Shyam Sankar
Appearances
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
With AI and the AI revolution, people think, oh, it's going to make the median person better. That's true. But it's going to make the very best person superhuman.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
The decision is leading up to the point where you realize that's what they're trying to do. How do I integrate the human reporting that I have that tells me what might be going on? Now, keep in mind that... One part of the reporting is in this country. One part of the reporting is in that country. Who's willing to share what?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Who even knows that sharing it is going to lead to a mission critical outcome that saves lives? So how do you start to automate more of that? How do you help them piece those things together? How do you combine the technical collection you have with this too?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Maybe you have SIGINT that helps you understand this, helps you understand that this reporting is correlated to other cells that you actually care about, where you have intercepts that tell you something.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
How do I use my historic FMV footage, observations of that compound that helped me piece together more things that lead to the conclusion, we've got a problem here and we've got a tight timeline to act on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
It's like shining, it's like turning on the light on the battle space, the things that you couldn't see before you could see now. Now, some important, might seem slightly technocratic, but we're providing the software to the government customers. No one's providing us all of this data. The government has the data, great, but it's just sitting there. It's in the dark.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
It's hard to see all of this information. It's overwhelming. Great. How do we get the spotlight to highlight the things that actually matter? How do I get to ask the next question? Here's something that's risky. Okay, what are the next 10 questions you're going to want? Can you even answer those 10 questions in 10 seconds, or is that going to take you 10 weeks?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
If it takes you 10 weeks, you're not even going to bother answering those questions. So can I make that fast enough that you get to why does this matter and is this a threat or is this irrelevant? That's the first part. The second part of it that's really important is because why is this information sharing so hard? Well, there are lots of rules and regulations. People have different authorities.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Different things can be shared. The way we enforce that today is with humans. which is crazy, which is why it's slow and inefficient and you miss things. We replace that enforcement with software. The software ensures no one can see anything they're not allowed to see.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
The software ensures under the right conditions for information sharing, the right pieces of information flow from one agency to the other. So by automating that flow, it means that you kind of have a hive mind.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
the entire government can operate competently because you're actually able to see everything you're allowed to see, as opposed to, well, we have humans who are gatekeeping us along the way, just slowing everything down, which always, when you have humans, it always devolves into control.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
The mission gets obfuscated by, well, we do this job, they do that job, and the interpersonal factors get in the way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Well, you know, it was really hard because none of us had worked in government. None of us had clearances. We would go to D.C. We'd literally carry our Pelican case with a projector. I mean, talk about state of technology. You couldn't even rely on a projector being in the government conference room.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You had to bring your own projector to make sure you could actually show the customers what you were building. And we were really eliciting feedback from them. Like, okay, I built this. And we don't know your workflow, but based on your reactions, I'm going to go away and code that night and come back tomorrow and show you something new.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And we had to do all this kind of notionally to begin with on low side synthetic data. until we got to a threshold of conviction. And that threshold of conviction, I mean, almost to the point, it started because of a renegade analyst. And I think she's been a prior guest of yours, actually, Sarah Adams. No kidding. Yeah, so Sarah Adams.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
So In-Q-Tel brought a fresh, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed cohort of CIA analysts out to the West Coast. We were maybe 20 people at the time. We were one of the stops along the way. And she saw the demo, and she's like, I need this. Why don't we have this? In fact, I joined this organization because I thought I'd be having James Bond technology. And somehow I have WordPerfect and Lotus Notes.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And she organized a day on her own. I think she was maybe like a GS-12. On her own, she organized a day of... Three meetings where more than 200 analysts came to see this thing. At some point, the deep state, the IT people got wind of this and came to this meeting trying to shut it down, trying to dampen the excitement. But the analysts were just in revolt. Like, why can't we have a pilot?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Why can't we try this out? And that broke the floodgates open for us. So years. I probably did 300 demonstrations and meetings trying to get a single pilot. And that one day, she made it all happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
When Rocket Man was rattling his saber in 2017, the Army wanted to answer the question, how many tanks are there in the Army? That is a three-week data call. Are you serious? So Operation Paperclip was our covert action to bring the very best scientists from Nazi Germany to the US to enable our defense program, in particular our rocket and space program.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
It was always about defense. I mean, I'm very happy we have a commercial business. It powers a lot of innovation. And frankly, a lot of the things we learn in commercial, we're able to bring over to give the government decisive advantages. We're able to amortize the R&D. Ideas that BP or Avis have make the Army better. That's one way of thinking about it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
But we really started because we cared about the government mission. And we honestly would not have built a commercial business except for the fact that the government was so slow and so hard that we were going to go broke if we just stuck by being purely a government company. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
A desire to build all this stuff themselves. We don't need this. We don't need these outsiders. They don't know our stuff. I'll reason by analogy. So I recently met someone who was in Kwajalein. And I think it was 2014 when SpaceX was launching their early rockets. And Elon was one launch, he had three failures, and he was one launch away from losing the whole business.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And he said, I was there, and the SpaceX facility is right next to the Boeing facility. And you go to the SpaceX facility, and you compare it to the Boeing. The Boeing facility is like a clean room. You're wearing a bunny suit. It looks so sophisticated. SpaceX, it's open air, parts on a table, things are rusting. And you're just like, these guys are never going to make it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
They don't know what they're doing. But you fundamentally misunderstood what was happening there. It's not, where are they today? It's, what's the first derivative? How quickly are they improving? How good is that team? And that is the world's best team, right? And look what's possible now. Our launch capability is unmatched. And the price performance that Elon is able to deliver.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
When I was a kid growing up, Shuttle, it used to cost $50,000 per kilogram to get to orbit. With Starship Heavy Reuse, it'll be 10 to 20 bucks I mean, it's just orders of magnitude difference, right? And I think there was something like that in the early days for us, which is, this seems like a joke. Who are these kids running around in shorts?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
No, thank you for having me. I'm just really grateful for everything this country has given us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You know, I remember one early meeting I had in the Pentagon, I didn't wear a tie. I mean, I wore a suit, everything except for a tie. First 30 minutes of the meeting, I just got dressed down for how disrespectful it was to show up without a tie. Look, I always wear a tie now. I've learned my lesson. But I think we lost the plot. The substance is the code, not the quality of my tie.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
It's the quality of the code.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
There was. There was a lot of pushback. There's a lot of – kind of fake partnerships, like, hey, let's bring you in for some small, tiny amount of work share that will actually be zero. We don't really need you, is the vibe. But I would say, in fairness, when we first started, we thought the primes would be our big competitors.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
What I didn't realize is actually the government was our big competitor. The way that the government structured you have these program offices and they have the perfect five-year, 10-year plan. They kind of just want to lock in their plan. And we were a threat that disrupted all of their well-laid plans. Instead of adopting us, you know, they wanted to reject us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And so if you really look at the early days of Palantir, all of our adoption was driven from the field back. You know, so all of our attempts to get people in DC really interested in what we're doing, it was in benefit of hindsight, was wasted time. You know, our first deployment, was with Tent Group as they took over Siege of Sotaph AP in Balad.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And it's because the commander, the colonel, was just like, three days before deploying, he called us up. We had been showing him our software. He's like, well, I don't know. Like, I don't buy things. I'm a warfighter. I don't buy things. And three days before he was going, he just had that feeling, like, I need this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Like, if you guys come, drive for Fort Carson, I'll palletize your servers, and I'll give you four seats. And that's what happened. We just drove all our stuff over there, flew over. For two weeks, the Krusty Warren officers were like, why do I have to find housing for these 22-year-olds? Two weeks. But after that, we earned our keep. They're like, I know why they're here. You were over there?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I didn't go on that trip, but Matt Grimm, who is one of the co-founders of Andral, was working for me at the time. He went over on that trip. Greg Barbaccia, who's now the federal government CIO, he was one of our first guys on the ground in Balad. But you've been over there? Yeah. What was that like for you? It was eye-opening.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I mean, most of my time I spent at Leatherneck, so in Hellmond, working with the Marines. Nice place. I've been there. Dicey spot. What year? That was 2012, or 2011.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I mean, we would have these... It's like a cup of motivation undersells it. It's like a water tank of motivation. You have these people. They come back from mission. They tell you what happened. They tell you their ideas, their feature requests. And you just have unbounded energy to code right there. You're just in a plywood little setup writing code.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And OK, I'm going to have something better for you for tomorrow. And you just do that again and again, that the whole product development life cycle, that was really, I was the first forward deployed engineer at Palantir, which investors hated because they thought it was a service business, not how you're supposed to do software.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Everything about it was wrong to them, but it was so clearly right for our users. You know, of course you need the person who actually knows how to build the product sitting forward in the tent with the people doing the work so that you can observe not what people in headquarters think the software needs to be, but the empirical reality on the front of what is missing?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
