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

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

Shyam Sankar is Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President at Palantir Technologies, where he has served since 2006 as one of the company’s earliest hires and key builders. A seasoned technologist with over two decades of experience, he has led the design and deployment of software platforms that support some of the world’s most complex and high-stakes environments. from defense operations to enterprise systems. Sankar holds a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University and an M.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University. His career reflects a commitment to advancing technology that strengthens national resilience and accelerates industrial and defense innovation. A vocal advocate for applying artificial intelligence to empower American workers and reindustrialize the United States, Sankar is deeply engaged in initiatives such as the American Tech Fellows program, which develops domestic AI talent. He regularly speaks on the role of AI in transforming national security and industry through practical adoption rather than speculation. Rejecting narratives of AI “doomerism,” Sankar emphasizes real-world deployment and measurable results—showing how Palantir’s tools are redefining the speed of warfare, industrial output, and decision-making across the defense and commercial landscapes. His insights are frequently featured in conversations about the future of AI, national power, and America’s technological edge. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Join thousands of parents who trust Fabric to help protect their family—apply today in just minutes at https://meetfabric.com/SHAWN. Try Gusto today at https://gusto.com/SRS and get three months free when you run your first payroll. New customers can save 35% on your first month of Dose for Cholesterol by going to https://dosedaily.co/SRS or entering SRS at checkout. Shyam Sankar Links: X - https://x.com/ssankar Substack - https://www.shyamsankar.com LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/shyamsankar On The Defense Reformation - https://18theses.com First Breakfast - https://www.firstbreakfast.com Book - https://www.amazon.com/Mobilize-Reboot-American-Industrial-World/dp/B0FQWGC94Z/ref=sr_1_1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sean, welcome back, man. Thanks for having me, Sean. It's great to be back. I owe you huge, thank you. So the last time you were here, you wore a hooded blazer. So I saw it and I was like, what the fuck is that thing? It's amazing. So now I got a whole wardrobe of them.

I love it. Yeah, man. So thank you. But yeah, it's good to have you back. I'm pumped about our conversation today. And I know you got the new book coming out and everything. But what have you been up to? Oh, man. A lot's gone on in the world since we last met, and a lot's gone on for us.

You know, I think trying to be a positive advocate for what I think is the future of AI for the American worker. You know, I think essentially the American people are being lied to there. And I've earned an opinion working with American workers on the front line, whether it's the factory floor or the ICU ward, trying to bring back the bonds between our industrial base, like the private sector and government again. And I think the work that we've done with Attachment 201 and Commission. is part of that. And then, of course, this moment that we've had over the last year to really fix the Department of War, fix how we buy things, how we prepare for war, so that we can preserve peace, you know, really empowering the heretics, the crazy ideas. So it's been a full out last 12 months. Sounds like it. Are you looking for real estate in Miami now?

Well, I already have a spot in South Florida, so I'm set. Right on, right on. What prompted that? Headquarters is moving to Miami. It just came out a couple days ago, right? Yeah. So, you know, I think it's important to be in a state where your reps are actually going to rep you. And I think that's part of it that matters. And then you could think about, okay, well, what are the places we could go from Denver? And Miami or really Florida had the best, both combination of legal and positioning perspectives for us. It's the right place. We don't be like the 50th company to go to Austin or something. Austin's great. We have an office there. We love Austin. We love Texas. But Miami felt like the right home for us.

Right on, man. Congratulations on all that. That's awesome. And speaking to AI, did you see this new, this China robot AI video? Have you seen that yet? I haven't seen the latest. Catch me up. I mean, I don't even know what to say it, but it's like the latest. Everybody's wondering if this is a huge advancement. Damn, I got to, I don't have my phone on me. Otherwise, I'd pull it up and show you. but they basically choreographed all these robots doing like some kind of choreographed, I don't know, dance display thing and everybody's kind of going on about it. And then there was, what, that stuff with Claude that came out about the Claudebots going and trying to figure out how to get long-term memory.

Do you have any insight on that? I think it's very hard to separate fact from fiction with these things, you know, because you can kind of egg the agents on to doing very specific things. to tell a dystopic story. Like, what's going on in the prompting with, like, the Malt Book bots? My lived experience, using these things operationally,

is that nothing crazy like this is happening. You know, that actually, it's much more contained, it's much more sane. It really is more like an Iron Man suit for the American worker than it is a headless, godless machine that's just roving around, doing, you know, this is, maybe we should just start here. It's like the ways in which

I think the American people are really being lied to about AI, is that you have, on one hand, incredible doomism. Like, hey, this thing, it's going to lead to, like, mass unemployment, 50% of entry-level jobs are going to be destroyed inside of a year or two. And on the other hand, you have, like, essentially this fantasism. It's going to lead to a utopia, like untold abundance. I think neither of these things are right. They're really, and they're wrong for the same reason, which is they assume there's no human agency. You know, AI doesn't do anything. Humans use AI to do something. And the reality is that the future of AI has not been determined. It is being determined every single day based on the decisions we're making. We can choose to use it to build AI

slop or new forms of addiction and gambling. We can choose it to reindustrialize the country and bring prosperity through the American worker. Those decisions are being made every single day. We should use our agency as humans to decide what we value. And it's very clear what we ought to value. Then there's another part of this, which is age old. Who are we listening to in AI? We're committing the same fallacy we have in the past, which is we're listening to the people who invented the technology, not the people who are using the technology. And by the way, these inventors are geniuses. We need them in America. They are my heretics and hero archetypes that I talk about. But just because they have the genius to invent the technology doesn't also imply

they have the genius to think about how to apply that technology, how to govern it, what are the consequences of it? The example I like to give people is the telescope. You know, Galileo did not invent the telescope. Galileo used the telescope to discover planetary motion. Who had a greater impact or a greater opinion of the impact of the telescope on physics and knowledge? Was it the person who invented it or the person who wielded it? So the people we ought to be listening to are exactly the people who are not invented to give op-eds, who are not on mainstream media.

It's the American worker. It's the guy in the submarine industrial-based parts manufacturer. It's the ICU nurse. It's the factory worker making wires or machinery or equipment. And ask them, like, how has AI impacted your job? Has it replaced you or has it empowered you? And perhaps, I think, the most profound question that I always like to ask folks,

how optimistic are you about your children's future in an America with AI? You'll be surprised how optimistic they are. I got questions. What? I got a lot of questions. I got toddlers. And, you know, and I'm not, I'm not very well versed in AI. My team is incredible out at our video editors. Everybody's using it. Researchers are using it. And it's, it's, I can see that it's become, it's turned them all into force multipliers. I mean, it's insane. They're doing the work of 10, 20 people with one person. Yeah. But that might. mean that there's 10 to 20 jobs that are gone because it has empowered them that much, which, which I don't get me wrong. I don't want to turn back. I'd rather have one guy using AI that's a, that's a badass, you know, turn an A player

into a plus plus plus player. But one thing that I wonder about is what are my kids going to learn? What do they need to learn in school? Like what did I learn in school that's completely opposite elite now with this new age of AI? I think there's a lot in the education system that kids will just be spinning their wheels on. I think it can be massively empowering. So let's come to each of these in turn. So let's start with the kids and then we'll come back to this idea of replacement.

I have kids too, 13-year-old, 11-year-old. And so it's a personal question. It's not an abstract question to me. And what I think I want them to know is how to use this tool. That it's a tool. And it can unlock profound. education for them, but the people are going to succeed are going to have two things. They're going to have specific knowledge.

