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

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Aldi, Gutes für alle. Sham, welcome back, man.

Thanks for having me, Sean.

It's great to be back. I owe you a 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, but yeah, it's good to have you back. I'm, 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 Detachment 201 and commissioning 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?

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

Right on. Right on. What prompted that? Well, 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 want to 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, right home for us.

Right on, man. Congratulations on all that. That's, that's awesome. And speaking of AI, did you see this new— this China robot AI video?

Have you seen that? I haven't seen the latest.

Catch me up. I don't— I mean, I don't even know what to say, but it's like the latest. Everybody's wondering if this is a huge advancement. Damn, I got it. 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, uh, choreographed, I don't know, dance display thing, and everybody's kind of going on about it. And then there was, uh, what, that stuff with Claude that came out about the Claude bots going and trying to figure out how to get long-term memory? Do you have any insight on that?

I think, um, 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 the Moltbook bots. My lived experience using these things operationally is that nothing crazy like this is happening, 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— 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 doomerism, like, hey, this thing, it's gonna lead to like mass unemployment, 50% of entry-level jobs are gonna be destroyed inside of a year or two. And on the other hand, you have like essentially this fanaticism, it's gonna lead to a utopia, like untold abundance. I think neither of these things are right. They 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 to 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 that, 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, you know, mainstream media. It's the American worker. It's the guy in the submarine industrial base 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 at it. Our video editors, everybody's using it. Researchers are using it. And 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 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 use an AI that's a, that's a badass, you know, turn an A player into an A+++ player. But, but one thing that I wonder about is what are my kids going to learn? What do they, what do they need to learn in school? Like what, what did I learn in school that's completely obsolete now with this new age of AI? I think there's a lot that 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 this is— it's a personal question, 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 who are gonna succeed are gonna have two things. They're gonna 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? So essentially, 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 sensibility is 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, and I mean this in 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 is 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, 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? Not— we're not talking Palantir home stuff. What, what does a normal person use this for?

Well, I think the, 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 gonna give the American worker superpowers. They're gonna 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 US. We're not saying we're gonna 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?

You know, we're going to reinvent production. So an example from Panasonic Energy, they make every battery that goes into, into every Tesla at the Gigafactory in Reno, in Sparks, Nevada. This is exquisite high-end Japanese technology that is operating 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 3 years. With AI, it's 3 months. That's leading to more employment, not less. Wow. And this is, this is the way in which, like, 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 gonna help me, you know, categorize my bills better. It's gonna help me write responses. I think all those things are trivial. You know, 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.

I— that's not the case.

Okay, I thought that's where you're 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 E-4, the E-8, 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 to 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, 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 aren't basic government services provisioned 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, um, these people just don't care. That 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, metaphorical 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? Like 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 it to 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 gonna 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, give the intent. Let these people run. Let them cook. Don't like overmanage them. Don't, don't drain the creativity out of their souls. You think of every innovation on the battlefront. It was like the E-4 rolling tanks across Europe in World War II who discovered additional ways of getting through equipment, right? And, and the generals would let, would let the soldiers cook. Uh, this is, this is a powerful moment for the country.

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 I just don't feel like much happened. So that was kind of the first run. But how is it going to work itself out? Have you thought about that? How's 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 let's— there's this concept called Jevons' 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 healthcare, it's exploding. It's like 20% of our GDP. Healthcare might be— healthcare 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, 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 Jevons paradox. So an example of this with Tampa General, we were able to get sepsis deaths with the leading cause of deaths in the ICU down to zero from 50% of all deaths. 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 bedside and then helped them spend time with the right patients who had the greatest amount.

So it's just eliminating all the drag.

It is. 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 deadweight loss in planning. Like I gotta 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 wanna be too Pollyannish. I think there are things we need to make sure of. 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.

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Hi, I'm Sarah Adams, the host of Vigilance Elite's 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. Terrorists, 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.

Um, I, 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, uh, 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 in a new dark age. The dark ages were caused because we lost fundamental knowledge in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Even though we get to live, 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? Mm-hmm. I don't have to spend my time thinking about how to design chips. I live somewhere else in the stack. I, 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, 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, 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, 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 ahead. 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.

Like 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. So hold on, what's 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'll be no jobs.

See, is— 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? Should— 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? Uh, they got the bomb because we had geniuses working on the Manhattan Project, and a small number of them thought— some of them very famous, like Niels Bohr, one of our greatest physicists— thought, you know, we should, we should tell the Soviets that we're building this thing. If we tell them it, they won't be scared.. And then another, another guy, Theodore Hall, one of the youngest members of Manhattan Project. He was 18 years old working on this, and he thought— 18? Wow. PhD 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. Uh, and I think it'd 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 usurped the chain of command and, 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?

