Shyam Sankar – Are We Sleepwalking Into World War 3? (Transcript)

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, or what the consequences of it are.

The example I like to give people is the telescope. 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 invited to give op-eds, who are not on mainstream media. It’s the American worker. It’s the guy in the submarine. It’s the industrial base parts manufacturer. It’s the ICU nurse. It’s the factory worker making wires or machinery or equipment. Ask them — how has AI impacted your job? Has it replaced you or has it empowered you? And perhaps the most profound question that I always like to ask folks is, how optimistic are you about your children’s future in an America with AI? You’ll be surprised how optimistic they are.

AI in Education and the Workforce

SHAWN RYAN: I got a lot of questions. I got toddlers, 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 I can see that it’s turned them all into force multipliers. I mean, it’s insane. They’re doing the work of 10, 20 people with one person.

But that might mean that there’s 10 to 20 jobs that are gone because it has empowered them that much. Which, don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to turn back. I’d rather have one guy use an AI that’s a badass — turn an A player into an A+ player. But one thing that I wonder about is what are my kids going to learn? What do they need to learn in school? What did I learn in school that’s completely obsolete now with this new age of AI? I think there’s a lot in the education system that kids will just be spinning their wheels on.

SHYAM SANKAR: I think it can be massively empowering. Let’s come to each of these in turn. Let’s start with the kids and then we’ll come back to this idea of replacement.

I have kids too — a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old. So this is 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 going to succeed are going to have two things. They’re going to have specific knowledge — who’s winning right now at the front lines? It’s the guy who has 15 years of experience. 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? 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 about how they should use it — they’re just thinking. And the American sensibility is to roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty, play with the thing, experiment, try it out. 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.

So I think one of the mistakes that our education system could make is to try to restrict AI. In the early days, you’re going to have people using it in stupid ways to write their essay for them. It’s going to 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? Help me elevate my own thinking. It becomes a partner to do these things. I think that’s really powerful.

What AI Tools to Use and How

SHAWN RYAN: What programs do you use the most just in your daily life? And what do you use them for? Not talking Palantir home stuff — what does a normal person use this for?

SHYAM SANKAR: I think the most interesting use cases are going to start where you have the deepest domain knowledge. I think that’s part of the reaction the American people have — 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 crappy content that’s being generated, misinformation, disinformation. So on balance it’s like, 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 re-industrializing the country — we’re going to give the American worker superpowers, they’re going to be 50 times more productive than any other worker in any other country — that’s not just a matter of pride. That economic leverage is how we bring back manufacturing to the U.S. We’re not saying we’re going to compete symmetrically. This is David’s slingshot against Goliath. Yeah, okay, the Chinese are the best at mass production today. What is our asymmetric approach to regaining the very thing that we once created? We’re going to reinvent production.

So an example — Panasonic Energy makes every battery that goes into every Tesla at the Gigafactory in Reno, in Sparks, Nevada. This is exquisite high-end Japanese technology that is operating with an employee base in that region of Reno. They’re prior casino workers. The old apprenticeship journey to learn how to operate and maintain this equipment used to be three years. With AI, it’s three months. That’s leading to more employment, not less. And this is the way in which — to my point of human agency — how do you choose to use this stuff? It really does matter.

And I think on the consumer side, yeah, it’s going to help me categorize my bills better, going to help me write responses. I think all those things are trivial. The real stuff is going to start in the enterprise and work its way back.

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha.

AI Adoption in the Military

SHYAM SANKAR: 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 with AI, that’s not the case.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, I thought that’s where you were going. I was like, holy sh.

AI, Workforce Disruption, and the Future of American Prosperity

SHYAM SANKAR: 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 — the intel Warrant Officer, the E4, the E8 — who are inventing the future of how we’re going to deter conflict. And that poses lots of interesting challenges which I think apply just as much to the commercial sector as government, which is like, it breaks rank structure, it breaks hierarchy. You’re going to have to really embrace the internal disruption that’s going to happen.

But I think this is a great thing for the American worker because for the last hundred 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. 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 say, well, these people just don’t care. 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 they don’t know it’s actually a prop from the jungle cruise ride at Disneyland. That steering wheel is not connected to anything. 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 say, “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. 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. Everyone acknowledges it’s not working right now. The answer is not burning it to the ground, it’s fixing it.

How are we going to fix it? What’s our theory of change here? And the theory of change has to start both at the bottom and at the top. At the top, it starts with people who care, people who want to get things done — high-agency leaders who care about the outcome. Then they need the tools. Everyone needs the tools to do this. And so how do you empower the people at the bottom, closest to the problems, to actually go solve them?

That I think is a quintessential American characteristic. We think about it as mission command — give the intent, let these people run, let them cook. Don’t over-manage them, don’t drain the creativity out of their souls. Think of every innovation on the battlefront. It was like the E4 rolling tanks across Europe in World War II discovering additional ways of getting through equipment. And the generals would let the soldiers cook. This is a powerful moment for the country.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, when you’re talking about it replacing the middle managerial class and bureaucrats, my mind went straight to DOGE at the beginning of the administration — all that went into that, all the fraud and all the s* that they uncovered. And I just don’t feel like much happened. 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.

SHYAM SANKAR: Yes.

Jevons Paradox and the Productivity Dividend

SHAWN RYAN: Yes.

SHYAM SANKAR: So 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 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. If you look at something that is fundamentally demand-constrained — like, if we made more, no one would want it — then getting more efficient is going to result in fewer jobs. But I don’t think most things in the economy look like that. Most things in the economy — look at healthcare. It’s exploding. It’s like 20% of our GDP. Healthcare costs might be our greatest national security risk. The solvency of our country depends on being able to deliver care to the American people at a better price. And we’re only going to need more care over time. So we know we’re going to need more care over time for the same amount of money. How can we deliver more care? How can we get more efficient in doing that? That’s Jevons Paradox.

An example of this is Tampa General. We were able to get sepsis deaths — the leading cause of deaths in the ICU — down to zero from 50% of all deaths.

SHAWN RYAN: What?

SHYAM SANKAR: 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 need.

SHAWN RYAN: So it’s just eliminating all the drag.