Like, who's winning right now at the front lines? It's the guy who has 15 years of experience. We'll talk about operators in a second, but like people who really know what they're doing have unique knowledge and insight because what the AI doesn't know is that. But then with that insight and a bit of direction to the point of human agency, it is this incredible Iron Man suit for them. So that's one thing. Specific knowledge is going to continue to be valuable.

The second part of it is, do they know how to use AI? You know, so essentially, like, it is a bicycle. You have to learn how to ride the bicycle. And that requires reps. I think that's why it's actually turning into a massive advantage for America. Because if you just compare it to, say, Europe, people are really thinking hard. How should we use it? They're just thinking.

You know, and the American sensibilities to roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty, play with the thing, experiment, try it out, do something. You know, a little bit of it. And I mean this is the most positive possible way, the cowboy spirit. And that is something that the child's mind is very good at. You know, so I think one of the mistakes that our education system could make

is try to restrict AI. Yeah, absolutely. In the early days, you're gonna have people using it in stupid ways to write their essay for them. It's gonna be a sloppy essay that you can tell as AI generated. But that might be what they need to get through that initial gate to go on to the more intelligent uses of it,

which is, hey, I wrote a first draft of the essay, say, critique it, what did I miss, what are other things I should think about? You know, help me elevate my own thinking. You know, it becomes a partner to do these things. I think that's really powerful. What programs do you use the most? Just in your daily life, and what do you use them for? We're not talking Palantir, home stuff.

What is a normal person use this for? Well, I think the most interesting use cases are going to start where you have the deepest domain knowledge. Like, I think that's part of the reaction the American people have is they look at it, And it seems like some of these things are kind of trivial. Like, you're saving me a little bit of time here. And then that's weighed against, like, crappy content that's being generated, misinformation, disinformation. So on balance, it's like, why is this, why should we believe in this future? Plus, I got these data centers coming up and my electricity bill is going up.

But if you look at it as, hey, this is the basis for reindustrializing the country. Like, we're going to give the American worker superpowers. They're going to be 50 times more productive than any other worker in any other country. And that's not just a matter of pride. That economic leverage is how we bring back manufacturing to the U.S. We're not saying we're going to compete symmetrically. This is David's slingshot against Goliath here. Like, yeah, okay, the Chinese are the best at mass production today.

What is our asymmetric approach to regaining the very thing that we once created? We're going to reinvent production. So an example from Panasonic Energy, they make every battery that goes into every Tesla at the Gigafactory in Reno in Sparks, Nevada. This is exquisite high-end Japanese technology that has operated the employee base in that region of Reno. They're prior casino workers. So the old apprenticeship journey to learn how to operate

and maintain this equipment used to be three years. With AI, it's three months. That's leading to more employment, not less. Wow. And this is the way in which, it's like, to my point of human agency, how do you choose to use this stuff? It really does matter.

And I think on the consumer side, yeah, it's going to help me, you know, categorize my bills better. It's going to help me write responses. I think all those things are trivial. The real stuff is going to start in the enterprise and work its way back. Gotcha. I think one of the exciting things I've seen is that actually, historically with these technology revolutions, the government and the military in particular has been one of the last adopters. But I'm actually seeing one of the last adopters?

Historically. With AI, that's not. the case. Okay. I thought that's where you were going. I was like, holy shit. And it's really compelling to see how you have non-computer scientists. It really proves out the whole thesis here, which is like experts, you know, the Intel warrant officer, the E4, the E8, who are inventing the future of how we're going to deter conflict. And that poses lots of interesting challenges, which I think apply just as much of the commercial sector as government, which is like, it breaks rank structure. It breaks hierarchy. Like, you're going to have to really embrace the

internal disruption that's going to happen. But I think this is a great thing for the American worker because for the last 100 years or so, the managerial revolution has pulled power away from the frontline American worker towards the bureaucrat. AI is reversing that trend very quickly, and that's very destabilizing to the middle managers, where you're going to see a lot of resistance out of this. But it gets at the core problem we have as a country, which is the legitimacy of our institutions. You know, why do doors fall off planes? Why, you know, why aren't basic government services provision in a way that we would all recognize as having basic competence? So you have two answers to that sort of question. You can be like, well,

these people just don't care. Well, it might be the case. But more often than not, my diagnosis of this, having done this across 50 different industries in the private sector and government, is that the people at the top, even when they do care, they have this steering wheel. They're trying to turn it very, very diligently. But what they don't know, it's actually a prop from the jungle cruise ride at Disneyland. Like, that steering wheel is not connected to anything. And so, and that disconnection happens through this bureaucracy. And then you have the people on the factory floor, metaphoric or literal factory floor,

they kind of look up and be like, how can my leaders be so clueless? How do they not realize what's actually going on here? That's really dangerous because it breeds nihilism, right? Then you look at it and you're like, man, it's hopeless. We should give up. Let's burn it all to the ground. It doesn't really matter. And that's horrible because actually, if you burn into the ground, things will get worse.

Like, yeah, everyone acknowledges it's not working right now. The answer is not burning it to the ground. It's fixing it. How are we going to fix it? What's our theory of change here? And the theory of change has to start both at the bottom and at the top. At the top, it starts with people who care, people who want to get things, high agency leaders who care about the outcome.

Then they need the tools. Everyone needs the tools to do this. And so then how do you empower the people at the bottom closest to the problems to actually go solve these tools? That, I think, is a quintessential American characteristic. Like, we think about it as mission command. Give the intent. Let these people run.

Let them cook. Don't, like, overmanage them. Don't drain the creativity out of their souls. You think of every innovation on the battlefront. It was, like, the E4 rolling tanks across Europe in World War II, discovered additional ways of getting through equipment, right? And the generals would let the soldiers cook. This is a powerful moment for the movement.

When you're talking about, you know, that it's going to replace the middle managerial class and in bureaucrats. I mean, my mind went straight to doge at the beginning of the administration and all that went into that and all the fraud and all the shit that they uncovered and that, I don't, I just don't feel like much happened. So, you know, that was kind of the first run, but how is it going to work itself out? Have you thought about that? How is it going to replace them? Where are they going to go? I mean, it's going to be, I think it's very apparent, it's going to be a fight. In terms of the workforce?

Yes. Yeah. So there's this concept called Jevon's paradox. When we started inventing more efficient coal-burning steam engines, everyone thought that the consumption of coal would go down. But the consumption of coal skyrocketed. Now that the engines were more efficient, the cost to transport goods per mile was actually dropping. And so then the number of engines we wanted went way up. and the number of trains we wanted went way up.

There's something like that that's going to happen here, where if you look at something that is fundamentally demand-constrained, like actually, if we made more, no one would want it. Yeah, that's a problem. Like, getting more efficient is going to result in more jobs. But I don't think most things in the economy look like that. Most things in the economy, you look at health care. It's exploding.

It's like 20% of our GDP. Healthcare might be, health care costs might be our greatest national security risk. Like the solvency of our country depends on being able to deliver care to the American people at a better price, and we're only going to need more care over time. So we know we're going to need more care over time. For the same amount of money, how can we deliver more care? How can we get more efficient in doing that? That's Jevon's paradox.

So an example of this, with Tampa General, we're able to get sepsis deaths with the leading cause of deaths in the ICU down to zero from 50% of all debts. What? And there's no replacement of labor there. It's really automating the parts of the job that took the nurse away from the patient's side and then help them spend time with the right patients who had the greatest amount. So it's just eliminating all the drag. That's exactly right. That's how we added a third shift to a submarine industrial-based

parts manufacturer because the drag was the time they spent, like dead weight loss in planning. Like I got to plan what to produce, then I produce it. If the planning takes too long, like tools down. You can't, if you don't have a plan yet, you can't start making things. If I can shrink the planning process from a couple of weeks to a couple of hours, I have more time to make things. And then organically, the company's like, well, I have more work than I have workers. I need to go hire people. And that's the bounty, the American prosperity that we can see out of this. Now, I don't want to be too polyanish.