Uh, well, I, I think the, the most optimistic case is really what is happening today with, with the American worker. So we've, 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 6-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, they, 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 you 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, this sense of like, I can make a dent on the planet with this capability. And that's working.

So you guys are, you guys are taking them and, 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, we want to fuel the disruption and disruption isn't just technical, it's also mindset. You know, one of these guys, prior enlisted Navy men, 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 gonna 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 gonna 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, um, work for less, and they're better than you. And that's, that's just not true, you know. 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 eye-watering. 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, I see, I see all kinds of things that are coming out of AI that it's, I know for a fact is not correct. Trust is earned. One, 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 Grok, what's this from? And it said, the Joe Rogan's, Joe Rogan 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, 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? 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 uniquely credible at? And you develop priors on it. Like, 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. 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? Then you develop, the technical term for this is evals, but you develop a set of tests that you're constantly running it through to understand 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? Is there new trust that can extend to it? Again, to the point that that trust has to be earned. So you're not gonna get any of this stuff for free where it's just like YOLO, ask a question, blindly trust it. It's gonna be like, hey, this is a new teammate, this is a fresh second lieutenant. Like, I don't trust them with anything. Like, we're gonna build a relationship together solving problems together, and we're gonna see where you're really a rockstar and where you can help me be more effective. And working backwards from the problems we have, that's a much narrower scope. It's like, hey, I make wires. You know, I'm a potato farmer, 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 a really good judge of whether— the danger is like using it where you actually have no knowledge, so you're a blank slate, and you're gonna by default maybe trust it way more than you should.

Okay, okay. So just like any relationship, you have to build trust. Sounds so weird to me, but But hey, Shaam, let me give you an intro here real quick. Shaam 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 2 decades of experience designing and deploying software platforms for complex, high-stakes environments from defense to enterprise. You hold a bachelor's in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell University, an MS in management 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 Stop 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. That's— I saw that, man. I was really excited about that. I think that's, 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 software from 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? Like, we, 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 the, is the data that 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, 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, all the, 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 don't want protections that 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 Palantir 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? You know, so 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, and a precept of human intelligence that's telling us about something, we're in a new regime for a limited period of time. Having a system that allows all that to happen. If you really go back to a pre-9/11 world, it was essentially binary. You either share all the data or none of it, which then biased towards either gross violations of oversharing or not being able to connect the dots because people didn't share at all. That's insane. That's the position you don't want to be in. Now, the reason we tend to get attacked is we're living in the messy reality of the arena. You know, if you're, if you're, 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— it is Patriot Act 2.0. They're really worried about the privacy stuff.

I worry about it too. You know, 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. Okay. 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 antidote to nihilism, you know, make things work. That, 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. Uh, we got to build our way out of these things.

We got to build a better future. Gotcha. I got you a gift too.

It's the same one as last time. Amazing. There you go. Thank you. Little something for you. I gobbled these up last time, so I'm looking forward to doing that again. Right on. I too got you a gift here. Oh, nice. 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 operation since 1941 making ammo. This specific box was made in '73. It held 20mm electrically primed shells. Don't worry, there's no shells in it now. Damn.

I have in it—

Oh man. I have in it a little Mobilize swag. We have the book, we have a hat, some stickers, some patches. There we go. There it is. Yeah. And a nice little Mobileye 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 We got stuff going on in China, Russia and Ukraine still kicking off, Venezuela, the Mexico, you know, Mexico-U.S. border, Gaza. What, what, what are you most concerned about?

Well, I mean, if you think about it, so I was on in April, Operation Spider's 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 of these things are happening against the backdrop of China still. So even though in some sense China's taking a back seat, 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, I have been underestimating the US.

And we have to continue that trend where the kind of missing part of this, I think if you thought about it as a spear, the pointy end 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 8 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, 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 5-year-old suffer or potentially die from an ear infection that we, we basically think of as a trivial sickness today, common, common ailment that goes away. You know, we, 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 that it's easy to get cynical about the defense industrial base. It's easy to see it as warmongering or fearmongering, 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 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. Instead, do things that work. How about that? How about we just do things that work and get out of our own way? And a big part of the book, I spend time talking about the historic figures who threw away the process, who rebelled against the system and actually delivered the capabilities we need. 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 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.

