Inside Palantir: Building Software That Matters | Shyam Sankar on a16z

1. 0:00 – 7:53

   Introduction

   1. SSShyam Sankar0:00

      World events remind us that there is actually evil out there. Just horrendous barbarism is still possible. When a country goes to war, it's not enough to just have the Department of War fight these wars. It is actually the whole country. The idea that somehow the American people are not capable of this, it beggars belief. I think our biggest risk as a country is suicide, not homicide.

   2. ETErik Torenberg0:19

      How do we win the AI race, particularly as it moves towards more physical AI and robotics, et cetera?

   3. SSShyam Sankar0:24

      The things that we did to win in the past, we accidentally turned our back on, and there's an opportunity to reclaim that with vigor. In the moment right now, you could say, "We need to build more weapons. We need to do this. We have..." Yes, but the most important thing we need to do is-

   4. ETErik Torenberg0:45

      So Katherine, when we were talking about guests that we had to have on, Sh-Shyam was at the, the, the top of your list. What, what, what, what, why was that?

   5. SPSpeaker0:53

      Yeah. Well, I, you know, it's, it's-- I think people are, you know, after the Jeremy Stern profile and Colossus and a lot of, um, I think, you know, stories that have come out recently or podcasts that have come out about Shyam, um, it, he, he's one of these people that if you were in the know, uh, several years ago, you knew. He was the OG, like, fixer for everyone. You know, I, I think Trey Stevens, who's, you know, the co-founder of, of Anduril, came out, um, on Twitter and said, like, "He's single-handedly responsible for my career." And I, I, you know, John Doyle, so many of our founders have pointed to Shyam as the person who made their career and introduced them to Palantir, supported them in Palantir, but also sort of, um, you know, gave them wings to fly away from Palantir and to start something new. And you hear that story time and time and time again. But it wasn't until, and, and Erik, you and I were talking about this, it wasn't until a couple years ago that I think Shyam actually became more of a public figure. He was sort of the behind-the-scenes guy, the behind-the-scenes fixer. Um, and I think the thing that really changed it was Shyam, and I'd love to, to talk to you about kind of what was the inspiration for this. You, you sort of, um, wrote this seminal piece about First Breakfast, about defense reformation, um, and were the first person to really start talking about it. Um, but again, this was like seventeen years into the journey of Palantir that you decided, "I'm gonna be, you know, a strident voice for what needs to happen in America." Uh, so I'd love to talk to you about this, you know, going from the behind-the-scenes person, the, the guy behind the guy in so many of our companies, uh, to saying, "I need to come out and, and be a voice for this movement." What, what was the kind of impetus for that?

   6. SSShyam Sankar2:26

      It was kind of equal parts an act of desperation and an act of optimism. Um, you know, I, I felt like after years of just seeing, uh, the, the, the building, the Pentagon from the inside, seeing how defense was operating, I felt this frog boil that continued to happen, uh, set in a historical context. But the reason to say something is actually I thought this was the moment that it could all be fixed, that alongside of that happening, seeing what was happening outside of the building, that the founders were reemerging. There was a huge amount of energy. People wanted to build in the national interest. Uh, and, and it was a moment to kind of crystallize what, at least put forth what I thought the fundamental diagnosis was that really the things that we did to win in the past, we accidentally turned our back on, and there's an opportunity to reclaim that with vigor. Uh, and we needed to do so quickly, that time was running out. There was a shot clock here that we have frog boiled our way to a place where we've lost deterrence. You know, it's, any one of these items in isolation you can write off. You could say, "Okay, the Russians annexed Crimea in twenty fourteen. That's just one thing." Then you have the militarization of the Spratly Islands in the fift- in fifteen. You have the, the failure of GC- JCPOA to keep the Iranians from getting a bomb. You have a pogrom in Israel, and certainly after October seventh, I w- I, I... It was kind of a radicalizing moment that like, "What is going on here? Uh, we, we need to act." And I think we, we've only had more things since then. Now, I, I think the good news is in the last year, more has changed in the department than I've seen change in the prior nineteen years, and, and people are, are seizing that moment for reformation. Um, and it's, it's been, it's been rewarding to kinda get it out there, get people to rally behind it, and, uh, all of us building in the national interest.

   7. SPSpeaker4:13

      Yeah. I mean, what, what is it-- 'cause I think you get this question probably all the time. What is it about the last, I mean, a-as you said, it wasn't a single moment, but there is some change in the culture and the zeitgeist, and I think, you know, you have a unique understanding too of, of, of culture and, and kind of how these memetic shifts happen. But what was it about, you know, eighteen months ago where it's like everyone seems to agree on the thing that was so contrarian, uh, for, for many years where you were sort of banging your head against a wall saying like, "This is, you know, this needs to happen"?

   8. SSShyam Sankar4:44

      Well, maybe unsurprising for my worldview, it all comes down to leadership. You know, I, I-- We call them the Founding Fathers for a reason. There is something special about the American spirit, uh, that is, you know... Ev-every founding story is, is equal parts he-heresy and heroism. And, um, we had the right people who s- kind of saw, like, "Hey, th-this is not working, and we're, the shot clock is running out, and we have to do something." And we had those people both inside the building and outside the building. So i-it's kind of a c-conspiracy coalition of the willing, co-coalition of the capable to go do that. Um, so it's, it's hard to point to any one single moment. I, I think the, the kind of, the election is a big part of it. Not to, not to make it political, but just being able to get in, uh, leadership that viewed it with clarity and set the conditions, uh, to, to make this change happen.

   9. SPSpeaker5:34

      Yeah. So y-you've been busy. Um, you, you know, you've, you've joined the Army. Um, you're, you've written a book that's coming out. Um, I'd love to get into to Mobilize, but first, why did you decide now's the time to sort of write the, write the canonical book of what needs to happen in America? And then maybe we can talk about sort of the, the sort of fundamental thesis too. But why, why, why now? Why, why write a book, join the Army, um, and also, uh, be leading Palantir? [chuckles]

   10. SSShyam Sankar5:59

       [chuckles] Y-well, they're all... There is a, there's a cogent kind of thread through that, which is like how, how do we mobilize to prevent a bigger conflict? And if you're, if you're really paying attention, it's hard not to think that we're kind of in the late thirties here, that things are, are brewing. They've been brewing for a while. Um-People talk about great power com-competition, uh, and I, I think we're kind of coming out of the malaise of having won the Cold War, or the Soviets having lost it, perhaps more accurately, and that kind of led to a lot of, of bad behaviors. It allowed us to believe a lot of lies about the future that, that we're kind of now marking to market. Uh, and so par-- we, we will not have the luxury that we really had in, uh, in World War II of letting the adversary attack us first and then deciding to mobilize. And I think a, a more clear-eyed view of what actually happened in World War II is that's not it. It's not this facile thing that we just flipped a switch, and the automotive industry decided, "Okay, after Pearl Harbor, we're gonna make all this war material." What really happened is that leadership from FDR realized in the, in the '30s, in the late '30s, that we needed to mobilize, but there was not yet a national will or popular mandate to do so.