I think there are things we need to make sure. The most important thing I care about is reestablishing the connection between GDP growth and wage growth. Somewhere in the 70s, something broke fundamentally, where our GDP kept growing and wages stagnated. You know, this has got to be, this is the fundamental promise to the American people, that the prosperity will be shared. And the way in which that happens, I call this the productivity dividend.

The American worker at the front line who is using these tools to make their companies better, they need to participate in the economic upside of doing that. That's critical to not only the social stability of the country, but the prosperity of the nation, seizing this initiative. As a husband and a dad, I think a lot about responsibility. We train for the unexpected in so many areas of life,

But a lot of people don't prepare financially for the one thing none of us can control. If something happens to me tomorrow, I want to know my family isn't scrambling. That peace of mind matters. Fabric by Gerber Life is term life insurance you can get done today, made for busy parents like you, all online, on your schedule, right from your couch. You could be covered in under 10 minutes with no health exam required. If you've got kids, especially if you're young and healthy, the time to lock in low rates is now. And even if you have coverage through work, it might not be enough.

And it usually doesn't follow you if you leave your job. Fabric has flexible, high-quality policies that fit your family in your budget like a million dollars in coverage for less than a dollar a day. They've also partnered with Gerber Life, trusted by millions of families for over-eastern. 50 years. Join the thousands of parents who trust Fabric to help protect their family. Apply today in just minutes at meetfabric.com slash shan. That's meetfabric.com slash shan. M-E-E-T-Fabric.com slash shan. Policies issued by Western Southern Life Assurance Company, not available in certain states, price is subject to underwriting and health questions. Hi, I'm Sarah Adams. The host of Vigilance elites, the watch floor, where we highlight what matters. It became a permissive state.

Explain to you why it matters and then aim to leave you feeling better informed than you were before you hit play. Terrace, hostile intelligence agencies, organized crime, not everything is urgent. But this show will focus on what is need to know, not just what is nice to know. What do you think about how close are we to CGI? To AGI. I'm sorry, yeah, yeah. Excuse me. I've always felt, and I think the present moment kind of shows it, that it's like this continuous journey you're on,

that maybe it's a frog boil, not in a negative sense, where every version of the model is more capable than it was before. The models still have what they call jagged intelligence. Like, they're savants at some things. They're not good at other things. But they're getting, you know, even the things they're getting, they were not good at, they're getting better at.

So some people would say we're already there. Like for coding, they're so good, we're already there. I still think there's a fair amount of human agency that's involved in getting these things to work. As a consequence, it's valuing taste more than anything. You know, like what to build, how to build it, how to think about the problem, what's the elegance of the solution? And then it gives you a big lever to go after it.

I think one of the challenges, you could almost imagine entering a new dark age. Like, the dark ages were caused because we kind of lost fundamental knowledge in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Even though we get to live, you know, not everyone has to know everything, but at the end of the day, someone has to know every, someone in society has to know about every part of it, right? I don't have to spend my time thinking about how to design chips. I live somewhere else in the stack. I get to write code. I get to rely on the fact that Someone else is a semiconductor expert and knows how to do lithography and make the chips that I depend on.

But at some point, you can kind of see how it actually doesn't work for humans to not be involved with any of this stuff ever. That's the fantasist part of this stuff. That if you don't know how it's made, you can't innovate on how it's made. You can't govern it. You can't understand or debug it. And so I think a much more reasonable path is what I call the inductive path. It's like we're on a journey. it's very dangerous to kind of skip steps and fantasize about the future head.

I mean, you want to be optimistic about it. You want to be able to see it. But you don't want to be reactionary to it. Things like UBI, I think, are reactionary to this totally unproven idea that there's going to be so much bounty that we're going to be reduced to being as useful as house cats. Hold on. What's a UBI? Universal basic income. Basically, this idea that everyone should just have an income provided by the government that we fund through taxes because there will be no jobs.

See, I could be off on, is Elon talking about that? Lots of people on the inventor side of AI talk about that. It's a little bit to my point of, should we be listening to the people who are using it and wielding it? And they're geniuses. I'm not saying, you know, it's a subtle critique. But we saw this same challenge with the Manhattan Project to maybe just pick on something that's a little spicy. You know, how did the Soviets get the bomb? they got the bomb because we had geniuses working on the Manhattan Project,

and a small number of them thought, some of them were very famous, like Neil, Neil Bohr, one of our greatest physicist, thought, you know, we should tell the Soviets that we're building this thing. If we tell them it, they won't be scared. And then another guy, Theodore Hall, one of the youngest members of Manhattan Project, he was 18 years old working on this. 18. 18.

Wow. Ph.D. from Harvard. he thought, well, in my infinite wisdom, because I'm so good at physics, I think that if two countries had the bomb, that would ensure global peace and stability. So he actually walked to the trade mission in New York and told them, hey, I'm building this bomb. And then subsequently, he went back in there with technical specifications. So this is a lack of epistemic humility, right? It's like, just because you're a genius in one area doesn't mean you're a genius in another area. And I think it would be a fair accounting to say every death due to communism since 1949,

some of that culpability is on the hands of the Manhattan Project scientists who usurp the chain of command and thought, hey, I'm just going to do this thing unilaterally. It's an interesting point. What else should I be asking you about AI? Well, I think the most optimistic case is really what is happening today. with the American worker. So we've started running what we call American Tech Fellowships. We take people on the factory floor in the front lines,

and we put them through a six-week nights and weekends boot camp to learn how to build their own AI apps. These are not computer scientists. I'm not even trying to make them computer scientists. They're people who have deep domain knowledge of what they do. They manufacture wiring. They are ICU nurses. One guy's a potato farmer in North Dakota.

Like, they know their craft, and I'm supercharging them with this. One of the most exciting new American Tech Fellowships we did was specific to veterans. These are not, and actually active duty. So enlisted officers, some of these folks are Mustangs, 500 people applied, 50 people are in the first cohort. Most of these folks are from combat arms. Some of these folks who will have served with, like they're operators from the Special Operations community, the conventional community, and they are building some of the most exquisite AI applications you can imagine. And to me, it really underlines this thesis, that it's like the human knowledge,

the vocational ability, the calling to do these things, the motivation that, hey, my institution can be better, I can be better, which I think, again, is another quintessential American drive, the sense of, like, I can make a dent on the planet with this capability. And that's working. So you guys are taking them and putting them into this program? Yeah. That's amazing. It's been really rewarding for us to do. I mean, part of the thesis is, like, we want to fuel the disruption. And the disruption isn't just technical. It's also mindset. You know, one of these guys, prior enlisted Navymen, a sailor,

he now works at a manufacturing company, grew up in a rural part of Georgia, dirt poor. No one ever told him he was supposed to be smart. No one ever told him he could do these things. You know, and so just having someone lean in and say, we believe in you, we're going to give you the tools to unleash your human agency. Watching this guy cook, he's improved.

So he's reduced downtime on machines by, 50%, he's improved yield on the factory floor by 20%. These are big numbers. You know, it's shocking, and you're really looking at the output of one person. You know, one person who all that potential was latent, there's, what the AI did is it removed all the drag, to your point, that all the ideas he had he could now realize. And that's going to have a compounding effect. Like, it's like, this is how we grow our GDP again.