What could make this person more successful on the next mission than the prior mission? And if you do that for long enough, you just build this deep understanding of everything that's broken in the world, everything that sucks about their experience, everything that makes them more likely to come back as a team together. And it's also, by the way, how you say, you know,
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I love it. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
There's lots of jobs coders can take, but it is an addiction to the motivation. Your sense of purpose is unbounded.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Nailed it. Nailed it. Well, you know, to take credit away from us and give it to our customers, I think, you know, first of all, this kernel is absorbing a lot of risk by kind of bending some – I wouldn't say breaking, but bending some rules and going against the system. And that was the beginning of a much longer fight. As that became successful, more and more people –
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
the first thing they do when they would deploy would put in an urgent operational needs statement to get Palantir because what they had wasn't working. And some of those people did suffer career consequences for doing the right thing and doing that. And you knew you had to deliver for them. But the other part of it is really without their partnership.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
It's like the good ideas don't come eating strawberries in Palo Alto, right? They come on the fire cells of Djibouti and the factory floor of Detroit where you can see firsthand what's happening and not. And that's all of the inspiration, all of the creativity. It comes from that environment. I think now this methodology has become more commonplace.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
People talk about forward-deployed engineering, companies are building around it. I think it's great because I would say a critique of the software industrial complex is, if software is so great, why does nothing seem to work? Why are doors falling off planes? Why is there so much fraud in our government system?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
We should be looking really hard at this, and I think it's because we've just been doing it wrong. We haven't been holding ourselves accountable to the primacy of winning. It doesn't matter what box of software you thought you were going to make. Everyone living inside that box doesn't work. It doesn't matter. What could you change so that it worked better tomorrow?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And are you impatient enough to go drive that change? And a lot of that comes down to... institutionalizing rebellion. There was nothing that headquarters was going to tell our engineers in the field that would make them better at coming up with the next feature. That was going to come out of their own crazy creative ideas being really right next to the problem.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
So my job is to support them in doing that to the greatest extent possible as we continue to build the company so that the machine doesn't crush them, the machine encourages them. And that's led to this philosophy at Palantir that we are not a factory, we're an artist colony. Like, my job is to find Dali and Monet and don't do stupid things like yell at Monet to paint more like Dali.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Like, each of these people are unique artists. And my job is to get out of their way, make sure other people stay out of their way, provide as much room as possible, and help them, you know, just like an artist. It's not like every piece of art is better than the last one. You go through waves and cycles and just create the environment that allows them to do their best work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Yeah. In 2016, we sued the Army because we were unable to compete on their Army intel program. So the story is like all these units, as they would deploy, they would request Palantir. The reason they had to request Palantir is there was an Army program of record, as the government calls it, called DSIGS. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
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Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Yes, absolutely. Quantum, quantum surprise, staying ahead of it, understanding its implications. One way of thinking about it is there's nothing new under the sun. There's just the OODA loop. And what is quantum's implication on how quickly you're going to go through John Boyd's observe, orient, decide, act OODA loop? I think it has exponential implications on that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I think that it's really fast, like millions of times faster is the way to think about it. It's like you can compute, it uses quantum mechanics to do the computation and you're able to compute things enormous permutations and combinations of things at incredible speed. The most obvious implication is it breaks all of our legacy encryption.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
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Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
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Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
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Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
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Shawn Ryan Show
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Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
So your ability to communicate securely and to the extent anyone has been storing historical encrypted communications, their ability to decrypt that will be near instantaneous. So it has huge implications there. But then for your ability going forward now, you're going to have to adopt that so you have quantum proof. quantum encryption that works.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And then you have this sort of nihilism. It breeds this nihilism, like nothing works. We should tear it all down. And sometimes that's the answer. But also, you have to kind of wake up. There has to be some force waking up trying to make these institutions actually functional. And that's what we see. our software doing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
It's actually creating a steering wheel for the C-suite that is connected directly to the people who do the work. And that gives you a basis to understand what is happening. When I provide steering input, is it actually going to result in changes? How do I iterate on my policy and my strategy? When I have a question like how many tanks are in the army, I should know that in three seconds.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And that lets me know, do I need more or not? And I can move on to the next problem, the next problem. If I have to wait three weeks to answer that, you can just see how the whole system just gets gunked up. Nothing actually works. You don't understand that the quality on assembly of doors is not working. And therefore, we're going to have problems.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And small problems that can be solved become big problems that people will struggle to solve. This breeds a legitimation crisis. The legitimacy of our institutions is based on the fact that they work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
How do you spend $11 billion on high-speed rail in California and have 1,600 feet of track that goes nowhere with a government institution that's really proud of how many jobs they created by doing this? You compare that to SpaceX. They've only spent $9.6 billion, and they put more than 300 rockets into orbit. Or we spent $40 billion on rural broadband and have no rural broadband.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
We've spent $80 billion on electric chargers, and I think we had like eight. So there's something wrong. Part of the disease that we're facing is this idea that all you need to do is cut a check. Like money will just solve the problem. You know, money enables the founder personalities. Money enables people to do the work. It's the front end of enabling the work. And it's the back end.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
It's the reward for having done the work. But someone's got to do the work. And you got to be really good at doing the work. And that's like, that's art. That's craft. You know, it's not a commodity. It's not mindless. You don't just outsource it. And we need people to be proud of that and our efficacy in doing that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
But then I think there's even more implications beyond that. The encryption is the first thing that we have to worry about. The next thing is, how are we going to employ this for decision advantage? How close are we to that? Well, that's kind of an open question.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You know, you think about I think the counterfactual, if you just say like, we didn't have Hyman Rickover, we had someone else, or we had DATMA back then, and we rotated people in and out of driving the nuclear Navy every two or three years, it wouldn't have worked. And so when we look at so many of things, why does the F-35, we conceived of it in the mid 90s, and it's just kind of working now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Why should it take 30 years when Kelly Johnson could build as a single human at Skunk Works? He's the founder of Skunk Works. He could build 41 airframes in his career. He could build the U2 in 13 months.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I do. I mean, the reason I've been writing about it is that I'm wildly optimistic that we're on the verge of changing it. I feel like it's a little bit like a ketchup bottle. You know, you shake it, you shake it, you shake it, nothing comes out, and then it comes out all at once. Like, this has been building. And people can kind of feel this subconsciously.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
They can see it in the parts of the American economy that are working. which frankly are the only parts of the economy, you know, look at Europe, nothing's actually working over there. So like the parts of the world economy that are working look like this, the parts that don't, you see it with when Doge goes to DC, like there's a lot of noise, certainly from the other side around Doge,
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I think really smart people I know keep saying we're really close, but really smart people in the 60s thought we were 10 years away from AI. We'll have to see.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
But it's been amazing. You have people who are the NBA athletes of technology walking around kind of realizing like, oh, that's a seventh grade basketball team over there. And people who can call balls and strikes. And conversely, you can be like, that person in government is a genius. They're not empowered. We need to empower. This is the person who actually knows the right answers. We pull that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Doge has the ability to make those calls and to do so with taste. And that realignment is profoundly needed. Why do you think there is so much pushback on that?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
It's not supposed to work this way. We were following the playbook. We had a playbook. There's a system. It's this belief in process over outcomes. And it's profane to have to blow up all the process and to believe that everything that we believed in the past didn't actually work, or that there would be another way of organizing yourself that would be superior and would work better.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And I think that's the subconscious undertone of the pushback. And then people, this, you know, it's like the best engineers are, like I said, with Hyman Rickover, he was hated by the Navy, but he was a national treasure. And can you hold that contradiction that, okay, yes, the engineer said something that hurt your feelings, but they're right. Can you hold that contradiction?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Are you optimizing the outcome? Because if you care about the outcome, that's easy to get over. It's like, yeah, you're right. So it's ego. It's all ego. What a shame, man. I think the results will speak for themselves. And I've seen this so many times. Once the bureaucracy gets out the way, you can often solve these problems inside of 30 days.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
