Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar launches 'Mobilize': America needs 800 days of weapons stockpile, has 8

of sense and Microsoft should probably follow a similar strategy so uh exciting news there let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange want to change the world raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange change. Just do it. And we have our next guest, Sean Sankar from Palunteer. He is the chief technology officer in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in the TV show. Sean, good to see you.

Good to see you guys. How are you, Jordy?

Welcome back. It's been far too long. It's been like almost a year. You were one of our earliest guests. A huge moment for the show. Thank you so much for joining then. And thank you so much for joining today. How are you doing?

It's a big day.

I'm doing great. I'm pumped to be back on St. Patrick's Day, but more importantly on the book the book launch day on uh on Mobilized.

Yeah. What's the Strauss and Reed?

You sent us a green package.

Yes. Should we open this? Can we open this on the

You got to open it.

You sent us a green package because you knew

needs to take it was

it was going to be on St. Patrick's Day.

Look at this thing.

Look at this thing. So, it opens.

This is so

This is a real piece of hardware.

So big. It's an actual uh US Army ammo box. It It held 20 mm electrically primed munitions.

And now it holds mobilize.

It's got the hook. It's got some schwag.

There's amazing stuff.

You've outdone yourself. So cool.

Much. Um I'm going to sit back.

You can move that.

This might get in the way of the camera. Anyway, um so uh I mean you've been working at Palunteer for a long time. Has it been almost two decades now?

It's It'll be 20 years this Friday.

W Oh, this Friday. Congratulations. Amazing. So, uh, when did you when did you feel like, okay, now is the time to write the book? What was the thesis? What was the, uh, what was the the moment where you were like, okay, it makes sense to actually take all that experience and distill it down into something that can be instantiated in an actual book?

Well, the book is the long form version of the 18 thesis. So, I put the Defense Reformation out there in October of 2024, and that was kind of the welling up of all these feelings I had working more or less in the bowels of the Department of War for 18 years. Yeah.

Watching deterrent slowly erode,

seeing that we had a problem. Like you you go back in time and you say we had the annexation of Crimea in 14. We had the militarization of the Spratley Islands in 15, breakout capability for Iran to get the bomb in 17. We've had a pogram in Israel, the invasion of Ukraine, conflict with the Houthis. what's going on here? Like we're spending a trillion dollars a year. Where is our deterrence? And uh that that's one piece of it and you and you look at what what's looming with China.

Then you look at the other side of this and you really look at history and you say like what what gave us deterrence in World War II and the Cold War, how did this stuff work? You recognize how much the industrial base that won World War II and the Cold War is not the industrial base we have today. Mhm.

You know, the the astonishing statistic is that only 6% of major weapon systems were built by defense specialists in '89 when the Berlin Wall still stood. So 94% of spending,

yeah,

went to companies that were what I call dual purpose. Chrysler was the prime on the Minute Man intercontinental ballistic missile. So Chrysler made missiles and minivans. Ford made satellites. General Mills, a serial company, more made torpedoes. We had an economy that was equally invested in freedom and prosperity. But the corporate story is not enough. So that that's a precondition. You could kind of say, well, what were these companies like? You know, because we think about it today as Northrup Grumman and Loheed Martin, but it was Glenn Martin, it was Jack Northrup, it was Leroy Grumman. It's something that your audience would understand foundationally. It was founders. You know, our entire industrial base was made up of founders.

What's happened, you know, at the end of the cold war, we had this enormous financialization of defense. These companies became run by the third, fourth generation. buybacks, dividends, financial engineering over real engineering. And by the way, that's not specific to defense. The same thing happened to Intel. The same thing happened to a lot of great American companies. The rejuvenation of our economy comes from the heretics. And then I started researching a lot about the the history of innovation in defense. It's like nothing worked because of the system. Everything that worked worked despite the system. You look at Andrew Higgins, this Scots-Irishman in Louisiana who built the boat that won the war. 92% of all boats in World War II were Higgins boats.