This is how we become a prosperous nation. Probably the part that I think the American people should feel most gaslit about over the last 30, 40 years with globalization is this idea that somehow you're not smart enough, that there are people elsewhere who are going to work harder, work for less, and they're better than you. And that's just not true. And I think part of this comes down to a belief in oneself, and what is the message that we're giving them? And if you let these guys cook, it's eyewater. I'm learning from them, not the other way around. Wow. How do you, how do we know we can trust it? I mean, just I see all kinds of things that are coming out of AI that I know for a fact is not correct.

Trust is earned. One, I mean, just an example I saw this morning. I saw a clip of myself on X or something. Yeah, it was X. And they somebody said, hey, Grop, what's this from? And it said, to Joe Rogan's experience. You know what I mean? And I'm like, shit.

I mean, that's pretty basic stuff. You know, and so it makes me wonder, you know, you know, shit, what else is this stuff getting wrong? Because we rely on this for a lot of things here. But so when I see like a simple mistake like that, it just makes me wonder what other mistakes are we getting out of this? Yeah. Especially when it comes to defense.

I would think about it as how do we trust the humans? You know, if you ask the human, hey, what is this from? In that particular case, we'd expect them to be a lot better. But there's an element of what is this person unique? credible at, you know, and you develop priors on it. Like, where are they, where are they able to help me? Where are they not? Maybe I'm not asking the question in the right way. Maybe I'm not providing enough context to doing it. So this is why I think the specific. So if you think about trust in the general, like any given human, you ask them a bunch of questions,

they're going to get some of this stuff wrong. They're going to be pretty convinced they're even right about some of the stuff they get wrong. I think AI, it's the same thing. So it's about us having enough, this is the point of rolling up your sleeves and playing with it is like, hey, where do you believe this thing? Where have you seen it being good or not. And then you develop the technical term for this as e-values, but you develop a set of tests that you're constantly running it through to understand like when they, when they release a new model, is this model at least as good as the old model? Is it better? How much better is it? Where can I, is there a new trust that can extend to it? Again, to the point that that trust has to be

earned. So you're not going to get any of this stuff for free where it's just like Yolo, ask a question, blindly trust it. It's going to be like, hey, this is a new teammate. This is a fresh second lieutenant. I don't trust them with anything. Like, we're going to build a relationship together, solving problems together, and we're going to see where you're really a rock star and where you can help me be more effective. And working backwards from the problems we have,

that's a much narrow scope. It's like, hey, I do, I make wires. You know, I'm a potato farmer. Like, these are my, this is my problem. How do I develop trust in this domain with you? Where I'm the expert, actually. And so I'm going to be really good judge of whether you're, the danger is, like, using it where you actually have no knowledge.

So you're a blank slate. and you're going to, by default, maybe trust it way more than you should. Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay. So, just like any relationship, you have to build trust. It sounds so weird to me. But, hey, Shab, let me give you an intro here real quick.

Shom Sankar, chief technology officer and executive vice president at Palantir Technologies, where you've served since 2006, is one of the company's earliest hires and key builders. A seasoned technologist with over two decades of, experience designing and deploying software platforms for complex, high-stakes environments from defense to enterprise. Hold a bachelor's in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell University and MS and management scientists in science and engineering from Stanford University, actively involved in initiatives like the American Tech Fellows Program to develop domestic AI talent. Author of the new book, Mobilize, How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stock. World War III, which comes out just a couple weeks, March 17th.

And last summer, you were commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve. Congratulations. Thank you. I saw that, man. I was really excited about that. I think that's really cool. And as you know, I've got a Patreon account, subscription account. They've been with me since the beginning, and they're the reason I get to sit here with you today.

So they get the opportunity to ask every guest a question. This is something that's on everybody's mind. You're aware of it. It's all over the Internet. This is from Derek. What technical safeguards prevent Palantir's software for being misused for warrantless surveillance of American citizens? Yeah, great question, Derek. So 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, or to a private sector, like to a manufacturer. So the only data that is going to be in the software is that is the, is the software. the data that the organization has access to. If you're a manufacturer, that's your supply chain, that's your production data, that's your customer orders. If you're the government, it's what you have lawful authorities 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 in, because we have immutable audit logs, we have purpose-based access control, role-based access control, classification-based access control. If you misuse the data in the platform, first of all the controls that are in there prevent misuse. But if you try to circumvent these things and misuse it, there's an immutable audit trail of what actually 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 sort of protections are too strong. Sometimes that's uncomfortable. Sometimes you don't want to know what the data, or you actually already know what the data is going to tell you. And, you know, you don't want protections that's strong coming in. 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. In my experience, you know, both sides are right about something. You know, it's like you kind of get nowhere by just arguing to the nth degree. The question is, how do we move out the efficient frontier? You know, like, if we go back to the Pallantor story in particular in 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 that 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? So 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, were 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 then biased towards either gross violations of oversharing or not being able to connect the dots because people didn't share it 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, If you can't see that actually both sides are right about something, that actually there's a kernel of both, how do we bring a synthesis of these perspectives? How do we do that with technology? So we're not reliant on the fallibility of humans or people rotating in and out and loss of knowledge and transfer. It's about restoring human agency. So for a given set of policies that a democratic society wants to enact, do you have the capacity to enact it? This goes back to my point of the broken steering wheel. You know, okay, if you have a broken steering wheel, how good can the institution actually be?

How nuanced can you, what sort of policy can you? How subtle can your policy be? Like, if we make that work, it can be responsive to the American people, being responsive to the electorate. I think a lot of people are worried that it is Patriot Act 2.0. They're really worried about the privacy stuff. I worry about it, too. 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, it's not deep enough thought to think that we're somehow, we're actually 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. It's like, I'm just saying, what's the counterfactual,

that letting a bunch of historical legacy contractors who aren't as sophisticated with technology trying to solve these problems. Who is leaning in and saying, we want to make these institutions function better? That's the antidotalism. You know, make things work. That's also the American builder way. You know, like, we're not going to get out of these problems

through policy alone, through politics alone. We've got to build our way out of these things. We've got to build a better future. Gotcha. I got you a gift, too. It's the same one as last time. Amazing. There you gobble these up last time, so I'm looking forward to doing that again.

Right on. I too got you a gift here. We have a mobilized ammo box here. So this is an actual, it was made at the Lake City Army Ammunition Facility in Missouri. It's been in continuous operations since 1941 making ammo. This specific box was made in 73 and it held 20 millimeter electrically primed shells. Don't worry, there's no shells in it now. But I have in it.

Oh, man. I've been in a little mobilized swag. So we have the book. We have a hat, some stickers, some patches. There we go. There it is. Yeah. And a nice little mobilized jacket.

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 shit going on in the world right now. I mean, there's not a whole lot of talk about China.

that kind of took the back seat a little bit, but I don't see, I don't understand why. But when we got stuff going on in China, Russia and Ukraine still kicking off, Venezuela, the Mexico border, you know, Mexico, U.S. border, Gaza. What are you most concerned about? Well, I mean, if you think about it, so I was on in April, Operation Spires Web, 12-day War, Midnight Hammer, the skirmish. between India and Pakistan, Maduro. You know, there's a lot going on in the world. Yes.

So, and I think are these skirmishes kind of 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. So even though in some sense, China's taking a backseat, it is the driving force here.

You know, 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 here. And so the radical pace at which these things are happening I think 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. And I'd say things like Midnight Hammer and Maduro are really the first things we've done that have restored deterrence, this sense of, oh man, And I have been underestimating the U.S.