   11. SPSpeaker7:08

       Mm-hmm.

   12. SSShyam Sankar7:08

       Uh, and Lend-Lease provided the mechanism to do that, that we... It took us 18 months to build factories and retool them, and we were able to create capability deterrence that we, we sold to the Brits and to the Soviets s-such that when World War II really kicked off for us, when Pearl Harbor happened, we were at full rate production. And the way that we mobilize, you know, when a country goes to war, it's the whole country that goes to war. It's not enough. I think part of the legacy of having won the Cold War is thinking like it's enough to just have a defense industrial base. It's enough to just have the Department of War fight these wars. It is actually the whole country, and I think that's the, the most, um, stark thing is like we all, as American citizens, need to be invested in both the prosperity the country gives us, but also the freedom that underwrites that prosperity. And we have come a very far way from

2. 7:53 – 18:01

   Rebuilding the Industrial Base

   1. SSShyam Sankar7:53

      that world. You know, in 1989, only six percent of spending on major weapons systems went to defense specialists, i.e., companies that were exclusively in the business of defense. That's not that long ago. That's when the Berlin Wall still stood.

   2. SPSpeaker8:04

      Hmm.

   3. SSShyam Sankar8:05

      Now that number is 86%. So really the, what we think of as normal is an aberration from the past, and Mobilize seeks to set that story in context of, one, hey, this is the industrial base, what I like to call the American industrial base, that won World War II. Chrysler built Minuteman missiles and minivans, and every camera, car, cereal box that an American consumer bought was actually also subsidizing our national security, and that's really important. We see this with the hyperscalers. We see this with technology. The amount that our private sector spends on R&D dwarfs what the government is capable of spending, and you wanna get on that price-performance curve as a way of delivering capabilities to our brave men and women in uniform.

   4. SPSpeaker8:44

      Yeah.

   5. SSShyam Sankar8:45

      Uh, a- the... So how do we get back to that? You know? And I, oh, so the second part of it. Yeah, so we had the American industrial base, but who was the American industrial base? Today, we think of it as Northrop Grumman. We think of it as Lockheed Martin. But actually it was Glenn Martin. It was Jack Northrop. It was Leroy Grumman. They were people. They were founders. They, they were kind of not thinking about, "Hey, what's the performance gonna be next quarter?" They were building something way bigger than themselves, way bigger than their, their companies. And those founders weren't just outside of government. They were inside of government. It was the Hyman Rickovers, the, you know, against the will of the Navy, building the nuclear navy. And I, I love that story too because it, it takes a lot of chutzpah. Oppenheimer, the father of the bomb, said the nuclear navy wasn't gonna work. He told Oppenheimer, he told Hyman he was gonna fail, and he still pers- he still proceeded. And that's something I think in the Valley we recognize as the classic founder personality.

   6. SPSpeaker9:41

      Mm-hmm.

   7. SSShyam Sankar9:41

      Uh, and a big part of what happened, you know, after, after the end of the Cold War, we, we wanted a peace devi-dividend. We started spending less in defense. We had this famous dinner, the Last Supper. We went from 51 prime contractors down to five. I think the conventional explanation of what happened, uh, is wrong, is that people think, "Hey, we had consolidation."

   8. SPSpeaker10:01

      Yeah.

   9. SSShyam Sankar10:01

      Consolidation means we lost competition. That's not... Yeah, okay, maybe at the margin. But that, first of all, it's always been a monopsony. You know, the, the nature of the competition is not what people think. It's not these companies competing against each other. The competition's always been the services competing. It's been competition inside of government-

   10. SPSpeaker10:18

       Sure

   11. SSShyam Sankar10:18

       ... that drove innovation, not competition from industry. What really happened from the Last Supper is that consolidation bred conformity. It was the beginning of true financialization of defense.

   12. SPSpeaker10:27

       Right.

   13. SSShyam Sankar10:28

       These companies really could no longer think about growth. They thought about financial metrics, dividends, buybacks, cash flow, and it, it kind of became very narrow. And that conformity is not an environment that founders can thrive in.

   14. SPSpeaker10:41

       Right.

   15. SSShyam Sankar10:41

       You know, the, the, the heretics ha- were expunged. They left. They went to other parts of the American economy, like tech.

   16. SPSpeaker10:47

       Mm-hmm.

   17. SSShyam Sankar10:48

       Uh, but the, those heretics are required. I, in fact, if you look at part of the book, we catalog all these amazing defense innovations. Almost to a T, every single one of them was a heretical idea.

   18. SPSpeaker10:59

       Mm-hmm.

   19. SSShyam Sankar10:59

       You know, the, the institution was against it. The bureaucracy was against it. The process tried to kill it. Uh, and these determinative outcomes, you can think about the Higgins boat, the boat that won World War II. The Navy didn't wanna buy the boat. The Navy tried to steal the designs for the boat. In the end, 92% of all boats in World War II were Higgins boats. Think about where we'd be if this Scots Irishman wasn't just willing to just almost pathologically commit himself to making this happen. The boys that would not have landed at Normandy.

   20. SPSpeaker11:24

       Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, I mean, and, and that's super interesting, yeah, 'cause I think that, as you said, it's always been, you know, the, this sort of forced consolidation, the we've picked the winners. They're, you know, we're, we're, we're post-history now. Like, we, we don't actually need to build for, for wartime. So it's your view that, that really that just expunged all of the talent that used to go to defense, and it's interesting 'cause it's also, I mean, it's in some ways it's, it's sort of serendipitous that that's exactly when the internet's rising. So it's like if you're this kind of weird personality, you're gonna go work on this new thing that's so exciting. You know, I, I think of, like, you know, Marc Andreessen, right? Like, he's, he could've been in the defense in-industry maybe 20 years earlier, but it's like, you know, the people who were building the internet in the '90s, they wanted to build the new thing. So I guess, like, i-i-is, is that sort of the fundamental problem, is that, like, it just became a place where anyone who was interesting or anyone who had a different view just could not thrive?

