Shyam Sankar Is Trying To Mobilize A Country | Palantir CTO Interview

Thanks for having me.

We have a gift for you. This is the actual Mobilize gift box here, which is a reconditioned, marginally reconditioned actual ammo box from the Lake City ammo facility in Missouri here. And inside, we got some goodies for you.

Book itself.

March 17th.

I love it. If I may say so. Pretty badass Mobilize patch.

I love it.

How are you? I'm doing well. How are you? Thanks for having me.

That's right. March 17th, Mobilize.

Yeah, as you just mentioned, I've been at Palantir almost 20 years now. I joined as the 13th employee, the first forward deployed engineer. That wasn't even my title. That's the title I came up with about a year into the job. But really I had been working at another startup for a couple years in San Francisco that Peter had seed funded. And I heard about these merry band of misfits that were working on solving problems in national security and counterterrorism and I was just ruined like I could not think of working on anything but this. So it all went pretty quickly. I met Joe in January of 2006. And by March I started and it was just awesome. It was just in the beginning it was like I built demos which was really a fancy way of QAing the product like product didn't work, product didn't exist you know those early days and started building a team around that and iterating with the customer doing the early deployments and it's been one thing after another since then.

For better or worse, I mean my frame is kind of the same. Like I try to keep my head in the engine room as close to the coalface with the customers, the deployments, the work, thinking about what could be better about the product, where should we be going next, where are we going to unlock the most amount of value for our customers? Kind of managing that work that goes on between the forward deployed engineers and the product development teams, right? So I know it sounds like a weird answer, but it doesn't feel different to me because I'm not paying attention to it. I'm like in the work.

Well, it starts with, you know, one of the things Alex has always said is like no great company was principally started to make money. Great companies start as a cult that happen to be a company because that's how you get to keep doing the thing you're obsessed with doing, right? And better part of 19 years working in national security. I put out in October of '24 a treatise called the 18 Theses that really represented not only my diagnosis of one, we've lost deterrence. We're in a precarious place. Perhaps World War III has already started. We have the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the militarization of the Spratly Islands in '15. Iran with breakout capability of the bomb in '17. A pogrom in Israel, the war in Ukraine, Second Thomas Shoal, lots of skirmishes in South China Sea. Like it looks a lot like the Spanish Civil War as the prelude to World War II. So the clock is ticking. We have a limited amount of time to deter broader conflict which is just an outcome that is going to be horrible for the world. And as really the leader of the world, we need to look seriously at what we can do to deter this. And then from there we talk about okay well what happened? We spend like a trillion dollars a year on defense. We were the sole superpower after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We built the arsenal of democracy in World War II. We have the most innovative economy in the world. What is going on? And it really goes through a diagnosis of what we believe it's like it's about the primacy of winning like we what built that arsenal of freedom. And we talk about a term that I love the heretics and heroes, right? It really is about people, about the primacy of people. And it wasn't Northrop Grumman. It was Jack Northrop and Leroy Grumman. And when we kind of pray at the altar of process and we think that hey the institutional approach alone as opposed to the great and courageous acts of incredibly creative people rebelling against the bureaucracy is what makes things work. We lose sight of what makes things work, right? And very importantly every major military innovation and we document a lot of these in the book is an act of heresy. You know, it was Churchill as the head of the British Navy, the Royal Navy, who built the tank because the British Army didn't think they needed anything other than horses. You know, it was Hyman Rickover who against the wishes of the US Navy built the nuclear navy, one of our last remaining asymmetric advantages against the Chinese, right? Innovation after innovation. Andrew Higgins, he ended up supplying 92% of all boats in World War II, but the Navy didn't want to buy them in the leadup to it, you know? So part of it is a message to the heretics that are serving every day as uniform service members or civilians in the department that your heresy is the difference between winning or losing and a message to the heretics that are outside the building like the heirs to Kelly Johnson the founder of Skunk Works like the work that you're doing really matters. The reason to send the message now is it finally felt like the shot clock was running out and the people had showed up. Maybe it's a version of the Churchillian saying that after doing everything else in the end, America does the right thing and the people, the founders were coalescing around it that the desire for profound reformation in the Pentagon itself was starting to bubble up and I think this was a moment to crystallize it all. So 18 Theses, the book is really like the long form explanation of 18 Theses and it crystallizes it, grounds it in more history and it does more research and kind of a deeper look at what we should be changing in particular.

Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, it's like, can I look my kids in the eye and say I did everything possible so that you guys would not be fighting a war and that you would be living in a free and prosperous world, right? And I guess I not only was the shot clock running out, but I felt like after 19 years of doing this, I'd earned specific opinions of what is broken and what we should be fixing and had a duty to at least articulate them. I'm not sure they're all right, but I think they're directionally right enough to catalyze a reformation.

That's right. We settled in Orlando when I was a child fleeing violence in Nigeria. And I think it really began on the couch with dad watching great American movies. You know, Hunt for Red October, Red Dawn, Rambo 3, Rocky 4. And I know that sounds crazy. You can only kind of connect these dots in retrospect, but I feel like as a 5-year-old, I knew what it felt like to be an American before I understood civics, right? But I was definitely raised in a household that understood the stark counterfactual, but for the grace of this nation to be dead in a ditch in Lagos. And I think growing up in Orlando in that time, like that's essentially the shadow of the space coast. Like when the shuttle re-entered, you'd have double sonic booms over your house and you could file out in the courtyard in the elementary school and look at the shuttle take off. You could see the contrail. It's pretty small, but you could see it. You were filled with this sense of wonderment that the future was going to be better because of technology and these were noble things to have and that the ambition, it's like we should send humans to space like ambition was latent in the environment, right?

Hardware is critical at the end of the day you're not going to win the war or deter the conflict with bits you know you need atoms. Now, the bits can help you bend the atoms better, and that's the whole thesis behind Warp Speed, which we can get to. But, you know, I think the starting precept is that the industrial base that won World War II was an American industrial base. Ford was building planes, General Mills, General Motors, Pontiac, Philco, everyone was in the fight. And in fact, that industrial base carried forward until roughly the fall of the Berlin Wall. And when the Berlin Wall fell, only 6% of spending on major weapon systems went to defense specialists, i.e. companies that we would think of today as defense contractors. The rest went to what I call as dual-purpose companies. Companies that had a consumer or private sector business and were providing for our prosperity and safety, our freedom really as companies. So, you know, Chrysler used to make missiles and minivans. Chrysler was the prime contractor on the Minuteman ICBM. That's hard to think about today. You know, Ford used to build satellites until 1990. General Mills, the cereal company, built torpedoes and inertial guidance systems. Kodak was, yeah, they made film. They also made spy satellites.

Because innovation is the consequence of productivity. So I think the great lie of globalization gone too far is hey you know we'll do the high value work we'll do the innovation they'll just do the production the low value work. The problem is innovation is a consequence of productivity. Let's take a more recent example, AI. What motivated Google in 2017 to do the work behind Attention Is All You Need, that paper is what catalyzed the transformer revolution. They wanted a 3% incremental improvement in the performance of Google Translate. You cannot think of something more banal, more closer to low value production that generated innovation than that. But that's been the history over time. It is the people who produce and that's what we're seeing unfortunately happening right now. You know, BYD starts as a battery company turns into a full-fledged car company. WuXi starts as a cheap contract research organization for big pharma companies and now what you see is that 50% of all clinical trials for drugs are happening by Chinese companies in China. They are moving up the stack and we have unilaterally essentially disarmed. We've ceded all this innovation to them. And it doesn't actually make sense because fundamentally you know the issue we have with the CCP is not actually about Taiwan. Taiwan is a flash point. It is maybe the thing that is most likely to escalate conflict but the issue at its core is you know America is a very positive sum country. We after we defeated Germany, Japan, we spent our own money to go rebuild their economies in order to drive peace and prosperity in the world. We let the Chinese into the World Trade Organization. Every single moment since then, they have been cheating. Yeah. On one hand, to drive their own prosperity, but it has always been their intent. It's not enough for China to prosper. The US must fail. And I'll give you a simple example to see this, but you can really see this in every single dimension, which is that you know, it's totally a business decision, which I do not begrudge them one iota of whether you want to buy US soybeans or Brazilian soybeans. Yeah. It's a whole another thing when while you're doing that, you're smuggling in agricultural funguses. So, we can't grow soybeans. And I think in some sense there's something broken where the American people are not fully tracking the dirty tricks, the undermining that's been going on because it's been a frog boil. Yes. You know, really since the ascension of the World Trade Organization by China on the economic side and since Gulf War I saw with what efficacy we dismantled the Iraqi army which was the fourth largest army in the world. Now, now we think of it as so easy, but you know, prior to that, it wasn't actually clear it was going to go like that, right? They have systematically invested in undermining all of our military capabilities around the world. So, I think there are great challenges ahead that we can prevent conflict by reinvesting substantially in deterrence. Now, positive signs, you know, I think Midnight Hammer and Maduro did a lot to reestablish deterrence. The scale of the operation that was Midnight Hammer is eye-watering. You know, no other country in the world could pull that off. And even Maduro, not only is it eye-watering that it was possible to do, but here you have a bunch of Russian and Chinese military equipment rendered useless. Yeah. And every single authoritarian around the world that has sided with them and bought their equipment is now thinking, 'Fuck.'