And we have to continue that trend where the kind of missing part of us, I think if you thought about it as a spear, the point of the spear is really good. Look no further than Midnight Hammer or Maduro to see that. The shaft of the spear needs work. That's the industrial base. That's our ability to link the factory floor to the foxhole. And just like we learned in World War II, it is like large-scale conflict is these protracted conflicts are about your industrial capacity. We outproduced our adversaries in World War II. Even Stalin was shocked at our productive capability and powers.

We have to recognize in the present moment, through a series of bad policies, really, since the end of the Cold War, an unfettered belief in globalization, we have put a lot of our capability in the hands of our adversary. And it's not just weapons. That's the easiest place to focus. You could say, okay, we have roughly eight days of weapons on hand for a major conflict. We obviously need something closer to 800 days. Look at pharmaceuticals. You know, you look at rare earths, and yeah, those rare earths go into weapons.

They also go into cars. And 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. And if in a conflict, obviously, we're not going to be getting those things. And the American people are not going to have an appetite to have their five-year-old suffer or potentially die

from an ear infection that we basically think of as a trivial sickness today, common ailment that goes away. way, you know, we need to have our own sovereignty over these capabilities. That itself is deterrence. Like, having our own pharmaceutical manufacturing capability, that is deterrence. And so I think a lot of people, especially folks, it's easy to get cynical about the defense industrial base. It's easy to see it as war mongering or fear mongering. But we need to think about it as the core thesis of the book is that national security is American prosperity. These are just two sides of the same coin. And if you get too fixated on just national security, national security, national security, that's the world,

is not an end unto itself. It's a means to underwrite the prosperity of the American people. And we're a little bit out of balance there. Fortunately, a lot has happened in the last 12 months to really address these things. There's been a huge amount of change in the Pentagon acquisition reform, which sounds like a very boring term. But hey, we got to like throw away the process, not be a victim to the process and say, do things that work.

How about that? How about we just do things that work and get out of our own? own way. And a big part of the book, I spent time talking about the historic figures who threw away the process, who rebelled against the system and actually delivered the capabilities we need. And 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 the system. And having the courage to look at the American industrial base, whether it's Isaiah with with valor, you know, people trying to build nuclear reactors now, like, it's the heterodox

thinking. It's not coming from the big companies. It's coming from the founder figures. It's coming from the crazy, youthful energy of invention that has always characterized the American soul. You know, I see that in all. I've interviewed a lot of these guys. I'm sure you probably know.

But, I mean, the innovation is there and the technology is there. I mean, obviously, I don't have much insight into what China is doing. I learned a lot of that from you guys. But I mean, everything from Epirus with those direct DMP weapons to what Isaiah is doing with Valor. I mean, Anderil, Shield, AI. I just interviewed, do you know Ethan Thornton? Yeah. Holy shit.

What a sharp fucking kid. Whoa. Just interviewed him, blew me away. Nick Cedar Ramen. Yeah. You probably know him too. But I mean, but Dino Mavrucus was Seronok. I mean, and I believe everybody that I just rattled off is.

manufacturing in the U.S., I don't know how much they're manufacturing. A lot of this stuff is prototypes, you know, or it seems to be not on mass scale yet. Am I wrong on that? We're capable of it, though. I mean, I think that's just going through it. Like, they're in that, first of all, you know, huge credit to the department. Because if you went back even 10 years, none of these people existed. And it's not because we didn't have them in America.

It's because there was no way the department was going to do. Like the case didn't, the business case didn't meet. No one was going to buy that. Now you have the department leaning in, recognizing that a maverick like Dino is not a problem. He's the solution. You know, how do we make more bets? I fucking love what I'm seeing.

I mean, Driscoll, at the, I can't remember what the event was, but I mean, they had like a Y combinator of just whoever coming up and pitching their ideas. It was, it's cool to see them get away from the big prives, you know. And, and I just, I just, I, I just, I, I think that's amazing that they're doing that. One of the things I spend time in the book is understanding how do 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. You know, probably my colleagues who are innovators would get a little upset at me at giving the Prime some credit in some sense. But they're not boneheads, right? They actually do a number of things incredibly well. I think they are a victim of the system. And that system has been pushing cost plus contracting. It's been pushing risk onto the taxpayer instead of these companies. It's been reducing the reward for taking risk.

It almost doesn't even make sense to take risk. And the way I like to encapsulate this is like every country, including Russia and China, have turned their back on communism, except for Cuba and the old DOD. And I think what you're seeing with the new DOW is recognizing, like, that shit doesn't work. Let's go back to winning again. Like, winning matters. And what does winning look like?

You know, it looks like innovation. It looks like something that powers the rest of the American economy. This is not some muscle that's atrophied in America. It's really a victim. It's a consequence of being the sole superpower since the end of the Cold War that we didn't have to tolerate the crazies anymore. You know, you go back to figures like Hyman Rickover, John Boyd, these are famously difficult people. And even I would say the most talented engineers I have,

they are difficult humans. And you tolerate them because that's what winning requires of you. So reattaching yourself. Like I talked about Theodore Hall and how he was a traitor in the Manhattan Project. His brother, Edward Hall, was the inventor of the Minuteman missile. And Edward Hall was a famously, and it's kind of interesting dichotomy there,

which we can talk about in a second. But Edward Hall was famously, he was a pain in the I mean, Schrever protected him because he recognized, yeah, this guy's a pain, but he's a genius. Like, we are going to build an ICBM because of Edward Hall. Edward Hall famously, when he was in World War II, he was overseeing some mechanics, some British soldiers repairing aircraft, and he thought they were doing a shitty job. He pulled out a service weapon on them and actually held them at gunpoint until they did the job right. And of course, the British hierarchy got really pissed at him, called him to yell at him, but he's like,

but I was right. Like, I'm not going to send my men back out in that plane that these guys are doing a shitty job on. And there you have a fearless figure, right? It's, yeah, I'll suffer consequences for doing what's right. It takes a little bit of crazy to do that. But that's what winning looks like. So I think what's interesting about Edward and Theodore is like these are two people from the same family. Genius tends to run in the family.

And you could say that Theodore's biggest disadvantage is he was too young. You know, Edward was actually the person who bought him the original books on communism. And you could say probably Edward, you know, it was the zeitgeist of the time in the 30s. Like people flirted with this stuff. But Edward got through that. He's like, yeah, this shit's not going to work. I'm a committed capitalist. I believe in America.

I'm wearing the cloth of the nation. And on the other hand, you have this 18-year-old Theodore who takes a very different path. One guy builds ICBMs. One guy gives Soviets the bomb. Interesting. Interesting. What, I just want to backtrack a little bit. I mean, it's been, it's been almost a year since we've chatted last. What, what is going on in the world that concerns you? I mean, you had mentioned all these little skirmishes. Are they leading up to World War III? How do you see that happening? Are you seeing alliances built behind the scenes, maybe not even behind the scenes, things like bricks? What do you say? Yeah, the grave risk we have is, you know, let's start the very foundational precept. There would be, We know conflict.

Like, after World War II, America, at our expense, rebuilt Japan and Germany. Our, I think we might have been the first sort of victor in a conflict of that scale to actually realize that peace and prosperity in the world depended on rebuilding these countries, making them democratic, free, open, and successful. The people need to have jobs. Most of the electronics industry in Southeast Asia, that was an intentional decision by us to take manufacturing from the U.S., 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. Because I think if that was their goal, there would be no tension. It is also for America to fall. And I'll give you an anecdote to look at this. Look, it is absolutely within their prerogative as a country to decide if they want to buy our soybeans or not.

