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

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Thanks for having me, Sean. It's great to be back. I owe you a huge thank you. So the last time you were here, you wore a hood blazer.

So I saw it and I was like, what the fuck is that thing? It's amazing. So I got a whole wardrobe. I love it.

Yeah, man. So thank you. But yeah, it's good to have you back. I'm pumped about our conversation today.

I know you got a new book coming out and everything, but what have you been up to? Oh, man. A lot's gone on in the world since we last met and a lot's gone on for us. You know, I think trying to be a positive advocate for what I think is the future of AI for the American worker.

You know, I think essentially American people are being lied to there. And I've earned an opinion working with American workers on the front line, whether it's the factory floor or the ICU ward, trying to bring back the bonds between our industrial base, like the private sector and government. Again, I think the work that we've done with attachment to one and commissioning is part of that. And then, of course, this moment that we've had over the last year to really fix the Department of War, fix how we buy things, how we prepare for war so that we can preserve peace, really empowering the heretics, the crazy ideas.

So it's been a full out last 12 months. Sounds like it. Are you looking for real estate in Miami now? I already have a spot in South Florida, so I'm set.

Right on, right on. What prompted that? Headquarters has moved to Miami. That's right.

That's right. Yeah. So, you know, I think it's important to be in a state where your reps are actually going to rep you. And I think that's part of it that matters.

And then you can think about, OK, well, what are the places we could go from Denver? And Miami, or really Florida, had the best both combination of legal and positioning perspectives for us. It's the right place. We want to be like the 50th home to go to Austin or something.

Austin's great. We have an office there. We love Austin. We love Texas.

But Miami felt like the right home for us. Right on, man. Congratulations on all that. That's awesome.

And speaking of AI, did you see this new, this China robot AI video? Have you seen that? I haven't seen the latest. Catch me up.

I mean, I don't even know what to say, but it's like the latest. Everybody's wondering if this is a huge advancement. Damn, I don't have my phone on me. Otherwise, I'd pull it up and show you.

But they basically choreographed all these robots doing like some kind of choreographed, I don't know, dance display thing. And everybody's kind of going on about it. And then there was that stuff with Claude that came out about the Claude bots going and trying to figure out how to get long term memory. Do you have any insight on that?

I think it's very hard to separate fact from fiction with these things, you know, because you can kind of egg the agents on to doing very specific things to tell a dystopic story, like what's going on in the prompting with like the multiple bots. My lived experience using these things operationally is that nothing crazy like this is happening. You know, that actually it's much more contained. It's much more sane.

It really is more like an Iron Man suit for the American worker than it is a headless, godless machine that's just roving around doing, you know, this is maybe we should start here. It's like the ways in which I think the American people are really being lied to about AI is that you have on one hand incredible humorism. Like, hey, this thing is going to lead to like mass unemployment, 50% of entry-level jobs are going to be destroyed inside a year or two. And on the other hand, you have essentially this fantasism.

It's going to lead to a utopia, like unfold abundance. I think neither of these things are right. They're really, they're wrong for the same reason, which is they assume there's no human agency. You know, AI doesn't do anything.

Humans use AI to do something. And the reality is that the future of AI has not been determined. It is being determined every single day based on the decisions we're making. We can choose to use it to build AI slop or new forms of addiction and gambling.

We can choose it to re-industrialize the country and bring prosperity to the American worker. Those decisions are being made every single day. We should use our agency as humans to decide what we value. It's very clear what we ought to value.

Then there's another part of this, which is age old. Who are we listening to in AI? We're committing the same fallacy we have in the past, which is we're listening to the people who invented the technology, not the people who are using the technology. You know, and by the way, these inventors are geniuses.

We need them in America. They are my heretics and hero archetypes that I talk about. But just because they have the genius to invent the technology doesn't also imply they have the genius to think about how to apply the technology, how to govern it, what are the consequences of it. The example I like to give people is the telescope.

You know, Galileo did not invent the telescope. Galileo used the telescope to discover planetary motion. Who had a greater impact or a greater opinion of the impact of the telescope on physics and knowledge? Was it the person who invented it or the person who wielded it?

So the people we ought to be listening to are exactly the people who are not invented to give op-eds or who are not on mainstream media. It's the American worker. It's the guy in the submarine industrial-based parts manufacturer. It's the ICU nurse.

It's the factory worker making wires or machinery or equipment. And ask them, how has AI impacted your job? Has it replaced you or has it empowered you? And perhaps I think the most profound question I always like to ask folks, how optimistic are you about your children's future in America with AI?

You'd be surprised how optimistic they are. I got questions. I got a lot of questions. I got toddlers.

And, you know, I'm not very well versed in AI. My team is incredible at it. Everybody's using it. Researchers are using it.

And I can see that it's become – it's turned them all into force multipliers. I mean, it's insane. They're doing the work of 10, 20 people with one person. But that might mean that there's 10 to 20 jobs that are gone because it hasn't powered them that much, which I don't get me wrong.

I don't want to turn back. I'd rather have one guy use an AI that's a badass, you know, turn an A player into an A++++ player. But one thing that I wonder about is what are my kids going to learn? What do they need to learn in school?

What did I learn in school that's completely opposite the leap now with this new age of AI? I think there's a lot in the education system that kids would just be spinning their wheels on. I think it would be massively empowering. So let's come to each of these in turn.

So let's start with the kids and then we'll come back to this idea of replacement. I have kids, too. 13-year-old, 11-year-old. And so this is a personal question, not an abstract question to me.

And what I think I want them to know is how to use this tool. That it's a tool and it can unlock profound education for them. But the people who are going to succeed are going to have two things. They're going to have specific knowledge.

Like, who's winning right now at the front lines? It's the guy who has 15 years of experience. Well, we'll talk about operators in a second. But people who really know what they're doing have unique knowledge and insight because what the AI doesn't know is that.

Do they know how to use AI? So essentially, it is a bicycle. You have to learn how to ride a bicycle. And that requires rats.

I think that's why it's actually turning to a massive advantage for America. Because if you're just compared to, say, Europe, people are really thinking hard. How should we use it? They're just thinking.

The American sensibilities to roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty, play with it, experiment, try it out, do something. And I mean, this is the most positive possible way of the cowboy spirit. And that is something that the child's mind is very good at. So I think one of the mistakes that our education system could make is try to restrict AI.

Yeah, absolutely. In the early days, you're going to have people using it in stupid ways to write their essay for them. It's going to be a sloppy essay that you can tell the AI generated. But that might be what they need to get through that initial gate to go on to the more intelligent uses of it, which is, hey, I wrote a first draft of the essay.

Critique it. What did I miss? What are the things I should think about? Help me elevate my own thinking.

It becomes a partner to do these things. I think that's really powerful. What programs do you use the most in your daily life? And what do you use them for?

We're not talking Palantir, HomeStuff. What does a normal person use this for? Well, I think the most interesting use case is you're going to start where you have the deepest domain knowledge. I think that's part of the reaction the American people have is they look at it and it seems like some of these things are kind of trivial.

Like you're saving me a little bit of time here. And then that's weighed against like crappy content that's being generated, misinformation, disinformation. So on balance, it's like, why is this? Why should we believe in the future?

Plus, I have these data centers coming up and electricity bills going up. But if you look at it as, hey, this is the basis for reindustrializing the country. Like we're going to give the American workers superpowers. They're going to be 50 times more productive than any other worker in any other country.

And that's not just a matter of pride. That economic leverage is how we bring back manufacturing to the U.S. We're not saying we're going to compete symmetrically. This is David's slingshot against Goliath here.

Like, yeah, OK, the Chinese are the best at mass production today. What is our asymmetric approach to regaining the very thing that we once created? You know, we're going to reinvent production. So an example from Panasonic Energy, they make every battery that goes into every Tesla, a gigafactory in Reno, in Sparks, Nevada.

This is exquisite high-end Japanese technology that has operated the employee base in that region of Reno. They're private seamovers. So the old apprenticeship journey to learn how to operate and maintain this equipment used to be three years. With AI, it's three months.