Well, I think the starting precept is, you know, no civilization can be great if it's not proud of itself. And we've sort of lost the narrative here. So, this is where I think my grounding in the counterfactual, my family's experiences in Lagos. You could, America is not perfect, but please tell me somewhere else that is better. It doesn't actually exist, right? You know, where do you have the mobility we have? Where do you have the meritocracy, the individual liberty? It's a very dynamic place where actually you really can be from any background and achieve incredible things. Yeah. There is human flourishing here. One of the things is like culture doesn't self-propagate. You need to actually work and fight for culture every single day. That's as true inside of a company as it is in a country. And I think we've kind of lost the plot a little bit. Some of that is a cynicism built up from the global war on terror. Some of that is just, you know, you can see how much things changed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine where a lot of people, particularly in tech, were like, 'Oh, this rules-based international order doesn't just run itself.' You know, someone can just roll tanks across a border and, you know, like I worked with those Ukrainians on technical projects and now they're, you know, fighting for their lives. So I think that was a real wakeup check. But there's a lot more to do here. And I think one of the things the Chinese have been very clever at doing is infiltrating our society in a way where there's no media that paints the Chinese as the adversary because of the historical film financing and kind of a malaise in Hollywood around these things where it's kind of popular or in the zeitgeist to paint America as the person who kind of screwed up the world.

Exactly. I mean, Richard Gere's career was essentially ruined by supporting Tibet, you know, but we need a certain sort of courage and I think that courage comes from the heretics, these founder personalities. So, Jack Warner, everything we're seeing has happened before, you know, like history rhymes. The Nazis. So, Germany used to be the third largest export market for American media content for Hollywood in the 30s and the Nazis would deploy censors into Hollywood to screen content and basically edit the content. So, it was nothing negative said about the Nazi party. Jack Warner was the only studio head, also a founder of Warner Brothers who said, 'Fuck this.' Like he, you know, after his studio executive was assaulted he started telling the truth and I think there's a certain amount of courage we need to say obvious truths that are happening here and I think a lot of it is a broader issue than the government even if you look back at the Cold War it wasn't the president rattling the saber saying how evil the Soviets were come and go but you need to preserve diplomatic maneuvering right there's a broader zeitgeist there's a broader element of media, mainstream media has completely failed to inform the American people of what's going on here. Entertainment, you know, you can think about a 5-year-old in the 80s watching wrestling. Who are the heels? The Iron Sheik, the Russian Bear. You know, you would know who the adversaries of America were. These simple signaling mechanisms, you know, the Chinese have been very smart in undermining and make sure that doesn't really happen. So, you're left with people who are kind of confused about what's going on.