Wow. Wow. But the Navy didn't let him compete. Then when they finally let them compete and he won, they stole his designs and failed to copy it successfully. In the end, after all these things are like, "Fine, we'll buy the freaking boat."

And the boys in Normandy landed on Higgins boats. That's correct. You know, and you go story after stories.

Yeah.

Himman Rickover who built the nuclear navy, his first office was a women's restroom. And I think part of documenting these stories of the heresy because of course the Navy wanted to humiliate him into quitting. And and then think about the hood like Oppenheimer told him this is not going to work. You're not gonna be able to build a nuclearpowered submarine. And in the face of Oppy telling you this, you're like, "No, you're wrong. I'm going to do it."

That's bold.

No. Yeah.

Bold.

Bold. Have you heard the story of Ball Corporation? They make mason jars.

You know, you know those mason jars. Also a defense contractor. Yeah. I think they eventually sold it to BA Systems in 2024. But for a long time, the company that made the mason jars that are in every like hipster millennial burger joint in America was also making like satellites and sensors and all sorts of stuff. And so there's just endless stories about that of of re-industrialization. I'm wondering like there's a huge boom in new startups that are saying we're going to build boats from scratch. We're going to build missile systems from scratch. We're going to build satellites from scratch. But is there some underrated industrial capacity in America where we haven't actually gone to Chrysler and said, "What can you do these days?" is I know Chrysler might be a bad example because it's a older company, but is there still some is there still some latent industrial capacity where in the worst case scenario like America can actually adapt?

Well, that's that's the important part of the book is we're telling the story that it's not the fil version of the story where we flipped a switch in World War II and then bam, the automotive industry started making munitions. It was actually a journey. It took 18 months to retool and rebuild factories to produce war material.

Yeah. Uh, and so you really want to get moving early. And now I we have a lot of this latent capacity. You think about GM produces a new Escalade every 90 seconds. You know, right about now, we need some SM6s, SM3s, and and Tomahawks rolling off the line every 90 seconds, too. And so, how do we take the kind of exquisite artisal approach to a low number of munitions we built and start scaling that out? And you're going to need a breath of approaches. You're going to need the new entrance building entirely new classes of things, and you're going to need to make the exquisite things much more quickly. What makes this stark is

we have eight days of weapons on hand for a major fight with China.

Nobody thinks that's deterrence. Nobody thinks that's enough. Yeah. Right. We need 800 days. How do we really fire up the arsenal of freedom here and get serious about building? And we're going to have to build those things in new ways. And a lot of that skill exists in Elsagundo. It exists in the modern American manufacturing economy.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh I I'm always reminded of this uh this like Palmer Lucky take about like uh the younger generation throughout the 2000s got obsessed with building consumer software ad platforms. We love ads but I take the point. Um is there something similar going on right now with AI? Because AI can be important for the military but also you see there's only a few caterpillars or electricians and they're working on data centers. If that doesn't become critical to the defense and deterrence of the nation, it actually just winds up being more just juice for the economy, which is probably good, but at the same time, it's it might be sucking capital, sucking human talent out of true industrialization efforts.

Well, I think so. Like I think with AI, we have to remember that we have huge human agency. AI doesn't do X or Y. Humans use AI to do X or Y. Let's pick intelligently. Let's pick things that are in the national interest that give the American people prosperity that actually propel civilization forward and aren't AI slop and you know AI slot machines.

Yeah.

Uh and I think the the promise in front of us is that AI is an opportunity to give the American worker superpowers. How do you make the American worker 50 times more productive than any other worker anywhere in the world? And that solves the math equation of like how do we re-industrialize economically? This is actually

Yeah. How do you how do you uh how do you rate the current reindustrialization process? There's a lot of founders you mentioned in places like Elsagunda that are working as hard as they possibly can.

But but is are we 10% of the way there for what you want to see?

Are we 20% of the way there? Are we 5%? Like where where do we stand right now given all the effort that has already started? But

we're still, you know, early in this process. Well, I'd say three years ago at the first re-industrialized, there was an aspirational aspect to it. Now, I think we're closer to 5%. Like, this is happening. We're in the early, but it's happening. Yeah.