That's a business decision. I don't begrudge them if they want to buy it from Brazil and not us. I prefer they buy it from us, but fine. It is not a business decision when you decide to smuggle in agricultural funguses so that we can't grow soybeans. That's happening? Oh, yeah, that's happening. I had no idea. That's the first time I've heard.

How long has that been going on? It's been going on. I mean, I think in the agriculture domain, it's a full-on, we're in conflict. You know, like the reintroduction of new-world screw worm, which is a livestock parasite that infects living livestock that started in Central America. Most credible sources believe it was reintroduced by China Hees. It didn't just reemerge. And it's spread up. If you talk to farmers and ranchers in America, they all know this came from the CCP. No shit. I got one coming on here next week. Asked about it. Governor in Iowa. I'm bringing that stuff up. And so we've had a few,

you see like we don't talk about it too much. I mean, there's a few cases where we arrested someone flying in from China where they'd smuggled in the agricultural fungus in their shoe. But of course, we clearly are just reading between the lines, I don't have any specific knowledge. But it wasn't like CBP decided his shoe was suspicious. I think we had Humeant that tipped us off to arrest him when he came in. So that's dirty tricks. You know, that's, we have to take their intent literally and quite seriously there. You see that was rare.

We got that bio lab, what, last week? Was that Vegas? Yeah. Somewhere in Nevada. Then there was the, I don't know, I can't remember if this was China. Chinese or not, but the cell phone farms in New York City. Yeah, that was Chinese. That was Chinese too.

And there's a huge question of the penetration of the homeland. So if we go back to something that's happened in the last year, you have Operation Spider-Web. That was the Ukrainian operation where they used essentially containerized drone carriers. So the drivers, this just looks like commercial shipping. It's on a truck. And you're dropping off a container somewhere in Russia. And it just like it could have furniture in it, could have toys in it, could have whatever, could have corn in it. Well, this container suddenly pops open, 117 FPVs drop out in multiple different locations across the country.

These drones are commanded and controlled over LTE networks, over cellular networks, by pilots who are sitting in a basement somewhere in Ukraine and taking out the strategic bomber fleet. You know, these are high-value assets. At least 20% of the fleet was taken out. Many of these things were fueled, ready to go, carrying cruise missiles, so they exploded in big, big, spectacular ways. It's got a bigger impact than it seems. First of all, these things are out of production.

They've been out of production since the end of the Cold War, since the Soviet Union fell. And the assets that were out on the tarmac were the best assets, the most available. The rest of the assets have maintenance problems. They have issues. so it has a massive asymmetric impact. So, you know, I don't know, each drone probably costs $600,000 to $1,000 at most.

And you think about the amount of tens of billions of dollars of damage that have been wrought from it. You go to the 12-day war, in particular, the Operation Narnia, the part of it, you know, the Israelis built covert drone factories in Iran. So it wasn't like they were, it's not even containerized fires. You have covert factories to manufacture and launch the drones. Those drones take out the air defenses, the I-A, that enable you then to deliver more layered effects that come in component after component. Now, we should be looking at our homeland and understanding how at risk are we? 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 are the Chinese buying all this farmland near our bases? We have a lot of surface area to go protect. Now, there's a protection element of this. There's also a deterrence element of this. You know, we, maybe we can't close all these doors. We should try, but maybe we can't.

But we also need to have the counterreaction that we're capable of doing being so costly, so painful that actually no one wants to fight. You know what else I like that I've been hearing lately? Actually, I've heard from Brandon saying at Shield AI is the decentralization of military, basically not allowing what happened at Russia with the Operation Spider to

decentralizing all the all the drones so that it's not they're not all on one fucking runway you can get them at FOBs you can get them everywhere he described it every pickleball court in the country becomes a launch pad do you see other countries doing this are these are other countries doing this too

I think if we look at Spider's Web If we look at 12-day war, we have to assume other countries are doing this. It's so cheap to do, and it's so asymmetric that we have to worry about. A lot of the investments that the Chinese have made since the end of the Gulf War, the first Gulf War, is not to defeat America writ large. It's to figure out what are our strategic choke points that if they can intersect us, if they can defeat us in space, if they can defeat us here, that it actually basically takes out the whole chain. It's their kind of concept of systems warfare. And so I think this is one of these areas where, you know, air defense is hard. How are you going to defend against a thousand drone swarm? Now, there are ways. People are investing it. We're doing it. But the reason we're doing it is

because we haven't done it before. Like we need to go reestablish deterrence and capability in these areas. So I think we'd be foolish not to think that people are going to go look at asymmetric, cheap ways. And then we, of course, should be thinking about the same thing. I mean, I think One of the great ideas that's implicit in Brandon and the expat is like, we need to create lots of problems and dilemmas. Like across the first island chain, we should be able to launch from anywhere. You know, 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, like, are things going to get through that reduce your capabilities?

Can we go after a system's warfare perspective of taking out the least amount of things that caused the amount of pain that get you to say, I don't want to fight. Let's take a quick break. Running a business means wearing a lot of hats. One minute you're focused on growing the company. The next, you're buried in paperwork, tax forums, onboarding documents, and payroll logistics. If you've ever spent an entire afternoon dealing with admin work, instead of actually building your business, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses.

It's all in one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use so you can pay, hire, on board, and support your team from anywhere. With Gusto, things like automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, workers, comp, and even 401K options are handled all in one place. They offer unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price, so there's no hidden fees or surprises. It's built to save you time and take the headache out of managing payroll and HR. And that's exactly why I use Gusto right here at the Sean Ryan Show. It makes it easy, especially for people that don't know anything about business like me. Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash SRS and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash SRS.

One more time, gusto.com slash SRS. When the health system fails you, it's on you to get ahead of it. That's why I take my health seriously and try to stay proactive, especially when it comes to things like cholesterol health. Cholesterol is one of those things that can be tough to manage. Sometimes it's a lifestyle issue, but for a lot of people, It runs in the family, and it feels like it's out of your control. That's why I've been paying attention to dose for cholesterol.

It's a clinically backed cholesterol support supplement that targets triglycerides, LDL, HDL, and total cholesterol. It's also simple to work into your day. It's just a daily two-ounce shot to taste like mango, no pills, and no powders. I've been using dose along with some of the guys on the SRS team, and it's one of those things that's easy to stay consistent with. I only talk about products on this show that I actually like, and DOS is one of the best out there. It uses ingredients like turmeric, amla,

and other naturally occurring ingredients. And it shows up right at your door, so you don't have to think about it. New customers can save 35% on your first month of subscription by going to DOSdaily.com slash SRS or entering SRS at checkout. That's D-O-S-E-D-A-I-L-Y dot C-O-S-R-S for 35% off your first month subscription. All right, John, 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. And the journey is an exceptionally interesting one Because I think a lot of the heroes and heretics I talk about They're from the past. Here we have one in the present and looking at how much bureaucracy had to fight.

His nickname in the department was the Iron Dome of Pentagon bullshit Like the amount of pain this guy went through to birth it is truly incredible. And 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 be like, oh, it's old going to be. But really, it started as a rogue project in a cubicle in the B-ring of the Pentagon. And even before then, you could say, well, what motivated this Marine Intel officer to go after this? You know, so with Colonel Kukor, you have a very interesting personal story. This guy grew up in Southern California, single mother, a Mormon, dirt poor. So when he got, when he ended high school, he had a kind of fork in the road. It's like, I can go to the trade schools, I can join the military. So, Ratsi scholarship, went to college, joined the Marines.