So, and I think that's the, I know those guys, that's what they're focused on every day, which is just delivering results, keeping their head down, delivering results. And, you know, I think it's, they're a national treasure.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
From a technical perspective, we could have done it 30 years ago. I think from a political will perspective, it took President Trump's political will and the mandate that he got with the election in order to make it happen. And you still see the amount of pushback that there is.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And to tie it back to founder mode, my own support for President Trump is when I had a three-hour dinner with him in presence of a few other folks, and what I felt profoundly was a founder personality.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
This is a person who was going to throw away the manager playbook, who actually had an intuitive understanding of the things that were broken and what to do about them, was going to make contrarian calls and actually cares about the outcome.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I'm not. I think there will be some volatility. I've been looking at the markets, kind of thinking about how much of this is the market reacting to the playbook. It's like prophylaxis. Before the pain is even felt, they're like, but we take as an axiomatic given from our economic theory that this is a bad thing, versus empirically, it's already resulted in badness.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I think there's going to be some chop between here and there. But the ultimate thing about the founder playbook, it's not that founders are always right, but it's that they are first intuitionally driven, and then often can only fully explain their intuition over time. And so you have to decide, is the rebuttable presumption going to be we're going to lean in and try what the founder is saying?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Or are we going to resist every step? Is the burden of proof such that I will not take any action until I perfectly understand everything or not? And I think no great things are accomplished that way. It's too slow. The OODA loop's too long. It takes too long to bring everyone along. So I'm in a suspension of disbelief mode.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And I would say Scott Besant is a very smart person. Human, very smart macro trader, you know, part of an elite, there's probably like on the order of 10 people in the world like him or a current treasury secretary. And, you know, I basically, it comes down to confidence in the team. I have a lot of confidence in the team.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
My father did. Your father did. Yeah. So my father was the last of nine children in a single, he grew up, he was born in a single room mud hut in the south of India. And his siblings all helped him get to college. And India had its own version, still does, have its own version of DEI there. So he was not allowed, he's a very smart man, but he wasn't allowed to go to med school.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Well, the U.S. and our allies is really our focus. So, you know, we have most of Western European intelligence organizations use our software. You know, some of that is, look, they're subscale in many ways. So I don't want to call it philanthropy, but it's the right thing to do. After the Bataclan massacre, we volunteered to help the French out massively.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And they took I think that was actually kind of a mark to market moment of we need the help. A lot of these European countries have their own indigenous industrial base, which they're very proud of, but it's not at the level of the US industrial base.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And so there's always a conflation of what part of my industrial base is a jobs program and what part is supposed to provide deterrence and lethality to protect my nation. And so I think we're really happy with that level of work here. Australia, Japan, the US and our allies.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I think the way I think about it is that we want to make any sort of kinetic or even non-kinetic economic action against Taiwan too risky for our counterparts in China. We want to push out. If the Davidson window ends at 27, our goal is to make that 28, then make it 29 and 30 and just keep making it harder and harder and too risky for the CCP to do anything. That's the optimality.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
That's the primacy of winning. It's a mindset that's like, we're not trying to solve the problem. We're trying to make sure they can't move on Taiwan. Could you be a little more descriptive on how would we do that? We have to make it not survivable or unpredictable of what the outcome is going to be.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And I think the way the CCP works, the amount of certainty they're going to need is pretty high for an operation. And if they know exactly what we're going to do, they're going to figure out a counter plan. They're the best at long-range planning. They have a 50-year plan, and it's actually really well thought through. They're good at that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
But I think the fundamental American strength, like why I think we'll win in the end, is that we're crazy. We don't know what we're going to do. When we get punched in the face, we don't even know what we're going to do. So how could they?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And so I think we have to kind of bring that craziness left of the balloon going up and make sure that the level of unpredictability that we're creating in that battle space means that we stay in competition and never get to crisis or conflict.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
For the leading edge, very. And I think that's the important part of our head strategy. We have to, you know, I heard that Intel and TSMC are announcing a new joint venture. We need to bring, this is part of the broader need for reindustrializing the nation. You know, we are, we probably have two weeks of pharmaceutical supplies. Most of these pharmaceuticals are made in the upstream ingredients.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
The APIs are made in China. If we just start going through the things we need to ensure our American prosperity, too many of them are in the hands of our lethal adversary.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
He couldn't get a slot, but he became a pharmacist. That's like the next best thing for him. And he was sleeping, after he graduated from pharmacy school, he was sleeping literally under the kitchen table of one of his brothers. And his sister-in-law, brother's wife, got kind of tired of having him around the house, so found him a job in Nigeria. He was 23 at the time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Yeah, the reverse opium war, as I call it. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I think we do not yet have clarity of the threat amongst the American people. The national security community is not confused. They understand it is the priority threat. And I think part of this might just come down to our media and our culture. What was the last movie you saw that showed America is the good guy and the CCP is the bad guy?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You know, when I was a child, even the Worldwide Wrestling Federation had the Iron Shake. We had the Iranians as the back, that was the heel, right? There was a USSR heel. We had a very clear sense of who our adversaries were and that we were competing every day.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
If you look at the essential Chinese propaganda, which we kind of imposed on ourselves with their ascendancy into the World Trade Organization, it's taken two forms. One is we're so weak, there's nothing to worry about here. We're so weak. The other is we've already won. There's nothing to worry about here because you've already lost the competition.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
But I think these two lines of propaganda, even though they seem contradictory, they have one thing in common, which is saying we're not competing because either we're irrelevant or we've already won. But it was designed to obfuscate the fact that we are competing every single day and viciously. And that's the clarity that we need as the American people to realize that we're in a competition.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Today, it's an economic competition. Let's do everything we can to make sure it remains only an economic competition that requires us to invest in deterrence. The Chinese were kind of surprised that we did nothing when they militarized the Spratly Islands after telling us to our face that they were not going to do it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And this is the part where I think their miscalculus comes in because the sort of Midwestern, we positive some, we're fair people. You know, we seek peace. So we'll take you at your word and we'll treat you well. But at some point, you'll break that. And then, you know, as one admiral once told me, then the American OODA loop comes out, you know, observe, overreact, destroy, apologize.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And so how do we... how do we manage this so that we are actually conveying and managing the threat appropriately?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
It would be very bad. And I mean- Right now, it would also be very bad for them. And so what are they doing? They're trying to produce their own indigenous chips, their own GPUs. They want their own NVIDIA. We've curtailed their access. Of course, they're getting around sanction evasion. They're buying from Malaysia, buying from Singapore. But we've made it hard for them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
We're creating dilemmas and problems. So they're trying to make themselves self-sufficient. We need to be investing in the same things along strategic areas. It can include our allies. Sometimes I worry that friend-shoring is like a half measure. It's kind of an easy out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Like, yes, I'm not trying to exclude our allies from being part of the solution here, but everything that we can make at home in America, we should make at home in America. Now, the pathing really matters. When we were mobilizing for World War II, we took Bill Knudsen, a Danish emigre, direct commissioned him a three-star general, and he was in charge of war mobilization.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And so he, you know, young man, excited about adventure. He went to Nigeria as a pharmacist to build the first pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in all of Africa. Until then, all the drugs were imported. And so he did really well for himself at a very young age. I was probably born seven years after he'd been living in Nigeria. My mom went back to India to have me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
He had a lot of room and a lot of flexibility. And FDR actually put him in charge as a civilian in 38, I think, is when it happened. In 38, we have to remember, there was not consensus in America that we should be involved in this European matter. The strong sense of we got to do this, we should be isolationist here. There's conflicting views.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
But what FDR realized is it takes time to build factories. Like I need an option. Like maybe we should be isolationist. But what I definitely don't want to do is be isolationist because the cupboard is bare. So how do we mobilize so that we can provide credible deterrent? And I think this is not about wartime mobilization. It's about mobilizing so that there is not a war.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And that is really mobilizing our re-industrialization. And that was kind of a term, I've been talking about this for five years now, but back then it seemed like a far off fantasy. People thought it was a little crazy. This term has entered the mainstream. You will see it on Fox News. Reindustrialization is a theme. There are serious people who are investing serious capital to do this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
When we get the American private capital markets behind this, which is starting to happen, it's going to be unstoppable.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And to the point of confidence in your team, they're thinking about that. I've heard proposals that are around changing the depreciation and amortization schedule for factories and investments. So how do I use the financial math to encourage the capital markets to view these things differently? fundamental deregulation. How do we change NEPA?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