SHYAM SANKAR: That’s exactly right. That’s how we added a third shift to a submarine industrial base parts manufacturer, because the drag was the time they spent in planning — dead weight loss. I’ve got to plan what to produce, then I produce it. If the planning takes too long, tools down. 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 says, “Well, I have more work than I have workers. I need to go hire people.” And that’s the bounty — the American prosperity that we can see out of this.

Now, I don’t want to be too 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. This has got to be addressed. This is the fundamental promise to the American people that the prosperity will be shared.

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.

How Close Are We to AGI?

SHAWN RYAN: What do you think — how close are we to AGI?

SHYAM SANKAR: To AGI?

SHAWN RYAN: I’m sorry. Excuse me.

SHYAM SANKAR: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I’ve always felt, and I think the present moment kind of shows it, that it’s like this continuous journey you’re on — 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. They’re savants at some things, they’re not good at other things, but they’re getting better even at the things they were not good 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 involved in getting these things to work. As a consequence, it’s valuing taste more than anything — what to build, how to build it, how to think about the problem, what’s the elegance of the solution. And then it gives you a big lever to go after it.

I think one of the challenges — you could almost imagine entering a new Dark Age. The Dark Ages were caused because we lost fundamental knowledge in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Not everyone has to know everything. But at the end of the day, someone in society has to know about every part of it. I don’t have to spend my time thinking about how to design chips. I live somewhere else in the stack. I get to write code. I get to rely on the fact that someone else is a semiconductor expert and knows how to do lithography and make the chips that I depend on.

But at some point, you can see how it actually doesn’t work for humans to not be involved with any of this stuff ever. That’s the fantasist part of this — 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.

So I think a much more reasonable path is what I call the inductive path. It’s like we’re on a journey. It’s very dangerous to skip steps and fantasize about the future ahead. You want to be optimistic about it, you want to be able to see it, but you don’t want to be reactionary to it. Things like UBI, I think, are reactionary to this totally unproven idea that there’s going to be so much bounty that we’re going to be reduced to being as useful as house cats.

SHAWN RYAN: Hold up, what’s UBI?

SHYAM SANKAR: 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.

SHAWN RYAN: Is Elon talking about that?

The Manhattan Project and Epistemic Humility

SHYAM SANKAR: 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? They’re geniuses, I’m not saying otherwise, but it’s a subtle critique.

We saw this same challenge with the Manhattan Project — maybe just to pick on something that’s a little spicy. How did the Soviets get the bomb? They got the bomb because we had geniuses working on the Manhattan Project, and a small number of them thought — some of them very famous, like Niels Bohr, one of our greatest physicists — thought, “We should tell the Soviets that we’re building this thing. If we tell them about it, they won’t be scared.” And then another guy, Theodore Hall, one of the youngest members of the Manhattan Project — he was 18 years old working on this.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

SHYAM SANKAR: 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 Soviet trade mission in New York and told them, “Hey, I’m building this bomb.” And then subsequently he went back with technical specifications.

So this is a lack of epistemic humility. Just because you’re a genius in one area doesn’t mean you’re a genius in another area. 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 thought, “Hey, I’m just going to do this thing unilaterally.”

AI, Trust, and the American Worker

SHAWN RYAN: It’s an interesting point. What else should I be asking you about AI?

SHYAM SANKAR: Well, I think the most optimistic case is really what is happening today with the American worker. So we’ve started running what we call American Tech Fellowships. We take people on the factory floor, in the front lines, and we put them through a six week, nights and weekends, boot camp to learn how to build their own AI apps.

These are not computer scientists. I’m not even trying to make them computer scientists. They’re people who have deep domain knowledge of what they do. They manufacture wiring. They are ICU nurses. One guy’s a potato farmer in North Dakota. 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. 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 — 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 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, “I can make a dent on the planet with this capability.” And that’s working.

SHAWN RYAN: So you guys are taking them and putting them into this program?

SHYAM SANKAR: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s amazing.

SHYAM SANKAR: It’s been really rewarding for us to do. Part of the thesis is we want to fuel the disruption. And the disruption isn’t just technical, it’s also mindset.

One of these guys, prior enlisted, Navy man, 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. And so just having someone lean in and say, “We believe in you, we’re going to give you the tools to unleash your human agency.” Watching this guy cook — he’s reduced downtime on machines by 50%. He’s improved yield on the factory floor by 20%. These are big numbers. It’s shocking.

And you’re really looking at the output of one person — one person who had all that potential lying latent. What the AI did is it removed all the drag. To your point, all the ideas he had, he could now realize. And that’s going to have a compounding effect. This is how we grow our GDP again. This is how we become a prosperous nation.

Probably the part that I think the American people should feel most gaslit about over the last 30, 40 years with globalization is this idea that somehow you’re not smart enough, that there are people elsewhere who are going to work harder, work for less, and they’re better than you. And that’s just not true. 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.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

Trusting AI: Building Credibility Over Time

SHYAM SANKAR: How do we know —

SHAWN RYAN: — we can trust it? I mean, I see all kinds of things that are coming out of AI that I know for a fact is not correct. Just an example — I saw this morning a clip of myself on X. And somebody said, “Hey Grok, what’s this from?” And it said it was from Joe Rogan’s experience.

SHYAM SANKAR: You know what I mean?

SHAWN RYAN: And I’m like, that’s pretty basic stuff. And so it makes me wonder, what else is this stuff getting wrong? Because we rely on this for a lot of things here. When I see a simple mistake like that, it just makes me wonder what other mistakes are we getting out of this? Especially when it comes to defense.

SHYAM SANKAR: I would think about it as how do we trust humans? If you ask a 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? You develop priors on it — 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.

So if you think about trust in the general — 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 is the same thing.

It’s about us having enough — and this is the point of rolling up your sleeves and playing with it — like, “Hey, where do you believe this thing? Where have you seen it being good or not?” And then you develop — the technical term for this 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? Where can I extend new trust to it?

Again, to the point that trust has to be earned. You’re not going to get any of this stuff for free. It’s not just, “Yolo, ask a question, blindly trust it.” It’s like, “Hey, this is a new teammate. This is a fresh second lieutenant. I don’t trust them with anything. We’re going to build a relationship together, solving problems together, and we’re going to see where you’re really a rock star and where you can help me be more effective.”

