Boz To The Future - The Future According to Shyam Sankar

0:00Hello, this is Baz to the future, and I am Baz. Now, longtime listeners won't know anything has changed, but people who catch these clips on the internet will notice that I am uncharacteristically in a suit, tie, and a mustache. And actually, my guest, Shyam Sankar, has a lot to do with both of those. Thank you, to be honest with you. So just as a recap, this is a podcast I created because I find so many great other podcasts.

0:29They go really broad and they tend to go as deep. So in this podcast, we try to go a little deeper into some of these important topics, often technological, but sometimes societal, as if it's like we'll get into today a little bit. The reason that this is all happening to your eyes is I'm in DC. And first of all, when you're in DC, you're taking meetings, you are often in a suit. So that's relatively explicable and not entirely Shaum's fault. But why I'm in DC taking these meetings is because he and I, a year and a day ago, accepted the commissions into the U.S. Army reserves together into Detachment 201. And last night was the commissioning of the second wave of, you know, Lieutenant-Colonels to join our detachment. And so we were in uniform, and this is the uniform, the only uniform-approved facial hair that you can have in the U.S. Army. So that's the mustache. I could actually shave it, but at this point it feels...

1:18like a disrespect to our NCOIC who fought hard for this to be an immigration master. I agree. You got to keep it. No, it's like the squad has become the mascot. Exactly. I was just going to say that. Yes, for the squad. In addition to being a fellow Lieutenant Colonel, Shyam is the seat as a fellow CTO, the CTO of Palantir. And so one thing I do in this podcast, rather than me reading your like Wikipedia page, whichever one can do, what do you think is the most important thing for people to know about you? Like, what's, you know, we've, we've, I've already cheated on the army thing. What else do they need to know about you?

1:48Well, I think the through line to, you know, Palantir, the army, the other things I kind of care about is, you know, my family, we came, we fled violence in Nigeria to settle in the US. I grew up in the shadow of the space coast with this amazing sense of the possibilities of science and technology in the future were supposed to create for us. So I'm profoundly grateful to be in America, and I'm interested in dedicating my life to American greatness. That's one. Two, I love puns.

2:13Yeah, listen, these are the important things we need to know about you. A profound life story in that you like puns. A profound life story and also bad taste, as Arbor and Wordplay. Let's start with Detachment 201 just because I kind of already broached the topic. You know, actually, it was kind of almost two years ago that you called me, and I've recounted this conversation many times to people. I'm pretty sure in my head, at least, it went, and we hadn't met before. You're like, hey, do you want to join the army? I think I said probably.

2:42And I think that we literally was like from there was like, great, I'll let you know. And that was the whole thing. We're one year and a day in what's what do you think? What do we learned? Well, I think we've learned a lot. First of all, it's been just interacting with our uniformed service members. They're so compelling. Yeah, you're like drowning in talent.

3:02And it's a really it's a question of like how we continue to mobilize them Make sure the right people are in the right shoes that we get the bureaucracy out of their way to do these things and on the other end I think we've also learned a lot that the depths of American industry have a lot to contribute to our uniform military that the experiences you've had building meta over 20 years The cynical case would be like well if the arm is gonna make mistakes, please don't make any mistakes I've made at least benefit from that but more so than that you delivered things at enormous Internet scale that really the the army should be able to benefit from yeah It's actually kind of interesting to think about the internet as a thing that is one of the few things maybe That is of a scale that is actually bigger than the army and that private sector companies have solved things at a huge scale in a way that actually is very applicable to the army a Lot of other things don't have that you know relationship, but but the internet certainly does I really couldn't agree with you more it is so

3:59Incredible when you get to spend time with a formation doing what they do best They're the best in the world and they care immensely every single soldier like it cares and like immensely believes immensely And is super capable It actually does make you feel more acutely all the ways that we in public-private Partnership have let them down. They're not equipped with even the equivalent of what you would expect a private citizen to have attempting the same task. Yeah. I mean, it's usually motivating to see them, despite all these things, how hard they work, what they're able of doing. Imagine if we kind of lean in and actually enable them. Yeah, that's right. I've kind of told people, I think the culture that I've found in the army is a get-it-done culture, which is super admirable. And they kind of get it done with what they have. And you look at it like, oh, man.

