American people. Some of them were industrialists and had unique knowledge on how to do mass production planning, supply chains. This expertise essentially when a country goes to war, the whole country goes to war. And because we haven't been faced with this sort of mass mobilization, our military was 16 million strong in World War II, it's hard for us to imagine today even Vietnam it was 3 million. So we're kind of below that now. The shared experiences aren't there, but also the knowledge. And one of these things I observed with the Israelis after October 7th, I think it's a really interesting example because first of all, it's a technical country, and they pride themselves on being technical and they are technical. Everyone's prior service by definition. So on October 8th, they mobilized 360,000 odd reservists. And when those reservists came back, they were actually horrified at the state of tech in the IDF. And that's a profoundly interesting statement to me. What they're really saying is a self-critique. They're saying, 'Oh man, when I was 20, I knew how to code, but I didn't know what I was doing.' So there's more to it. It's like now I've spent 20 years in industry. I've built internet scaled solutions. I've learned so much knowhow. They got more done in the four months after October 7th than in the prior 10 years. We have that times 100 in this country. And we're just not enabling the people with those skills. If China makes civil military fusion a requirement, we make voluntary civil military fusion impossible. So how do we rebuild that bridge here? It's been super rewarding. Like any reservist, the general counsel's office looks at what can you work on based on your conflicts. So my primary focus is on talent. It's on how do we think about software talent in the army in particular? How do we organize around that to deliver lethality? And one of the most impressive things is these people are wildly talented. We are not missing for intelligence or capability. We need to empower them. A lot of this breaks rank structure. A lot of this breaks forms of thinking. How can I leverage what I'm seeing at the most productive commercial companies, how they're leveraging their talent, their factory floor, how they're empowering them, the tools they're providing to empower our warrant officers and our E4s. The best programmer I found in Hawaii is an E4. Everyone knows this guy's really talented, but of course they don't know what to do with him. And so, how do I bear hug this guy? Give him the mentorship he needs, give him access to other people in Silicon Valley, supercharge his growth, enable him to be one of the people who writes the future of how we fight in software.

That's right. Yeah. It was the CTO of Meta, Andrew Bosworth, Kevin Wheel from OpenAI, Bob McGrew, who is essentially the inventor of ChatGPT, myself, we're the first four, and we hope it'll be a very successful program that delivers incredible value to the army and they'll see need and value and continue to grow it.

So, this is this is the program you were talking about at the beginning of the interview where we're taking active service members and you guys are basically their mentors. So that's attachment 2011 is our reserve unit in the army. I have a separate program at Palantir that's the American Tech Fellowship.

Um, there where we let active duty and veterans apply. And we've run a few of them. There's a fellowship specific for veterans and for the active duty community where we teach them these tools. Largely they're transitioning members. So, how do I help them actually get amazing commercial jobs where they are AI application developers even though four months ago they were JOC operators?

One of the ways in which these things relate though is just recognizing how capable the uniform service members are of building these applications. Whether they're going to build it as active duty for war fighting or they're going to build it as part of the greater American industrial base for commercial and private sector actors, it goes back to my underlying point that we are drowning in talent. Our problem is not do we have talented enough people, it's are we allowing them to apply themselves, are we taking the shackles off, are we letting them run, are we embracing the fact that rank means nothing? Going back to Cukor, the only thing in the IG investigation that he would say guilty is charges. He was accused of undermining the rank structure. And he's like, 'Yeah, guilty as charged. I had captains who knew way more than generals and colonels and I let them speak their mind. And by the way, if you care about winning, that's what you're going to do. If we're at war, that's what you're going to do. Doesn't mean you're breaking the chain of command, but just because you have the stars doesn't mean you have the right answer.