And I think it was roughly 2012. He had this really catastrophic experience where, 2012, 2014, somewhere in that time range, where he was on a helicopter trying to land on Mount Sinjar to evacuate the Yazadi, who had fled to Mount Sinjar with ISIS pursuing them. And a young Marine thought he saw RPGs and waved. off the helicopters from landing. This guy was probably, you know, 24 hours in, bleary-eyed. It turned out there were none. But because of that, you have hundreds of Yazadi

who then were sex slaves, tortured. You know, they were lost, basically. And he, this is a sort of initial catalyst for him. He got a just fixation on like, computer vision could have told me whether there was an RPG or not. Why are we having a bleary-eyed Marine having to make this determination?

How do I get better tools for the operative This has huge consequences in terms of human life here. And so when he had the opportunity to start Project Maven, it was this rogue AI effort in the Pentagon. And, you know, the Pentagon has this sort of myth. Nothing good should come out of OSW. Everything, or OSD at the time, but, you know, everything needs to come from within the services.

It's very parochial. And this was this kind of centralized, protected effort that everyone tried to kill over and over and over again. And CooCorp was a very, this amazing blend of he's an operator who understand acquisition and understood technology. It's like kind of this, you know, it's the triple threat here, the fact he can bring all this together. And he had this deep experience from his time in the Marines, like the government instinct to try to invent everything internally is going to fail. Let's go out to Google.

Let's go out to the leading technology companies in America and ask them to help us solve this problem. And it was a heretical approach that led to lots of pushback. Lots of bullshit. It was under his leadership. We had the famous kind of 2017 walkout where Google said, like, we're going to leave Project Maven. We don't want to work with the department that's sort of crucible for Silicon Valley, which, to Google's great credit, you know, that's not their position anymore. They're very much in the fight. They're all in.

What changed? Well, let's go ahead and finish the story. Sorry. Yeah, no, we should get to get to that. I think this man was so successful. So, like, all the services didn't really want to adopt this. like most good things in the military, you start with J-Soc, people who just want to get things done. They have very little religion and outcomes are the only thing that matter.

And so in 2017, it started there very successfully. It grew, it came over to the conventional side with 18th Airborne because there were a bunch of J-Soc operators who became in charge of these conventional units. And it started automating the targeting cycle. It's like we could go, you know, at the time it was 12 minutes, which was impressive. now it's closer to two minutes or less, from detecting a target to putting fires on the target. And it kept expanding. You can 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, okay, 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 Oudaloupe

that our adversaries can compete? So I'll just say that he delivered something truly exquisite there. But along the way, he was dealing with bullshit after bullshit. People who were threatened by his program would file IG investigations. The best, one of the, always anonymous, of course,

that this Marine officer was accepting bribes. He had stashes of money at his house. He is housing somehow, housing illegal aliens in his basement. Oh, shit. 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. You know, in the NCS, yeah, there are two cars, each with more than 100,000 miles on them. You know, if anything, the NCIS officer left thinking, how do you even, how are you making this work? You know, but these things matter. They came after his rank.

They tried to demote him to lieutenant colonel. You know, and you think about how crazy you have to be to just keep pushing through all that bullshit, all these people coming after you to deliver something that you know is going to be a foundational capability for the military. And I think that's the sort of arc we see it,

like whether it's Hyman Ricker or Boyd or Colonel Drew Cucor, that's the sort of commitment you see to the nation. And I think one of the common themes for these heroes is really like during their immediate lifetime, their immediate period of service, they get fucked. And it's only later on when the 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, they will be anonymous to history. No one will ever know their names. They will not be remembered. But everyone will know

that Colonel Drew Kukor's sacrifices created Project Maven. Man, and that was, why did Google, what changed? Why are they back? 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. Like, yeah, yeah, you know, you were over there fighting and people were going to the mall. Well, do you think that's because we were distracted or we were complacent? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, the great power, it was happening. We just weren't aware. 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, like 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 realized, like,

like, wait a second, like, 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, that 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, you know, I think. 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. It's a big part of why I wanted to join detachment tool, wanted to 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. You know, it's like we, 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. Like 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 Minuteman, the prime contractor, and the Minuteman? Chrysler. You know, 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. Can you talk a little bit about about Detachment 201 and what it is, what it's for? 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 our, the military structure, of course, you kind of grow through the ranks. It's very, very hard to be inorganically inserted into there.

And these two worlds are pretty separate. and that we'd be much better off if these worlds, if there was more of a network where you could collaborate on things together. 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, You know, like these, 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, I mean, our military was 16 members strong in World War II. 16 million, sorry, million strong in World War II. It's hard for us to imagine today. Even Vietnam, it was three million. So, you know, we're kind of, we're below that now. I don't even know. What are we at today? I think it's closer to two million, including civilians.

Wow. Wow. the, and so like the shared experiences aren't there, but also the knowledge. Like, and one of these things I observed with the Israelis after October 7th, you know, I think it's a really interesting example because, first of all, it's a technical country, you know, and they pride themselves on being technical, and they are technical. Everyone's prior service by definition, you know. 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, it's 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, too. It's like now I've spent 20 years in industry.

I've built internet-scaled solutions. Like, I've learned so much know-how. They got more done in the four months after October 7 than in the prior 10 years. Wow. We have that times 100 in this country. And we're just not enabling the people with those skills. Like 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. I mean, like any reservists, of course, 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 are providing them, to empower our warrant officers and our E-4s? Like, the best programmer I've 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, supercharges growth, enable him to be one of the people who writes the future of how we fight in software. Wow. Wow.

Do this, is Detachment 201 new? Was this stood up when you joined? That's right. Yeah. I had the, it's 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 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 201 is our reserve union. in the Army. I have a separate program at Palantir that's the American Tech Fellowship. Okay. Where we let active duty and veterans apply. And we've run a different, a few of them. There's a fellowship specific for veterans and for the active duty community where we teach them these tools. Larger, 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 J-Soc operators?

Okay. Okay. So one is transitioning into civilian life, the other is keeping it in. One of the ways in which these things relate, though, is just recognizing how capable the uniformed 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, like, wow, we are drowning in talent. You know, our problem is not do we have talented enough people. It's like, are we allowing them to apply themselves? Are we taking the shackles off? Are we letting them run?

Are we embracing the fact that, yeah, rank means nothing? Going back to Kukor, the only thing in the IIG investigation that he would say, guilty is charge is he was accused of undermining the rank structure. And he's like, yeah, guilty is charge. 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. you're going to do. And if we're at war, that's what you're going to do. It 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. You know, we talked a lot about getting ready for World War III. Do you think we're ready? I think we're getting ready to deter it. I mean, let's just, oh, I always like to remind people, the point is not to fight World War III. It's to be so ready for it that our adversaries realize, oh, this, 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. Or that the of fighting is too high, they will avoid the fight. And our goal is not to, you know, the goal is not, hey, let's permanently make it so that, you know, from now into eternity, it's really by a year.

Over this next year, what are we going to do so that every day she wakes up and says, today's not the day. And then over that, 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. You know, and I think, you know, 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 make, 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, if you, you know, where did the tank come from? Let's just go back even 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, whatever they call it over there, the civilian oversight, he's like, oh, I'm going to build this thing. And he called it a landship because he can only build ship. So he built a land ship. And of course, we can't really imagine the intervening periods between the inner war 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. You thought we were slow on that? I think we were relatively slow because a lot of it threatened. threatened our big exquisite assets rather than seeing it as an and thing.