How do we change the regulation permitting processes so that it doesn't take you four years of waiting for a bureaucrat to tell you that you didn't dot the right I or cross the right T, but four minutes to get the approval to go. This is what unleashing American energy is about. What does a factory run on? Like the cost of energy is a material input to everything, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
It is the first input into all the goods and services we buy. You bring the cost of energy down, it is a massive deflationary force. And what we are the largest energy producer in the world. Like, the resources we have, we need to just get out of our own way on this and not have a regressive mindset around like, oh, you know, using energy is bad.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Actually, the basis of modern civilization is energy, and the more energy you use, the better your standard of living is, the more things are possible. I feel like that's not a contrarian thing to say anymore. You would have had pitchforks and protests if you said that five years ago. And now people are like, yeah, well, obviously that's true. How do we get after that?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You see the tech community investing in things like fusion and fission and small modular reactors and people who recognize the reason to be super optimistic, particularly on energy, is that the AI companies are going to be crippled if they're not able to have the energy that's needed to run their AI, which means they are investing in it themselves off their own balance sheet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
They're not waiting for a utility to do this or that. They're going to be building energy production behind the meter. Wow. It's not even going to the grid. It's like captive energy for their data center. And a lot of that is just the bureaucratic BS of how long does it take? Oracle was just talking about how one state utility company was saying, oh, we could get you this energy in the 2030s.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And then I came back to Nigeria as soon as I was old enough to travel. So really, my first three or so years of my life, I was in Nigeria. But the reason that came to an end, we had a horrible armed robbery in the house, which we lived across the street from the manufacturing facility. where all of the cash was kept from the operation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
2030s? You know, it's like, we should be talking, we need to measure everything in months. This is really the core thing that's gonna solve our problems is being impatient. Like we need to be thinking about what can we be doing now? What can get done? And that's what I love, the focus of this administration is very much, these are the things that must be delivered inside of this administration.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
That then changes how you think about solving these problems. It forces you to realize that the playbook and the process is totally screwed. It's never going to get there. It was never going to work anyways, but now it's just clear it's not going to deliver on the time. How do we reinvent ourselves in this moment to go make it work? What kind of energy should we be looking at? All types.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Like, I mean, if you really look at, you know, we need more natural gas. We need to make investments in nuclear. It's going to take longer. We, sure, bring on more renewables, but look at the reliability around base load, the variability, the battery storage means that we need to be practical.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
So I'm not trying to favor one type over the other, but we're going to need more of all of these types of energy. Would you like to see more nuclear? Yes, I would. Why? I think turning our back on the atom was one of the gravest mistakes for our rate of progress. Nuclear is largely expensive right now because we've regulated ourselves to death. The designs that we have are very safe.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Hyman Rickover, when he was building the nuclear navy, his safety standards were set so high, higher than civilian safety standards. because his litmus test was my son will be in this sub. How safe does it have to be for my son to be in this sub?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
If you compare that to the Soviet submariners, for every six months they served, they had six months of rest in Sochi to regenerate their bone marrow because they were irradiated to all hell. So there's a way of doing it. You get the right people, the right design, the right founder mode leadership.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
This stuff is safe, and it's abundant, and it's clean, and we can get it at scale, and you can build it in all sorts of places. And we have to be thinking about this from a competitive advantage perspective. I'm not sure it's a perfectly linear extrapolation, but in order for our shipbuilding to be competitive,
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You need more than just building government warships because to this point of a diversified R&D base, a workforce that knows how to do these things, you need scale, right? As we all know, the one shipyard in China alone has more than all the shipbuilding capacity of all the U.S. combined, right? They have 250 times the shipbuilding capacity that we do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I'm not sure that we need to match them, but we need to be able to produce ships. When we say we're going to have two subs a year, we need to have two subs a year, not 1.1.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I think it's all of the above. So they're not building 250 times the number of warships, but the ability to produce commercial ships enables them to drive down the cost of producing the warships and enables them to produce the warships at a speed that's relevant to building their Navy up to be big enough to keep us out of the theater or to create dilemmas and problems that we have to deal with.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And so it was a little bit of an inside job of people who worked there who did this. They decapitated the dog. They pistol-whipped dad. They threatened to execute him. They threatened my mom. I was a child, and really, I was just excited to have visitors. You can't control a child. I was just excited to have visitors in the middle of the night.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And so I think we should be thinking about how, what would be, it's just a thought experiment, but what would be required for commercial shipping, ship construction in America to be competitive on the world stage? I think we have to take an asymmetric approach because if we're just doing labor versus labor, we're going to lose that. But if we say, actually, we're going to build the first
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
commercial nuclear cargo fleet. It's going to have the lowest cost of operation. It's going to be able to be in service much longer.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And we're going to leverage the Navy's unique knowledge of how to do this in order to power this American prosperity that's going to then drive up the volume in shipyards, drive up the capital requirements and the ability to leverage capital markets to build new shipyards, bigger shipyards, to do the facilitation. Because right now, all that investment is on the American taxpayer.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And that's why we struggle with it. Like, how much should the taxpayer keep dumping into these shipyards? The answer is always more, but we're getting less for our money every single time. And the way out of this problem is to realize that monopsony, the government as a sole buyer, is actually the problem. That's how we got into this problem to begin with.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
The world used to be very different when the Berlin Wall still stood, just came down. Only 6% of major weapons system spending went to defense specialists. The other 94% went to what I call as dual purpose companies. Too much is said about dual use. A missile is single use. You need Palmer to build lethal effects that only the government is the buyer of. But dual purpose.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Chrysler used to build cars and missiles. Ford built satellites until 1990. General Mills, the cereal company, built torpedoes and inertial guidance systems in their mechanics division. No shit. Everything they learned about building machinery to process cereal, they were able to leverage in the service of national security to make our war fighters more lethal.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And what happened was that over time, the government became such a difficult buyer to work with. All sorts of esoteric rules that only matter for the government, all sorts of auditing, all sorts of bureaucracy, that people tried to figure out how to exit that business. And that started in the 70s. Boardrooms started talking about it. It accelerated in the 80s.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And then when the Last Supper happened in 1993, there was this dinner in the Pentagon. We used to have 51 major defense primes. Well, they got the 15 largest together, they had a dinner and they said, we need a peace dividend, we've won the Cold War, we're gonna slash defense spending. So for every dollar we used to spend, we're gonna spend 33 cents and it's gonna happen all at once.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
you guys are not all going to survive. You have our permission to consolidate, to merge, to try to find commercial lines of business, like do what you need to do. And we let that happen until 1999 when we blocked the merger of Lockheed and Northrop. That was the last, we said, okay, this is too much. So we went from 51 down to five. The popular narrative. What are the five?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Northrop, Lockheed, GD, Boeing, and Raytheon. The popular narrative is this is when we lost competition in the industrial base. 51 down to five, you have less people to pick from. That definitely happened, but I don't think it's the dominant problem. The dominant problem is really that the consolidation bred conformity.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Dad was only spared because one of the five armed robbers was a regular at, my mom ran an open kitchen. Anyone who worked at the facility, anyone who was help, anyone from the surrounding area, they could always come and eat Indian food that mom would make. And so this guy was a regular and he just, you know, he just made sure they didn't kill us. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You had companies that were almost like test tube babies, artificial mergers, no single unified culture. They became essentially almost like state-owned enterprises, extensions of the government, just doing the government's bidding. There was not enough heresy, not enough crazy ideas that pushed the envelope, not enough Kelly Johnsons of the world. It drove out the founders.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Founders cannot work in a conformist environment. They are heretics by their very nature. And it drove the founders to other industries like tech. The reason for immense optimism in this moment. So that 6% today is 86%. So the 6% that used to go to only defense specialists has ballooned into 86% that go to defense specialists. So these companies have very little commercial business.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
They are kind of on the Galapagos Islands. They've built specialist entities that only know how to sell and interact with the government. And this is part of our, and this is- So that's the key.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You compare that to China. So in China, their primes, their equivalent of our big five, only 27% of their revenue comes from the PLA, the People's Liberation Army. The rest comes from commercial things they're selling. Unfortunately to us, so that cheap crap we're buying on Amazon is subsidizing potential lethality against future US service members.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
So let me give you a cause for optimism. More than $120 billion of private capital has been deployed in the last three years in the service of national security, in the national interest. You know, the founders are back. Palmer Luckey is an archetypal example of this. You talk about a heretic, right? We have people who are hardheaded, who are doing this more...