I think we're getting ready to deter it. I mean, let's just I always like to remind people the point is not to fight World War II. It's to be so ready for it that our adversaries realize, oh, I'm going to lose. You know, if your adversaries are certain they're going to lose or think it's very likely they're going to lose or that the cost of fighting is too high, they will avoid the fight. And our goal is not, hey, let's permanently make it so that from now into eternity. It's really buy a year. Over this next year, what are we going to do so that every day she wakes up and says today is not the day. And then we're going to buy another year. We're going to buy another year and we're just going to deter the conflict continuously by being too dangerous to fight with the whole time.

I feel like we're there right now. I'm very much an optimist in that regard. First of all, no army that lost its morale has ever won the war. And I think we have a bounty of natural strengths which I've been talking about over the course of the show. I'm very much optimistic. I think we need to just not be complacent about it. We need to embrace that there are going to be disruptions to how we've thought about these things historically that are critical to continuing to maintain the deterrence. And that is actually the American way. You know, where did the tank come from? Let's just go back to history. I'll give you a non-American example, but I think it's instructive. Most people don't realize the tank was invented by the Royal Navy because the British Army thought, I have horses. Why would I need a tank? That's stupid. So Winston Churchill when he was the First Lord of the Navy, the civilian oversight, he's like, 'Oh, I'm going to build this thing.' And he called it a land ship because he could only build ships. So he built a land ship. And of course, we can't really imagine the intervening periods between the interwar period when he started doing this and the present day without tanks being a core part of how armies are formed and fight.

You think about the opportunity in front of us, like where I think we're now going faster, where we were a little bit slow is with all this unmanned stuff. You know, we positioned many of the unmanned things.

I think we were relatively slow because a lot of it threatened our big exquisite assets rather than seeing it as an and thing.

Slow for ourselves for sure. In comparison to other countries, only because for them it was an asymmetric cost advantage to lean into it. They were not going to be able to compete with us on an F-35. So where could they compete with us? Leaning into autonomy and unmanned things. Now we're not behind on autonomy, but I think we want to be dominant there. And I think a lot of those ideas are, part of the challenge is really what does innovation feel like? It feels like [__]. Innovation is chaotic. It's messy. It's frustrating. At Palantir, I've probably been involved with transitioning 15 different projects from the zero to one to borrow Peter Thiel's phrase, the invention phase to the scaling phase. Every single time, the first few times I did this, I was like, 'Wow, why is this so hard?' Why do the people on both sides of this thing hate each other? Why is there so much interpersonal friction? This sucks. Maybe I can invent a process that makes this suck less. Every attempt at inventing a process killed the magic. None of those things transitioned. They all died. And this is the mistake that we're essentially making which is we think like oh we need a scalable process to go from invention to reaching the full force. It turns out there is no scalable process. It turns out every one of these transitions requires human grit. It requires ingenuity. It requires a willingness to just chew through pain. And every transition 15 times now I can accept that as reality. And I think this is why you both need the heretics. And you need a willingness to disrupt yourself. This working backwards from winning. Is the goal to have a pain-free process because that's like managing decline into a mountain is also pain-free, or is the goal to win and how much pain are you willing to tolerate to win? I think in that frame it becomes obvious.