   21. SSShyam Sankar12:18

       Yeah, exactly, and then we compounded on that problem byYou know, the, the nature of the monopsony, so, uh, unlike a monopoly where you have one seller of a thing, a monopsony is where you have one buyer of a thing. That-- The Department of War is a monopsony. Um, the nature of the monopsony is it forgets, it starts imposing all sorts of constraints on its suppliers and how they behave and what they need to look like. And that led to, it's like putting-- we put all of these companies on the Galapagos Islands. Uh, they're not on the mainland anymore. And so what do you get on the Galapagos? You get these exquisite giant tortoises. They're really amazing. Uh, like, it's like alien life. It's, it's very cool. Except when you take the tortoise back to the mainland, they're not competitive. They're gonna get eaten alive by the wolves.

   22. SPSpeaker12:59

       Yeah.

   23. SSShyam Sankar13:00

       Uh, and so we started creating a huge number of barriers for these people who, even when they had ideas, that could those ideas come back into defense? Uh, what I like to say, like, when we started Palantir, there was no front door in the Department of Defense.

   24. SPSpeaker13:14

       Yeah.

   25. SSShyam Sankar13:14

       You know, you had to-- The only front door, there was exactly one, it was in the intelligence community, it was In-Q-Tel.

   26. SPSpeaker13:19

       Mm-hmm.

   27. SSShyam Sankar13:19

       If you were an outsider, there was no other way in. The only people that worked here were insiders.

   28. SPSpeaker13:24

       Mm-hmm.

   29. SSShyam Sankar13:24

       Uh, of course, now that is, that's part of the sea change that happened starting really in 2015, but that means putting forth the 18 Theses and the Defense Reformation in 2024 makes a lot of sense because we have 10 years of heretics who have been knocking at the gate ready to, to come help the department.

   30. SPSpeaker13:40

       Yeah. Now, and, and so much of the book, I mean, you talk about these sort of heretical heroes. You know, in doing the research, and I mean, you're, you're now sort of like the walking encyclopedia for the defense industry, um, in tech. Who are, who are the most exciting heroes? Like, who's the person you look at and you say like, "Gosh, that, that is, that is the person that people don't know about they need to know"?
3. 18:01 – 24:20

   Joining the Army to Modernize

   1. SPSpeaker18:01

      Um, and you've joined the Army, um, and it's a program from General George and Secretary Driscoll. Maybe tell us a little bit about h- the origin of that and then what you're doing specifically inside, uh, inside the Army now, um, to support that change.

   2. SSShyam Sankar18:16

      Well, the, the origin story of this is really, so I've worked with the Israelis in some capacity since roughly 2014. This is a very technical countryUm, and, and they're proud of how technical they are. After October 7th, you know, October 8th, they mobilized roughly three hundred and sixty thousand reservists. By definition, all these reservists are prior service through national conscription. Uh, and most of them had now had twenty years of experience in industry. And when they got back to the IDF, they were horrified at the state of technology in the IDF, which is actually an implicit self-critique, which is, "Hey, when I was twenty, I was really good at coding, but I didn't know what I was doing. Now I have twenty years of experience building internet-scaled things, and I actually know how to do these things correctly." So I saw them modernize more in the four months after October 7th than I, than I did in the prior ten years of working with them.

   3. SPSpeaker19:09

      Mm.

   4. SSShyam Sankar19:09

      And that was just-- I couldn't, I couldn't s- unsee that. So of all countries in the world, we are drowning with that talent. You know, the, the, the skills we have at building things in the Valley, the companies that a16z backs, like we know how to do this as a nation.

   5. SPSpeaker19:24

      Mm-hmm.

   6. SSShyam Sankar19:25

      The twenty-year-old version of our green suiters maybe didn't. You know, there's the will, there's the intelligence, the capability, but there's also then the tradecraft, the know-how, the experience, all the dead ends that I've run into in my career, the mistakes I've made. If you're gonna make mistakes, please make new ones. Don't make the same ones I already have done, you know? How can you stand on the shoulders of American industry to go faster and do this? And so I'm not sure I really had a lot to give the Army at, you know, twenty-four, but I think at forty-four, uh, th- there's a lot I can do to accelerate certain things, and that, that's not just a narrow statement about me. I think that's a whole statement about the Valley. There's a whole statement about American manufacturing, everyone in El Segundo. You know, how do we make sure, uh, i- if, if the Chinese make civil-military fusion compulsory, why do we make voluntary civil-military fusion impossible? And, and when I look back at history, we didn't used to make it impossible. In World War II, we direct commissioned a hundred thousand people that look like what we now consider Detachment 201 into the military, and we should be doing that again. The authorities exist. They're just laying there dormant, and we're basically underutilized. So I was proud to join the Army with, uh, three other colleagues. So we have Bob McGrew, chief, former Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, uh, Boz, the CTO of Meta, and Andrew Wheel, the former Chief Product Officer of OpenAI-

   7. SPSpeaker20:40

      Yeah

   8. SSShyam Sankar20:40

      ... Head of Science now. Uh, and I think we've been able to work on different projects that really we, we act as senior advisors to Army senior leaders, and there's different projects that we kinda get our hands dirty in and help. But I think it's been a really pr- I've learned a lot by doing it. Uh, hopefully, the Army's benefiting from it, but I think more broadly, we would like to catalyze this across all of the services in a broader call, uh, for folks who are listening to this now in industry.

   9. SPSpeaker21:03

      What, what, what's been the biggest surprise? Like, I mean, you've obviously worked with the department for, for years, but being on the inside now, uh, what surprised you?

   10. SSShyam Sankar21:13

       In my-- So my, my focus is really, um, two things. I'm, I'm helping them think through how to plan force structure over long periods of time. So how do I generate the force I want for all the different military occupation specialties? Uh, so that's been one. But the second part of it is thinking through how do we want to employ software as a, almost like a malleable weapon system, as something that our commanders can wield, uh, to drive advancement. And they, they call these the operational data teams. What's been hugely impressive to me is the quality of talent in our green suiters, people who are not formally trained computer scientists, people who have just learned these things. The most compelling AI applications I'm seeing across commercial or, you know, so private sector or public sector are being built by these green suiters.

   11. SPSpeaker22:00

       Hmm.

   12. SSShyam Sankar22:00

       Uh, and it's, and I think there's something about the existential stakes. You know, you're not doing this for fun. You're not doing this for ten percent efficiency. It's a binary outcome, win or lose. The other thing about this moment that I think is really interesting with AI is it's massively empowering to people with specific skills. So, you know, it is the intel warrant officer who really knows their domain.

   13. SPSpeaker22:18

       Mm-hmm.

   14. SSShyam Sankar22:19

       And I was wondering, you know, as someone who's been doing this for twenty years, like, where was this person ten years ago?

   15. SPSpeaker22:24

       Yeah.