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
with a horizon that is beyond just what's going to happen this quarter. They have a vision of what they're trying to create in the world. And there are hundreds of them. And the department is open to working with them. There's a whole sea change, particularly with this administration, of recognizing the need for this reformation. And so we're starting to embrace that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I think we should, to the point of the ketchup bottle, it is coming out all at once right now. And it is the moment for us to seize the opportunity to fix ourselves.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Saronic and their unmanned, their USVs, the surface vessels. You have Epirus with anti-drone technology, counter-CUS, Shield AI.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Shield builds autonomy for fighter pilots. They flew the F-16 autonomously. They built the VBAT, which is a drone that so far seems like the primary US-made drone that is able to survive in the contested Russian EW environment in Ukraine. To the point of just getting out of our own way, how do the Ukrainians decide what drones to buy? Once a quarter, they have a field test.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
They create a test range. They jam the crap out of the environment. Anyone who wants can show up, fly your stuff. If it doesn't fall out of the sky, we might buy it. And Shield showed up to one of these things, and they were the only one who didn't fall out of the sky.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And so we left all of our earthly possessions behind and had to find a place to resettle. Dad had a friend who somehow just, you know, how life works, had moved to L.A., a friend that he grew up with in this village, moved to L.A. and he was selling knickknacks at theme parks.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
No requirements document, no red tape. The facts, this is the equivalent of forward-deployed engineering. You go to where the problem is and it either works or it doesn't work. You taste the steak, you either like it or you don't.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I don't know, if you had to write a requirements document of what is required in a steak that you're going to like, it misses the essence of, I don't know, when I taste it, it either is great or it's not.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Yeah, I think it was a great bet by Joe very early on to take an entirely different approach to this gallium-based semiconductor material to generate walls of energy. that actually almost act like cyber effect. So unlike it's not one-to-one where you're firing a munition against a single drone, you're really putting a wall of energy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
So it doesn't matter if it's one drone or a thousand drones, it's going to have the efficacy of being able to stop them and block them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Yeah, it's putting up an entire wall of energy. And that is, you know, it's a very clever approach to solve the problem. I think we're going to need defense in depth with an approach like this. When you think about the UAS problem, it is a massive offset that our adversaries have against us. You know, how many million dollar missiles can you shoot at $200 drones, even $2,000 drones?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You're going to lose that equation. And so we're going to need entirely different ways of thinking about this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Now, this challenges, so there's a question of how quickly can the force adapt these things and recognizing that you're not going to have just one answer, that you're going to actually have to have a series of answers that mean that you're not afraid of putting your destroyers into a position to be relevant anymore. And that's the greatest threat.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
So when I look at Ukraine, there are really three lessons I take away. And this is one of them. The Ukrainians, people often look and say, wow, isn't it amazing that they sunk half the Russian black sea fleet, even though they don't have a Navy? And I say, no, no, no, no. It's because they didn't have a Navy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
That's how they could conceive of an entirely different force structure that had sea dues, essentially, these cheap explosive munition drones that were guidable with a Starlink. It's an entirely different conception of the problem that I think a big surface Navy could get there eventually, but it's not gonna get there as quickly or as dynamically. That's one lesson.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
The second one is we should have realized we had a five alarm fire when we went through 10 years of 155 production in 10 weeks. And I think in World War II, we used to make like 500,000 shells a month. And now we're struggling to make roughly one-tenth that, 65,000 or so. We've had some time. Ukraine didn't happen last week. We've had some time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
What lessons can we take about what it's going to take to actually ramp up the industrial base as a consequence? The lesson from that is that we got it wrong. We thought the stockpile was the deterrent. If we could go to our adversaries and say, look at how much stuff we have sitting on the stock they'd be scared. It's not. The deterrent is your ability to produce the stockpile.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Yeah. And so we should never have cut down to minimum rate production, all these ideas that were really born out of an economic fantasy that we could spend way less and still have as much security. Look, I think it's reasonable for a democracy to debate. Like, how much do we want to spend? but to believe you're not trading off security.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Like, we have to just account for all the trade-offs appropriately. And I think if we all understood, like, actually, we're going to change our spending profile, and it's going to mean that we're much less secure, we may have made different decisions along the way. So we shouldn't, you know, that is a hard-earned lesson that the production, not the stockpile, is a deterrent. We shouldn't forget it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
So this friend was like, there's this place, Orlando. I live in LA. There's this place, Orlando. All the theme parks are moving there. I need someone I can trust there. And that's how we ended up in Orlando selling knickknacks to theme parks, which was fantastic. For me, it was fantastic. My after-school care program was really mom would pick me up from school.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And it should shape everything. That's why you need something like an end rule. You need to be able to make 10,000 of these things, not 100. And when you think in your mind, oh, I'm only going to need 100, you start having all the bells and whistles. Like, how do we make this thing super exquisite, super fancy? It needs to do all these things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And I'm only going to have a few of them, so let's make it like a Swiss Army knife that can do everything. And then it turns out it takes eight years to build one of them, and they're ungodly expensive. And then in the moment of need, you realize, I actually need 10,000 of these. And so when you start realizing those trade-offs, like, how can we cut production time down to one-fifth.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
It should take 20% as long to build these things. They should be affordable so we can be able to build 100 times as many as we would historically have built. And now we're back to deterrent.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
We'd go to SeaWorld so she could restock the shelves. And I'd be petting the stingrays. So I thought that was normal. I didn't quite realize what a unique experience it was. Now, there were some downsides to this. Some of the knickknacks we sold were t-shirts. And until I was old enough to read, I was dressed in all of the t-shirt misprints. It didn't say Shamu. It would say Tamu.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
It's like everything that went wrong, that was free clothes I got to have. But it was also really a privilege to grow up in the shadow of the Space Coast. Orlando is close enough that in elementary school, you would file out to the courtyard to watch the shuttle launch. You would wake up Saturday mornings to a double sonic boom of the shuttle reentering.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And it gave you a visceral sense of scientific progress, American prosperity, what we can do collectively when we put our mind to it. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
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Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
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Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
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Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
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Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
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Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
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Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
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Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
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Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You know, he vertically integrated. He builds the whole rocket engine himself. And that means he can control and reduce the number of parts. He can say, hey, you know, these three parts should be combined because it'll be more efficient. And that's how you get the asymmetric advantage and the leaps, the ability to innovate on these things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And so that's where I say, it's not that we're not good at making things in this country, it's that the old way of doing it is not competitive anymore. We need this new way, much more vertically integrated, much more creative. His R&D engineers at SpaceX sit on the factory floor of assembly. Usually these are thought of as two totally different things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
At a pretty early age, because my dad, in some sense, you could say, was also an entrepreneur. And he was always encouraging me to think about these things. And I worked at his pharmacy in Orlando as a child in high school. I started programming. 11th grade, I started programming professionally and kept doing that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You have people who design the parts, you have people who assemble the parts. You know, but actually, if the engineers can see what's happening in assembly that's causing it to be slow, what's causing quality issues, it might change how you design the parts. And so how are they going to observe that if they're not physically sitting together?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
It sounds so simple, but it speaks to the cultural thing, and it's resonant with forward-deployed engineering, right? So how do we leverage this, like, uniquely American perspective on doing these things to just get back to being the best in the world at doing it again?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Well, I'm talking to colleagues in the national security community about it to see if there's a way of doing it. I'm also trying to just do it through the front door. Are there companies in particular where we can provide capital to reinvigorate it? The easy place to start is in the US. You have a lot of these mid-tier suppliers They are actually family-owned.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
The next generation maybe doesn't want to continue the business. Because the government has been such a promiscuous buyer, so unpredictable in demand, they haven't had the economic reason to invest in capitalizing their facilities to do much more. There have been boom and bust cycles around this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
But if you can buy a bunch of these up and aggregate scale, particularly in a thematic line where it's like, actually, these three parts are related, and I could actually make it one part, and I could deliver the part more cheaply, generate more value. He's like, how do you get the math to work out?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
But I think we could just start here and start filling in the holes that we have with capabilities and technologies from allies.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I'll take both sides of that because I feel like I really do. I have a view of it, which is few people should argue with this idea of taking the world's best. But so much of the H-1B program has also been abused to take average.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Right, and so then that kind of, you lose the moral high ground on the entirety of the program.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And so, yeah, like, you know, that's what's amazing about America, that we can continue to incorporate the world's best who want to come here, who believe that America's a shining city on the hill, who want to assimilate, who want to be American. But we have to do so in a way that also is clear-eyed about our economic prosperity, that we're doing this in the service of the American people.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
It's not just that we want them to come here and be prosperous. As a consequence of them being prosperous, they're creating jobs, they're creating innovation, they're creating economic security. And I think large swaths of the program are used by certain companies to essentially hire cheap labor they probably could have been hiring here and should be hiring here. And so...