Working backwards from the problems we have — that’s a much narrower scope. “Hey, I make wires. I’m a potato farmer. This is my problem. How do I develop trust in this domain with you, where I’m the expert?” And so I’m going to be a really good judge of whether the output is right. The danger is using it where you actually have no knowledge. You’re a blank slate and you’re going to, by default, maybe trust it way more than you should.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay. So just like any relationship, you have to build trust. Sounds so weird to me. But hey, Shyam, let me give you an intro here real quick.

Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President at Palantir Technologies, where you’ve served since 2006, is one of the company’s earliest hires and key builders. A seasoned technologist with over two decades of experience designing and deploying software platforms for complex, high stakes environments from defense to enterprise. He holds a bachelor’s in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University and an MS in Management in Science and Engineering from Stanford University. Actively involved in initiatives like the American Tech Fellows program to develop domestic AI talent. Author of the new book How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War Three, which comes out just a couple of weeks — March 17. And last summer you were commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve. Congratulations.

SHYAM SANKAR: Thank you.

SHAWN RYAN: I saw that, man. I was really excited about that. I think that’s really cool.

Palantir, Civil Liberties, and Surveillance Safeguards

And as you know, I 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?”

SHYAM SANKAR: Great question, Derek. So the first thing you have to understand is we don’t collect any data. We are a software company. We provide our software to the government, or to the private sector, like to a manufacturer. So the only data that is going to be in the software is the data that the organization has access to. If you’re a manufacturer, that’s your supply chain, that’s your production data, that’s your customer orders. If you’re the government, it’s what you have lawful authorities to have access to.

Then there’s the question of safeguards, which is where we think Palantir is the worst platform to try to abuse civil liberties in. Because we have immutable audit logs. We have purpose-based access control, role-based access control, classification-based access control. If you misuse the data in the platform, 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 — there are institutions that don’t want to work with us because sometimes those protections are too strong. Sometimes that’s uncomfortable. Sometimes you don’t want to know what the data is going to tell you, and you don’t want protections that strong coming in.

But that’s the core thesis. You have to go back to the founding precept of the company. Politics is structurally zero sum. People just like to argue about who’s right or not. In my experience, both sides are right about something. You kind of get nowhere by just arguing to the nth degree. The question is, how do we move out the efficient frontier?

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?” 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 for a given level of security I can have more privacy? How do you bring more nuance to the question?

So if you can protect data in a more fine-grained way, if you can attest to the purpose with immutable audit trails, maybe you can have reasons to have access to data on a temporary basis. Maybe you can have condition-based access control where, given what’s happening in the world and a precept of human intelligence that’s telling us about something, 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. 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 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 with loss of knowledge and transfer?

It’s about restoring human agency. 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. If you have a broken steering wheel, how good can the institution actually be? How nuanced can your policy be? If we make that work, it can be responsive to the American people, responsive to the electorate.

SHAWN RYAN: I think a lot of people are worried that it is Patriot Act 2.0. They’re really worried about the privacy stuff. I worry about it, too.

SHYAM SANKAR: It would be insane not to worry about it. I think it’d be insane not to worry about it. 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.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

SHYAM SANKAR: And that’s my real point. When you’re in the arena, you’re going to be criticized for doing it. It’s almost like a purity test — “You shouldn’t be touching this at all.” But what’s the counterfactual? Letting a bunch of historical legacy contractors who aren’t as sophisticated with technology try to solve these problems? Who is leaning in and saying, “We want to make these institutions function better?” That’s the antidote to nihilism — make things work. That’s also the American builder way. We’re not going to get out of these problems through policy alone, through politics alone. We’ve got to build our way out of these things. We’ve got to build a better future.

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha. I got you a gift, too. It’s the same one as last time.

SHYAM SANKAR: Amazing.

SHAWN RYAN: There you go.

SHYAM SANKAR: Thank you. I gobbled these up last time, so I’m looking forward to doing that again.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on.

SHYAM SANKAR: I, too, got you a gift here.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, nice.

SHYAM SANKAR: 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, and it held 20 millimeter electrically primed shells. Don’t worry. There’s no shells in it now, but I have in it —

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, man.

SHYAM SANKAR: I have in it a little mobilized swag. So we have the book. We have a hat, some stickers, some patches. There we go.

SHAWN RYAN: There it is.

SHYAM SANKAR: Yeah. And a nice little mobilized jacket.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, perfect. Thank you. Appreciate it. That’s awesome.

How Do We Prevent World War III?

SHAWN RYAN: 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. There’s not a whole lot of talk about China. That kind of took the back seat a little bit. But I don’t understand why. We got stuff going on in China, Russia and Ukraine still kicking off, Venezuela, the Mexico-US border, Gaza. What are you most concerned about?

SHYAM SANKAR: Well, I mean, if you think about it — I was on in April — Operation Spider’s Web, 12 Day War, Midnight Hammer, the skirmish between India and Pakistan, Maduro — there’s a lot going on in the world. And I think, are these skirmishes kind of like the Spanish Civil War? Are they the prelude to potentially something much bigger?

SHAWN RYAN: Sure feels like it.

SHYAM SANKAR: 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. 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 is — 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, large scale conflict — 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 that in the present moment, through a series of bad policies really since the end of the Cold War, an unfettered belief in globalization, we have put a lot of our capability in the hands of our adversary.

And it’s not just weapons. That’s the easiest place to focus. You could say, okay, we have roughly eight days of weapons on hand for a major conflict. We obviously need something closer to 800 days. Look at pharmaceuticals. Look at rare earths. Those rare earths go into weapons, they also go into cars. Our entire global Western auto industry will be brought to its knees if we don’t have sovereignty over these things.

With pharmaceuticals, 80% of our generics come from China. And in a conflict, obviously we’re not going to be getting those things, and the American people are not going to have an appetite to have their five year old suffer or potentially die from an ear infection that we basically think of as a trivial sickness today. A common ailment that goes away. We need to have our own sovereignty over these capabilities. That itself is deterrence. Having our own pharmaceutical manufacturing capability — that is deterrence.