I think we've hit an inflection point. I think we have the right people driving things. They're not necessarily the senior most ranked person but they're the most competent people with the most amount of experience and they're breaking down silos. They have credible technical opinions. They know who to back. They're running it through intense competition. One of the points of the book is that you really need to embrace inter-service rivalry. Many people look at inter-service rivalry as a bug. I think it's a feature. When we were building the ICBMs, we had four concurrent competing programs. We think of Minuteman today, but the Navy had a program, the Army had a program down in Huntsville, the Jupiter, you had Polaris, which was the emerging winner. Even within the Navy, there were four competing programs. So we tend to look at that from the luxury of being the sole superpower in the '90s and say that seems duplicative. Surely there's a better, cleaner, less messy process. And the answer is no, there's not. If you do that, it's all fake. It's like the program never works. Everything costs too much. Everything takes too long. But actually the desire for these people to compete against each other short of the ultimate competition against the adversary is what leads to innovation. It leads to creativity. It leads to reimagining constraints. You know who would have thought back then. You know, there's a famous anecdote I was given by someone who was actually in Kwajalein when Elon was testing the early Falcons. Kwajalein is an atoll in the Pacific for those who may not know. And we do a lot of rocket launches there. And there was a Boeing facility and the SpaceX facility. And this guy who's a PhD physicist, kind of like a science adviser, he's observing these two things. In the Boeing facility, it's got a clean room, people are in bunny suits, it looks super professional. You go to the SpaceX facility, parts are on the table, some of the parts look like they're rusting. It looks haphazard. And so you might say it's reasonable to ask, who do you think is going to win this? But then of course fast forward a little bit and Elon has launched well over 160 rockets last year alone. He's brought down the price of getting a kilogram to orbit from roughly $50,000 a kilogram with the space shuttle to $10-20 with Starship heavy reuse that's imminently coming. It's crazy innovation and I think other countries don't have an Elon.

Well, I think we should, one of the mistakes we made was thinking like, hey, let's this thing is so expensive, we should plan to use it for 80 years. I don't even know what the world is going to look like in 10 years, let alone 80 years. How do we get into tighter cycles of iteration? Iterate faster. In World War II, we had roughly 150 different airframes. We think about the P-51, the B-52, we have these archetypal planes that we think of, but many of them we've forgotten. So maybe we could say 10 of those airframes really mattered, but we produced 150 different ones. And maybe that's roughly the sort of chaotic innovation you need. You can't get to those 10 just by thinking your way through it. You need to experiment and play your way through it. And most of them had a short shelf life. And we got to be thinking about what is the true cost of doing this because sometimes we lull ourselves into a sense that if we just plan this out better, it'll be cheaper over the long run. And in fact, what we see is it's not actually cheaper over the long run. It becomes very expensive and you don't have any of the competitive pressure. And it's not just internal competitive pressure, it's the outside where the enemy gets a vote. So as they're changing, we're going to realize that we need different weapon systems. One of the lessons that I really highlight in the book is it's not actually what your weapon system does today that's determinative of victory, it's how quickly you can change your weapon system to what you need it to do tomorrow. This is why the work with Detachment 201, the organic ability for green suits to reprogram their weapon systems to do new and innovative things in combat is truly the advantage. It's the meta advantage. It's not literally just what does it do today, but how malleable is this weapon system to what I'm going to need it to be able to do tomorrow. How much of that can I do as I'm fighting? We see the Ukrainians do quite a bit of that, right? And certainly at large scale con, it's not a one-to-one mapping between what's happening in Ukraine and what's going to happen, but there are absolutely lessons to learn. One of those meta lessons, another one is before the war, many of these infantry men in Ukraine, the average age is 41 for a Ukrainian infantryman. Many of them actually worked in IT outsourcing firms. They actually have technical skills. Now, the infantryman is not writing code, but because they understand the technology, they're able to ask very precise feature requests like, 'Hey, I need it to do this.' and they know whether their request is going to take one hour, one day, one week, one month, and they titrate their request relative to, yeah, if I get it in a month, I might be dead. I'll settle for this capability in a day that I can use to apply effects on the adversary. So it makes them better customers. And that alone, we need folks in combat arms who are principally experts in their combat arms, but also have enough technical literacy to view software as a weapon system that they know how to wield and fight off of.