That's leading to more employment, not less. And this is the way in which, like, to my point of human agency, how do you choose to use this stuff? It really does matter. And I think on the consumer side, yeah, it's going to help me, you know, categorize my bills better.

It's going to help me write responses. I think all this things are trivial. The real stuff is going to start in the enterprise and work its way back. I think one of the exciting things I've seen is that actually, historically, with these technology revolutions, the government and the military in particular has been one of the last adopters.

But I'm actually seeing... One of the last adopters? With AI, that's not the case. Okay.

I thought that's where you were going. I was like, holy shit. And it's really compelling to see how you have non-computer scientists... It really proves that whole thesis here, which is, like, experts, you know, the Intel Warrant Officer, the E4, the E8, who are inventing the future of how we're going to deter a conflict.

And that poses lots of interesting challenges, which I think apply just as much to the commercial sector as government, which is, like, it breaks rank structure. It breaks hierarchy. Like, you're going to have to really embrace the internal disruption that's going to happen. But I think this is a great thing for the American worker, because for the last 100 years or so, the managerial revolution has pulled power away from the frontline American worker towards the bureaucrat.

AI is reversing that trend very quickly. And that's very destabilizing to the middle managers, where you're going to see a lot of resistance out of this. But it gets at the core problem we have as a country, which is the legitimacy of our institutions. You know, why do doors fall off planes?

Why aren't basic government services provisioned in a way that we all recognize as having basic confidence? So you have two answers to that sort of question. You can be like, well, these people just don't care. Well, that might be the case.

But more often than not, my diagnosis of this, having done this across 50 different industries in the private sector and government, is that the people at the top, even when they do care, they have the steering wheel. They're trying to turn it very, very diligently. But what they don't know, it's actually a problem with a Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland. Like, that steering wheel is not connected to anything.

And so that disconnection happens through this bureaucracy. And then you have the people on the factory floor, metaphorical or a literal factory floor, they kind of look up and be like, how can my leaders be so clueless? How do they not realize what's actually going on here? That's really dangerous, because it breeds kneelism.

Right? Then you look at it, and you're like, man, it's hopeless. We should give up. Let's burn it all to the ground.

It doesn't really matter. And that's horrible, because actually, if you burn it to the ground, things will get worse. Like, yeah, everyone acknowledges it's not working right now. The answer is not burning to the ground.

It's fixing it. How are we going to fix it? What's our theory of change here? And the theory of change has to start both at the bottom and at the top.

At the top, it starts with people who care. People who want to get the high-agency leaders who care about the outcome. Then they need the tools. Everyone needs the tools to do this.

And so then how do you empower the people at the bottom closest to the problems to actually solve these tools? That, I think, is a quintessential American characteristic. Like, we think about it as mission command. Give the intent.

Let these people run. Let them cook. Don't, like, overmanage them. Don't drain the creativity out of their souls.

You think of every innovation on the battlefront. It was like the E4 rolling tanks across Europe in World War II discovered additional ways of getting their equipment, right? And the generals would let the soldiers cook. This is a powerful moment.

When you're talking about, you know, that it's going to replace the middle managerial class and bureaucrats, my mind went straight to Doge at the beginning of the administration. And all that went into that and all the fraud and all the shit that they uncovered, and I just don't feel like much happened. So, you know, that was kind of the first run. But, I mean, how is it going to work itself out?

Have you thought about that? How is it going to replace it? Where are they going to go? I mean, it's going to be, I think it's very apparent, it's going to be a fight.

In terms of the workforce. Yes. Yeah. So, there's this concept called jet launch paradox.

When we started inventing more efficient coal-burning steam engines, everyone thought that the consumption of coal would go down, but the consumption of coal skyrocketed. Now that the engines are more efficient, the cost to transport goods per mile is actually dropping. And so then the number of engines we wanted went way up, and the number of trains we wanted went way up. There's something like that that's going to happen here, where if you look at something that's fundamentally demand-constrained, like, actually, if we made more, no one would want it, yeah, that's a problem.

Like, getting more efficient is going to result in more jobs. But I don't think most things in the economy look like that. Most things in the economy, look at healthcare. It's exploding.

It's like 20% of our GDP. Healthcare might be, healthcare costs might be our greatest national security risk. Like, the solvency of our country depends on being able to deliver care to the American people at a better price, and we're only going to need more care over time. So, we know we're going to need more care over time.

But the same amount of money, how can we deliver more care? How can we get more efficient in doing that? That's a general's paradox. So, an example of this, with Tampa General, we were able to get sepsis deaths with a leading cause of deaths in the ICU down to zero from 50% of all deaths.

What? And there's no replacement of labor there. It's really automating the parts of the job that took the nurse away from the patient bedside and then helped them spend time with the right patients who had the prison. So, it's just eliminating all the drag.

That's exactly right. That's how we added a third shift to a submarine industrial-based parts manufacturer, because the drag was the time they spent, like, deadweight loss in planning. Like, I've got to plan what to produce, then I produce it. If planning takes too long, like, tools down.

You can't, if you don't have a plan yet, you can't start making things. If I can shrink the planning process from a couple of weeks to a couple of hours, I have more time to make things. And then, organically, the company's like, well, I have more work than I have workers. I need to go hire people.

And that's the bounty, the American prosperity that we can see out of this. Now, I don't want to be too polyamorous. I think there are things we need to make sure of. The most important thing I care about is reestablishing the connection between GDP growth and wage growth.

Somewhere in the 70s, something broke, fundamentally, where our GDP kept growing and wages stagnated. You know, this has got to be, this is the fundamental promise to the American people that the prosperity will be shared. And the way in which it happens, I call this the productivity dividend. The American worker at the front line who's using these tools to make their companies better, they need to participate in the economic upside of doing that.

That's critical to not only the social stability of the country, but the prosperity of the nation, seizing this initiative. As a husband and a dad, I think a lot about responsibility. We train for the unexpected in so many areas of life, but a lot of people don't prepare financially for the one thing none of us can control. If something happens to me tomorrow, I want to know my family isn't scrambling.

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Hi, I'm Sarah Adams, the host of Vigilance Elites, The Watch Floor, where we highlight what matters. It became a permissive state, explaining to you why it matters, and then aims to leave you feeling better informed than you were before you hit play. Terrorists, hostile intelligence agencies, organized crime, not everything is urgent. But this show will focus on what is neat to know, not just what is nice to know.

What do you think about how close are we to CGI? The AGI. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Excuse me. I've always felt that I think the present moment kind of shows that it's like this continuous journey you're on, that maybe it's a frog boil, not in a negative sense, where every version of the model is more capable than it was before. The models still have what they call jagged intelligence. They're savant at some things.

They're not good at other things. But they're getting, you know, even the things they're getting, they were not good at, they're getting better at. So some people say we're already there, like we're coding. They're so good, we're already there.

I still think there's a fair amount of human agency that's involved in getting these things to work. As a consequence, it's valuing taste more than anything. You know, like what to build, how to build, how to think about the problem, what's the elegance of the solution? And then it gives you a big lever to go after it.

I think one of the challenges, you can almost imagine entering a new dark age. Like the dark ages were caused because we kind of lost fundamental knowledge in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Even though we get to live, you know, not everyone has to know everything. But at the end of the day, someone has to know every, someone in society has to know about every part of it, right?

I don't have to spend my time thinking about how to design chips. I live somewhere else in the stack. I get to write code. I get to rely on the fact that someone else is a semiconductor expert and knows how to do lithography and make the chips that I depend on.

But at some point you can kind of see how it actually doesn't work for humans to not be involved with any of this stuff ever. That's the fantasy part of the stuff. That if you don't know how it's made, you can't innovate on how it's made, you can't govern it, you can't understand or debug it. And so I think a much more reasonable path is what I call the inductive path.

It's like we're on a journey. It's very dangerous to kind of skip steps and fantasize about the future ahead. I mean, you want to be optimistic about it, you want to see it, but you don't want to be reactionary to it. Like things like UBI, I think are reactionary to this totally unproven idea that there's going to be so much bounty that we're going to be reduced to being as useful as house cats.

Hold on, what's UBI? Universal basic income. Basically this idea that everyone should just have an income provided by the government that we fund through taxes because there'll be no jobs. See, could be awful.