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You know, both things can be true. There have been abuses and we want the very best to be here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Well, fusion, so fission is how do you split the atom? Fission, excuse me. So fission, nuclear fission is how do you split the atom to generate power? Fusion is what our sun does, which is how do you like jam hydrogen molecules together to create energy? Um helium but in doing so it also releases energy huge amounts of energy We don't have commercial grade fusion yet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I actually dropped out of Cornell for a hot minute there to build a company and try to get going with it. But I've always been dabbling in these sorts of efforts. And I knew that ultimately I wanted to be part of creating something new, being part of an early founding team.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
That's that's more r d Um, but fission is a tried and true technology all of our all the nuclear that when we think about nuclear we're really talking about fission um, and we are experimenting with what's called small modular reactors. How do you go from what is otherwise a huge $30 billion multi-decade power plant and make these things smaller, more modular?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
They're essentially pre-assembled, so you can put them where you need them. They require less infrastructure, substantially less time to build, and the designs are modern in a way that it's default safe. You don't have a risk of a meltdown.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
The physics just don't work the same way that these legacy old systems do, which frankly, we've had the technology for a while, but because of our, I mean, understandable fear around it, we backed away from the atom and it became politically, we just started investing in other things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I think it'll be harder for households to do that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I'm hoping that the tech company's enormous appetite for cheap power is going to provide the necessary demand stimulus to the economy to go build these things again and provide the necessary stimulus for the government to reform the permitting process so that we can be clear-eyed and focused on the cost of power, the time it takes to build these things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
But you're going to need, talk about another industry that lacks founders. These public utilities are basically also run like state-owned enterprises. So where is that innovation going to come from? Well, it's going to come from the small modular reactor company or the nontraditional power provider who's behind the meter.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
That means that they're just providing their power directly to this data center. They're not trying to put it on the grid for everyone else to use. So there's less regulation, less... bureaucratic coordination as a consequence of doing that. But by doing that, eventually, that power is going to be there. And any excess power, you're going to want to connect to the grid at some point.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
So that's going to drive the stimulus to modernize the grid infrastructure as well. We've really underinvested in the grid. We probably have a couple trillion dollars. of investment we need to make, but we haven't been able to spin this chicken or egg thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
As we get economic value out of being, hopefully, the world leader in the application of AI, I think it will make the other side of the equation clearer of why the modernization needs to happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And really, the reason I went from Cornell to Stanford in 2003 can be hard to remember, but even Google didn't recruit on the Cornell campus. Most of my technical classmates, unfortunately, went into consulting and banking. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not the same thing as creating.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You know, I like to quip it. At some fundamental level, you either believe in free markets or you don't. And especially when you look at the government having, you know, post-Cold War, like...
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
everyone has given up on communism including the Russians and the Chinese except for Cuba and The US government essentially like we have five-year centralized plans and DoD We call it the fight app like literally we have a five-year plan that looks very very Soviet in terms of how we think the world's gonna work It's this centrally unplanned approach so if we can start building stuff behind the grid behind the behind the meter and
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And if we can do the permitting reform that's necessary that this administration is focused on, it's going to enable new entrants to start creating power and reduce the monopoly that historically the utilities have had, which as a theory of change means like they have to react to this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
So they're either going to slowly find themselves shriveling and shrinking, or they're going to reinvigorate themselves and show up to compete and be like, okay, these guys were the first movers and we can do it. There's kind of a theory of the economy that's actually at any given epoch, there's only maybe five to 10 live players, you know, founder driven institutions, really innovative.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
They set the pace, they define what's possible. And the other companies in the economy are sort of mimetically different. copying, they're imitating them. And that's OK, because it provides the necessary stimulus for the whole thing to kind of work. And I think the problem we found ourselves in, let's say the last 20 years, is outside of tech largely, there have been no live players.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
these parts of the economy have kind of shrunk and shriveled and become, they're only dead players. And so the reinjection of some live players is how we'll reinvigorate this. Andrel is a live player for hardware defense primes, right? And the other primes have to respond to that. And that, if you're going to have hope in them, some of them may not.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
But the ones who want to survive are going to respond to that. Similarly in utilities, the small modular reactor companies, the upstarts are going to be the live players that drive the change. And this, I feel like it's such an exciting time because you start to see the emergence of these live players.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
People are coming out of their shell and cocoon and, you know, you can point to things that are worth investing in. The capital markets are starting to see that. They're starting to put capital behind these founders. You know, it's a great time for the American revival.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
What usually happens is at first you just laugh at them. So we're in this phase of like, well, it's never gonna work. You know, the fish is in water. The fish doesn't understand what could possibly be outside the water. So, you know, yeah, for the utility company and the rules they live by and the bureaucracy they've ensconced themselves in, it is never gonna work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And so I had to find some way, some mechanism to get to the West Coast to be with a bunch of other people who really thought of building as the primary purpose of their life's mission. So within two months of being at Stanford, I had a full-time job as the fifth employee at a startup called Zoom with an X that did international money transfer. It was seed funded by Peter Thiel.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
They couldn't do it today, you know, but these guys are throwing away the rule book. They're not gonna follow the same rules and subject themselves to the same bureaucracy and have the same slow decision-making process. They're gonna do it differently. And once this starts working, they're going to have to respond. So three of the five Andral co-founders worked for me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And they are world-class talent. In my interaction with some of the primes, the thing they love to say is something like, Andral's like the Theranos of defense. Andral's a fraud. And I was really scratching my head. It's like, why do they believe this? It's so obviously not true, just to be 100% clear. It's like, obviously not true. These guys are crushing it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And my conclusion was it's because they can't imagine of a different way of doing it. Therefore, if there's a company doing it a different way, it must be a fraud. It can't work. So as Andrew starts to just keep crushing it out there, they will realize there's a different way. They will have to realize there's a different way of doing it. They'll have to respond to these things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And that's the reinvention stimulus that the economy needs.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I think it both looks exactly like the past and completely different. So the part that's exactly like the past is I think that the kind of fundamentals of the OODA loop, that it is about decision advantage and speed, is the same thing. Those principles are not changing. The most valuable application of technology then is going to be towards that end. So why is lethal autonomy so valuable?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You could say we've had that for a while. If you're flying in a fighter jet, it is your computer that is telling you that there is an enemy on your radar that you can't see. You're trusting the computer. That sounds like autonomy to me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And then when you release, when you press fire control there, the kind of terminal guidance is happening through an autonomous system, through the computer on the projectile. Okay, so now we're talking about, let's just start there. It's a difference of kind. I'm sorry, it's not a difference of kind. It's a difference of degree. We already have systems like this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
We're just talking about supercharging it, doing substantially more with it. And what is the more? The more is a much shorter term. decision-making lifecycle at much greater scale. And you start to see that with these first-player FPV drones. I think the Russians are losing roughly 1,500 people a day to these little drones that Ukrainians are flying. So at some point- 1,500 people a day? Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
It's tough. That's effective. So if you start thinking about that, it's like, well, that's the equivalent of small arms, really. It's like part of the innovation now is, okay, this drone has become the equivalent of small arms. But doctrinally, and that's how the Ukrainians treat it. It's like the E3, E4 who has fire control on that weapon, right? But for us, you know, we're not at war.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
We haven't changed our doctrine. Like we would think of... The authorities on that is something the equivalent of a tomahawk, like a cruise missile. It's going to go way up the chain. And of course, if the balloon goes up, we'll throw all that away and we'll reinvent our doctrine. But I think we should be getting ahead of that now and start thinking about what are small arms now?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And my interviews were with Rolof Botha and Keith Reboy, who are founding members of the PayPal mafia. And that's how I kind of got started in that world.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Because it's not just your M4. So that's one piece of it. And then I think that also implies that the fighting force is going to have to be more technical. They're not going to have to be coders. But the responsibility, just like if you're going through Green Beret qualification, you learn everything about the gun. You know how to assemble it, disassemble it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
They're going to be that level of proficiency you're going to need for a set of technical capabilities that are going to be decisive on the battle space. It's going to extend to electronic warfare and cyber attacks and space-based access and communication. all the way to the end lethal effects.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I do think we're going to have to invest in, and this is where you need the outside tech mentality in kind of an Apple-like experience here. You know, yesterday when I was at Bragg, part of this capability exercise that General Praga put on talking to the different MOSs, you know, the special ops medic was like, my job is the best job. You know, the weapons officer, my job is the best job.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Well, the commo guy was like, my job is the worst job. When everything works, no one even knows I'm around, and the second things stop working, you know, it's all my fault. And what I saw in that was cognitive burden. Basically, like, we... How often does your internet go down at home? How often do you have to think about these things? The amount of investment, your iPhone just kind of works.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And we are doing a great disservice to these commo officers or NCOs by the burden we place on them to have to manage these things versus what our technology could actually be doing. So we have to redraw that front line so they can actually focus on the decisions that make the beer taste better, so to speak. The decisions that actually matter on the battle space.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