Uh, and I think people are starting, you know, one of the

amazing things about the American Spirit is people just roll up their sleeves and get busy trying things, you know, and I'm I'm working with people on the factory floor every day who are using AI to change how they do production. One of our submarine parts manufacturers actually added a third shift. They were able to use AI to automate the planning process, which meant instead of having to have tools down while they did planning and quoting, they were actually able to get that done in 10 minutes. They needed to hire a third shift because there was more work to do. And these are the sort of narrative violations that aren't being reported. And I think the underlying phenomenon is that we are listening. So these revolutions are always tools driven revolutions, not concept revolutions. uh and it the the impact of the revolution is determined by the people who wield the technology not the people who invented it. Galileo did not invent the telescope. He used the telescope to discover the planets in planetary motion.

The microscope, the power loom, the personal computer, thing after thing. It's the wielder of the technology that determined its impact on society. Today, we are way overindexed on listening to the inventors of AI.

They're very smart, but just like their creations, they have their own jagged intelligence. And the future of AI is going to be written by the the American worker.

Yeah. Yeah. How do you think uh AI interfaces with the re-industrialization effort? There's there's also like Yes. Use AI in the factory, but I imagine that retraining is a really underrated opportunity. I've already heard just years ago I was talking to Chris Power about from Adrian about how he was able to hire someone and just get them forklift certified and teach them how to use the things. Reskilling has always been happening, but it feels like we're going through an acceleratory phase of reskilling, but what are you seeing on the reskilling side related to AI?

Well, enormous thing. So, I mean, I think Chris has really led the way with Adrian here. He's going to have a huge factory opening on Friday. Hopefully, you guys get a chance to cover that. Factory 4.

Um, the it's Panasonic Energy. Our work with them. So, they're located in Sparks, Nevada, inside the Gigafactory. They make every cell for the Gigafactory for Tesla.

Interesting. the the population, your employee base there are prior casino workers and this is high-end exquisite Japanese equipment. It used to take three years of apprenticeship to learn how to be a battery technician for this equipment with AI. It now takes three months.

Wow.

So that's a very concrete example of the reskilling. More profoundly, I'd say, you know, the one of the things we cover in the book is the story of Colonel Cukor, the the father of Maven, and it's one of it's the newest heretic. He's a contemporary. he's alive today and you know obviously um and what I think is is is really compelling about that story is like this is actually the most consequential AI system in the world today but because it exists in the department of war it's not something that broadly the valley interacts with or thinks about and I think one of the reasons it's so consequential is the stakes are existential people are not they don't have lane goals like how do I get 10% more efficient or you know reduce headcount by x or y it's really like how do I have complete dominance and overmatch and as a as a result of this the people who are building it are not just formally trained computer scientists over here but it's become a platform that the vocational expert the intel warrant officer the fires officer is able to really encode their knowledge build agents that are their kind of team working with them to get things done and so the efficiency the speed the scale of what's going on like really we're learning more from those users today than we are anywhere else.

Yeah. uh how are you how are you thinking about um the role of the forward deployed engineer in the AI boom? It feels like there's uh the capability overhang and incredible amount of uh you know genius intelligence from the machines and yet uh there's so many processes that are still manual. I went to the doctor recently and I had to fill out a paper form and so in many ways like there's still a capability overhang just from like HTML web forms. uh and it feels like as amazing as the AI is getting and has we're seeing so much progress there uh there's still something that needs to fall into place to actually get systems deployed.

I think that's right. There's a huge I mean I in air quotes mockingly I'll call it the last mile problem. You know everyone's the first 80% of the problem was building the genius technology. The second 80% it turns out is actually how do you implement it for economic value. Yeah. And that's where we're that's kind of our jam. That's what we do for a living. Uh, and I think it's never been more fun to be a for deployed engineer than right now because the speed at which you can take new product ideas that you're learning, systematize them, generalize them, it's crazy. And I I know Ted's talked about this, but like we have to reinvent for deployed engineering as we go right now. Things that we used to think would take four weeks, take four hours. And so the amount that you can get done, how you go to market with that, it's like let's just sit in a room with the customer that there's no sales meeting. It's sit in the room. Let's go build agents to start automating actual workflows today. by tomorrow you'd die.