Yeah, you know, I see that in all— I've interviewed a lot of these guys. I'm sure you probably know, but I mean, in, in the innovation is there and the technology is there. And I mean, I mean, obviously I don't have much insight into what China is doing. I learn a lot of that from you guys, but I mean Everything from Epirus with those direct EMP weapons to what Isaiah is doing with Valor. I mean, Anduril 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-Raman. Yeah, you probably know him too. But I mean, but do you know Mavrookas with Saronac? I mean, and I believe everybody that I just rattled off is manufacturing in the US. I don't know how much they're manufacturing manufacturing a lot of this stuff as prototypes, you know, or, or, or it seems to be not, not, not on mass scale yet.

Am I wrong on that? We're capable of it though. I mean, I think that's just the 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. I was— it's cool to see them get away from the big five, the big primes, you know, and, uh, I, I just, I, I think that's amazing that, that they're that they're doing that.

One of the things I spend time in the book is, is understanding how did we get here. How do we go from having the most amazing industrial base in World War II and the early Cold War to one today that is capable of building a small number of truly exquisite things? And they are exquisite, you know. Um, probably my, 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 that system has been pushing cost-plus contracting. It's been pushing risk onto the, 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 DOD 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. Edward Hall was 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 ass. I mean, Shriver 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 his 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 in 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. That's just interesting. What— I want to— 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 BRICS.

What are you saying? The grave risk we have is, you know, let's start the very foundational precept. There would be no conflict. Like, at the— after, 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, 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 US, send it there. Yes, we had the benefit of cheaper labor, cheaper goods, but it was also a way of developing their economies, creating stability, uh, 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, you know, 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. And it's happening.

Oh yeah, that's happening. I had no idea. That's the first time I've heard that.

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 Screwworm, which is a livestock parasite that infects living livestock that started in Central America. Most credible sources believe it was reintroduced by the Chinese. It didn't just re-emerge and it spread up. If you, 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, 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— 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 HUMINT that tipped us off to, to arrest him when, when he came in. So that's, that's dirty tricks, you know. That's— there's— we have to take their intent literally and quite seriously there.

You see that? We just call that— we got that bio lab, what, last week? And was that Vegas? Yeah, that's somewhere in Nevada. Then there was the— I don't know, I can't remember if this was Chinese or not, but the, the, the cell phone farms in New York City. Yeah, that was Chinese.

That was Chinese, too. And there's a huge question on the penetration of the homeland. So if we go back to something that's happened in the last year, you have Operation Spiderweb. That was the Ukrainian operation where they used essentially containerized drone carriers. So the drivers— this just looks like commercial shipping. It's on, it's on a truck. And you know, you're dropping off a container somewhere in Russia. 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, these are high-value assets. At least 20% of the fleet was, 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, 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 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 IADS, 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 know, you think about our high-value bases. This is, this is the underlying concern with why are the Chinese buying all this farmland near our bases? You know, 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, we, 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 it from Brandon saying with Shield AI is the, the decentralization of military, uh, basically not allowing what happened in Russia with the, with the, uh, 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 in FOBs, you can get them everywhere. He described it, every pickleball court in the country becomes a launchpad. 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 That, that, you know, a lot of the investments that the Chinese have made since the end of the Gulf War, the first Gulf War, is, 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 and 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, 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 systems warfare perspective of taking out the least amount of things that cause the amount of pain that gets you to say, I don't want to fight.

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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, uh, it's 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 he had to fight. His nickname in the department was, uh, the Iron Dome of Pentagon bullshit. Like the, 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 was always 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 Cooker, you have a very interesting personal story.

This guy grew up in Southern California, single mother, 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 ROTC 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 Yazidi 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 Yazidi who then were sex slaves, tortured, You know, they were lost basically. And 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 operators?

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 Kukort was 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 that 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.

Um, 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? Um, well, let's go ahead and finish the story.

Sorry. Yeah, no, we should get to, get to that. I think this, 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 JSOC, people who just want to get things done. Uh, they have very little religion and outcomes are the only thing that matter. And so in 2017, it started there, uh, very successfully. It grew, it came over to the conventional side with 18th Airborne because there were a bunch of JSOC 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 is impressive. Now it's closer to 2 minutes or less from detecting a target to putting fires on the target. Wow. And it kept expanding. You could think about that as a very narrow slice of the problem, which is in the foxhole. But how do you integrate that back to supply? How do you think about, 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, how do we get so good at this OODA loop? That our adversaries can't compete. So I'll just say that he delivered something truly exquisite there. But along the way, he was dealing with bullshit after bullshit. People who were threatened by his program would file IG investigations. The best one of these— always anonymous, of course— that this, this Marine officer was accepting bribes. He had stashes of money at his house. He is housing somehow, housing illegal aliens in his basement. Whole, you know, thing after thing. So NCIS actually went out to his house. Again, this is a devout Mormon, 4 kids, 1,400-square-foot house in Northern Virginia, no basement in the house, mind you. You know, the NCIS— and yeah, there are 2 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, like whether it's Hyman Rickover or Boyd or Colonel Drew Kukor, 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. Uh, 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 you know, 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, that— and that was— why did— why did Google— what changed?