Is Elon talking about that? Lots of people on the inventor side of AI talk about that. It's a little bit to my point of, should we be listening to the people who are using it and wielding it? They're geniuses.

I'm not saying, you know, it's a subtle critique, but we saw the same challenge with Manhattan Project. Maybe just pick on something that's a little spicy. You know, how did the Soviets get the bomb? They got the bomb because we had geniuses working on the Manhattan Project and a small number of them thought, some of them were famous, like Neil Bore, one of the greatest physicists, thought, you know, we should tell the Soviets that we're building this thing.

If we tell them that, they won't be scared. And then another guy, Theodore Hall, one of the youngest members of Manhattan Project, he was 18 years old, working on this, and he thought, 18, PhD from Harvard, he thought, well, in my infinite wisdom, because I'm so good at physics, I think that if two countries had a bomb, that would ensure global peace and stability. So he actually walked to the trade mission in New York and told them, hey, I'm building this bomb, and then subsequently he went back in there with technical specifications. So this is a lack of epistemic humility, right?

It's like, just because you're a genius in one area doesn't mean you're a genius in another area. And I think it'd be a fair accounting to say every death due to communism since 1949, some of that culpability is on the hands of Manhattan Project scientists who served the chain of command and thought, hey, I'm just going to do this thing unilaterally. That's an interesting point. What else should I be asking you about AI?

Well, I think that the most optimistic case is really what is happening today with the American worker. So we started running what we call American tech fellowships. We take people on the factory floor in the front lines, and we put them through a six-week, nights and weekends boot camp to learn how to build their own AI apps. These are not computer scientists.

I'm not even trying to make them computer scientists. They're people who have deep domain knowledge of what they do. They manufacture wiring. They are ICU nurses.

One guy's a potato farmer in North Dakota. Like, they know their craft, and I'm super charging them with this. One of the most exciting new American tech fellowships we did was specific to veterans. These are not, and actually active duty.

So enlisted officers, some of these folks are Mustangs, 500 people applied, 50 people are in the first cohort. Most of these folks are from combat arms. Some of these folks who will serve with that. They're operators from the special operations community, conventional community, and they are building some of the most exquisite AI applications you can imagine.

And to me, it really underlines this thesis. It's like the human knowledge, the vocational ability, the calling to do these things, the motivation that, hey, my institution will be better. I can be better, which I think, again, is another quintessential American drive, the sense of, like, I can make a dent on the planet with this capability, and that's working. So you guys are taking them and putting them into this program?

Yeah. That's amazing. It's been really rewarding for us to do. I mean, part of the thesis is, like, we want to fuel disruption, and disruption isn't just technical.

It's also mindset. You know, one of these guys, prior enlisted Navy Men, a sailor, he now works at a manufacturing company, grew up in a rural part of Georgia, dirt poor. No one ever told him he was supposed to be smart. No one ever told him he could do these things.

You know, and so just having someone lean in and say, we believe in you. We're going to give you the tools to unleash your human agency. Watching this guy cook, he's improved, so he's reduced downtime on machines by 50%. He's improved yield on the factory floor by 20%.

These are big numbers. You know, it's shocking. You're really looking at the output of one person. You know, one person who all that potential is latent.

What the AI did is it removed all the drag, to your point, that all the ideas he had, he could now realize. And that's going to have a compounding effect. Like, it's like, this is how we grow our GDP again. This is how we become a prosperous nation.

Probably the part that I think the American people should feel most gaslit about over the last 30, 40 years of globalization is this idea that somehow you're not smart enough. That there are people elsewhere who are going to work harder, work for less, and they're better than you. And that's just not true. You know, I think part of this comes down to a belief in oneself and what is the message that we're giving them.

And if you let these guys cook, it's eye water. I'm learning from that, not the other way around. Wow. How do you, how do we know we can trust it?

I mean, just, I see, I see, I see all kinds of things that are coming out of AI that I know for a fact is not correct. Trust is earned. One, one, I mean, just an example I saw this morning, I saw a clip of myself on X or something. Yeah, it was X.

And then somebody said, hey, what's this from? It's a Joe Rogan experience. You know what I mean? And I'm like, shit, I mean, that's pretty basic stuff.

You know, and so it makes me wonder, you know, shit, what else is this stuff getting wrong? Because we rely on this for a lot of things here. But so when I see like a simple mistake like that, it just makes me wonder what other mistakes are we getting out of this? Yeah.

Especially when it comes to defense. I would think about it as, um, how do we trust the humans? You know, if you ask the human, hey, what is this from? In that particular case, we expect them to be a lot better.

But there's an element of what is this person uniquely credible at? You know, and you develop priors on it. Like, where are they able to help me? Where are they not?

Maybe I'm not asking a question the right way. Maybe I'm not providing enough context to doing it. So this is why I think it's specific. So if you think about trust in general, like any given human, you ask them a bunch of questions, they're going to get some of this stuff wrong.

They're going to be pretty convinced they're even right about some of the stuff they get wrong. I think AI is the same thing. So it's about us having enough, this is the point of rolling up your sleeves and playing with it. It's like, hey, where do you believe this thing?

Where have you seen it being good or not? And then you develop the technical term for this as evals. But you develop a set of tests that you're constantly running it through to understand when they release a new model. Is this model at least as good as the old model?

Is it better? How much better is it? Where can I, is there new trust that can extend to it? Again, to the point that that trust has to be earned.

So you're not going to get any of this stuff for free, where it's just like YOLO, ask a question, blindly trust it. It's going to be like, hey, this is a new teammate. This is a fresh second lieutenant. Like, I don't trust them with anything.

Like, we're going to build a relationship together, solving problems together. And we're going to see where you're really a rock star and where you can help me be more effective. And working backwards from the problems we have, that's a much narrower scope. It's like, hey, I do, I make wires.

You know, I'm a potato farmer. This is my problem. How do I develop trust in this domain with you? Sean, let me give you an intro here real quick.

Sean Sankar, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President at Palantir Technologies, where he's served since 2006, is one of the company's earliest hires and key builders. A seasoned technologist with over two decades of experience designing and deploying software platforms for complex, high-stakes environments from defense to enterprise. He holds a Bachelor's in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University and MS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University, actively involved in initiatives like the American Tech Fellows Program to develop domestic AI talent. Author of a new book, Mobilize, How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III, which comes out just a couple weeks, March 17th.

And last summer, you were commissioned as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Reserve. Congratulations. Thank you. I saw that, man.

I was really excited about that. I think that's really cool. And as you know, I've got a Patreon account, subscription account. They've been with me since the beginning.

Another reason I get to sit here with you today. So they get the opportunity to ask every guest a question. This is something that's on everybody's mind. You're aware of it.

It's all over the Internet. This is from Derek. What technical safeguards prevent Palantir software from being misused for warrantless surveillance of American citizens? Yeah, great question, Derek.

So the first thing you have to understand is we don't collect any data, right? We're a software company. We provide our software to the government. So the only data, or to a private sector, to a manufacturer.

So the only data that is going to be in the software is the data that the organization has access to. If you're a manufacturer, that's your supply chain. That's your production data. That's your customer orders.

If you're the government, it's what you have lawful authorities to have access to. Then there's a question of safeguards, which is where we think Palantir is the worst platform to try to abuse civil liberties in. Because we have immutable audit logs. We have purpose-based access control, role-based access control, classification-based access control.

If you misuse the data on the platform, first of all, all the controls that are in there prevent misuse. But if you try to circumvent these things and misuse it, there's an immutable audit trail of what actually happened. You are going to be caught. Now, I can tell you anecdotal stories.

There are institutions that don't want to work with us. Because sometimes those sort of protections are too strong. Sometimes that's uncomfortable. Sometimes you don't want to know what the data, or you actually already know what the data's going to tell you.

And you don't want protections that strong coming in. But that's the core thesis. So you can go back to the founding precept of the company, which is politics is structurally zero-sum. People just like to argue about who's right or not.

In my experience, both sides are right about something. You kind of get nowhere by just arguing to the nth degree. The question is, how do we move out the efficient frontier? If we go back to the pounder store in particular in the post-9-11 world, everyone was like, what's more important, privacy or security?