4:58It's amazing you're getting this done with what you have. This is tremendous accomplishment. You're making this much harder than it needs to be. I've also been delighted that I feel like we've been invited to the real conversations. We've been able to get into some of the real conversations that are happening and contribute in those ways, and that's meaningful. Of course, I should call out to people that we're doing this entirely separately from our professional roles. There's no blending. It's a very church and state thing. And for you, that's actually quite limiting given Palantir.

5:27the ways that areas that you are cordoned off from are many, but you're still finding a lot of interesting areas to contribute. Yeah, principally, I've been helping on software talent strategy. You know, we really do have uniform service members who are enormously capable developers all the way from embedded systems to enterprise applications. And the kind of industrial era model for talent, it has an impedance mismatch with the information age. Yeah. And so how do we help the army rethink like what is the career trajectory for these folks?

5:56What are their expectations around productivity? You know, the army almost sometimes has this caricature like, hey, these great people they leave because they could make more in private sector. I always remind them like, look, they knew what they were signing up for. They wanted to join the army. They're leaving because they can't be productive deaths. You don't know how to employ them. Like we can solve these problems. And it's been really rewarding to see how much the army has adopted these recommendations over the.

6:18last six months or so. Yeah, and, you know, I'm working on Munitions, which has very little to do with what medicine is doing. So it's a broad range of skill sets that we're trying to bring to bear on the problems. I am kind of curious. I mean, you were the person who kind of ushered not just me, but quite a few of our, you know, Kevin Wheel and Bob McGrew and Attachment Inn. And you've been such a champion, and I'll even, I'm not usually, I'm not actually, we're not usually here hyping the books, but I got to do it because I actually really believe in this.

6:43It wasn't just that you called me. You called me and you sent me the link to your 18 feces. Am I getting that right? Is it correct? What kind of manifesto? And now you've kind of followed up with this book. And this is not like, I feel like a talk show host. I'm like, oh, and it's not what we came to do, but I had to bring it up because I do think it's an interesting, you've a much broader construct of how to take this industrial mindset that created the army that we grew up being so proud of and how to move it forward. What's the like major thesis you have here?

7:12It really starts with this idea that the the military as we think about it today is a consequence of having won the Cold War and that the military that won World War two the early Cold War it looked radically different, right? And to our audience today it might be most relatable to understand that we had founders then you know We first of all going back to attachment 201 in World War two we direct commissioned a hundred thousand citizens to be officers in the military and serve the entire media communications department of the military was run by Disney employees, right?

7:41We always talk about Bill Midson who was commissioned a three star general. The only person that were commissioned in that high rank to run the manufacturing for, and he previously ran GM. Like he was the one pioneered and had GM beating forward years before. We took the best of industry and brought them in to the military for that effort. We did similar things in, even in the Civil War with like railroads and logistics. So there's a rich history there to draw on. But if we kind of neck down, I think one of the things that's really unique about The military is that they are the sole buyer of a thing, you know, there's only one person who's buying tanks There's no one person buying an aircraft carrier and and we call that a monopsony. Most people are familiar with monopoly where there's one seller over thing when there's one buyer It's a monopsony. It's really hard to be a monopsonist, you know, could you could you've come up with the iPhone on your own? You know, it's like that we all benefit at some fundamental level you you kind of believe in free markets or you don't and I like to quip that

8:32Everyone including the Chinese and the Russians have given up on communism except for Cuba and the DoD We literally have a five-year central planning process to decide what are we gonna buy and what a quantity and we don't have this sort of robust competition of ideas But if you kind of go back in time like World War two we built 154 different types of aircraft different frames Yeah, I'm pretty sure ten of them really mattered, but that's the whole point of the free market that You couldn't know which 10 were going to matter. That's right. Yeah. And they got quite a few of those wrong. There's quite a few that thought that weren't going to be important. That ended up being critical. And we went from building, well, it was, you know, on the order of thousands a year to building hundreds of thousands in the final years. Incredible. It's truly an unbelievable thing. In the course of four years, an incredible turnaround. Yeah.

9:14And so could we do that again today? I think we've kind of taken the wrong lessons of that history where we think, oh, we just flipped a switch and the automotive factories magically turned into war machines. And, you know, it was actually, first it was led by the people, you know, you had the building nuisance of the world, but you had more than that. You know, today we think of it as north of Grumman, but it was.

9:31Jack Northrop, it was Leroy Grumman, it was Glenn Martin, not Lockheed Martin, right? There's really the people and the founders and the energy behind that. We also had those founders inside of government, like Hyman Rickover, who built the nuclear navy. Over many objections. Oppenheimer himself told him, it's not gonna work. Imagine the kind of Hootsbud. You're like, yeah, the father of the nuclear bomb says, my nuclear submarine's not gonna work. I'm gonna do it anyways. Yeah, that's right. There's none of that almost.