Why are they back? Um, I— we were living in a weird period. One, you definitely can't discount Trump Derangement Syndrome, so there's that— that'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.

Like, 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. Uh, 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 some— there's a certain complacency when you don't have to deal with that. I think the Ukraine war was a big turning point where people realize, like, wait a second, 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? Uh, it was, it was a stark wake-up call. Um, 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 could be taken away from me. And that's driven a lot of alignment. There's a lot, 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. This is a big part of why I wanted to join Detachment 2. I 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 uniformed 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 on 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 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, 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. They, 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, 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 3 million. So, you know, we're kind of— we're, we're below that now.

I don't even know.

What are we at today? I think it's closer to 2 million, including civilians. Wow. Wow. The— and so like the, the shared experiences aren't there, but also the knowledge. Like, and one of these, 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. 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 to it. 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 4 months after October 7th 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 reservist, of course, the, 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, how can I leverage what I'm seeing at the most productive commercial companies, how they're leveraging their talent, their factory floor, how they're empowering them, the tools they're providing them to empower our warrant officers and our E-4s. Like the best programmer I've found in Hawaii is an E-4. Everyone knows this guy's really talented, but of course they don't know what to do with him. And so how do I bear hug this guy, give him the mentorship he needs, give him access to other people in Silicon Valley, supercharge his growth, enable him to be one of the people who writes the future of how we fight in software.

Wow. Wow. Did this— is Detachment 201 new?

Was this stood up when you joined? That's right. Yeah, it was. It's the CTO of Meta, Andrew Bosworth, Kevin Weil 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 and they'll see need and value and continue to grow it.

So this is, this is the program you were talking about at the beginning of the interview where we're taking active service members and you guys are basically their mentors.

So that's— Attachment 201 is our reserve unit in the Army. I have a separate program at Palantir. That's the American Tech Fellowship. Okay. There 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, largely they're transitioning members. So how do I help them actually get amazing commercial jobs where they are AI application developers, even though 4 months ago they were JSOC operators?

Okay, okay.

So one is transitioning into civilian life, the other's 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 gonna build it as active duty for warfighting, or they're gonna build it as part of the greater American industrial base for commercial and private sector actors. Like, 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 Cukor, the only thing in the IG investigation that he would say guilty as charged is he was accused of, undermining the rank structure. And he's like, yeah, guilty as charged. I had captains who knew way more than generals and colonels, and I let them say what— I let them speak their mind. And by the way, if you care about winning, that's what you're going to do. If we're at war, that's what we're going to do.

Doesn't mean you're breaking the chain of command, but just because you have the stars doesn't mean you have the right answer.

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— 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 gonna lose. You know, if your adversaries are certain they're going to lose, or think it's very likely they're going to lose, or that the cost of fighting is too high, they will avoid the fight. And our goal is, 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 or buy another year, and we're just going to deter the conflict continuously by being too dangerous to fight with the whole time.

I feel like we're there right now.

I'm very much an optimist in that regard. First of all, No army that lost its morale has ever won the war. And I think we have a bounty of natural strengths, which I've been talking about over the course of the show. I'm very much optimistic. I think we need to just not be complacent about it. We need to embrace that there are going to be disruptions to how we've thought about these things historically that are critical to continuing to maintain the deterrence. And that is actually the American way. You know, 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 ships, so he built a land ship. And of course, we can't really imagine the intervening periods between the interwar period when he started doing this and the present day without tanks being a core part of how armies are formed and fight.

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for details and applicable terms. Aber was ich noch erzählen wollte: Meine Nichte kämpft sich ja ganz schön durchs Studium. Semesterbeitrag, Laptop, Bücher, Software, Handy, Internet. Ey, so ein Master ist echt teuer.

Ach, sag ihr, sie kann sich das zurückholen.