I don't know. As an American citizen, that sounds really stupid. I kind of want both. Why can't we have more of both?

Who's working on the technologies that mean that for a given level of privacy, I can have more security? Or a given level of security, I can have more privacy? How do you bring more nuance to the question? So if you can protect data in a more fine-grained way, if you can attest to the purpose with immutable audit trails, maybe you can have reasons to have access to data on a temporary basis.

Maybe you can have condition-based access control, where given what's happening in the world and a precept of human intelligence that's telling us something, we're in a new regime for a limited period of time. Having a system that allows all that to happen, if you really go back to a pre-9-11 world, it's essentially binary. You either share all the data or none of it, which then bias towards either gross violations of oversharing or not being able to connect the dots because people didn't share at all. That's insane.

That's the position you don't want to be in. Now, the reason we tend to get attacked is we're living in the messy reality of the arena. If you're looking at this politically and you just want to argue about who's right, you can't see that actually both sides are right about something. That actually there's a kernel of how do we bring a synthesis of these perspectives?

How do we do that with technology so we're not reliant on the fallibility of humans or people rotating in and out at loss of knowledge and transfer? It's about restoring human agency. So if we're given a set of policies that a democratic society wants to enact, do you have the capacity to enact it? This goes back to my point of the broken steering wheel.

Okay, if you have a broken steering wheel, how good can the institution actually be? How nuanced can you, what sort of policy can you, how subtle can your policy be? If we make that work, it can be responsive to the American people, it can be responsive to the electorate. I think a lot of people are worried that it is Patriot Act 2.0.

They're really worried about the privacy stuff. I worry about it too. It would be insane not to worry about it. I mean, I think it'd be insane not to worry about it.

It's a little bit, it's not deep enough thought to think that we're somehow, we're actually the antidote to that. We're not the cause of it. Okay. And that's my point, when you're in the arena, you're going to be criticized for doing it.

Like, hey, you should, it's almost like a purity test. You shouldn't be touching this at all. It's like, I'm just saying, what's the counterfactual? That letting a bunch of historical legacy contractors who aren't as sophisticated with technology trying to solve these problems, who is leaning in and saying, we want to make these institutions function better?

That's the antidote to nihilism. You know, make things work. That's also the American builder way. You know, like, we're not going to get out of these problems through policy alone, through politics alone.

We've got to build our way out of these things. We've got to build a better future. Gotcha. I got you a gift, too.

It's the same one as last time. Amazing. Army Ammunition Facility in Missouri, spending continuous operations since 1941, making ammo. This specific box was made in 1973, and it held 20mm electrically primed shells.

No worries, no shells in it now. But I have it. Oh, man. I have a little mobilized swag, so we have the book, we have a hat, some stickers, some patches.

There we go. There it is. Yeah. And a nice little mobilized jacket.

Oh, perfect. Thank you. Appreciate it. That's awesome.

All right, let's move into how do we prevent World War III. I mean, there is a lot of shit going on in the world right now. I mean, there's not a whole lot of talk about China. That kind of took the back seat a little bit, but I don't.

I don't understand why, but we've got stuff going on in China, Russia and Ukraine still kicking off, Venezuela, the Mexico border, you know, Mexico-U.S. border, Gaza. What are you most concerned about? Well, I mean, if you think about it, I was on in April.

Operations Fires Web, 12-Day War, Midnight Hammer, the skirmish between India and Pakistan, Maduro. You know, there's a lot going on in the world. Yes. So, and I think, are these skirmishes kind of like the Spanish Civil War?

Are they the prelude to potentially something much bigger? Sure feels like it. All these things are happening against the backdrop of China still. So, you know, sometimes China's taking a back seat is the driving force here.

You know, who's buying the Iranian oil that keeps the regime going? What is the industrial base that's supporting Russia's war machine? These pieces are interconnected here. And so.