   16. SSShyam Sankar22:24

       And the conclusion I came to is they were always there. Ten years ago, what would they have done, though, with their idea? Make a PowerPoint slide? Brief some program bureaucrat who would tell them how bad their idea is? No, 'cause they're smarter than that. They wouldn't have wasted their time. Now they spend two weeks, they build it themselves.

   17. SPSpeaker22:39

       Mm-hmm.

   18. SSShyam Sankar22:39

       Now they're having an empirical conversation about how what they've built actually drives the Army forward, and everyone is quick to adopt it because everyone wants to win. So it's, it's been really exciting to see that. Um, the other part of it, I think, is, uh, big institutions, it is, it's conserved across private sector as well, struggle with zero to one.

   19. SPSpeaker23:00

       Mm-hmm.

   20. SSShyam Sankar23:01

       Everyone wants to get, you know, everyone want... If, if you have some sort of innovation, they almost wanna rush to get to N as quickly as possible. How do I scale this across the formation? Well, the Army is a very big place, and thinking very critically about the pathing of what is the journey and cycle of getting an innovative idea to scale, that's literally what we do as an industry all day long, right? And, and how, how do they take, imbibe those lessons rather than cargo culting their way there, which is frankly what I think the private sector, you know, large Fortune 100s do as well. So they, they have more to learn from startups in this capacity than they do from, you know, big Fortune 100 companies.

   21. SPSpeaker23:38

       Totally. And that's so interesting too about just, you know, that is something I hear time and time again, like the, the level of technical ability of someone very junior in the Army or the Navy today. It's like they came up tinkering, and yes, as you said, like now the tools are there. They can just build something where it's, and you're not only learning from startups, you're literally learning from individuals who are enlisted who have a great idea, which is, it's, it, it does feel like, as you said, like this is a revolutionary time for the military where they can actually learn from their, their, you know, junior people who, who have a great idea and that can be deployed very quickly. Um-

   22. SSShyam Sankar24:09

       Which plays to the American military's strengths of bottoms-up innovation, mission command type control. Um, it, it, it's really something that our military can uniquely do that no one else can.

4. 24:20 – 29:42

   The SaaS Apocalypse Debate

   1. SPSpeaker24:20

      Yeah.

   2. ETErik Torenberg24:20

      Let, let's get into the, the SaaS apocalypse. Uh, uh, you know, there, there's a line of thinking that says, "Hey-Um, now that the switching costs, or now that AI is here, the switching costs are, are very low. Th- you know, there's no code moat, there's, there's no data moat, there's no UI moat, and there's a set of SaaS companies that are on the conveyor belt on the way to the guillotine. Um, and you know, maybe it's monday.com first, and may-may-maybe it's Atlassian and, you know, companies that aren't systems of record, and then maybe it's, it's coming for them too. Um, the other people say, "Hey, you're not gonna vibe code, you know, Atlassian, you're not gonna vibe code these, these, you know, in-incredible products with all these integrations and all these, you know, distribution, e-e-et cetera." W-w-what say you on the SaaSpocalypse? How do you make sense of it?

   3. SSShyam Sankar24:59

      I think both things are true. So I have a, a... I would give you a different rubric to think about it, which is, um, what software is really fundamentally about beta and what software is about alpha? And I think that the, the software that's about beta is going to really struggle, that, you know, this is, this is software that made you more similar to everyone else. And this has been my historical critique of the software industrial complex, which is that the feedback loop for the people building the software is, "Can I sell it?" Not, "Did it, did it add value?" Which is downstream of can you sell it. Uh, and, and so the... You could think of almost like vibe coding, the, the advent of AI, it allows you to make software that's specific to you. It's inherently alpha focused if you do it right. Uh, but I... So I think that, that the platforms that are already focused on alpha are going to continue to have an advantage. It's, like, actually gonna be, uh, a wind that fills their sail up. Uh, on the other side, the, the stuff that's all beta is, is really gonna struggle. And you can almost argue, like maybe the beta wasn't that valuable to begin with. But one of, one of the jarring moments for me was in COVID, if you really look back at what were CEOs talking about in their earnings calls about software, they... No one talked about the five billion dollar ERP implementation they did that saved their supply chain, 'cause all of them fell over like paper tigers in two weeks. And what they were talking about was e- Zoom and Teams, and how that enabled them to go remote. And you cannot think of... Like, that's crazy. That is, that, that should've been a Sputnik moment for the software industry to say, "Wow, we haven't built shit that's valuable." How depressing. Um, and, you know, on the flip side, for us at least, COVID was a huge tailwind because it's, specifically because we were able to help our cu- our, our customers adapt to this reality a-at the speed of the disruption. It, it, I think it kind of separated the wheat from the chaff. And I think we'll kind of see that, you know, maybe there's a lot of things we've been spending on almost mimetically, like, well, other people use it for this, this is a standard industry solution for X. Those things are going to feel a lot of pressure. And on the, on the flip side, there are gonna be software that's almost almost like a toolkit, an approach, that allows you to express how you're more different than other companies. It, it's almost become software that allows you to express your competitive advantage, your strategy, is going to be a premium. On the day two stuff, like vibe coding, you can't do... I think that's actually true. Like, I think it's actually true that day two is much harder, a lot of it's unsolved, and you're gonna have to figure that out. But I don't think that's gonna preclude the pressure on the beta, on the beta software.

   4. ETErik Torenberg27:29

      Yeah. In, in, in terms of accruing value, ri-right now it seems like h-h-the hardware layer has the highest margins, um, whereas in the internet economy, the, the applications ha-had the highest margins. I'm, I'm curious if you think, um, AI will be li-like the internet, where the, sort of the entities that control the end user relationships a-accrue the most value, or if you think it'll be more like the cloud, where the infrastructure layer is the, is, is, is the mo- uh, accrues the most value or has the highest margins. H-h-how do you think about how it'll play out?

   5. SSShyam Sankar28:02

      Uh, if you thought about the, the stack as like chips, models, AI infrastructure, AI applications, what I see happening empirically is, um, the, the models are being commoditized and a-always under pressure. So the model companies are expanding up. Sometimes they, they almost call it in a diminutive way a harness, but it's actually they're building software around it that is AI infrastructure to do something, like, like code. Uh, and then the, the people who started as narrow vertical AI solutions are kind of earning their way down the stack to realize, like, "Oh, I need this actual AI infrastructure to be able to scale to my customer base and handle more use cases." So our theory has always been the value is gonna accrue in two places, at the chips layer and at the AI infrastructure layer, what we would call ontology. But tho-those two layers I think are gonna be pretty defensible.

