Shyam Sankar
speaker
319 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 6 May
Shyam Sankar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
as opposed to the things that set the conditions so that you can even think about those things.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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