And so. the radical pace at which these things are happening I think underlines the precept of the book and a lot of what I've been talking about which is to really prevent World War III we need to have a strong enough deterrence posture to make sure our adversaries don't want to mess with us and I say things like Midnight Hammer and Maduro are really the first things we've done that have restored deterrence this sense of oh man I have been underestimating the U.S. and we have to continue that trend where the kind of missing part is I think if you thought about it as a sphere the point of the sphere is really good look no further than Midnight Hammer or Maduro to see that the shaft of the sphere needs work that's the industrial mix that's our ability to link the factory floor to the foxhole and just like we learned in World War II it is like large-scale conflict is these protracted conflicts are about your industrial capacity we outproduce our adversaries in World War II even Stalin was shocked at our productive capability and powers we have to recognize in the present moment through a series of bad policies really since the end of the Cold War an unfettered belief in globalization we have put a lot of our capability in the hands of our adversaries it's not just weapons that's the easiest place to focus you can say okay we have roughly eight days of weapons on hand for a major conflict we obviously need something closer to 800 days look at pharmaceuticals you know you look at rare earths and yeah those rare earths go into weapons they also go into cars and our entire global western auto industry will be brought to its knees if we don't have sovereignty over these things with pharmaceuticals 80% of our generics come from China and if in a conflict obviously we're not going to be getting those things and the American people are not going to have an appetite to have their five-year-old suffer or potentially die from an ear infection that we basically think of as a trivial sickness today a common ailment that goes away you know we need to have our own sovereignty over these capabilities that itself is deterrence like having our own pharmaceutical manufacturing capability that is deterrence and so I think a lot of people especially folks it's easy to get cynical about the defense industrial base it's easy to see as war mongering or fear mongering but we need to think about it as the core thesis of the book is that national security is American prosperity these are just two sides of the same coin and if you get too fixated on just national security national security is not an end unto itself it's a means to underwrite the prosperity of the American people and we're a little bit out of balance there fortunately a lot has happened in the last 12 months to really address these things uh there's a huge amount of change in the pentagon acquisition reform which sounds like a very boring term but hey we gotta like throw away the process not be a victim to the process instead do things that work how about that how we just do things that work uh and get out of our own way and a big part of the book I spend time talking about the historic figures who threw away the process who rebelled against the system and actually delivered the capabilities we need and I think that's a really important narrative because honestly everything that's ever worked was against the system it was despite the system not because of the system and having the courage to look at the American industrial base whether it's um Isaiah with valor you know people trying to build nuclear uh reactors now like it's the heterodox thinking it's not coming from the big companies it's coming from the founder figures it's coming from the crazy youthful energy of invention that has always characterized the American soul yeah you know I see that in all I've interviewed a lot of these guys I'm sure you probably know but I mean the innovation is there and the technology is there I mean I mean obviously I don't have much insight into what China is doing I learned a lot of that from you guys but I mean everything from Epirus with those direct direct EMP weapons that what Isaiah's doing with valor I mean Anderil Shield AI I just interviewed do you know Ethan Thornton yeah holy shit what a sharp fucking kid whoa just interviewed him blew me away Nick Sederaman yeah you probably know him too but I mean but do you know Mabrukus with ceramic and I believe everybody that I just rattled off is manufacturing in the US I don't know how much they're manufacturing a lot of the stuff is prototypes you know or or it seems to be not not not on mass scale yet am I wrong on that capable of it I mean I think that's just going through it like they're in that first of all you know huge threats to the department because if you went back even 10 years none of these people existed and it's not because we didn't have them in America it's because there's no way the department was going to do like the case didn't the business case didn't meet no one was going to buy it now you have the department leaning in recognizing that a maverick like Dino is not a problem he's the solution you know how do we make more bets I fucking love what I'm seeing I mean Driscoll I can't remember what the event was but they had like a Y Combinator of just whoever coming up and pitching their ideas I was it's cool to see them get away from the big prize the big primes you know and uh I just I think that's amazing that they're that they're doing that one of the things I spend time in the book is understanding how do we get here how do we go from having the most amazing industrial base in World War II and the early Cold War to one today that is capable of building a small number of truly explicit things and they are explicit you know um probably my colleagues who are innovators would get a little upset at me giving the prime some credit in some sense but they're not boneheads right they actually do a number of things incredibly well I think they are a victim of the system and that system has been pushing cost plus contracting it's been pushing risk onto the on to the taxpayer instead of these companies it's been reducing the reward for taking risk it almost doesn't make sense to take risk and the way I like to encapsulate this is like every country including Russia and China have turned their back on communism except for Cuba and the old DOD and I think what you're seeing with the new DOW is recognizing like that shit doesn't work uh let's go back to the winning again like winning matters and what does winning look like you know it looks like innovation it looks like something that powers the rest of the American economy this is not some muscle that's atrophy to America it's really a victim of the consequence of being the sole superpower since the end of the Cold War that we didn't have to tolerate the crazies anymore you know you go back to figures like Hyman Rickover or John Boyd these are famously difficult people and even I would say the most talented engineers I have they're difficult humans and you tolerate them because that's what winning requires of you so reattaching yourself like I talked about Theodore Hall and how he was a traitor in the Manhattan project his brother Edward Hall was the inventor of the Minuteman missile and Edward Hall was a famous thing it's kind of this kind of interesting dichotomy there which we can talk about in a second but Edward Hall famously he was a pain in the ass I mean Schriever um protected him because he recognized yeah this guy's a pain but he's a genius like we are going to build an ICBM because of Edward Hall Edward Hall famously he was in World War II uh he was overseeing some mechanics and British soldiers uh repairing aircraft and he thought they were doing a shitty job he pulled out a service weapon on them and actually held them a gunpoint until they did the job right and of course the British got really pissed at him called him to yell at him he's like but I was right like I'm not gonna send my men back out in that plane that these guys are doing a shitty job on and there you have a fearless figure right it's yeah I'll suffer I'll suffer consequences for doing what's right it takes a little bit of crazy to do that but that's what winning looks like so I think what's interesting about Edward and Theodore is like these are two people from the same family genius tends to run in the family and you can say that Theodore's biggest disadvantage is he was too young you know Edward was actually the person who bought him the original books on communism you can say probably Edward you know it was the exact guys at the time in the 30s like people flirting with this stuff but Edward got through that he's like yeah this shit's not gonna work I'm a committed capitalist I believe in America I'm wearing the cloth of the nation and on the other hand you have this 18 year old Theodore who takes a very different path um one guy builds ICBMs one guy gives so gets the phone interesting interesting what I just want to backtrack a little bit I mean it's been it's been almost a year since we've chatted last what what is going on in the world that concerns you I mean you mentioned all these little services are they leading up to World War III how do you see that happening are you seeing alliances built behind the scenes maybe not even behind the scenes things like bricks yeah the great risk we have is you know let's start the very foundational precept there would be no conflict like after World War II America at our expense rebuilt Japan and Germany our I think we might have been the first sort of victor in a conflict of that scale to actually realize that peace and prosperity in the world depending on rebuilding these countries making them democratic free open and successful the people need to have jobs most of the electronics industry in South East Asia that was an intentional decision by us to take manufacturing from the US send it there yes we had the benefit of cheaper labor cheaper goods but it was also a way of developing their economies creating stability and prosperity and influence the challenge for us with the CCP is their goal is not simply to be prosperous because I think if that was their goal there would be no tension it is also for America to fall and I'll give you an anecdote look at this look it is absolutely within their prerogative as a country to decide if they want to buy our soybeans or not that's a business decision I don't begrudge them if they want to buy from Brazil or not us I prefer they buy from us but fine it is not a business decision when you decide to smuggle in agricultural funguses so that we can't grow soybeans and it's happening oh yeah that's happening I had no idea this is the first time I've heard how long has that been going on it's been going on I mean I think in the agriculture domain it's a full-on we're in conflict you know like the reintroduction of new world screwworm which is a livestock parasite that infects living livestock that started in Central America most credible sources believe it was reintroduced by the Chinese it didn't just reemerge and it's spread up if you talk to farmers and rangers in America they all know this came from the CCP oh shit I got one coming on here next week for the governor in Iowa I'm bringing that stuff up and so we have a few you see like we don't talk about it too much I mean there's a few cases where we arrested someone flying in from China where they smuggled in the agricultural fungus in their shoe but of course we clearly just read into the lines I don't have any specific knowledge but it wasn't like CBP decided his shoe was suspicious I think we had human that tipped us off to arrest him when he came in so that's dirty tricks you know that's we have to take their intent literally and quite seriously there you see that we got that bio lab last week and was that Vegas somewhere in Nevada then there was the I don't know I can't remember if this was Chinese or not but the um the uh the cell phone farms in New York City it was Chinese too and there's a huge question on penetration homeless if we go back to something that's happened in the last year you have Operation Spiderweb that was the Ukrainian operation where they used essentially containerized drone carriers so the the drivers this is like commercial shipping it's on it's on a truck and you're dropping off a container somewhere in Russia just like you could have furniture in it could have poison it could have whatever could have corn in it well this container suddenly pops open 117 FPVs drop out in multiple different locations across the country these drones are uh commanded and controlled over LTE networks or cellular networks by pilots who are sitting in a basement somewhere in Ukraine and taking out the strategic bomber fleet you know these are these are high value assets at least 20% of the fleet was taken out many of these things were fueled ready to go carrying cruise missiles so they exploded in big big spectacular ways it's got a bigger impact than it seems first of all these things are out of production they've been out of production since the end of the Cold War since the Soviet Union fell and the assets that were out on the tarmac were the best assets the most available the rest of the assets have maintenance problems they have issues there's a massive asymmetric impact so you know I don't know each drone probably cost 600 to 2,000 bucks at most and you think about the amount of tens of billions of dollars of damage that have been rocked from it you go to the 12 day war in particular the Operation Narnia the part of it you know the Israelis built covert drone factories in Iran so it wasn't like they were it's not even containerized fire the covert factories to manufacture and launch the drones those drones take out the air defenses the IADs that enable you then to deliver more layered effects that come in component after component now we should be looking at our homeland and understand how at risk are we how many containers are coming from China how easy would it be to get something in you know you think about our high value bases this is the underlying concern why are the Chinese buying on this farmland near our bases you know we have a lot of surface area to go protect now there's a protection element of this there's also a deterrence element of this you know we maybe we can't close all these doors we should try but maybe we can't but we also need to have the counter reaction that we're capable of doing being so costly so painful that actually no one wants to fight you know what else I like that I've been hearing lately actually I've heard from Brandon saying with Shield AI is the decentralization of military uh basically not allowing what happened in Russia with the uh with the operation spider to decentralizing all the all the drones so that it's not they're not all on one fucking runway you can get them to FOBs you can get them everywhere he described it every pickleball court in the country becomes a launch pad do you see other countries doing this are these are other countries doing this too I think if we look at spider's web if we look at 12 day war we have to assume other countries are doing this it's so cheap to do and it's so asymmetric that we have to worry about that you know a lot of the investments that the Chinese have made since the end of the Gulf War the first Gulf War is is not to defeat America writ large is to figure out what are our strategic choke points and if they can intersect us if they can defeat us in space if they can defeat us here that it actually basically takes out the whole chain it's their kind of concept of systems warfare and so I think this is one of these areas where you know air defense is hard how are you going to defend against a thousand drones swarm now there are ways people are investing and we're doing it but the reason we're doing it is because we haven't done it before like we need to go reestablish deterrence and capability in these areas so I think we'd be foolish not to think that people are going to go look at asymmetric cheap ways and then we of course should be thinking about the same thing I mean I think one of the great ideas that's implicit in Brandon and the expat is like we need to create lots of problems and dilemmas like across the first island chain we should have launched from anywhere you know are you going to be able to hold continuous custody of those targets as the adversary are we going to be able to outpace your magazine even if you're great at production like are things going to get through that reduce your capabilities can we go after a systems warfare perspective of taking out the least amount of things that cause the amount of pain that get you to say I don't want to fight let's take a quick break running a business 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gusto today gusto.com slash srs and get three months free when you run your first payroll that's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash srs one more time gusto.com slash srs when the health system fails you it's on you to get ahead of it that's why I take my health seriously and try to stay proactive especially when it comes to things like cholesterol health cholesterol is one of those things that can be tough to manage sometimes it's a lifestyle but for a lot of people it runs in the family and it feels like it's out of your control that's why I've been paying attention to dose for cholesterol it's a clinically backed cholesterol support supplement the targets triglycerides LDL HDL and total cholesterol it's also simple to work into your day it's just a daily two ounce shot that tastes like mango no pills and no powders I've been using dose along with some of the guys on the srs team and it's one of those things that's easy to stay consistent with I only talk about products on the show that I actually like and dose is one of the best out there it uses ingredients like turmeric amla and other naturally occurring ingredients and it shows up right at your door so you don't have to think about it new customers can save 35% on your first month of subscription by going to dose daily.co slash srs or entering srs at checkout that's d-o-s-e-d-a-i-l-y dot c-o slash srs for 35% off your first month's subscription all right john we're back from the break let's talk about the colonel colonel kukor so one of the cool things in the book is we tell the story of colonel drew kukor a marine