Ja, du meinst von der Steuer absetzen, ne? Aber sie verdient ja nicht. Egal. Zauberwort: Verlustvortrag. Macht sie ganz einfach mit Wieso Steuer. Und wenn sie dann arbeitet, heißt es Katsching. Das geht? Safe. Wieso Steuer? Hol dir dein Geld zurück. Jetzt kostenlos ausprobieren. We positioned many of the unmanned things. You thought we were slow on that? I think, 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 ourselves, for sure. In comparison to other countries, only because for them it was an asymmetric cost advantage to lean into it. They were not going to be able to compete with us on an F-35. You know, like that. So where were they? Where could they compete with us? Leaning into autonomy and unmanned things. Now we're not behind on autonomy, but I think we want to be dominant there. Uh, 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. I, at Palantir, I've probably been involved with transitioning 15 different projects. From the zero to one, to borrow Peter Thiel's, 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. Like, it turns out there is no scalable process. It turns out every one of these transitions requires human grit. It requires ingenuity. It requires a willingness to just chew through pain. And every transition, 15 times now, I can accept that as reality. And I think this is why you both need the heretics And you need a willingness, 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, managed decline into a mountain is also pain-free. Or is the goal to win? And how much pain are you willing to tolerate to win? I think in that frame it becomes obvious.

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 competition. You know, one of the points of the book is that you really need to embrace inner 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 4 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 4 competing programs. So we tend to look at that from the luxury of being the sole superpower in the '90s and say, that seems duplicative. Surely there's a better, cleaner, less messy process And the answer is no, there's not. If you do that, it's all fake. It's, 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've thought back then? You know, I, there's a famous anecdote I was given by someone who was actually in Kwajalein when Elon was testing the early Falcons, you know, Kwajalein 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 science scientific advisor, he's kind of observing these two things. And 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 haphazard. 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 and 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, $20 with Starship heavy reuse that's imminently coming. You— 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 F-35s even have a place anymore? I mean, there's, 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's gonna look like in 10 years, let alone 80 years. Like, how do we, how do we get into tighter cycles of iteration, iterate faster? In World War II, we had roughly 150 different airframes. Planes. You know, we think about like the P-51, the B-52, like we have these archetypal planes that we think of, but many of them 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, 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 over the long run. It becomes very expensive and you don't have any of the competitive pressure. And it's not just internal competitive pressure. It's the outside where the enemy gets a vote, as we say. So Yeah, as they're changing, we're gonna 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 determinative of victory. It's how quickly you can change your weapon system to what you need it to do tomorrow. This is why, like, the work with Detachment 201, like, the organic ability for green suitors to reprogram their weapon systems. To do new and innovative things in combat is, 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— it's not a 1-to-1 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, um, 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 infantryman is not writing code, but because they understand the technology, they're able to ask very precise feature requests like, hey, I need it to do this. And they know whether their request is going to take 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, and they titrate their request relative to like, yeah, if I get it in a month, I might be dead. I'll settle for this capability in a day that I can use to apply effects on the adversary. So it makes them better customers. And that alone, 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.

That, 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 Secretary Hegseth's leadership, this move from PEOs, Program Executive Offices, to PAEs, 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 upfront. 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 this and change what we want it 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 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, there's a lot of infighting, there's a lot of disunity. We've forgotten what, what makes us won. And I think a lot of that comes down to storytelling. Um, you know, there's— 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 Rambo III, 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, I, I— that's just super impressive, super competent, you know. And I, 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. Uh, and I— there's a, there's a real opportunity right now to 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, I really, um, it came back to wanting to watch movies with my kids again., you know, and that feeling. And I started looking around 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 reentered. 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 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, 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. Um, pride— no party should have a monopoly on patriotism. That's the one thing that binds us all. And then, yeah, like, 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 gonna 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. Uh, and I think a, a big, 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've kind of screwed up the world as a country. And that was represented in our media, it was represented in the zeitgeist. Coming out of Vietnam though, you know, you think about the Reagan era, right?

I think Reagan's real contribution was just being a positive leader. Like, it's going to be morning 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. Uh, and we're at the precipice of that. When you look at Isaiah at Valor, like, We are making things again, you know? And it's not just one point example with Isaiah. You span it out, all the people that you've had here. Yeah, maybe it starts with defense tech because it's so motivating to protect the nation, but I think it's gonna 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 need to get more solution-based instead of just complaining all the fucking time. 100%. What are we going to do about it? You're pretty close with Isaiah, maybe, huh?

Yeah, I've been really impressed with him. I mean, we're— 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 have— 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. What 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, they're never going to give up. Um, 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.

So I'm bringing them on, Sean.

Hey, man, you're— you're the antidote to the—

to the cynical media we have here. Well, 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.