   6. ETErik Torenberg28:49

      There's this funny chart in The Economist the other day about what's gonna happen to the economy, and it gives three, uh, [chuckles] three predictions. Either everything goes to the, uh, you know, goes vertical, [chuckles] A-AGI. Uh, either, you know, we're all, uh, dead or, you know, we're all e-economically dead, everything collapses, or, you know, two percent growth. Um, and so, [chuckles] uh, you know, uh, i- The Economist is, uh, is, is, is hedging just like many others. Um, I'm, I'm curious how you... W-what's your sort of mental model for what AI is going to do to the economy in terms of, you know, the productivity stats and, and GDP growth, um, but then also the, the, the, the job market? And I, I mean AI as it achieves i-its goals over the, you know, over the medium term, and, and we sort of, you know, start to reach the, the potential that people have been talking about. You know, people say AI twenty twenty-seven, it's-

   7. SSShyam Sankar29:36

      Yeah

   8. ETErik Torenberg29:36

      ... or even if it's twenty-thirty. H-h-how do you think it's gonna impact the economy?

   9. SSShyam Sankar29:39

      I have a lot of thoughts here, so hopefully we'll hit them all and I won't forget

5. 29:42 – 38:24

   Agency Over Automation

   1. SSShyam Sankar29:42

      them as we go through this. So the, the first bit is what always irks me about how we talk about AI is, i-is as if somehow we have no human agency. AI is gonna do X. No, that's not right. Humans are going to use AI to do X. There's a choice here. Do we wanna invest in AI slop, in essentially AI slot, to borrow an exp-expression from, from Sean Colson, Patrick Colson? No. I think th-these things are... I don't wanna invest in that, at least. So what is our normative view of why AI is valuable? How does, how does it result in American prosperity? How does it make our society better, not worse? And restoring the fact that we, we have agency, and therefore an obligation to steer this in a specific way. So that's the first part of it. Then if, okay, if we have agency, what is that? You know, my, my view of this is-We have a historic opportunity to fix the fundamental breakdown that happened in the '70s between wage growth and GDP growth. Uh, that this should be-- If we look at just the, the example we have about the Intel warrant officer who's suddenly able to do so much, well, I see that playing out on the ICU floor, I see that playing out on the factory floor. There is an opportunity to give the American worker superpowers with AI. It's David's slingshot in a world where the Chinese Goliath has been this giant sucking sound of American prosperity. Uh, if we do that, it's a basis for underwriting the reindustrialization of the country, and that we're not gonna do this symmetrically. That's why it's a slingshot. It's not like, "Hey, this is how they do it there. We're gonna do this here." It's, it's actually, we're gonna do this in entirely new ways, like Hadrian is a perfect example of that, right? We are reindustrializing using technology, making these people fifty, a hundred times more productive than it could be otherwise, and it's going to lead to all sorts of, of new possibilities, in particular because I think the great lie of globalization is that we can do the innovation over here, and we're gonna have the production go over there. Well, guess what? Innovation is a consequence of productivity. If you don't make the thing, you can't innovate on how you make the thing and what the thing is. You see that with SpaceX. There's a reason the R&D engineers are co-located on the production floor. What is the feedback loop and cycle time they expect to come out of that? And you see that in the negative where we used to think WuXi was just some cheap set of pipetting arms for contract pharmaceutical research, and now fifty percent of all clinical trials are being done in China. Uh, and, and so I think we should view this as a national emergency and a national opportunity, uh, around AI. And I-- what, what concerns me a bit, these, these technology revolutions are usually by, like, the vast, vast majority are tool revolutions, not concept revolutions. It was not Galileo who invented the telescope. He used it to discover planetary motion. It was-- The, the future of these technologies, the microscope, the power loom, the telescope, the personal computer, uh, they are determined not by the inventor of the technology, but by the people who wield the technology. Today, when we listen to the AI doomerism, we're listening to the inventors who are incredibly smart. But just like their creations, they have their own jagged intelligence. You know, just because they were smart at building the model doesn't mean they're gonna be right about the implications of it. Uh, and then we are implicitly giving up our own human agency in how to steer it. It is us as the wielders of it that are gonna determine the future course of this technology. And I see, you know, maybe the most authentic thing about that, uh, economist graph is those range of outcomes are exactly what's possible, and it's up to us to pick which one we wanna be on. It's a choice we're making. It's not something that's being done to us.

   2. SPSpeaker33:14

      Yeah. No, you, you just said something so interesting that I think is, is underexplored, which is the, the co-location of R&D and production, which is something we very much understood that was sort of, you know, that's the, that's the Henry Ford style, right? Like, that, that's how we used to build things in the physical world. And then, of course, globalization led to this sort of separation of them. And even you still see it in companies, right? It's like the engineering team in many companies is not the same as the production team. You can be a production company or an engineering company. We see this a lot in our, uh, American dynamism portfolio. What was the impetus for sort of that, uh, philosophical division? Um, you know, I think a lot of people point to policy changes in the '90s, but what was, like, the real impetus from your research that, that sort of led to this sort of divorce between p-production and engineering, and, and how are you seeing it come back together again in companies today?

   3. SSShyam Sankar34:03

      Europe has created exactly zero companies from scratch in the last fifty years worth more than a hundred billion euro. We have created all of our trillion-dollar companies from scratch in America in the last fifty years.

   4. SPSpeaker34:14

      Mm-hmm.

   5. SSShyam Sankar34:15

      The difference is founders. You know, you have really good companies over there, but they're, like, three hundred years old, a hundred years old, whatever it is. Uh, what we, we, we kind of had the Europe- Europeanization of our mega cap companies until recently. You know, Intel, at some point, there was this fork in the road where they could, they could have promoted their CFO to be the CEO or Pat Gelsinger as CTO back then, this is before he came back later, to be CEO. Who did they pick? They picked the CFO, the person that Wall Street would understand, um, not the person who could actually determine the future roadmap. And by the way, it really looked like it was working for ten years until it fell off a cliff.

   6. SPSpeaker34:56

      Yeah.

   7. SSShyam Sankar34:56

      But that was all financial engineering, not real engineering. Uh, you know, when was the, the last Boeing CEO to be an engineer? I think it was 2004. You know, there, there was a way... There-- So you think about there's a period of time in our economy where we understood that the engineering was leading these things. Elon says the pathway to the CEO is through the CTO, which sounds like a crazy heretical statement 'cause, like, certainly from my generation, the way we grew up, that's not true.

   8. SPSpeaker35:19

      Mm-hmm.

   9. SSShyam Sankar35:19

      That's not how-- That's not what we were taught.

   10. SPSpeaker35:21

       Yeah.

   11. SSShyam Sankar35:22

       Um, now I'm, I'm not saying that because I'm the CTO here. N-don't read anything into that.