How do you think about uh advice for young people? I imagine that you'd say, you know, come work with you. But also, it seems like there's some potential alpha in being a young person that goes to a Chrysler and says, I'm going to be the AISAR. I'm going to be the forward deployed engineer fully foiled deployed because I'm just going to work at this company. Uh where where are the opportunities for young people in during this like tumultuous AI revolution?

So, I I'll give you two two answers to that. The first is what would I tell my children like what should they learn right now?

Yeah.

Uh and really what I would want to cultivate in them is agency. Extreme agency. Like I think all the other skills you'll be able to figure out as you go, but you know do you really believe that your human effort can make a dent on the planet and and how you experience that and live that?

Then where would you spend time? I I think Palantry is an amazing platform to have impact on the world. The things that you do in the commercial sector impact the government and vice versa. And you know you have access to the problems. You're in it. Um, but second to that, it's like when you're thinking about being inside of a company, I think AI is going to be the antidote to the managerial revolution of the 20th century. All this power that was sucked away from the frontline worker who actually knew what they were doing to an amorphous blob of middle managers and even actually they sucked power away from the senior leadership that's being reversed because all of the bureaucracy is getting cut. the agency that someone has. I was thinking about this because I in the military I'm seeing incredible AI application developers who are not formerly trained computer scientists. And I was like, what happened? I've been doing this for 20 years. This feels like a discontinuity. Where do these people come from? And I realized like, oh, they've always been there. That the thing is like, what would this guy have done 10 years ago? Make a PowerPoint, try to convince some program manager that his ideas were good only to be told they weren't, knowing full, you know, he's too smart for that. He's not going to waste his time. Now he just goes away in a corner for two weeks and builds it and he's arguing about something that's empirical and the commander's like, "Shit, this works. Let's go." You know, and

I think I think that's like the the most underappreciated part of this moment. I we've been covering we covered a story yesterday of a guy in Australia who's gone on like a year journey to try to cure his dog's cancer. And he had experience building uh in AI and ML, but didn't have any experience in, you know, biology or pharma or any of these things. And he and just by leveraging the models he was able to kind of figure out the right path to go down. Figure out like even he took a recommendation from Jad CBT of like which professor to go to in their sort of local university system to get help with the problem that he was working on. And he ultimately has been able to show like real results on this sort of experimental vaccine. And you apply that to that type of that that sort of uh nationwide realization that like you don't need to be an expert. You don't need to have gone to school for a certain thing. You don't need to be a software engineer to build software. You don't need to be an electrician to start figuring out how this stuff works. And I think that that that unlock across the entire world where just like bringing down the kind of like knowledge boundary around so many different tasks is going to dramatically transform huge parts of the economy.

Yeah.

I couldn't agree more. I mean and talk about an example of agency. Like he couldn't have started that unless he thought I could do this. Yeah. It's gonna work.

Yeah.

Yeah. And like you said, it wasn't it wasn't like it didn't it wasn't like he just oneshotted anything. And that's the point. That's what people need to realize. It's like if you just want AI to oneshot everything, that's like saying like I want results in life and I don't want to have to work. And it's like anybody throughout all human history, if you want results and you're not willing to put in the work, you're going to have a bad time. But like now, there's never been a better moment in history to want to build something to do something uh and and have a better shot at actually achieving that or learning how to do that than right now. And so again, it's all it all comes down to agency. Yeah, I guess the question is like can you teach agency or is it is it is it innate? You know, I I find like if I'm talking with somebody about their career, sometimes it's like, you know, in your head like all the different moves that you should make in order to achieve the outcome. And yet some people just think, okay, I'm just going to go back to like submitting, you know, uh resumes that never get answered because that's like

the the straightforward path. Uh so so anyways, we're going to find out make it

go back in. Remember, you know, he wanted to eat his fake steak.