A lot of people, especially folks — it’s easy to get cynical about the defense industrial base, it’s easy to see it as war mongering or fear mongering. But 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 we’ve got to throw away the process, not be a victim to the process, and just do things that work. How about that? How about we just do things that work and get out of our own way?

A big part of the book, I spend time talking about the historic figures who threw away the process, who rebelled against the system and actually delivered the capabilities we need. 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, people trying to build nuclear reactors now — 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.

Innovation in the Defense Industrial Base

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I see that. I’ve interviewed a lot of these guys. The innovation is there and the technology is there. I mean, obviously I don’t have much insight into what China is doing — I learned a lot of that from you guys. But everything from Epirus with those direct EMP weapons to what Isaiah’s doing with Valor, Anduril, Shield AI — I just interviewed, do you know Ethan Thornton?

SHYAM SANKAR: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy shit, what a sharp f*ing kid.

SHYAM SANKAR: Whoa.

SHAWN RYAN: Just interviewed him. Blew me away. Nick — you probably know him too. But Dino Maverick is with Saronic. I mean, I believe everybody that I just rattled off is manufacturing in the US. I don’t know how much they’re manufacturing. A lot of this stuff is prototypes, or it seems to be not on mass scale yet. Am I wrong on that?

SHYAM SANKAR: We’re capable of it, though. I mean, they’re going through it. First of all, 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 it — 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. How do we make more bets?

SHAWN RYAN: I f*ing love what I’m seeing. I mean, Driscoll at — I can’t remember what the event was, but they had like a Y Combinator of just whoever coming up and pitching their ideas. It’s cool to see them get away from the big five, the big primes. And I just think that’s amazing that they’re doing that.

How Did We Get Here? The Decline of the Defense Industrial Base

SHYAM SANKAR: One of the things I spend time on in the book is understanding how do we get here? How do we go from having the most amazing industrial base in World War II and the early Cold War to one today that is capable of building a small number of truly exquisite things? And they are exquisite. Probably my colleagues who are innovators would get a little upset at me for giving the primes some credit in some sense. But they’re not boneheads. They actually do a number of things incredibly well. I think they are a victim of the system — a system that has been pushing cost-plus contracting, pushing risk onto the taxpayer instead of these companies, reducing the reward for taking risk. It almost doesn’t even make sense to take risk.

The way I like to encapsulate this is: every country, including Russia and China, has 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 that that shit doesn’t work. Let’s go back to winning again. Winning matters. And what does winning look like? 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 consequence of being the sole superpower since the end of the Cold War — that we didn’t have to tolerate the crazies anymore. You go back to figures like Hyman Rickover, John Boyd. These are famously difficult people. And even the most talented engineers I have — they are difficult humans. And you tolerate them because that’s what winning requires of you.

I talked about Theodore Hall and how he was a traitor in the Manhattan Project. His brother Edward Hall was the inventor of the Minuteman missile. And it’s kind of an interesting dichotomy there. Edward Hall was famously — he was a pain in the ass. Schriever protected him because he recognized, “Yeah, this guy’s a pain, but he’s a genius. We are going to build an ICBM because of Edward Hall.”

Edward Hall, famously, when he was in World War II overseeing some mechanics — some British soldiers repairing aircraft — 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 and called him in to yell at him, but he said, “But I was right. I’m not going to send my men back out in that plane that these guys are doing a shitty job on.” There you have a fearless figure. “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.

What’s interesting about Edward and Theodore is these are two people from the same family. Genius tends to run in the family. You could say that Theodore’s biggest disadvantage is he was too young. Edward was actually the person who bought him the original books on communism. Probably it was the zeitgeist of the time in the ’30s — people flirted with this stuff. But Edward got through that. He said, “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 the Soviets the bomb.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting. Interesting.

SHYAM SANKAR: What?

Are These Skirmishes Leading to World War III?

SHAWN RYAN: I just want to backtrack a little bit. It’s been almost a year since we’ve chatted last. What is going on in the world that concerns you? 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 seeing?

China’s Covert Operations and Agricultural Warfare

SHYAM SANKAR: Yeah, the grave risk we have is — let’s start with the very foundational precept. There would be no conflict after World War II. America, at our expense, rebuilt Japan and Germany. I think we might have been the first sort of victor in a conflict of that scale to actually realize that peace and prosperity in the world depended on rebuilding these countries, making them democratic, free, open and successful. The people need to have jobs.

Most of the electronics industry in Southeast Asia — that was an intentional decision by us to take manufacturing from the U.S. and send it there. Yes, we had the benefit of cheaper labor, cheaper goods, but it was also a way of developing their economies, creating stability and prosperity and influence.

The challenge for us with the CCP is their goal is not simply to be prosperous. Because I think if that was their goal, there would be no tension. It is also for America to fall. And I’ll give you an anecdote to look at this.

It is absolutely within their prerogative as a country to decide if they want to buy our soybeans or not. That’s a business decision. I don’t begrudge them. If they want to buy it from Brazil and not us, I prefer they buy it from us. But fine. It is not a business decision when you decide to smuggle in agricultural funguses so that we can’t grow soybeans.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s happening?

SHYAM SANKAR: Oh yeah, that’s happening.

SHAWN RYAN: I had no idea. That’s the first time I’ve heard. How long has that been going on?

SHYAM SANKAR: It’s been going on. I mean, I think in the agriculture domain it’s a full-on — we’re in conflict. 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 reemerge, and it’s spread up. If you talk to farmers and ranchers in America, they all know this came from the CCP.

SHAWN RYAN: No sh. I got one coming on here next week — a startup for governor in Iowa. I’m bringing that stuff up.

SHYAM SANKAR: And so we’ve had a few — you see, we don’t talk about it too much. There are a few cases where we arrested someone flying in from China where they had smuggled in the agricultural fungus in their shoe. But of course, 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 arrest him when he came in.

So that’s dirty tricks. We have to take their intent literally and quite seriously.

SHAWN RYAN: Just call that — we caught that bio lab, what, last week? Was that Vegas? Yeah, somewhere in Nevada. Then there was — I don’t know, I can’t remember if this was Chinese or not — but the cell phone farms in New York City.

SHYAM SANKAR: Yeah, that was Chinese.