   12. SPSpeaker35:25

       [laughs]

   13. SSShyam Sankar35:26

       I just, I just mean that, like, uh-

   14. SPSpeaker35:27

       Yeah, we, we won't infer that you're breaking news today. [laughs]

   15. SSShyam Sankar35:30

       Yeah. Thank you. Andy Grove, who was the president of Intel, used to start his annual sales and marketing kickoff meeting by reminding all the salespeople, "Just remember, it's the engineers who create all the value. You guys just move it around." You know, and, and it doesn't mean the salespeople aren't important or aren't necessary, but there is kind of a sequencing here, and I think we kind of got very confused about that, that we became very good at financial engineering and forgot about engineering.

   16. ETErik Torenberg35:55

       One thing one of our portfolio co-CEOs said is that m-maybe salespeople are the, are the least AI-able in terms of being able to, uh, to be automated or, or, or, or replace something. I mean, I'm curious how, how you think about, um, sort of the, the jobs at tech companies, um, you know, leveraging with AI, how, how you're using in your own, your own com- uh, you know, in, in Palantir. H-how do you think about that?

   17. SSShyam Sankar36:17

       Yeah. Um, the-- So one, one part I was, I was gonna say from earlier that I think is relevant to this isYou know, Pascal said every human has a God-shaped hole in their heart. And part of the, uh, potential pathology from the labs is that they have filled that hole with AGI. And so there are things that they assert as empirical that are actually articles of faith. They may be true, they may not be true, I don't know, but they get confused between what's an article of faith and what is actually an empirical reality. Uh, and so if you viewed this through a very pragmatic, clear-eyed view, say, the salespeople, I'm not sure why the goal is replacing people to begin with. Like, isn't the goal to win? Isn't the goal to be dominant in your industry? Um, you wanna be better. And so maybe being better is about a mixed mammal-AI teammate. It's, you know, how do I build the Iron Man suit for the salespeople I do have? How do I make the best salespeople more productive and systematize what is it that makes them good for everyone else? Like, there's all sorts of other ways of thinking about the problem if your goal is winning. But if your goal is AGI, it's, it's the aesthetic of the fact that you couldn't replace the person with this model is offensive, and you're just gonna, you know, you're just gonna keep driving at that. And I think, uh, it could be, it could be a distraction. This is one way in which I think the Chinese do have a little bit of an advantage, which is, um, first, first of all, just to be clear, I'd bet on us a hun- you know, a hundred times out of a hundred. But they're, they have a pragmatic approach, like the whole point of AG, uh, of, of AI is to win. It's not AGI. Uh, it's how do I, how do I improve my productive forces, as they would call it. Now, I think that the good news is if you look at the people who wield the technology in America, that's what they're focused on. You know, the CEOs I deal with, uh, none of them have asked me, "Hey, I wanna fire a bunch of people," or, "How do I get rid of these people?" The... Maybe 'cause we're too expensive for that sort of bullshit use case, but they come to me and say, "I wanna dominate my industry." Like, "I wanna destroy my competition." Okay, great. So the ambition is there, and maybe you get more efficient by doing it, but actually the whole point is to, is to grow massively. So that, that ambition sets the frame of how you're gonna apply the technology and what sort of solutions you find valuable.

6. 38:24 – 40:42

   Beating China Without Self Sabotage

   1. ETErik Torenberg38:25

      Sp- speaking of China, h-h-how do we win the AI race, particularly as it moves towards more physical AI and, and robotics, et cetera? What, what are the things to ma-make sure we get right or, or the things we need to, we need to fix?

   2. SSShyam Sankar38:37

      I think our biggest risk as a country is suicide, not homicide. You know, I, I have... A-anyone who knows me knows I'm, I'm a big China hawk, and I think part of the, the challenge with China is it's not enough for the CCP to prosper, America must also fall. Like, look, if you wanna buy our soybeans or not, I don't begrudge you. That's a business decision. That's free trade. W- Great. But when you're trying to smuggle in agricultural funguses so that we can't grow soybeans, that's a different ballgame altogether. And that, that offends my kind of American Calvinist sensibilities of fair play. But, so all that said, that would, that would make it seem like I care a lot about homicide. But I think our problem is actually one of national will and focus, and, like, are we actually addressing the problems that we face here? Are we encouraging the agency and our people to believe the world can be better? You know, this manifests in a, in a sense of just kind of like nihilism and polarization, that, that we forget what makes us, what unites us, and we focus on what divides us. Uh, and there's this kind of sense like, hey, nothing really works and doesn't really matter, so let's just burn it all down. Uh, and a big part of, like, how I think of what Palantir does in the world is it, it is about the legitimacy of our institutions. Like, whether it's doors falling off planes or basic government services working, these institutions should all work excellently. In the absence of them working, uh, it breeds this nihilism, and then you, you get the wrong reaction to it. So that's what, that's what I think we should focus on addressing. So now to physical AI, the point of having an ambition, like let's re-industrialize. Let's be maximalist about this, not some sort of half measure that's like le- a little bit of friend shoring here or there or whatever. It's like, no, we invented all of these technologies. We invented mass production. We invented nuclear power. Thing after thing after thing. It's like the idea that somehow the American people are not capable of this thing, how is that... It, it beggars belief, right? So I think it's actually about will and motivation and leadership.

   3. SPSpeaker40:26

      Yeah. No, I think that that is such a good segue into what you're doing in terms of building culture, 'cause I, I think this is something that, um, is overlooked. A lot of people think it's a technical problem or a production problem, and, and I agree with you that I think it's, it's a seriousness and a will problem.

7. 40:42 – 49:57

   Film as Cultural Willpower

   1. SPSpeaker40:42

      Um, and you have now been investing in film, uh, which is totally different than what you do at Palantir. So I would love to understand, you know, why did you start a, a, a film production company, um, and how do you think that's ultimately going to change the culture around having more will about doing these hard things?

   2. SSShyam Sankar41:00

      Well, my... It really starts with my own assimilation journey. You know, I ca- I came to the US as a, as a young child. I settled in Orlando, and my assimilation journey as a four-year-old, five-year-old was watching movies with dad on the couch. And what were the movies of the '80s and '90s? It was Hunt for Red October, Red Dawn, and Rambo II and III, and, you know, I like to say as a five-year-old, I knew what it felt like to be an American before I knew civics. That was way, way down the line.

   3. SPSpeaker41:27

      Mm-hmm.