infantry officer sorry intelligence officer who was really the father of ai in the modern department of war and the journey is uh you you exceptionally interesting one because I think a lot of the heroes and heretics I talked about they're from the past here we have one in the present and looking at how much bureaucracy his nickname in the department was the iron dome of pentagon bullshit like the amount of pain this guy went through to birth it is truly incredible and I think it's important because today people can look at Maven which I think is the most consequential operational use of AI anywhere in the world and be like oh it's always going to be but really it started as a rogue project in a cubicle in the b-ring of the pentagon and even before then you could say what motivated this marine intel officer to go after this you know so with Colonel Kukor you have a very interesting personal story this guy grew up in Southern California single mother Mormon um dirt poor so when he got when he ended high school he had a corner fork in the road he's like I can go to trade schools I can join the military so Razi scholarship went to college joined the marines and I think it was roughly 2012 he had this really catastrophic experience where um 2012-2014 somewhere in the time range where he was on a helicopter trying to land on Mount Sinjar to evacuate the Yazadi who had fled to Mount Sinjar um with ISIS pursuing them and a young marine thought he saw rpgs and waved off the helicopters from landing this guy was probably you know 24 hours in bleary-eyed it turned out there were none but because of that you have hundreds of Yazadi who then were sex slaves tortured you know they were lost basically and this is a this is a sort of initial catalyst from he got a just fixation on like computer vision could have told me whether there was an rpg or not why are we having a bleary-eyed marine having to make this determination how do I get better tools for the operators this has huge consequences in terms of human life here and so when he had the opportunity to start project maven it was this rogue ai effort in the pentagon and you know the pentagon has this sort of myth nothing good should come out of osw everything or osc at the time but you know everything needs to come from within the services it's very parochial and this was this kind of centralized protected effort that everyone tried to kill over and over and over again uh and kukor was this amazing blend of he's an operator who understand acquisition and understood technology it's like kind of this you know it's the triple threat here that he can bring all this together and he had this deep experience from his time in the marines like the government instinct to try to invent everything internally is going to fail let's go out to google let's go out to the leading technology companies in america and ask them to help us solve this problem it was a heretical approach that led to lots of pushback lots of bullshit it was under his leadership we had the famous kind of 2017 walkout where google said like we're going to leave project maven we don't work with the department that's sort of crucible for silicon valley um which to google's great credit you know that's not their position anymore they're very much in the fight they're all in what changed uh let's go ahead finish the story sorry yeah no we should get to get to that but i think this this man was so successful so like all the services didn't really want to adopt this like most good things in the military you start with jsoc people who just want to get things done uh they have very little religion and outcomes are the only thing that matter and so in 2017 it started there uh very successfully it grew it came over the conventional side with 18th airborne because there were a bunch of jsoc operators who became in charge of these conventional units and it started automating the targeting cycle it's like we could go you know at the time it was 12 minutes was impressive now it's closer to two minutes or less from detecting a target to putting fires on the target wow and it kept expanding you think about that as a very narrow slice of the problem which is in the foxhole but how do you integrate that back to supply how do you think about okay what shots are worth taking based on my resupply timeline based on the magazine depth based on the effect it's going to have on the enemy how do we how do we get so good at this loop that our adversaries can't compete so i'll just say that he delivered something truly exquisite there but along the way he was dealing with bullshit after bullshit uh people who were threatened by his program would file ig investigations the best one of the always anonymous of course uh that uh this this marine officer was accepting bribes he had stashes of money at his house he is housing somehow housing illegal aliens in his basement um you know thing after thing so ncis actually went out to his house again this is a devout mormon four kids uh 1400 square foot house in northern virginia no basement in the house mind you you know the ncs yeah there are two cars each with more than 100 000 miles on them you know if any ncis officer left thinking how do you even how are you making this work you know but these things matter they came after his rank they tried to demote into lieutenant colonel you know and you think about how crazy you have to be to just keep pushing through all that bullshit all these people coming after you to deliver something that you know is going to be a foundational capability for the military and i think that's the sort of arc we see like whether it's or boyd or colonel true cuckor that's the sort of commitment you see to the nation i think one of the common themes for these heroes is really like during their immediate lifetime their immediate period of service they get fucked uh and it's only later on when the history is written when people can look at it with clear eyes that they get lionized we recognize their immense contributions you know it gives me a little bit of satisfaction to know that all those people who filed those ig complaints they will be anonymous to history no one will ever know their names they will not be remembered but everyone will know that colonel true cuckor sacrifices created project payment man that was why did google what change why are they back um we were living in a weird period one you definitely can't discount trump derangement syndrome so there's that part of it as an overlay but we're living in a weird period coming out of g-watt still in g-watt where we had no great power competition there was no sense of threat to the nation like yeah yeah you know you're over there fighting and people are going to them all well do you think that's because we're distracted or we were complacent yeah absolutely i mean the great power it was happening we just weren't aware exactly we weren't organized we weren't mobilized uh and so this kind of left people this kind of existential angst of like what is america for are we even good are we the good guys what's the counterfactual a lot of these things you really understand because are we perfect absolutely not are we better than any alternative out there for the world yeah as someone whose alternative was being dead in the ditch and legos like that's never been a question in my mind and i think there's a certain complacency when you don't have to deal with that i think the ukraine war was a big train point where people realize like wait a second like russia just decided to roll their tanks across the border one day you mean like this rules-based international order just doesn't maintain itself uh it was a stark wake-up call um so then people i think i wouldn't say it's perfect uniformity but i think people kind of recognize like oh maybe everything i'm able to do is a consequence of the prosperity and freedom that this country has given me to be able to do these things and these things aren't free they're not given that there is a world where these things can be taken away from me uh and that's driven a lot of alignment there's a lot there's a lot more to go you know i think and this sort of epistemic humility of the people who invent the tools the people who use these tools neither alone are going to have the full answers it's a big part of why i wanted to join the attachment tool i wanted to be such an advocate for it how do we build a bridge between our leading technologists and our defense department again where our technologists have exposure to the problems they understand not just the problems of the people you know it's like we our uniform service members are better than we deserve now it's what we're providing them good enough for what they deserve and i think that's the missing part of the equation like the the american industrial base that's distinct from the defense industrial base used to be completely invested in our national security you know who built the minute man the prime contractor the minute man chrysler you know it was a very different world um i think we need to get back to it doesn't have to be perfect this is not forced it's not like the chinese system where it's civil military fusion you must do this or else but you want to do this i want to live in a world i want to be an advocate for an america where we understand the necessity for investing in this thing to underwrite our economic prosperity can you talk a little bit about detachment 201 and what it is what it's for yeah the idea um really is like we have a bounty of unique technical knowledge in this country most of it is in silicon valley or there about some of this in else window um and then our the military structure of course you kind of grow through the ranks it's very very hard to be inorganically inserted into there and these two worlds are pretty separate and that we'd be much better off if these worlds if there was more of a network where you could collaborate on things together i know this is more so this is literally what we did in world war ii in world war ii we direct commissioned 100,000 people as officers in the army some of them were from hollywood and they were in charge of making media content and communicating to the american people some of them were industrialists and had unique knowledge on how to do mass production uh planning supply chains you know like these this expertise essentially when a country goes to war the whole country goes to war and because we haven't been faced with this sort of mass mobilization i mean our military was 16 members strong in world war ii 16 million sorry millions strong in world war ii it's hard for us to imagine today even vietnam was 3 million so you know we're kind of we're below that now i don't even know what are we at today i think it's closer to 2 million including civilians wow wow the and so like the shared experiences aren't there but also the knowledge like one of these things i observed with the israelis after october 7th you know i think it's a really interesting example because first of all it's a technical country you know and they pride themselves on being technical and they are technical um everyone's prior service by definition you know so on october 8th they mobilized 360,000 odd reservists and those reservists came back they were actually horrified at the state of tech in the idea and that's a profoundly interesting statement to me what they're really saying is a self-critique they're saying oh man when i was 20 i knew i had code but i didn't know what i was doing so there's more to it's like now i spent 20 years in industry i built internet scale solutions like i've learned so much know-how they got more done in the four months after october 7 than in the prior 10 years wow we have that times 100 in this country and we're just not enabling the people with those skills like if china makes civil military fusion a requirement we make voluntary civil military fusion impossible so how do we rebuild that bridge here it's been super rewarding i mean um like any reservist of course the the general counsel's office looks at what can you work on based on your conflicts so my primary focus is on talent it's on um how we think about software talent in the in the army in particular um how we organize around that to deliver lethality and one of the most impressive things is these people are wildly talented we are not missing for intelligence or capability we need to empower them a lot of this breaks rank structure a lot of this breaks forms of thinking um how how can i leverage what i'm seeing at the most productive commercial companies how they're leveraging their talent their factory floor how they're empowering them the tools are providing them to empower our warrant officers and our e4s like the best programmer i found in hawaii is an e4 everyone knows this guy's really talented but of course they don't know what to do with him and so how about bear hug this guy give him the mentorship he needs give him access to other people in silicon valley supercharge his growth enable him to be one of the people who writes the future of how we fight in software wow wow did this is detachment 201 new is it was this set up when you joined that's right yeah uh it was it's the cto of meta andrew bosworth um kevin wheel from open ai bob mcgrew who is essentially a venture of chat gpt myself for the first four and we hope it will be a very successful program that delivers incredible value to the army and they'll see need and value and continue to grow it so this is this is the program you were talking about at the beginning of the interview where we're taking active service members and you guys are basically their mentors tapping 201 is our reserve unit in the army i have a separate program at palantir that's the american tech fellowship okay um there where we let active duty and veterans apply um and we run a few of them there's a fellowship specific for veterans and for the activity community where we teach them these tools largely they're transitioning members so how do i help them actually get amazing commercial jobs where they are ai application developers even though four months ago they were jsoc operators okay okay so one is transitioning into civilian life the others can keep it in one of the ways in which these things relate though is just recognizing how how capable the uniformed service members are of building these applications whether they're going to build it as active duty for war fighting or they're going to build it as part of the greater american industrial base for commercial and private sector actors like it goes back to my underlying point like wow we are drowning in talent you know our problem is not do we have talented enough people it's like are we allowing them to apply themselves are we taking the shackles off are we letting them run are we embracing the fact that yeah rank means nothing going back to kukor the only thing in the ig investigation that he would say guilty as charged is he was accused of undermining the rank structure and he's like yeah guilty as charged i had captains who knew way more than generals and colonels and i let them say i let them speak their mind and by the way if you care about winning that's what you're gonna do if we're at war that's what you're gonna do doesn't mean you're breaking the chain of command but just because you have the stars doesn't mean you have the right answer you know we talked a lot about getting ready for world war three do you think we're ready i think we're getting ready to deter it i mean let's just i always like to remind people the point is not to fight world war three is to be so ready for it that our adversaries realize oh this i'm gonna lose you know if your adversaries are certain they're gonna lose or think it's very likely or that the cost of fighting is too high they will avoid the fight and our goal is it's not that you know the goal is not hey let's permanently make it so that you know from now to eternity it's really by a year over this next year what are we gonna do so that every day she wakes up and say says today's not the day and then over that then we're gonna buy another year we're gonna buy another year and we're just gonna deter the conflict continuously by being too dangerous to fight with the whole time i feel like we're there right now i'm very much an optimist in that regard first of all no no army that lost its morale has ever won the war you know and i think you know we have a bounty of natural strengths which i've been talking about over the course of the show um i'm very much optimistic i think we need to just make not be complacent about it we need to embrace that there are going to be disruptions to how we've thought about these things historically that are critical to continuing to maintain the deterrence and that is actually the american way you know where did the tank come from let's just go back even to history i'll give you a non-american example i think it's instructive most people don't realize the tank was invented by the royal navy because the british army thought i have horses why would i need a tank that's stupid so winston churchill when he was the first lord of the navy whatever they call her there the civilian oversight he's like i'm gonna build this thing he called it a landship because he can only build ships so he built a landship and of course we can't really imagine the intervening periods between the interwar period when he started doing this in the present day without tanks being a core part of how armies are formed and fight when you run a business you track every dollar and your bank shouldn't make that harder or hold you back china's changing the way people bank by offering the most rewarding fee-free banking it's built for you not like these old banks no overdraft fees no monthly fees and access to thousands of fee-free atms with time you can get up to one thousand one hundred and fifty dollars in annual rewards fee-free you get five percent cash back on your time card in a category of your choice like gas or groceries your savings grow faster with a three point seven five percent apy that's nine times higher than the national average you also get 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i think we were slow on that i think we were slow on that i think we were slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're slow on that i think we're Slow for ourself or slow in comparison to other countries? Slow for ourself, for sure.