SHAWN RYAN: That was Chinese too.

The Threat of Containerized Drone Warfare on the Homeland

SHYAM SANKAR: 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. The drivers — this just looks like commercial shipping. It’s on a truck. And you’re dropping off a container somewhere in Russia, just like it could have furniture in it, it could have toys in it, it could have whatever, it 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. These are high value assets. At least 20% of the fleet was taken out. Many of these things were fueled and ready to go, carrying cruise missiles. So they exploded in big, spectacular ways.

It’s got a bigger impact than it seems. First of all, these things are out of production. They’ve been out of production since the end of the Cold War, since the Soviet Union fell. And the assets that were out on the tarmac were the best assets, the most available. The rest of the assets have maintenance problems. They have issues — it’s a massive asymmetric impact. Each drone probably costs 600 to 1,000 bucks at most, and you think about the tens of billions of dollars of damage that have been wrought from it.

You go to the 12-Day War — in particular Operation Narnia — the Israelis built covert drone factories in Iran. 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 we are. How many containers are coming from China? How easy would it be to get something in? You think about our high-value bases — this is the underlying concern with why are the Chinese buying all this farmland near our bases? We have a lot of surface area to protect now.

There’s a protection element of this. There’s also a deterrence element of this. Maybe we can’t close all these doors — we should try, but maybe we can’t. But we also need to have the counter-reaction that we’re capable of delivering being so costly, so painful, that actually no one wants to fight.

Decentralization and Asymmetric Strategy

SHAWN RYAN: You know what else I like that I’ve been hearing lately? I’ve heard it from Brandon Tseng with Shield AI — the decentralization of military. Basically not allowing what happened in Russia with Operation Spiderweb — decentralizing all the drones so they’re not all on one 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 too?

SHYAM SANKAR: I think if we look at Spiderweb, if we look at the 12-Day War, we have to assume other countries are doing this. It’s so cheap to do and it’s so asymmetric. We have to worry about a lot of the investments that the Chinese have made since the end of the Gulf War. The first Gulf War — it’s 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, they can defeat us here — that it basically takes out the whole chain. It’s their concept of systems warfare.

I think this is one of those areas where air defense is hard. How are you going to defend against a thousand-drone swarm? There are ways people are investing in it — we’re doing it — but the reason we’re doing it is because we haven’t done it before. We need to go reestablish deterrence and capability in these areas.

We’d be foolish not to think that people are going to look at asymmetric, cheap ways. And we, of course, should be thinking about the same thing. I think one of the great ideas implicit in Brandon and the concept is — we need to create lots of problems and dilemmas across the first island chain. We should be able to launch from anywhere. Are you going to be able to hold continuous custody of those targets as the adversary? Are we going to be able to outpace your magazine even if you’re great at production? 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.”

Colonel Drew Cukor and the Birth of Project Maven

SHYAM SANKAR: So one of the cool things in the book is we tell the story of Colonel Drew Cukor, a Marine infantry officer, sorry, intelligence officer, who was really the father of AI in the modern Department of War. And the journey is an exceptionally interesting one because I think a lot of the heroes and heretics I talk about, they’re from the past. Here we have one in the present.

Looking at how much bureaucracy he had to fight, his nickname in the department was “the iron dome of Pentagon bullshit.” The amount of pain this guy went through to birth it is truly incredible. 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? With Colonel Cukor, you have a very interesting personal story. This guy grew up in Southern California, single mother, a Mormon, dirt poor. So 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 — 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 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 — they were lost basically.

And this is a sort of initial catalyst for him. He got a fixation on computer vision. Could it 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.

Project Maven: A Rogue Effort That Changed Everything

And so when he had the opportunity to start Project Maven, it was this rogue AI effort in the Pentagon. And the Pentagon has this sort of myth that nothing good should come out of OSD — 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.

Cukor was this amazing blend — he’s an operator who understood acquisition and understood technology. It’s like the triple threat. The fact he could bring all this together. And he had this deep experience from his time in the Marines. The government instinct to try to invent everything internally is going to fail. Let’s go out to Google, 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 that we had the famous 2017 walkout where Google said, “We’re going to leave Project Maven. We don’t want to work with the department.” That’s sort of a crucible for Silicon Valley. Which, to Google’s great credit, that’s not their position anymore. They’re very much in the fight. They’re all in.

SHAWN RYAN: What changed? Well, let’s go ahead, finish the story. Sorry.

From JSOC to the Conventional Force: Maven’s Expansion

SHYAM SANKAR: Yeah, no, we should get to that. I think this man was so successful. So all the services didn’t really want to adopt this. Most good things in the military, you start with JSOC. People who just want to get things done, they have very little religion, and outcomes are the only thing that matter.

And so in 2017, it started there very successfully. It 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. At the time it was 12 minutes, which is impressive. Now it’s closer to two minutes or less from detecting a target to putting fires on the target.

And it kept expanding. You can think about that as a very narrow slice of the problem, which is in the foxhole. But how do you integrate that back to supply? How do you think about, okay, what shots are worth taking? Based on my resupply timeline, based on my magazine depth, based on the effect it’s going to have on the enemy. How do we get so good at this OODA loop that our adversaries can’t compete?

The Personal Cost of Innovation

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 — always anonymous, of course — that this Marine officer was accepting bribes. He had stashes of money at his house. He was somehow housing illegal aliens in his basement. Thing after thing.

So NCIS actually went out to his house. Again, this is a devout Mormon, four kids, 1,400 square foot house in Northern Virginia. No basement in the house, mind you. There were two cars, each with more than 100,000 miles on them. If anything, the NCIS officer left thinking, “How are you even making this work?”

But these things matter. They came after his rank, they tried to demote him to Lieutenant Colonel. And you think about how crazy you have to be to just keep pushing through all that 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 — whether it’s Hyman Rickover or Boyd or Colonel Drew Cukor, that’s the sort of commitment you see to the nation. And I think one of the common themes for these heroes is that during their immediate lifetime, their immediate period of service, they get f*ed. And it’s only later on, when the history is written, when people can look at it with clear eyes, that they get lionized. We recognize their immense contributions.