   4. SSShyam Sankar41:27

      Uh, and I think a lot of people experienced that again after a long period of time when they watched Top Gun Maverick. And so f- you know, we sometimes overintellectualize these things. Like, there's a feeling to it. Uh, even subtle things like I, I heard from the, the guy who made the movie "300" that after "300" came out, Navy SEAL recruitment went through the roof, and he, he was kind of perplexed. Uh, obviously it's, it's a movie about Spartans. Like, what does this have to do with Navy SEALs? But it clearly inspired so many people to be like, "I wanna look like that. I wanna be that strong. I wanna be that heroic." You know? And, and so the, the virtue of entertainment as, first of all, it's gotta be entertaining. It's not Pravda here. But then it, it lets us reflect on ourselves and who do we wanna be and what do we wanna be like. And if our entertainment is all Terminator, AI ruins the world, technology's a force of evil, it's all dystopic future scenarios, that sets a sort of condition, which I would juxtapose to my youth in Orlando growing up in the shadow of the Space Coast, which was just like science and technology's amazing and it's... We're gonna be living on other planets and, you know, as a sixth grader, write a report on how are you gonna get to Mars andIt, it just inculcates a fundamental belief that the future will be better and that science, technology, the will to invest in these hard problems is worth it. It's worth it.

   5. SPSpeaker42:42

      Yeah.

   6. SSShyam Sankar42:42

      Uh, and, and so I think we, we have a moment to reclaim storytelling in a way that's both entertaining and inspiring.

   7. SPSpeaker42:47

      Yeah, no, I, I love that you point out that you grew up in Orlando. It's funny, I, I also grew up in Florida in the '80s and '90s, and it was like, you know, uh, people made fun of Florida, right? Like, they didn't understand there was anything good there. But Orlando, I mean, you say it's the shadow of the Space Coast, it's also Disney World, right? It, it's the best stories of, uh, of, of a century. It's, it's, it's American culture. And so I'd love to-- I mean, were you a Disney kid? I mean, like, was that something that like also spoke to you of like these, these stories of good and evil that are passed down through cartoons?

   8. SSShyam Sankar43:17

      Absolutely.

   9. SPSpeaker43:17

      Are you kind of... Like, h-how, how does that develop your-

   10. SSShyam Sankar43:20

       You can't not be a Disney kid in Orlando. So also, I mean, there's a part of this story which is the, the, the business-- Like, why did we end up in Orlando? You know, a-after we, we fled violence in Nigeria, my dad had a childhood friend who was living in LA who sold knick-knacks at theme parks, and he's like, "Hey, look, I know this horrible thing just happened to you. There's this up-and-coming place with theme parks. I don't live there. I need someone I trust there. Uh, why, why don't you go to Orlando?" So literally, it's not just that was I a Disney kid. My parents' job was to provide knick-knacks in the theme park stores. So like after school, they would take me to SeaWorld, and I would pet the stingrays while they restocked the shelves. You know, and so I, I grew up very much imbibing the, the storytelling, the aspir- I mean, Epcot. Epcot was all about painting an optimistic vision of the future and what technology was gonna be like and the stories of, of heroes and, you know, that, that there was both, there was both evil and bad in the world, and there were clearly heroic actions that you could take, and it was all super inspiring.

   11. SPSpeaker44:18

       Mm-hmm. And do you-- I mean, th- that, that's what's so interesting too is like I feel like the, the height of the sort of good and evil battle inside of Disney film was sort of the, you know, Lion King '90s, right? Like, I mean, they were different films then. How do we get back-- I mean, maybe it's not back, maybe it's forward. But how do we get back to those stories for children, um, for people to feel optimistic again? I mean, you know, i-i-in some ways you don't hear, "Oh, I grew up in this city and, and it's the height of optimism." You don't hear that about California anymore. Um, what, what, what will it take for movies to, to transform that?

   12. SSShyam Sankar44:51

       Well, you know, this is a, a kind of a personal opinion, but I'm really excited that, uh, David Ellison is, is going to have Warner Brothers. Because, you know, if you think about Hollywood, the original studio heads, they were founders. Like Jack Warner, in the '30s, Germany was the third largest export market for American entertainment, and the Nazis actually deployed censors into Hollywood to control what was being made, and every studio capitulated except for Warner Brothers. Jack Warner was the only person willing to stand up and speak truth, and only a founder can do that 'cause if you're a c- a professional CEO who's employed, that's-- you c- you can't survive that.

   13. SPSpeaker45:28

       Mm-hmm.

   14. SSShyam Sankar45:29

       Um, a-and so I think in some ways there's a mirror to the present day Hollywood and the defense industrial base. It's conformity. It, it's, it's kind of lack of opinion. It's, it's, it's lack of a normative view of what is it trying to communicate. Then if you go a little bit f-further down the line, you look at the Vietnam era. Like we had very cynical Hollywood content in Vietnam as a reflection of how we felt about ourselves.

   15. SPSpeaker45:53

       Yes.

   16. SSShyam Sankar45:53

       Uh, in '73, George Lucas made American Graffiti because he was tired of it. He's like, "I'm tired of it. I just wanna make a movie about boys driving cars chasing girls."

   17. SPSpeaker46:02

       Mm-hmm.

   18. SSShyam Sankar46:02

       And it was a palate cleanser, that kind of like, yeah, the American people remembered like, okay, we, we went through our period, our cycle of grief and cynicism, and we're, we're ready. And it set the conditions for the movies of the '80s and '90s that we all love. I think we're, we're, we're also kind of tired of it right now. We're tired of the cynicism, the everything's gonna be worse. And it-- You see that in the performance of stories. Top Gun: Maverick's the easy one to point to, but, but, but the, the content that's doing well right now is American-oriented. It's pr- There are inspirational figures. The heroes aren't anti-heroes that are drug addicts that you wouldn't want your kids to grow up to be. There's actually some sense of inspiration in it and some pride in, in terms of, uh, who we are and how that reflects in the entertainment itself. So I think, I think we're, you know, if you think about the next, uh, two to 10 years, we're gonna see a lot of content like that. That's what I see in the development pipeline from these studios themselves.

   19. SPSpeaker46:55

       That's exciting. So, so maybe talk to us about some of your projects or, or things you're working on and, and what you're most excited about. But then also, yeah, that's so interesting. We, we've had these conversations, Erik and I, uh, with Mark and others about how, you know, the pipeline for the last 10 years has been dour. We're sort of getting the end of the pipeline. You're seeing it in sort of the Oscar [chuckles] nominees this year. You know, it's like they're, they're not optimistic. But as you said, like maybe 10 years from now, we're gonna see this pipeline of just like pro-America, exciting, optimistic, enthusiastic, golden age sort of content. What are you seeing and, and, and what most excites you?