I think it's things like Top Gun Maverick. It's things like Landman. It doesn't all have to be military movies, but like content that inspires again content that unifies us. And I think that's a big thing, which is, you know, politics are structurally zero sum. That's the nature. You win or I win. That sort of thing, right? But America, what makes it special is the positive sum place. And we need to do, yeah. Okay. We can have disagreements on politics, but we also need to remind ourselves that first and foremost, we're Americans. Yeah. And we're invested in the prosperity of each other, and we're rowing in the same direction. You know, as a kid in the 80s, if a neighbor had a flag in front of their house, that wasn't right or left coded. No, it was just, yeah. You live in America. No. So I think some of these things, you know, we've also been here before this sort of malaise. We had this sort of cynical vibe in the country after Vietnam, during and after Vietnam. And it was like you need optimistic leadership, like it's the Reagan sort of leadership. It's morning again in America. To my point of no civilization can do great things unless it's proud of itself. And I do think it is factually the case, which is where we need to educate our youth, that no country has more to be proud of than America. Again, it doesn't mean we're perfect, but please find me a place you think would be better.

Well, I think our greatest threat as a country is not homicide. It's not what is China going to do to us. It's suicide. It's are we going to be asleep at the wheel and react zero. Right? So re-industrialization is on us. Now lots of people look at re-industrialization and it seems incredibly daunting. And it is daunting, you know, and yeah, the best time to have started this would have been yesterday. The next best time is today. And you just have, it's a thousand lead bullets. There's no magical solution. It's going to be hard. Wake up. Like get on the horse, put on your cowboy hat. And that's exactly the frontier American spirit we need here. And by the way, it's happening. You know, you look at the El Segundo crowd. Like there's a whole generation of modern hardware manufacturers born in America raised with American ingenuity reimagining how manufacturing happens driving innovation. That innovation is not, maybe defense is the first buyer for it. But just like you know integrated circuits, you think about the microprocessor, the first buyer for the microprocessor was the government in like '68, '69, something like 96% of all integrated circuit sales were for the Apollo program, you know, but now think about our world, I don't know, we probably have 100 integrated circuits within 5 feet of us right now. It's changed everything. And so that sort of prosperity cycle I think is really important. It starts with the belief in itself, starts with a belief that you can do this again. The other thing that's massively in our advantage is AI. Yeah. And you know, I'm not talking about writing poetry. I mean, I think of AI as David's slingshot against Goliath here. It is the basis to underwrite re-industrialization. How do we bring things back by making the American worker 50 times more productive, not 50%, than any other worker in the world. That totally changes the efficient frontier of what is now economical to bring back here.

Yeah. Exactly. So, let's start with the doomerism first. So I think the American people are being lied to about AI. You know, on one hand, you have this doomerism narrative. It's going to destroy jobs and, you know, maybe turn us into the equivalent of a house cat. And on the other hand, you have this sort of fantasist narrative that it's going to lead to this like total untold abundance. And the reason these things are a lie is both of them discount human agency. Both of them kind of imply that the AI future has already been determined, right? That's not what's happening. It's being determined every single day based on the decisions we make. AI doesn't do anything. Humans use AI to do something. So, humans can use AI to make AI slop and addictive, you know, social media or we can use AI to re-industrialize the country to create jobs and drive prosperity, right? And this is not just a talking point like if we look at the work we're doing with ShipOS, one of our submarine industrial base suppliers using AI to automate the planning process has been able, you know, when you think about production you come up with a production plan and then you produce things. If it takes you two weeks to come up with a production plan you're not producing anything in that time you don't have a plan yet what can you do right? If you can shrink that to an hour you suddenly have more time to do work. So this particular company realized wow we have more work to do than people I need to add a third shift. So now this is a total narrative violation that no one's reporting on. So now you have jobs, more jobs because of AI and I'm not talking about building data centers here. I mean the actual ongoing running of the economy and this is at the core of this is Jevons' paradox which is this observation that you know when our coal steam engines got more efficient everyone thought we would use less coal right? We actually ended up using exponentially more coal because suddenly the cost per mile of transport of goods went down. There was more demand for doing these things. So if you really believe we live in a completely demand constrained world, okay, maybe that's really scary. But history suggests we don't. We actually live principally in a supply constrained world. And if we can make things cheaper and better, you're going to have way more prosperity as a consequence of this. The other mistake we're making is we're listening to the wrong people. And I mean this with all humility, but you know the geniuses that created AI and they are geniuses and they're national treasures, they're the inventors of this technology, but these sorts of technical revolutions are always tool-driven revolutions. They're not concept-driven revolutions. And the ultimate impact of the tool is determined by the people who wield the tool. Right. So Galileo did not invent the telescope. He used the telescope to discover planetary motion. I'm not sure the inventor of the telescope had anything to say about the impact the telescope was going to have on humanity. And so you have this sort of, you know, I like to quip AI, we have this term jagged intelligence, right? It's really good at some things, not good at others. Well, maybe humans also have jagged intelligence. You could see a historical analog here to the Manhattan Project. This is probably my spiciest take on this. You had brilliant physicists building the bomb. And of course, these physicists had lots of opinions on how to use the bomb. One of them, Theodore Hall, one of the youngest members of the Manhattan Project at 18 years old, he thought in his brilliance, well, I think the world would be safer and more stable if the Soviets also had the bomb. So, he betrayed his country and he gave the Soviets designs to the bomb. You know, he was a brilliant physicist. He was not a brilliant geopolitical strategist. And you could say that every death to communism since 1949 rests on the hands, that blood is on the hands of the Manhattan Project scientists that betrayed the country.