And it gives me a little bit of satisfaction to know that all those people who filed those IG complaints will be anonymous to history. No one will ever know their names. They will not be remembered. But everyone will know that Colonel Drew Cukor’s sacrifices created Project Maven.

SHAWN RYAN: And that was — why did Google, what changed? Why are they back?

Why Silicon Valley Came Back to Defense

SHYAM SANKAR: We were living in a weird period. One you definitely can’t discount — Trump Derangement Syndrome — so that part of it as an overlay. But we were living in a weird period coming out of GWOT, where we had no great power competition. There was no sense of threat to the nation. You’re over there fighting and people were going to the mall.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think that’s because we were distracted or we were complacent?

SHYAM SANKAR: Yeah, absolutely. The great power threat was there, we just weren’t organized around it, we weren’t mobilized. And so this kind of left people with this existential angst of like, what is America for? Are we even good? Are we the good guys? What’s the counterfactual?

Are we perfect? Absolutely not. Are we better than any alternative out there for the world? Yeah. As someone whose alternative was being dead in a ditch in Lagos, that’s never been a question in my mind. And there’s a certain complacency when you don’t have to deal with that.

I think the Ukraine war was a big turning point where people realized, wait a second, Russia just decided to roll their tanks across the border one day. You mean this rules-based international order just doesn’t maintain itself? It was a stark wake-up call.

And I wouldn’t say it’s perfect uniformity in Silicon Valley, but I think people kind of recognize, “Oh, maybe everything I’m able to do is a consequence of the prosperity and freedom that this country has given me, and that these things aren’t free, they’re not a given. 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 more to go. And this sort of epistemic humility — 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 201 and have been such an advocate for it. How do we build the bridge between our leading technologists and our Defense Department again, where our technologists have exposure to the problems? They understand not just the problems, but the people.

Our 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. The American industrial base, distinct from the Defense industrial base, used to be completely invested in our national security. Who built the Minuteman? The prime contractor on the Minuteman? Chrysler. It was a very different world.

I think we need to get back to it. It doesn’t have to be perfect. This is not forced. It’s not like the Chinese system where it’s civil-military fusion — “you must do this or else.” But you want to do this. I want to live in a world, I want to be an advocate for an America where we understand the necessity for investing in this thing to underwrite our economic prosperity.

Detachment 201: Bridging Silicon Valley and the Military

SHAWN RYAN: Can you talk a little bit about Detachment 201 and what it is, what it’s for?

SHYAM SANKAR: Yeah, the idea really is that we have a bounty of unique technical knowledge in this country. Most of it is in Silicon Valley or thereabouts. Some of it’s in El Segundo. And then the military structure — of course, you kind of grow through the ranks. It’s very, very hard to be inorganically inserted into there. And these two worlds are pretty separate. We’d be much better off 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. We directly commissioned 100,000 people as officers in the army. Some of them were from Hollywood, and they were in charge of making media and content and communicating to the American people. Some of them were industrialists and had unique knowledge on how to do mass production, planning, supply chains. This expertise — essentially when a country goes to war, the whole country goes to war.

And because we haven’t been faced with this sort of mass mobilization — our military was 16 million strong in World War II — it’s hard for us to imagine today. Even Vietnam, it was 3 million. So we’re below that now.

SHAWN RYAN: I don’t even know what are we at today?

Detachment 201 and Civil-Military Talent

SHYAM SANKAR: I think it’s closer to 2 million, including civilians. The shared experiences aren’t there, but also the knowledge. One of these things I observed with the Israelis after October 7th — I think it’s a really interesting example because first of all, it’s a technical country, and they pride themselves on being technical. And they are technical. Everyone’s prior service by definition.

So on October 8th, they mobilized 360,000 odd reservists. And when those reservists came back, they were actually horrified at the state of tech in the IDF. And that’s a profoundly interesting statement to me. What they’re really saying is a self-critique. They’re saying, “Oh man, when I was 20, I knew how to code, but I didn’t know what I was doing.” Now I’ve spent 20 years in industry, I’ve built internet-scaled solutions, I’ve learned so much. They got more done in the four months after October 7th than in the prior 10 years.

We have that times 100 in this country, and we’re just not enabling the people with those skills. If China makes civil-military fusion a requirement, we make voluntary civil-military fusion impossible. So how do we rebuild that bridge here?

It’s been super rewarding. Like any reservist, of course the general counsel’s office looks at what you can work on based on your conflicts. So my primary focus is on talent — how do we think about software talent in the army in particular, how do we organize around that to deliver lethality?

One of the most impressive things is these people are wildly talented. We are not missing for intelligence or capability. We need to empower them. A lot of this breaks rank structure. A lot of this breaks forms of thinking. How can I leverage what I’m seeing at the most productive commercial companies — how they’re leveraging their talent, their factory floor, how they’re empowering them — the tools they’re providing to empower our warrant officers and our E4s?

The best programmer I’ve found in Hawaii is an E4. Everyone knows this guy’s really talented, but of course they don’t know what to do with him. 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.

SHAWN RYAN: Is Detachment 201 new? Was this stood up when you joined?

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

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

SHYAM SANKAR: Detachment 201 is our reserve unit in the Army. I have a separate program at Palantir called the American Tech Fellowship, where we let active duty and veterans apply, and we’ve run a few of them. There’s a fellowship specific for veterans and for the active duty community where we teach them these tools. Largely, they’re transitioning members, so how do I help them actually get amazing commercial jobs where they are AI application developers, even though four months ago they were JSOC operators?

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, so one is transitioning into civilian life, the other is keeping it in.

SHYAM SANKAR: One of the ways in which these things relate, though, is just recognizing how capable the uniformed service members are of building these applications — whether they’re going to build it as active duty for war fighting, or they’re going to build it as part of the greater American industrial base for commercial and private sector actors.

It goes back to my underlying point that we are drowning in talent. Our problem is not do we have talented enough people. It’s, are we allowing them to apply themselves? Are we taking the shackles off? Are we letting them run? Are we embracing the fact that rank means nothing?

Going back to Cukor, the only thing in the IAG investigation that he would say guilty as charged — he was accused of undermining the rank structure. And he’s like, “Yeah, guilty as charged. I had captains who knew way more than generals and colonels, and I let them speak their mind.” And by the way, if you care about winning, that’s what you’re going to do. And if we’re at war, that’s what you’re going to do. Doesn’t mean you’re breaking the chain of command. But just because you have the stars doesn’t mean you have the right answer.