as opposed to the things that set the conditions so that you can even think about those things.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I think there's no doubt that a meaningful portion is. The question is, how do you know what that portion is? And I think there's a fair amount of good debate that needs to happen about that. Let's take the tank. Some people think the tank's obsolete. I'm not so sure the tank's obsolete. Maybe it's obsolete on the first island chain.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
There's a question of, what are the conditions around which you need these things? And how would you reinvent the hardware to make it relevant? I view that as a productive competitive stimulus. Everyone who owns this platform should be thinking about, why is my platform still relevant?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
So I had been working at Zoom for almost three years. And one of the colleagues I was working with said, you know, there's this company that just sounds perfect for you. It's a small group of people. At the time, it was 12 people. And my freshman room dorm mate at Stanford is one of the co-founders. No kidding? So he put me in touch with Joe, and Joe hired me. That's how I got started.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
But what the kind of initial bureaucratic impulse is to say, is to not say why, but just to dig in and say, it is relevant. You just don't understand. I need to protect the program. I need to protect this rice bowl that I have. And maybe the tank of the future has to be different than the tank of the past. The way that we employ it may have to be different.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
or may not, but that's something that you have to earn that opinion. You have to prove that out. We don't have enough competing force structures. It would be better if there was a group who was thinking about the future relevancy of the tank and a group trying to make the tank irrelevant.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You know, and that's what I saw with the Ukrainians not having a navy, which is they could conceive of this completely differently. You know, maybe we should have a navy one and navy two. It's a thought experiment. I wouldn't literally do it that way, but you can see how you need kind of these oppositional forces.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
There's a reason the tank was invented by the UK Royal Navy, not by the UK's land forces. The tank was anathema to them. It was as heterodox to the platforms that they already had. And they viewed it as unnecessary and wrong. And can you imagine? They would have lost World War I without it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I think that's probably one of the most important reforms. First of all, the person is the program. So stop thinking about these programs as independent of, do you have the right human to lead this? And by the way, once you get the right human, don't let them leave. We know this. The most important things, like the head of the nuclear reactor program in the Navy, it's an eight-year gig.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
As you well know, most gigs in the military, they're like two to three years. There's a reason we made it an eight-year gig, because there's increasing returns to expertise, and it's a highly complicated thing, and you need continuity there. I actually think, in reality, there's many more things that look like that where you need continuity.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
If you're in a role for two to three years, you don't even know you've made a mistake, let alone had the opportunity to learn from a mistake. When I think about the 19 years plus I've been a pounder, I have screwed so many things up. And I've had the ability to learn from all those things to make it better and better. It's just compounded over time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
If you somehow had someone do my role where we were just swapping every two to three years, I can't even imagine how much further behind we would have been. So that's one aspect of personnel. The second aspect is... With AI and the AI revolution, people think, oh, it's going to make the median person better. That's true. But it's going to make the very best person superhuman.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And so in a lethal context, in defense context, that means that's the only thing that matters. Like, who are the very best people? How do we give them the decision advantage to win? And that then, as a consequence, you have to think about who are your best people.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I'll tell you one of the combatant commands, I won't get into all the details, but one of the combatant commands, there is a major, prior police officer, joined the service late, Army major, he does the work of 100 people. No shit, 100 people, kinetic strikes around the world that are being driven by his work. I don't think the military has ever been in a position where it's that asymmetric.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And so that has a lot of consequences for your force structure and how you think about who should be in what role. What are you going to lose when that person rotates out? You know, and then our ability, you know, because the more we took, when I said earlier, Palantir thinks of itself as a artist colony, as opposed to a factory, we didn't talk about what is a factory.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
To me, a factory is a place where you have this linear progression, you have this chart. Here's the ladder you climb, here are the rules, here are the experiences, everything's mapped out. And that gives the human a lot of comfort. It gives the institution comfort. It's easy to understand what to do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You don't have to really think that hard about what comes next or answer hard questions like, am I growing? Or any of these things that people have legitimate questions around. But what it does is deprives you of the sense of, what is this human really good at? What are they world class at? What is their superpowers? And how do I maximize that use for lethality?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You can see that sort of thinking in JSOC, smaller community, more primacy to the outcomes that need to be driven, higher stakes, but the big machine loses that qualitative sense. And so I think that's gonna be really important. When I think about the most important projects we've been involved with, There were really a handful of commanders who were so insightful.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I think they might be offended to hear me describe them this way, but they are what we would call in Silicon Valley product managers. They are the people with the vision of what they need the software to do so that they can accomplish this thing in the world. And they would not see it as below them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Three-star, four-star generals, they would not see it as below them to sit there and critique your mocks. of and tell you these pixels are wrong. I need it to be like this because they recognize that what they're getting is an Iron Man suit, a software Iron Man suit that allows them to control the battle space. It's got to fit them perfectly. It's got to fit their mind.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
They are in this context, founder personalities, right? And as a consequence, they can get so much done. And I think so much goes wrong when you're trying to think about your software solution independent of the human who's going to be wielding it and operating the principle, the founder.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
It was honestly something much smaller. I mean, it was still ambitious in the sense that this group of folks wanted to work on problems to help a handful of institutions in the world with counterterrorism.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I think it's one example of it. It'll cut out. It'll make you a much smaller, leaner fighting force for sure. So let's just call it half. Yeah. You can probably make everything half as big and as lethal or more lethal than before. There's so many things with tanks. How do you clear the range of fire? The commander has to pop their head up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
They have to somehow get on a phone and tell the other tanks. When the soldiers are dismounting, you don't want to be in the field of fire. That should all be software. No one should be picking up the phone. The tank should be able to communicate to the other tanks.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
So once you start unpacking the layers of how many things we're just covering down with human labor, you start to realize, oh, this stuff's going to go away. The humans are doing it slow. We're doing it at the speed that humans can do it. And we make mistakes when we're doing it. And it has a huge training burden to do it. So how long does it take to even ramp people up changes?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
So I think it's going to be a pretty dramatic impact. You have to earn it, though. You have to kind of ship these innovations to the operating fighting force. And no one will be faster to adopt this than the fighting force. It makes them more survivable, more lethal. There was one project we did. At NTC, at Fort Irwin, the division was roaming around the desert.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You know, division, big army formation. But using the latest technology, just like this, they were able to get their division footprint down to 26 people. So instead of the normal 400-plus people you need, a big jock, big screens, which means the enemy can see you, you're pretty immobile, you're not going to be survivable, you're going to be blown to smithereens.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And we had this idea that in the discourse, if we can remember what it was like immediately post 9-11, it was really the political discourse was something like, what matters more, security or privacy? And it's like, to us as engineers, that sounded stupid. Like, don't both of those things matter? And so... Politicians, they debate where should you be on the efficient frontier?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
26 people, the red team could not find them in the desert.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Well, you definitely want first contact to be made by... entities that have no blood in their system, right? Like the front line of troops, but there's also the front line of robots, and that should be further front. And we need to be thinking about how we have less risk to force as a consequence and have, you know, improved mission outcomes by doing this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I do think, though, that the tail is where the immense opportunity is. So the tail here, so yes, it's going to make the tooth sharper, and you're going to need fewer teeth. But the tail... is enormous. You have more people in the Acquisition Corps than you do in the Marine Corps. And the human processes that we use to support all of this is both very latent and slow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
It obfuscates indirectly just because humans are touching and massaging the data, like what's actually going on. And we need to integrate that. When I think about the most important missing strategic asset to the US government from a deterrence perspective, it is an integrated view from the factory floor to the foxhole.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And by that, I really mean, let's articulate the threats we care about under the timelines. These are the foxhole scenarios that matter to us. This is the national defense strategy. This is who we're trying to deter and when. And work that backwards to, based on what I'm spending and building, does any of that stuff matter? Will it be there in time?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And I think the Department of Defense is the only institution I know of that has divided up supply and demand. The process of integrating supply and demand is usually the beating heart of a commercial company. This sales and operation planning process, people have different names for it. In the department, we ask the services to go build things. That's the supply side.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And we ask the combatant commanders to do the war fighting. That's the demand side. They have to respond to real world events. They don't really get that much of a vote in terms of what's happening here. We have a lot of control over what's happening here. We have ideas about the scenarios in the world we care about making sure don't happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