Slow for ourselves or slow in comparison to other countries? Slow for ourself, 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. You know, like that. So where could they compete with us? Leaning into autonomy and unmanned things.

Now, we're not behind an autonomy. But I think we want to be dominant there. And I think a lot of those ideas are, you know, part of the challenge is really, what does innovation feel like? It feels like shit. You know, innovation is chaotic. It's messy. It's frustrating. At Pounder, I've probably been involved with transitioning 15 different projects from the zero to one to borrow Peter Thiel's, you know, like the invention phase to the scaling phase.

Every single, the first few times I did this, I was like, wow. Why is this so hard? Like, 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. 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, and I have 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, this willingness to disrupt yourself, this working backwards from

winning. You know, is the goal to have a pain-free process? Because that's like, you know, manage decline into a mountain is also pain-free, or is the goal to win? And how much are you willing to tolerate to win? I think in that frame it becomes obvious. So you said you think we started slow. How do you think we're doing now? 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, You know, one of the points of the book is that you really need to embrace inter-service rivalry.

Many people look at the inner-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 was 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. 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, it's 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 Quadulane when Elon was testing the early Falcons, you know, Quadulane 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 CETA contractor, like a scientific advisor, he's kind of observing these two things. In the Boeing facility, it's like it's got a clean room. People are in bunny suits. It looks super professional. You go to the SpaceX facility. you know, parts are on the table. Some of the parts look like they're rusting. It looks half-hazard. And so you might say it's reasonable as someone looking at these two things

to say, who do you think is going to win this? You know, but then, of course, fast forward a little bit. Wow. Elon has launched, I think, well over 160 rockets last year alone. You know, he's brought down the price of getting a kilogram to orbit

from roughly $50,000 a kilogram with shuttle, space shuttle, to $10 bucks, 20 bucks with Starship Heavy reuse that's imminently coming. It's crazy innovation. And I think, you know, other countries don't have an Elon. No, they don't. With all this new innovation and autonomous systems coming up, I mean, how much of our

equipment is going to be obsolete? Are the, do the F-35s even have a place anymore? I mean, you know, all the, everything seems to be cheaper, faster to produce, and maybe even more capable? Well, I think we should, you know, 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 mean, man, I don't even know what the world is going to look like in 10 years, let alone 80 years.

Like, how do we get into tighter cycles of iteration, iterate faster? In World War II, we had roughly 150 different airframes. You know, we think about like the P51, the B52. Like, we have these archetypal planes that we think of, but many of them, we have. we've forgotten. So maybe we could say like 10 of those airframes really mattered, but we produced 150 different ones. And maybe that's roughly what that's the sort of chaotic innovation you need to, you can't get to those 10 just by thinking your way through it. You need to kind of experiment and play your way through it. And most of them had a short shelf life, you know, and we got to be

thinking about what is the true cost of doing this? Because sometimes I think we lull ourselves into a sense of 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 or 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, as we say. So as they're changing, we're going to realize that we need different weapon systems that are changing.

One of the lessons that I really highlight in the book is it's not actually what your weapon system does today that's a determinant 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 suitors to reprogram their weapon systems to do new and innovative things in combat is truly the advantage. It's kind of like 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, a 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 infantrymen in Ukraine, I think the average age is 41 for Ukrainian infantrymen. Many of them actually worked in IT outsourcing firms. They actually have technical skills. Now, the infantrymen 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, like, yeah, if I get in a month, I might be dead. I'll settle for this capability in the day that I can use to apply effects on the adversary. So it makes them better customers. And that alone, like, 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. I mean, that's just, so these guys are, they're in direct communication with what, with who they, who's manufacturing their shit. We don't have, at least when I was in, we didn't, we don't have that. Are we getting that? That's one of the things changing. So if you look at the under, under Secretary Hegstets leadership, this move from one of the, PEOs, a program executive offices to PAE's, these portfolio acquisition executives. The whole idea is, hey, specify less. Let's hold the objective.

We know what we're trying to accomplish. Let's delegate more authority down. Let's create more iterative, collaborative engagement to decide what we're going to need. Let's not pretend like we know everything up front. We're going to discover it as we go through it. And I've seen recent acquisition programs where there are Army green suitors who are developers who are part of exercise. So they're not just saying, hey, the capability does what we think it needs to do today.

Also, they're evaluating what is our ability as the Army to write new code on top of of this and change what we wanted to do, to integrate things we've built on our own into this. Is it cohesive? Is it interoperable? We're determining that at design time rather than, hey, we got it and we're trying to retrofit it later on and realizing we're stuck. So I'm optimistic that we're moving in the right direction and that we have the talent we need. We have the capabilities to do this as a country. We now have the will, the will to blow shit up and prioritize winning again. Let's talk about unity. How do we get to the world?

back to unity. That's a big missing component here. Yeah. It's probably the thing I care most about, you know, 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. You know, 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. You know, 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 you go back to the 80s and 90s, whether it's

hunt for Red October or Red Dawn or or Rambo 3, you know, we had a very different take. And yeah, they were complicated heroes. They're not, it's not probda. It's not propaganda. It's entertainment. But it gave you that feeling. And I think that's really important because that is really our soft power,

not only for the American people, but, you know, 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, you know.

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 merit, on the facts, we have a lot, a lot to be proud of. Is this why you're getting into media? You're trying to bring unity? Yeah, I want to tell positive stories. Like, I really, it came back to wanting to watch movies with my kids again, you know, and that feeling. And I started looking right. And some of it's very subtle. So, you know, I grew up in the shadow of the space coast in Orlando.

And it's hard, you know, 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 know, 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. You know, I had a classmate in the elementary school whose father designed the landing gear on the F-117A. And then when that thing, when we disclosed that asset existing, he was like the most popular kid in class, even though it was just the landing gear. You know, 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. No parties should have a monopoly on patriotism. That's the one thing that binds us all.

And then, yeah, 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, like, what are we passing on to our kids? You know, we've been here before as a country. If you go back to Vietnam, a lot of our movies were very cynical, kind of this sense that we kind of screwed up the world as a country, and that was represented in our media, it was representing the zeitgeist.

Coming out of Vietnam, though, you know, you think about the Reagan era, I think Reagan's real contribution was just being a positive leader. Like, it's going to be mourning again in America. We are great. We're capable of doing good things. It 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, like, 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. You know, there's a temptation to just say, like, burn it all down. there's maybe maybe there's a growing up phase where you go through that but like helping our youth exit that and understand that what we've built is worth fighting for is so critical it seems like a lot of people get need to get more solution based instead of just complaining all the fucking time a hundred percent what are we going to do about it you're pretty close with isaiah maybe huh

yeah i've been really impressed with them i mean we're um he's an exceptional human being you know i kind of have this, as you can tell from the heretics and heroes thing, like, I'm magnetically attracted to people who are powerfully driven towards a vision, almost a crazy vision. Like, how are you, you know, you're not like a triple PhD in physics. Well, it makes you qualify to do this, but this, it embodies the belief in self. And those are the people you want to back, right? Like, those are the people who are never going to stop and never going to give up. They're the people when you look at, like, yeah, I'd like my son to learn a thing or two from Isaiah. Like my daughter learn a thing or two from Brandon. You know, these are the role models that I don't see in TV

anymore, but that actually are going to determine the future trajectory of our nation and inspire greatness. That's why I'm bringing them on, Sean. Hey man, you're the antidote to the cynical media we have here. Wow, I appreciate that. Well, it's been a fascinating conversation and it's great to see you again. Always a pleasure. Thanks for everything you do, Sean. Thank you. Cheers. No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from,

if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.