Are We Ready for World War III?

SHAWN RYAN: We talked a lot about getting ready for World War III. Do you think we’re ready?

SHYAM SANKAR: I think we’re getting ready to deter it. I always like to remind people, the point is not to fight World War III. It’s to be so ready for it that our adversaries realize, “Oh, this — I’m going to lose.” 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.

Our goal is not, “Hey, let’s permanently make it so that 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, we’re going to buy another year, we’re going to buy another year, and we’re just going to deter the conflict continuously by being too dangerous to fight with the whole time.

SHAWN RYAN: I feel like we’re there right now.

SHYAM SANKAR: 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 have thought about these things historically — disruptions that are critical to continuing to maintain the deterrence. And that is actually the American way. Where did the tank come from? Let’s 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 — the civilian oversight — he said, “I’m going to build this thing.” And he called it a landship, because he could only build ships, so he built a landship. And of course, we can’t really imagine the intervening periods between the interwar period when he started doing this and the present day, without tanks being a core part of how armies are formed and fight.

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

SHAWN RYAN: You thought we were slow on that?

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

SHAWN RYAN: Slow for ourselves, or slow in comparison to other countries?

SHYAM SANKAR: Slow for ourselves for sure. In comparison to other countries, only because for them, it was an asymmetric cost advantage to lean into it. They were not going to be able to compete with us on an F-35. So where could they compete with us? Leaning into autonomy and unmanned things. Now, we’re not behind on autonomy, but I think we want to be dominant there.

The Chaos of Innovation

And I think a lot of those ideas — part of the challenge is really, what does innovation feel like? It feels like sh. Innovation is chaotic. It’s messy. It’s frustrating.

At Palantir, I’ve probably been involved with transitioning 15 different projects from the 0 to 1 — to borrow Peter Thiel’s framing — the invention phase to the scaling phase. The first few times I did this, I was like, “Wow, why is this so hard? Why do the people on both sides of this thing hate each other? Why is there so much interpersonal friction? This sucks. Maybe I can invent a process that makes this suck less.”

Every attempt at inventing a process killed the magic. None of those things transitioned. They all died. And this is the mistake that we’re essentially making, which is we think, “Oh, we need a scalable process to go from invention to reaching the full force.” It turns out there is no scalable process. It turns out every one of these transitions requires human grit. It requires ingenuity. It requires a willingness to just chew through pain.

Every transition — 15 times now — I can accept that as reality. And I think this is why you both need the heretics, and you need a willingness to disrupt yourself. This working backwards from winning — is the goal to have a pain-free process? Because that’s like managed decline into a mountain, which 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.

SHAWN RYAN: So you said you think we started slow. How do you think we’re doing now?

SHYAM SANKAR: 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.

Embracing Inter-Service Rivalry

One of the points of the book is that you really need to embrace inter-service rivalry. Many people look at inter-service rivalry as a bug. I think it’s a feature. When we were building the ICBMs, we had four concurrent competing programs. We think of Minuteman today, but the Navy had a program, the Army had a program down in Huntsville — the Jupiter. You had Polaris, which was the emerging winner. Even within the Navy, there were four competing programs.

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. 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, leads to creativity, leads to reimagining constraints.

Who would have thought back then? There’s a famous anecdote I was given by someone who was actually in Kwajalein when Elon was testing the early Falcons — Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific, for those who may not know. We do a lot of rocket launches there. And there was a Boeing facility and a SpaceX facility.

This guy, a PhD physicist, kind of a SETA contractor — a scientific advisor — he’s observing these two things. In the Boeing facility, it’s got a clean room, people are in bunny suits, it looks super professional. You go to the SpaceX facility, parts are on the table, some of the parts look like they’re rusting, it looks haphazard. So you might reasonably say, looking at these two things, “Who do you think is going to win this?”

But then, of course, fast forward a little bit, and Elon has launched well over 160 rockets last year alone. He’s brought down the price of getting a kilogram to orbit from roughly $50,000 a kilogram with the Space Shuttle to 10 or 20 bucks with Starship heavy reuse — which is imminently coming. That’s crazy innovation. And I think other countries don’t have an Elon.

The Future of Warfare: Autonomy and Obsolescence

SHAWN RYAN: No, they don’t. With all this new innovation and autonomous systems coming up, how much of our equipment is going to be obsolete? Do the F-35s even have a place anymore? Everything seems to be cheaper, faster to produce, and maybe even more capable.

Rapid Iteration and Weapon System Adaptability

SHYAM SANKAR: Well, I think we should. One of the mistakes we made was thinking, “Hey, this thing is so expensive, we should plan to use it for 80 years.” I mean, I don’t even know what the world’s going to look like in 10 years, let alone 80 years. How do we get into tighter cycles of iteration, iterate faster?

In World War II, we had roughly 150 different airframes. We think about the P51, the P52, we have these archetypal planes that we think of, but many of them we’ve forgotten. Maybe we could say 10 of those airframes really mattered, but we produced 150 different ones. Maybe that’s roughly what that chaotic innovation looks like. 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.

And we got to be thinking about what is the true cost of doing this. Because sometimes I think we lull ourselves into a sense of, “If we just plan this out better, it’ll be cheaper over the long run.” 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 as they’re changing, we’re going to realize that we need different weapon systems that are changing.

One of the lessons that I really highlight in the book is it’s not actually what your weapon system does today that’s determinant of victory. It’s how quickly you can change your weapon system to what you need it to do tomorrow. This is why the work with Detachment 201, the organic ability for green suiters to reprogram their weapon systems to do new and innovative things in combat, is truly the advantage. It’s kind of like the meta advantage. It’s not literally just what does it do today, but how malleable is this weapon system to what I’m going to need it to be able to do tomorrow. How much of that can I do as I’m fighting?