How do we integrate these things so that we understand like, you know what, it actually would be better to buy a less capable weapon system we can make seven times faster at a lower price point because the other stuff's not going to be ready in a time that's relevant to anyone, right? It's just running headless by doing this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Now, and I think if you had that, it becomes the first way you could have meaningful conversations like, yes, I know there are jobs in your district. But do you understand how you're actually going to sacrifice American prosperity? We are going to lose over 100 jobs in your district. And I think that becomes now you've changed. Turn the tables on what is politically survivable.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Should we trade off this to have more of this or whatever? But engineers, they build things so you can have more of both.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Yeah, the Titan truck is a satellite ground station on wheels that's really about enabling long-range precision fires. So how can we do deep sensing of the battle space to enable precision fires of the enemy deep in their territory? What I think is really cool about the Titan program is that we were the first software company to win as a prime contractor. It is a physical thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
We still don't think of ourselves as a hardware company. We built a team of super friends, of power horses, Andral, Northrop Grumman, L3 Harris, Sierra Nevada. They're helping us build this thing. But what makes the truck in some sense is a commodity.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
What's in the shelter is what's doing the AI that's finding the enemy on the battle space using national technical means, using satellite communications, doing the processing, processing, exploitation, and dissemination on board of this with a two-man crew. So very, very efficient. and enabling then the transmission to the gun line to actually go destroy and close with the enemy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And building this around the software first. What does the software need to do? That is our lethal capability. Then how do I make it as, amazing for the warfighter as possible as a consequence. Rather than doing what we've done backwards so many times is we have this hardware platform, and then we're constrained by what software can we put in there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And so who's going to build the actual technology that allows us to protect the data so that we can maximize what we can share, so that there's never going to be dots that we can't connect again, and do so in a way that the American people have confidence in and can believe in, and recognizing that a solution that was really going to do that would have to span countries.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And it's not good enough, and it's not adaptable, and there's not enough compute. You kind of designed it backwards. And this is one of the paradoxes. So if you're a true historical hardware company, you can think about like building a house. If you're building a house, you've got to build the foundation first. You are entirely limited by the foundation. Software is not like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
With software, you've got to build the kitchen first, and you build the rest of the house around the main thing. And now we're starting to see that culture enter into defense. That's what Tesla does. That's what SpaceX does.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
In defense, we're starting to see that happen, where people are taking very sophisticated, the next generation of platforms, and they're starting with the software-first approach. What does this platform need to do? What are the threats? What do I need to be able to sense? What do I need to be able to affect? Can I even build that compute first? Which, by the way, goes pretty quickly.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You can measure that in months, not years, certainly not decades. Once I get that right, now I have the constraints around what I can build my airframe or my land vehicle or my submersible around because I know it can accomplish the essential mission that I need and has the capabilities to do it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And you don't end up in these situations like with the frigate where you buy the frigate, you make a bunch of changes along the way, and you realize it won't float. The whole thing is for naught because you didn't start with the software-based approach. What about the boat? Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
The same concepts apply to surface vessels and submersibles and to airframes, actually, where you're really thinking about, our big challenge in the Pacific is, how do we get inside the weapon engagement zone? The enemy has been able to really build up a lot of air defenses and hypersonics, and they can threaten and hold us at risk when we're inside of this engagement zone.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
We don't have sufficient defenses. So maybe we need to build a bunch of relatively attributable, but certainly autonomous systems that don't have risk to force. that enable us to do the sensing we need to create the maneuver space we need.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And so there with Tenebris, it's really about using commoditized approaches to building ships so that we're not reliant on an industrial base that can't absorb more capacity and adding the mission-specific payloads that are highly exquisite and highly classified and modular at the point of need. And using that as, you know, it's not just about this ship
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
or this family of ships, but really a family of capabilities, whether it's space, air, sea, land, that give you this sort of software-defined approach to warfare.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
You know, one of the proudest operations that we were involved in was defeating an ISIS cell in Iraq that had a downed US drone that they were going to load with explosives and bring to a hospital, explode it, and then blame it on the coalition. And to solve that problem, it required intel from the Danes, the Americans, and the Brits. You know, and how does that work historically?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
I think software is a unique American strength, and it really comes down to culture. Look, there are smart people everywhere in the world. But think about it this way. There are zero Indian enterprise software companies that are competitive on the world stage. There are zero Chinese enterprise software companies. Europe only has a handful, and they're a pretty legacy. So what is it about...
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
America that we have all this software expertise. And it's cultural. Sometimes people look at Silicon Valley and they think, maybe we imported this culture from India or Israel. We didn't. We imported it from Iowa. It came from Bob Noyce, who is the co-founder of Intel, the co-inventor of the transistor.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And it comes from a Midwestern culture, a willingness to play positive sum games, open communication, transparency, a belief in working together. He brought that with him. The word open door policy, Noyce coined that. It's a Noycism. There's a way in which Silicon Valley doesn't even understand how much we are the progeny of this noise and this noise in culture.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And that's really permeated so much of how we organize ourselves to be able to build software at a scale that is world-beating by a long margin. The second best country in the world is Israel, and they can build canoes, not aircraft carriers. They can't get the culture of collaboration to scale even close to the level that we can.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
This is why you see most Israeli founders, when they found their second company, they moved to New York to start it, because you're not going to get the big success that you want otherwise. And so then I think we should lean into that. You're not going to win the war by shooting bits at your adversary. At the end of the day, you have to bend metal.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Hardware is a critical capability, but we should do it asymmetrically. Our hardware should be way smarter than our adversaries. That's something that we have the capability uniquely to do. Even when you think about DeepSeq, which we have this Chinese AI model, you can see two things from it. They couldn't have built that model without essentially distilling or stealing this from OpenAI.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
So you needed the requisite OpenAI investment. And then two, they did come up with a couple of very clever software optimizations, like novel innovative things that represent meaningful refinements on what's been happening here. But it is a refinement.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
That as a precondition required, it's not a coincidence that all the frontier AI labs are within 50 miles, a 50 mile radius in San Francisco, right? That density of talent and the culture that's required to organize around it is an American superiority.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Hopefully you have friends at each of these services and you're all going to share information and it gets through the foreign disclosure process. And, you know, everything in that methodology is set up so that we lose. You're not going to be able to do it fast enough to intervene.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
But, you know, our technology enabled that to happen machine to machine in a way that before they could get the drone out of their garage, they were gone. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
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Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
Yeah. Well, yeah, at this point, so we do much more than counterterrorism, as you're pointing out. The business, there's two sides of it. There's the government side and the commercial side. OK. And it's about 50-50. which is unusual, I think, for reasons we'll maybe get into later. But the commercial side, it's 50 different industries, energy and mining, insurance, pharmaceuticals.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
And the government side, most of what we're well known for is defense and intelligence. Absolutely, that's two-thirds of the business. But also health, the IRS, tax fraud, Justice Department, helping these organizations run themselves better. And what the technology really does, you can think about it as like an operating system for an organization. It allows you to actually see yourself.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
It's shocking how hard this is. How do I have access to all of the data that's in my enterprise in a way that I as a human think about it? I as the principal, not just the human, but I as the principal, like what's my model for this? What are the questions I want to ask? Simple example, when Rocket Man was rattling his saber in 2017,
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
In North Korea, the Army wanted to answer the question, how many tanks are there in the Army? That is a three-week data call. Are you serious? It takes three weeks to get an inventory? Until we got involved, it took three weeks to answer that question. Because there is no canonical representation of a tank. And what do you mean by tank? Do you mean the ones that are ready or not ready?
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
So the way you would do it is you would send down the data call to all of the units. They'd go check out the motor pool. They'd come back with the answer. And so there's no living, breathing, canonical record that continues to flow through this. We've built these systems. The army is older than the country. We've built these systems.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
It's like archeology when you go back there and try to look at this. It's not how you would do it today, but that's our extant reality. We have to deal with this messiness. Sometimes the cynical way to think about Palantir is it took something as sexy as James Bond to motivate engineers to work on a problem as boring as data integration. But that is the starting point.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
If you can't see yourself, if you can't integrate all your data, you're just always chasing your tail. Then on top of that, we make powerful interfaces for decision-making. One of the contrarian quips I have is that Data is not the new oil. People have been running around saying, data is the new oil, data is the new oil. I think data is the new snake oil.
Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
There's nothing inherently valuable about data. It's only valuable if you can use it to make a decision. So it's about decision advantage. So how do I leverage this data I've now integrated so that you can make a better decision, you can see further in the future, that you can out-compete your competitor in the commercial world or your adversary in the defense world?