In comparison to other countries, only because for them, it was an asymmetric cost advantage to lean into it. They were not going to be able to compete with us on F-35. So where could they compete with us? Weaning into autonomy and unmanned things.

Now, we're not behind on autonomy, but I think we want to be dominant there. And I think a lot of those ideas are, you know, part of the challenge is really, what does innovation feel like? It feels like shit. You know, innovation is chaotic.

It's messy. It's frustrating. At Poundtrap, I've probably been involved with transitioning 15 different projects from the 01, to borrow Peter Thiel's, you know, the invention phase to the scaling phase. Every single, the first few times I did this, I was like, wow, why is this so hard?

Like, why do people on both sides of this thing hate each other? Why is there so much interpersonal friction? This sucks. Maybe I can invent a process that makes it suckless.

Every attempt at inventing a process killed the magic. None of those things transitioned. They all died. And this is the mistake that we're essentially making, which is we think like, oh, we need a scalable process to go from invention to reaching the full force.

Like, it turns out there's no scalable process. It turns out every one of these transitions requires human grit. It requires ingenuity. It requires a willingness to just chew through pain.

And every transition, and I have 15 times now, I can accept that as reality. And I think this is why you both need the heretics. And, you know, a willingness, this willingness to disrupt yourself, this working backwards from winning. You know, is the goal to have a pain-free process?

Because that's like, you know, managed to climb into a mountain is also pain-free. Or is it going to win? And how much pain are you willing to tolerate to win? I think in that frame, it becomes obvious.

So you said you think we started slow. How do you think we're doing now? I think we've hit an inflection point. I think we have the right people driving things.

They're not necessarily the senior most ranked person, but they're the most competent people with the most amount of experience. And they're breaking down silos. They have credible technical opinions. They know who to back.

They're running it through intense competition. And one of the points of the book is that you really need to embrace inter-service rivalry. Many people look at the inter-service rivalry as a bug. I think it's a feature.

When we were building the ICBMs, we had four concurrent competing programs. We think of Minitman today, but the Navy had a program. The Army had a program down in Huntsville, the Jupiter. You had Polaris, which was the emerging winner.

Even within the Navy, there were four competing programs. So we tend to look at that from the luxury of being the sole superpower in the 90s and say, that seems duplicative. Surely there's a better, cleaner, less messy process. And the answer is no, there's not.

If you do that, it's all fake. It's like, if the program never works, everything costs too much, everything takes too long. But actually, the desire for these people to compete against each other, short of the ultimate competition against the adversary, is what leads to innovation, leads to creativity, leads to reimagining constraints. You know, who would have thought back then?