We see the Ukrainians do quite a bit of that. And certainly a large scale conflict — it’s not a one to one mapping between what’s happening in Ukraine and what’s going to happen. But there are absolutely lessons to learn. One of those meta lessons: 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 one hour, one day, one week, one month. And they titrate their request relative to, “Yeah, if I get it in a month, I might be dead. I’ll settle for this capability in a day that I can use to apply effects on the adversary.” So it makes them better customers, and that alone — we need folks in combat arms who are principally experts in their combat arms, but also have enough technical literacy to view software as a weapon system that they know how to wield and fight off of.

Direct Communication Between Warfighters and Manufacturers

SHAWN RYAN: These guys are in direct communication with who’s manufacturing their stuff. We don’t have — at least when I was in — we don’t have that. Are we getting that?

SHYAM SANKAR: That’s one of the things changing. If you look at Under Secretary Hegseth’s leadership, this move from PEOs — Program Executive Offices — to PAEs, 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 suiters who are developers, who are part of exercises. So they’re not just saying, “Hey, the capability does what we think it needs to do today.” They’re also evaluating, “What is our ability as the Army to write new code on top of this and change what we wanted to do, to integrate things we’ve built on our own into this? Is it cohesive? Is it interoperable?” We’re determining that at design time rather than, “Hey, we got it and we’re trying to retrofit it later on and realizing we’re stuck.”

So I’m optimistic that we’re moving in the right direction and that we have the talent we need, we have the capabilities to do this as a country. We now have the will — the will to blow s* up and prioritize winning again.

Rebuilding National Unity

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s talk about unity. How do we get back to unity? That’s a big missing component here.

SHYAM SANKAR: Yeah, it’s probably the thing I care most about. No civilization can be great unless it believes in itself, unless it’s proud of itself. And I think no nation has more to be proud of than America. But if you kind of just immerse yourself in the zeitgeist, that’s not the vibe. There’s a lot of infighting, there’s a lot of disunity. We’ve forgotten what makes us one.

And I think a lot of that comes down to storytelling. A lot of our stories today have really anti-heroes. The hero of some movie is a drug addict, or certainly not someone you’d want your child to grow up to be. And if you just rewind and go back to the 80s and 90s, whether it’s Hunt for Red October or Red Dawn or Rambo 3, we had a very different take. And they were complicated heroes. It’s not Pravda, it’s not propaganda, it’s entertainment. But it gave you that feeling.

And I think that’s really important because that is really our soft power — not only for the American people. 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. We were a strong, powerful country. I think even things like Maduro — even our most hardened cynics overseas say, “Wow, that is really cool. That’s just super impressive, super competent.”

And I think we have to acknowledge that not only does the world want a strong America, it doesn’t want an America full of self-loathing. The American people want that too. There’s a real opportunity right now to go tell those stories and to remind ourselves that we are always striving for a more perfect union. That belief in oneself is critical. And on the merit, on the facts, we have a lot to be proud of.

Telling Positive Stories Through Media

SHAWN RYAN: Is this why you’re getting into media? You’re trying to bring unity?

SHYAM SANKAR: Yeah, I want to tell positive stories. It came back to wanting to watch movies with my kids again. And I started looking, and some of it’s very subtle.

I grew up in the shadow of the space program in Orlando. Do you think I would grow up to be a CTO if I hadn’t been there? I think the answer is maybe not. Because what was in the zeitgeist in Orlando at the time? You would go to the elementary school courtyard and watch the shuttle launch. You would wake up to double sonic booms on a Saturday morning as the shuttle re-entered. It was this sense of, “America is a badass country. Look at what we’re capable of from a science and technology perspective.” And importantly, the subtext is the future is going to be better through science and technology and hard work.

I had a classmate in elementary school whose father designed the landing gear on the F-117A. And when we disclosed that asset existing, he was the most popular kid in class, even though it was just the landing gear. And this pride in what we’re building and this pride of togetherness — it didn’t matter if you’re left or right. When I grew up, if you were flying the American flag, that was not politically coded. No party should have a monopoly on patriotism. That’s the one thing that binds us all.

And 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. So I don’t think we’re going to win these things just by arguing. The arguing is not going to go away. But I’d like us to remind ourselves that we’re Americans first.

And I think a big part of this is what are we passing on to our kids? We’ve been here before as a country. If you go back to Vietnam, a lot of our movies were very cynical — kind of this sense that we kind of screwed up the world as a country. And that was represented in our media, in the zeitgeist coming out of Vietnam. But then you think about the Reagan era. I think Reagan’s real contribution was just being a positive leader. “It’s going to be morning again in America. We are great. We’re capable of doing good things.” It set the conditions for people to abandon the nihilism, reabsorb optimism, and actually make things again.

And we’re at the precipice of that. When you look at Isaiah, at Valor — we are making things again. And it’s not just one point example with Isaiah. You span it out, all the people that you’ve had here. Yeah, maybe it starts with defense tech because it’s so motivating to protect the nation, but I think it’s going to expand to every part of our economy. And rejecting nihilism is so important in our youth. There’s a temptation to just say, “Burn it all down.” Maybe there’s a growing-up phase where you go through that. But helping our youth exit that and understand that what we’ve built is worth fighting for is so critical.

SHAWN RYAN: It seems like a lot of people need to get more solution-based instead of just complaining all the f*ing time.

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

Role Models for the Next Generation

SHAWN RYAN: You’re pretty close with Isaiah, maybe?

SHYAM SANKAR: Yeah, I’ve been really impressed with them. He’s an exceptional human being. As you can tell from the heretics and heroes thing, I’m magnetically attracted to people who are powerfully driven towards a vision — almost a crazy vision. Like, “How are you — you’re not like a triple PhD in physics. What makes you qualified to do this?” But this embodies the belief in self. And those are the people you want to back. Those are the people who are never going to stop. They’re never going to give up.

When you look at it, yeah, I’d like my son to learn a thing or two from Isaiah. My daughter to learn a thing or two from Brandon. These are the role models that I don’t see on TV anymore, but that actually are going to determine the future trajectory of our nation and inspire greatness.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s why I’m bringing them on, Shyam.

SHYAM SANKAR: Hey, you’re the antidote to the cynical media we have here.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow, I appreciate that. Well, it’s been a fascinating conversation and it’s great to see you again.

SHYAM SANKAR: Always a pleasure. Thanks for everything you do, Shawn.

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