That's a big missing component here. Yeah, it's probably the thing I care most about. No civilization can be great unless it believes in itself, unless it's proud of itself. And I think no nation has more to be proud of than America. But if you kind of just immerse yourself in the zeitgeist, that's not the vibe. There's a lot of infighting. There's a lot of disunity. We've forgotten what makes us one. And I think a lot of that comes down to storytelling. There's a part of this is represented in our media. A lot of our stories today have really anti-heroes. The hero of some movie is a drug addict or certainly not someone you'd want your child to grow up to be. And if you just rewind and go back to the '80s and '90s, whether it's Hunt for Red October or Red Dawn or Rambo 3, we had a very different take. And yeah, they were complicated heroes. It's not Pravda, it's not propaganda, it's entertainment. But it gave you that feeling. And I think that's really important because that is our soft power not only for the American people but for the world. I think about my father who came to America never having been here but had a fully formed concept of America in his head which was driven by media, by entertainment. Like we were a strong powerful country. I think even things like Maduro, even our most hardened cynics overseas say, 'Wow, that was really cool.' Like that's just super impressive, super competent. And I think we have to acknowledge that not only does the world want a strong America, it doesn't want an America full of self-loathing. The American people want that too. And there's a real opportunity right now to go tell those stories and to remind ourselves that we are always striving for a more perfect union. That belief in oneself is critical and on the facts we have a lot to be proud of.

Yeah. I want to tell positive stories. I really, it came back to wanting to watch movies with my kids again, and that feeling. And I started looking around and some of it's very subtle. I grew up in the shadow of the space ghost in Orlando and it's hard, do you think I would grow up to be a CTO if I hadn't been there? I think the answer is maybe not because what was in the zeitgeist in Orlando at the time, you would go to the elementary school courtyard and watch the shuttle launch. You would wake up to double sonic booms on a Saturday morning as shuttle re-entered. It was this sense of America is a badass country. Look at what we're capable of from a science and technology perspective. And importantly, the subtext is the future is going to be better through science and technology and hard work. I had a classmate in elementary school whose father designed the landing gear on the F-117A. And when we disclosed that asset existing, he was the most popular kid in class, even though it was just the landing gear. And this pride in what we're building and this pride of togetherness. It didn't matter if you're left or right. When I grew up, if you were flying the American flag, that was not politically coded. Pride, no party should have a monopoly on patriotism. That's the one thing that binds us all. And then, like any family, we can fight about lots of things. We can disagree about things, especially if it's coming from a purity of perspective of wanting the country to be better. And so I don't think we're going to win these things just by arguing. The arguing is not going to go away. But I'd like us to remind ourselves that we're Americans first. And I think a big part of this is what are we passing on to our kids? We've been here before as a country. If you go back to Vietnam, a lot of our movies were very cynical, this sense that we kind of screwed up the world as a country. Coming out of Vietnam though, you think about the Reagan era. I think Reagan's real contribution was just being a positive leader. It's going to be morning again in America. We are great. We're capable of doing good things. To set the conditions for people to abandon the nihilism, reabsorb optimism, and actually make things again. And we're at the precipice of that. When you look at Isaiah at Valor, we are making things again. And it's not just one point example with Isaiah, you span it out all the people that you've had here. Maybe it starts with defense tech because it's so motivating to protect the nation, but I think it's going to expand to every part of our economy. And rejecting nihilism is so important in our youth. There's a temptation to just say burn it all down. There's maybe a growing up phase where you go through that, but helping our youth exit that and understand that what we've built is worth fighting for is so critical.

100%. What are we going to do about it?

Yeah, been really impressed with him. I mean, he's an exceptional human being. I kind of have this, as you can tell from the heretics and heroes thing, I'm magnetically attracted to people who are powerfully driven towards a vision, almost a crazy vision. How are you, you're not like a triple PhD in physics? What makes you qualified to do this? But it embodies the belief in self, and those are the people you want to back. Those are the people who are never going to stop. They're never going to give up. They're the people when you look at, yeah, I'd like my son to learn a thing or two from Isaiah. I'd like my daughter to learn a thing or two from Brandon. These are the role models that I don't see on TV anymore. But they actually are going to determine the future trajectory of our nation and inspire greatness.

Hey man, you're the antidote to the cynical media we have here.

Always a pleasure. Thanks for everything you do, Sean.