   20. SSShyam Sankar47:27

       Well, uh, you know, I don't wanna give away too much of my own development pipeline here. Um, but I would say, like you see like Call of Duty is being made right now, uh, with, by Pete Berg and Taylor Sheridan. You see the entire Taylor Sheridan universe. I mean, and, and talk about Sicario. It was like 2014 Sicario has basically came to life with the, uh, new-- the Jalisco New Generation cartel, right? Like, like there, there's a, a sense in which, um, the storytellers have exactly the frame that we're, that we're kind of excited about. I think there's recent events are very interesting to tell stories about right now. Um, even s- a movie like War Machine, which just came out, from watching the trailers, it was not yet clear. You could imagine like five years ago that, that the storyline would've been something more like the U.S. government build evil robots that the human soldiers had to defeat.

   21. SPSpeaker48:18

       Mm-hmm.

   22. SSShyam Sankar48:18

       In this case, it was more like aliens, basically... Sorry to give away the plot if you haven't seen it. But you know, you have an alien robot and brave American Rangers have to defeat them and, and do through their own ingenuity. That, that itself is I think showing you, it's, it's belies the shift in the narrative and storytelling that's happening. I think world events remind us that there are actuallyThere is actually evil out there. Russian tanks can just roll across a border. You know, October 7th, just horrendous barbarism is still possible that these things don't maintain themselves. Um, so what, what would, would I sh-- Like I think, so putting this back in a geopolitical lens, you know, as much as I've been saying we shouldn't call China near-peer, we should call them peer, 'cause calling them near-peer is like a shibboleth that lets us off the hook. When you look at operations like Maduro or Midnight Hammer, it's hard to think of more you have done to restore deterrence in the world. A reminder that we do have the will. Maybe because we didn't have the will, you forgot that we had the capability, but we have both the capability and the will to do things that are quite amazing. At the same time, it signals a very obvious truth, which is somehow none of the Russian and Chinese shit worked. So if you're a third-party country, and you're thinking about how, what is the future of the world and how do you wanna be al-allied, and maybe you've been hedging 'cause you've been seeing America in retreat, it's al- it's also a reminder that the Chinese did not come to save Maduro, and none of the equipment they provided actually seemed to do anything. So w- is that really an option for you? Uh, so I give you the geopolitical answer, but I think... Okay,

8. 49:57 – 54:00

   Projects and Rickover Story

   1. SSShyam Sankar49:57

      here are some, some projects I, I think I can share. So Oppenheimer was hugely successful.

   2. ETErik Torenberg50:01

      Right.

   3. SSShyam Sankar50:01

      And complicated, right? Where it's like it's three-dimensional to the point of entertainment. It's not Pravda. Uh, I think there's a very powerful story in Hyman Rickover and the birth of the nuclear navy. And we talked a little bit about him, but, you know, what I love about Rickover is he was born in a shtetl in Poland, uh, came, came over at the age of six, one of these near, almost near-miss stories, where they were on El- Ellis Island. When you get to Ellis Island, you have 10 days for someone to come pick you up. And so his mother sent a telegram, gave someone money to send a telegram to the father, who was already here, to come get them. The guy pocketed the money for the telegram. On day 10, someone happens to arrive that they know from the old world, who then runs out, gets the father to claim them, get, buys them one extra day, so on day 11, they get picked up.

   4. ETErik Torenberg50:46

      Mm-hmm.

   5. SSShyam Sankar50:46

      But you know, this near miss where we almost didn't have Rickover. But Rickover was a notoriously difficult personality. He was a five-foot-two, short, short guy. In World War II, he drove a coal ship, not... He had no... It was not a prestigious post. But after World War II, he was sent to Oak Ridge, uh, at the, the vestiges of the Manhattan Project, and he was inspired. He had this idea of putting nuclear power inside of the submarines. Because before then, submarines sucked. They, they could go underwater for, like, an hour. They were diesel-powered. They were loud. They, they were basically surface ships that could occasionally submerge.

   6. ETErik Torenberg51:18

      Mm-hmm.

   7. SSShyam Sankar51:18

      And after that, they became really exquisite. And, and he, I think he built the first one in, like, five years, six years, the Nautilus. But the Navy didn't want him to succeed. They, they... Not only did Oppenheimer think it was a stupid idea, the Navy did too. His first office was a women's restroom. I kid you not. You know, it's like, how can we humiliate this guy to quit? And he just kept going. And what I, I think is interesting when you look at his memoirs, like, it's not that he was immune to the humiliation. He felt every slight and insult. He documented them, but somehow he was able to channel that into something he was gonna push through and still succeed despite that. Zumwalt, who was the Chief of Naval Operations, the senior-most, uh, uniformed person in the Navy, said, uh, "The Navy has three enemies, the Soviet Union, the Air Force, and Hyman Rickover," his own admiral.

   8. ETErik Torenberg52:07

      Wow.

   9. SSShyam Sankar52:07

      Uh, the other thing that I think fits very closely with 18 Theses, like, Hyman Rickover was a four-star admiral for 30 years. That is something we can't even contemplate today. We, we, we, we almost view our, our officers as, as cogs to keep moving around. Every two to three years, you have to keep moving.

   10. ETErik Torenberg52:24

       Mm-hmm.

   11. SSShyam Sankar52:24

       Uh, as the first director of the nuclear navy, of, of n- of naval reactors, um, y- you know, he was in that role for a very long time, but that role, even today, is an eight-year stint, which shows you the primacy of people, that we understand with something this exquisite, something where this much knowledge and continuity matters, you don't just keep pulling people out every two or three years. Uh, and our n- our re- our ships, our subs were, are the safest in the world by a long shot. So every six months, the Soviet submariners would get six months of respite at Sochi to recover their white blood cell count because they were getting irradiated.

   12. ETErik Torenberg53:02

       Mm-hmm.

   13. SSShyam Sankar53:02

       We've had no deaths due to radiation.

   14. ETErik Torenberg53:05

       Wow.

   15. SSShyam Sankar53:05

       You know, he, he built it with the specification, "This has to be safe enough for my son." He built it to a specification that is 100 times safer than the minimum safety standard, and that is the sort of aspiration only a founder could have.

   16. ETErik Torenberg53:17

       Yeah. This is gonna be a great movie. [laughs] What, what else is there to do? I mean, you're doing, you're doing everything. So, so what, what, what else is on the radar for you?

   17. SSShyam Sankar53:27

       Well, you know, I, uh, in some sense, maybe it's enough, but all of these things have a through line, where it's really about American greatness and inspiring the next generation. And it's driven home to me when I think about my kids and recognizing that the America I grew up in is something that every generation has had to fight for, and I'm in that phase now where I'm fighting for the, the prosperity that the next generation ought to have. And so whether it's soft power and inspiration in movies or hard power and deterrence of adversaries and preventing World War III, it's all about American greatness and the prosperity of the American people.

Episode duration: 54:15