Yeah.

And uh I think you you look obviously there's a part of it that's innate, but there's a part of it that you can cultivate.

Yeah, I agree. Uh yeah, I was I was uh talking with my wife about my 5-year-old last night and was talking about AI and sort of like what he might do for a job and how it is nervous. It's a it's nerve-wracking. It's like okay what like what if I try to predict and set him up for success in some particular career like how is that tractable at all? And then I was reflecting my own career and I was like well for like 10 years I sold things online and when I was born e-commerce literally didn't exist because I was born before Amazon.com and before web van. So it was not fathomable to click a button

would have been a door to door protein sales.

Exactly. And now I have a live stream which was not a thing before the internet. And so like every career opportunity I've had has been adjacent to other things. People sold things before but or and they talked on you know TV before but the actual shape of the career has been wildly different. And so I felt very relaxed at the end of this conversation but it is nerve-wracking if you really do want to just think okay yes like doctor lawyer merchant chief forever and it will never change. But even the lawyers role has changed a ton with the with the electronic revolution and the information revolution. But yeah, it's a it's just a fascinating time. Um, where should we go next? Jordy, do you do do you have

any other any other stories that stand out and you can give kind of like a trailer so that you know, we want people to go and buy the book.

Uh, so just give us give us, you know, give us another trailer. I know there's so many.

Yeah. Well, we can talk about Colonel Cukor a little bit more. you think about. So you have this Marine colonel who's just the ex I call them heroes and heretics. Yeah. You know, because that it is somehow their rebellion that that gets all these things started. So he had this seminal experience where he was on a helicopter waiting to land on Mount Sar to evacuate the Yazadi who were fleeing ISIS.

Oh.

And uh there was a young uh uh Marine who thought he saw a rocket pel propelled grenade.

Mhm.

And because of this misidentification, this human error, they waved off the landing. It was obviously unsafe. and you have order of a thousand people who are raped, tortured, and enslaved from this small little decision. And so this is the sort of thing that he was like, there has to be a better way of doing this. And that kind of set him up on this crusade to go figure out how to bring AI to the department. What I think is interesting we document is how everyone tried to kill him in doing this. I mean, up to the point, you know, the services were threatened by it, the bureaucracy was threatened by it, people filed IG investigations, people claimed he was housing Iranians in his basement. Here you have this devout Mormon with four daughters living in a 1400 foot home that has no basement. They actually sent investigators out to go do this but just through that never giving up. And that's what you see consistently when you see Rick over, you know, you see in his memoirs that the humiliation of the women's bathroom, all these slights. It's not that they didn't get to him. You know, he he documents how much they did hurt, but despite that, he would push through and get all these things done. And perhaps one of the greatest heretics, Billy Mitchell, who's the father of the Air Force. He didn't even live to see the creation of the Air Force. But his his little rogue act of rebellion was the Navy was trying to sink a ship at this, they call it a SyncX, an exercise to do it, and they were failing to sink this stationary ship. And he's like, "You know what? I'm just going to drop a bomb from a plane." And there was no permission, there was no rules, and you know, you get this like feisty. He sunk the ship. Um, but before then, people thought air power was about sending messages back and forth across the front line. Nobody thought about actually using these as weapons of war. It's totally crazy.

Uh and so I think hearing these stories, what I what I really hope is both the heretics inside and outside the building are inspired because your country needs your heresy right now. And every one of these wars, it really comes down to

Churchill and the tank. You know, as the head of the Royal Navy, Winston Churchill funded and built a land ship. He could only build ships, of course. That's the tank. Because the the British army was like, "We got horses. We're good, dude. No thanks." you know, and and so you you start discovering these stories and you get emboldened to say like, I got to pursue what I think is right here. And uh you go back to World War II,

we built 154 different airframes, different types of aircraft. I think 10 really mattered, but just, you know, in in the sense of like the American free market system, like obviously you can't know. You need a market for competition. And that's that's part of what makes defense really hard. It's a monopsiny. There's a single buyer. People have a pension for control. I like to quip that, you know, everyone's given up on communism, including Russia and China, except for Cuba and the DoD. You know, we have this deeply centralized planning approach that we thought would provide for what the what what we needed to win wars, and it's just not the case.