100%. This is an empirical observation. This is not me pontificating. It's spending time on the factory floor, spending time in the ICU ward, spending time with our users. And you know, I think there's really two dimensions to it. One is you can ask the users, hey, how do you feel about your job with AI? You know, and they're incredibly positive, incredibly excited. And I'll give you a few riffs on that in a second. The second one, which I think is the more profound question, how do you feel about your children's future in America with AI? And they are wildly excited about that. Right? So I think the real doomerism is grabbing hold on people who have yet to experience AI in their workplace but are afraid of what they're hearing from the inventors and don't have any counter data points that suggest oh this may actually go pretty differently than I'm being told and the risk is that there's a reactionary kind of clamping down and rejection of this stuff that plays into the hands of our adversaries to the point of suicide not homicide. The other point, the reason I think this is massively empowering is this is the antidote to the managerial revolution of the 20th century. In the 20th century saw a lot of power pulled away from the founder class, the C-suite, and power pulled away from the frontline worker right into a managerial class. AI is actually empowering the frontline workers. And a concrete, you know, I had this observation as I've spent time with military units on the front line. You have E4s, relatively junior enlisted officers building really compelling AI apps and it's like the talent is unbelievable. Our uniform service members are better than we deserve, you know, dripping in talent. And I've been asking myself the question like did this change? What happened from 10 years ago where I didn't see them building any apps? And what's really happening is AI is kind of an anti-political phenomenon in terms of like the politics within an organization. So now you have this E4, this E8, whatever. Instead of trying to build a PowerPoint slide and convince their boss to convince their boss's boss, hey, this is a good idea, they just build it. Yeah. And they build it in a couple days and now you're arguing about something empirical like you're telling me my idea is bad except it's working. Yeah. Oh, wow. It's working. It's harder to argue with, right? So in that way, it's unleashing it. It's deleting the drag in their job. It's empowering them with their creativity, with their agency to go change their business. I think that's a quintessential American phenomenon, right? The sort of frontier spirit, the willingness to like buck the trend, do the right thing, go a little rogue, be your own little mini heretic. And that's why I think we're seeing so much adoption in the US broadly compared to other geographies because a lot of other places are waiting to be told what to do.

Because they sell, first of all they don't actually live with their customers, right? Their fundamental feedback cycle is could I sell the software? If I sold the software, the software must be good. But that's not actually true. You could say maybe it's good enough. Maybe what it really tells you is I was able to convince someone they should buy it. And our feedback cycle is incredibly different than that. The sale is a lagging indicator to value delivery. So we have a much more harsh judge of value which is like did it actually change it? Meaning you don't get paid until you provide value. Exactly. Yeah. And so we have a crisper opinion of what is happening in the real world based on the technologies we're building.