There's a famous anecdote I was given by someone who was actually in Quadroling when Elon was testing the early Falcons. You know, Quadroling, the atoll in the Pacific, for those of you who not know, we do a lot of rocket launchers there. And there was a Boeing facility and the SpaceX facility. And this guy, who's a PhD physicist, kind of like a CETA contractor, like a scientific advisor, he's kind of observing these two things.

And the Boeing facility, it's like, it's got a clean room, people are in bunny suits, it looks super professional. You go to the SpaceX facility, you know, parts are on the table, some of the parts look like they're rusting, it looks haphazard. And so you might say it's reasonable, as someone looking at these two things, say, who do you think is going to win this? You know, but then, of course, fast forward a little bit, and Elon has launched, I think, well over 160 rockets last year alone.

And he's brought down the price of getting a kilogram to orbit from roughly $50,000 a kilogram with shuttle, space shuttle, to 10 bucks, 20 bucks with Starship Heavy Reuse. That's imminently coming. It's crazy innovation. And I think, you know, other countries don't have Elon.

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

Well, I think we should, you know, one of the mistakes we made was thinking, like, hey, let's, this thing is so expensive, we should plan to use it for 80 years. I mean, man, I don't even know what the world's going to go back in 10 years, let alone 80 years. Like, how do we get into tighter cycles of iteration, very faster? In World War II, we had roughly 150 different airframes.

You know, we think about, like, the B-51, the B-52. Like, we have these archetypal planes that we think of, but many of them we've forgotten. So maybe we could say, like, 10 of those airframes really mattered, but we produced 150 different ones. And maybe that's roughly what, that's the sort of chaotic innovation you need.

You can't get to those 10 just by thinking your way through it. You need to kind of experiment and play your way through it. And most of them had a short shelf life, you know, and we've got to be thinking about what is the true cost of doing this? Because sometimes I think we lull ourselves into a sense of if we just plan this out better, it'll be cheaper over the long run.

And in fact, what we see is it's not actually cheaper over the long run. It becomes very expensive, and you don't have any of the competitive pressure. And it's not just internal competitive pressure. It's the outside where the enemy gets a vote, as we say.

So as they're changing, we're going to realize that we need different weapon systems that are changing. One of the lessons that I really highlight in the book is it's not actually what your weapon system does today that's determined of the victory. It's how quickly you can change your weapon system to what you need it to do tomorrow. This is why, like, the work with Detachment 201, like, the organic ability for green suitors to reprogram their weapon systems, to do new and innovative things in combat, is truly the advantage.

It's kind of like the meta advantage. It's not literally just what does it do today, but how malleable is this weapon system to what I'm going to need it to be able to do tomorrow? How much of that can I do as I'm fighting? We see the Ukrainians do quite a bit of that, right?

And certainly, a large scale con, it's not a one-to-one mapping between what's happening in Ukraine and what's going to happen, but there are absolutely lessons to learn. One of those meta lessons, another one, is before the war, many of these infantrymen in Ukraine, I think the average age is 41 for Ukrainian infantrymen, many of them actually work in IT outsourcing firms. They actually have technical skills. Now, the infantryman is not writing code, but because they understand the technology, they're able to ask very precise feature requests.

Like, hey, I need it to do this. And they know whether their request is going to take one hour, one day, one week, one month, and they titrate their request relative to, like, yeah, if I get in a month, I might be dead. I'll settle for this capability in the day that I can use to apply effects on the adversary. So it makes them better customers.

And that alone, like, we need folks in combat arms who are principally experts in their combat arms, but also have enough technical literacy to view software as a weapon system that they know how to wield and fight off of. I mean, that's just, so these guys are, they're in direct communication with who's manufacturing their ship. We don't have, at least when I was there, we don't have that. Are we getting that?

And one of the things changing. So if you look at the, under Secretary Hensett's leadership, this move from PEOs, program executive offices, to PAEs, the portfolio acquisition executives, the whole idea is, hey, specify less. Let's hold the objective. We know what we're trying to accomplish.

Let's delegate more authority down. Let's create more iterative, collaborative engagement to decide what we're going to need. Let's not pretend like we know everything. So they're not just saying, hey, the capability does what we think it needs to do today.

Also, they're evaluating what is our ability as the Army to write new code on top of this and change what we want to do, to integrate things we've built on our own into this. Is it cohesive? Is it interoperable? We're determining that at design time rather than, hey, we got it.

We're trying to retrofit it later on and realizing we're stuck. So I'm optimistic that we're moving in the right direction and that we have the talent we need. We have the capability to do this as a country. We now have the will, the will to blow shit up and prioritize winning again.

Let's talk about unity. How do we get back to unity? That's a big missing component here. Yeah.

It's probably the thing I care most about. You know, no civilization can be great unless it believes in itself, unless it's proud of itself. And I think no nation has more to be proud of than America. But if you kind of just immerse yourself in the zeitgeist, that's not the vibe.

You know, there's a lot of infighting. There's a lot of disunity. We've forgotten what makes us one. And I think a lot of it comes down to storytelling.

You know, part of this is represented in our media. A lot of our stories today have really anti-heroes. The hero of some movie is a drug addict. It's certainly not someone you want your child to grow up to be.

And if you just rewind, you go back to the 80s and 90s, whether it's One for Red October or Red Dawn or Rambo 3, you know, we had a very different take. And they were complicated heroes. Because that is really our soft power, not only for the American people, but, you know, I think about my father who came to America never having been here, but had a fully formed concept of America in his head, which was driven by media, by entertainment. Like, we were a strong, powerful country.

I think even things like Maduro, even our most hardened cynics overseas, say, wow, that was really cool. Like, that's just super impressive, super confident, you know. And I think we have to acknowledge that not only does the world want a strong America, it doesn't want an America full of self-loathing, the American people want that too. And there's a real opportunity right now to go tell those stories and to remind ourselves that we are always striving for a more perfect union, that belief in oneself is critical.

And on the merit, on the facts, we have a lot to be proud of. Is this why you're getting into media? You're trying to bring unity? Yeah, I want to tell positive stories.

Like, I really, it came back to wanting to watch movies with my kids again, you know, and that feeling. And I started looking at it. And sometimes it's very subtle. So, you know, I grew up in the shadow of the Space Coast in Orlando.

And it's hard, you know, do you think I would grow up to be a CTO if I hadn't been there? I think the answer is maybe not, because what was in the zeitgeist in Orlando at the time? You know, you would go to the elementary school courtyard and watch the shuttle launch. You would wake up to double sign booms on Saturday morning as shuttle re-entered.

It was the sense of America's a badass country. Look at what we're capable of from a science and technology perspective. And importantly, the subtext is the future is going to be better through science and technology and hard work. You know, I had a class in elementary school whose father designed the landing gear on the F-117A.

And then when that thing, when we disclosed that asset existed, he was like the most popular kid in class, even though it was just a landing gear. You know, and this pride in what we're building and this pride together. It didn't matter if you're left or right. When I grew up, if you were flying the American flag, that was not politically coded.

No party should have a monopoly on patriotism. That's the one thing that binds us all. And then, yeah, like any family, we can fight about lots of things. We can disagree about things, especially if it's coming from a purity of perspective of wanting the country to be better.

And so I don't think we're going to win these things just by arguing. The argument's not going to go away, but I'd like us to remind ourselves that we're Americans first. And I think a big part of this is, like, what are we passing on to our kids? You know, we've been here before as a country.

If you go back to Vietnam, a lot of our movies were very cynical, kind of this sense that we kind of screwed up the world as a country. And that was represented in our media, that was represented in the zeitgeist. Coming out of Vietnam, though, you know, you think about the Reagan era. I think Reagan's real contribution was just being a positive leader.

Like, it's going to be morning again in America. We are great. We're capable of doing good things. It's set the conditions for people to abandon the nihilism, reabsorb optimism, and actually make things again.

And we're at the precipice of that. When you look at Isaiah at valor, like, we are making things again. You know, and it's not just one point example with Isaiah. You span out all the people that you've had here.