That's a good hot take. Uh do do you think that the next batch of uh defense tech companies should go public earlier? Like what advice do you have for the current crop of private uh defense tech companies? It seems like there is appetite in the capital markets. Palanteer's obviously done very well in the capital markets. At the same time, uh the private markets seem to be able to find any amount of money in the couch cushions, especially if there's AI attached to the narrative. Uh but how how are you talking to leaders of private defense tech companies right now about the markets broadly?

My advice to them is all the same. I think one of the hardest things about doing the defense tech thing is um you need to hold two contradictory ideas in your head. One is like you need to run towards the pain

like are you know you need to run towards proving real results operationally

but that's not your buyer and so you know you could you could say there ought to be a marktomarket moment right now who's in the fight today in Iran

sure

where have these companies started bending the curve what are the opportunities to prove this capability you know I'm hearing about incredible things Shield's doing in in Ukraine right now

um

that's really important you're not going to get paid for that but that's the that's the validation you need and then you have to figure how to get programs of record, all those sorts of things. But if you just focus on the programs of record, if you just focus on treating the defense department as a buyer, you'll lose the magic. You'll you'll lose your own heresy that leads to the innovation.

Yeah, there was a little bit of that in the space economy where we saw there was a there was pretty quickly a bifurcation between space companies that were doing a lot of interesting work and signing deals and then other space companies that were like they got on the rocket and they went to space. And I feel like that was like an important binary. I don't know how, you know, the binary is sort of coming down now as more companies get to space, but it felt like, you know, actual deployment where the rubber meets the road. Uh it's always important in startups, but it it feels especially important in this scenario.

What about uh stories from history around copying what works? Does anything stand out? And the reason I ask is because one uh it was somewhat surprising seeing that we have Americanmade versions of the Shahed uh drone and I feel like America has always prided itself on being inventors. You know these sort of like 0ero to one

uh 0ero to1 projects right you said hundred something you know airplanes uh created or airframes created during World War II. Uh and yet here it felt like the smart decision was like hey this is like a battle tested form factor like we can just make the thing that is delivering results

uh on the battlefield but are there any other kind of stories that stood out around America kind of swallowing its pride and saying like hey this thing has worked

fast let's follow

let's fast

the best the best one that also speaks to the importance of founders and people the primacy of people is uh operation paperclip you know as the as as the Nazis were losing. We started, we actually had two competing programs. We had Fiat and Paperclip. Fiat's theory of the case was, "We don't need these people, these dirty Nazis. We're going to go steal all the technical papers and we're just going to be able to figure it out just by having all the papers." That was an abominable failure. It did not work at all. Instead, what worked was you go get the founders, you get Veron Braun, you get the people who actually know because there's something more three-dimensional to the knowledge than what's on the just the 2D paper. And I think that's a that's a huge swallowing of pride. It's some we had to really hold our nose to these Nazis and recognize that actually it delivered ICBMs, it delivered the space program, it delivered a fundamental offset against the Soviets. Uh but we did that other times as well. I think probably the most favor one is um there was a North Korean defector. I don't have the dates exactly right.

He flew out of North Korea on his MIG.

The Mig Korean War flew out on his MIG. You know, they they tried to shoot him down. He escaped. Fortunately, we didn't shoot him down. We figured out he was defecting. So, we reverse engineered the MIG and built our own. I'm forgetting. Was it the 8 F86 or the

something like that? And that actually helped us restore air dominance once again. So, you know,

it is the primacy of winning. Whatever it takes to win. It's, you know, you don't want to be like, hey, I didn't steal anything from from the adversary, but I died noy.

No. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. Yeah.

Uh, well, thank you so much for taking the time. Congratulations on launching the book and

yeah I can't wait I can't wait to get into it. We're going to have to we'll share our copy. We'll fight over it but uh here

we maybe got to but thank you so much. Yeah, congratulations on the launch and