Well, if we're talking about 20 years, I hope we mobilize in a way that there is no World War III. We deterred great power conflict. We invested in re-industrialization. We realized an AI productivity dividend for the American worker. You know, somewhere in the 70s something really broke down. We used to have, you know, GDP growth and wage growth were coupled. Yeah. And somewhere in the 70s, wage growth became flat and GDP growth kept going. This is not sustainable, you know, and I think in many ways the American worker has been gaslit into thinking that, you know, this is somehow their fault. Yeah. And I think a lot of it is the problems, you know, the overemphasis on completely free market globalization, which could plausibly work if other parties weren't cheating. But, you know, there was a lot of cheating going on, still going on. And that cheating has come at the expense of the American worker, while I think some of the lame legacy elite class profited off of that. And so, it really wasn't in their interest to analyze that in any sort of critical eye. And I think that's the other opportunity. If I look 20 years from now, I think Mobilize might be only some small part of it, but a refreshing of American leadership inside the country. Leadership of the country that cares about the prosperity of its people, invested in their success and future and really is a good steward of the country and that consequence, you know, because that sort of relationship, you know, you think about like Teddy Roosevelt after he was president, one of his sons served in World War I and died in combat. Another son served in World War II and died in combat. They did not have to serve. No. You know, and would that happen today. You can even see this, you know, it's a little starker comparison, but you look at like in World War II, roughly 690 graduates, alumni of Harvard died in World War II. In Vietnam, that number is, I believe, 22. It's either 22 or 35, but it's a very different number. And I think today, you know, the commitment of that class to service for the country is very different. Now, I don't want anyone to die in these wars. I want, you know, we should be so strong that no one has to. But I think it's a proxy as a way of thinking about it. How invested are you in this? How much is our experience mirrored between the leadership of America and the every American? And I think the closer those things are mirrored where we're serving side by side, that's the antidote to nihilism. That's the fuel for belief in self and that we're rowing in the same direction.

We need our companies to be as functional as possible. You know, I often talk about how our software fixes this fundamental issue in the legitimacy of our institutions. Why do doors fall off planes? Why does it seem like government services don't work? You know, there's not a steering wheel between the C-suite and what's actually happening on the metaphorical factory floor. And I think what there is instead is a prop from the Jungle Cruise Ride at Disneyland. It's a toy. And I think a lot of people don't realize that what they've been given to steer the ship is a toy. Yeah. And of course the people down below see that and they're like, how could they be so dumb? You know, they must, maybe it's been intentional that they're driving our ship into the rocks here. So fixing that is a big part of like, hey, when our institutions work, when you think an idea you have can translate into results, regardless of where you are in the stack, that's a compounding effect that you have. You're going to need that for all of our companies to participate in re-industrialization, right? And as a consequence, mobilization. And you can see how it very clearly integrates with the thesis of like, hey, our biggest risk is suicide. Our biggest risk is letting the nihilism stick, like losing our hope, continuing to not believe in ourselves, thinking there's nothing special about what we've done here on the 250th anniversary of the country. Or as I like to say the quarter millennial celebration, longer term view on these things. And I think we can be a big part of that.

Toss up between The Patriot with Mel Gibson or Saving Private Ryan.

So many good ones to choose from. I guess in my indulgent age now it would be truffle pasta.

Well, it's going to have to be linen, of course. And I think some Miami Vice colors.

I mean, it's hard to pick just one. I mean, okay, I'll give you a few. How about that? Okay, so I think Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World is really interesting. It's a kind of totally different take on the popular narratives of Genghis Khan. It shows you how much of an entrepreneur he really was. I'm obsessed with these figures that create something out of nothing. Yeah. And the journeys they're on. I think the biography of Menachem Begin is pretty interesting as well. It speaks a lot to the foundation of Israel and kind of the nitty-gritty of how tough those things are, how much it's like touch and go. Yeah. But if I had to only pick one, it would be David McCullough's 1776, which I think the US is the ultimate startup. You know, you can read Hard Things About Hard Things. You can read any startup book you want, but I promise you there's no more wisdom than what's available in 1776.

Thank you.