10:00Because it's become so institutional and also because we've been at peace for a long time Yeah, and we've or we've been at least at the very least a hegemon for such a long period of time that it feels almost fail-complete that these things are gonna come to us and now you get a situation where on an international stage you're very challenging geopolitics You know the South China Sea would be a very tough place to engage in a conflict without us continuing to invest tremendously in the capabilities if you really think about the purpose of the Department of Defense, it is there to deter war. And if you kind of think, well, why do people start wars to begin with? Usually it comes down to something like, well, I thought I was going to win. Why did Putin roll across the border to Ukraine? And so how can you convince the adversary they're not going to win? Today's not the day. Think about it tomorrow. And then tomorrow will tell them tomorrow's not the day either. And you're just trying to buy time. I think this is not entirely, this wasn't even, I didn't really appreciate when I joined the army.

10:59is the degree to which forced projection is a tremendously important path to global stability, geo-stability. And that benefits everybody, not just in the absence of conflict, but the presence of stable relationships and commerce and a bunch of things that come from it. And it is not cheap. And to do it, you have to not just be like kind of the probably better military.

11:24You have to be so obviously the better military that it's very clearly the long-term optimal strategy for other players on the field to just adapt around that status quo. And it's not even about American hegemony. It's about global stability. It's the best provider of global stability. Yeah. I mean, you know, America is very unique. You think about having one World War II. I don't think you can really find history another victor that invested its own capital to go rebuild Germany, go rebuild Japan. We did those things in order to create prosperity to create the conditions for global stability and peace. That's right, having screwed that up after World War I and really realizing, you know, the only way forward was to invest. How microelectronics even got to Taiwan and the rest of Southeast Asia was a similar strategy. This is a bulk word against communism. If these folks can experience capitalism, can experience prosperity. Yeah.

12:18Maybe they'll see the world differently. Yeah, totally. This is one of the things that we just talked about, Rick, over. And I think it's such an interesting part. You have this great framework, heretics and heroes. And it's not just in that you think of it in a military context, something you think about kind of in all contexts, certainly creative context. Talk more about that. Yeah. Well, I think in the, again, I would say in the Valley, we kind of call them founders. So it's an archetype that we kind of see and know. But in the history of defense innovation, everything that's worked was a heretical idea.

12:46It was Winston Churchill as the head of the Royal Navy who built the tank. He had to call it a land ship because, of course, he was only allowed to build ships. But think about, it's a profound indictment of the British army at the time that they thought, hey, we've got cavalry. We don't need this tank thing. You can go a little fast forward to World War II. There was a boat builder in Louisiana. And he had built these shallow draft boats that are very good at navigating the bayou. His name was Andrew Higgins, Fowlmouth, Scots, Irishman.

13:15And the Navy wouldn't let him compete in their competitions, right? And then eventually he got a chance to compete and he won and the Navy then tried to steal his IP and recreate his boat which they failed to do. In the end, they were like, fine, screw it. Just buy the damn boat. 92% of all boats in World War II were Higgins boats. Higgins boats, that's right, yeah. Ike called it the boat that won the war. The shallow draft boat. The boys landed in Normandy. We just passed the anniversary of Normandy on Higgins boats. That's right.

13:40The Sidewinder missile was a rogue project. It was built by the Navy at China Lake and the Air Force had the monopoly on building air-to-air missiles except the Air Force's Falcon didn't work. The Sidewinder was very cheap, very efficient. It was a heterodox idea using heat-seeking instead of an electro-optical camera.

13:57And so we have these these beautiful stories and I think what what makes partly what I why I wanted to elevate the discourse around this particularly for those heretics who are kind of lying and wait in the department is just remember the great Americans who came before you also face this yeah that's right yeah stick your head up the bureaucracy is gonna attack you you will probably be demonized probably in the short term maybe even your lifetime but retrospectively people realize the.

14:21actually how heroic your effort was. Yeah, it is funny how many, the A-10 Warthog, there's so many stories of things that came about through this kind of, you know, somebody who's a malcontent who sees the opportunity and just is not afraid to push for it. I mean, one of the jobs that we have, I think, in both our private and our public sector jobs, is finding that talent and making it safe for them to take those kinds of risks. I actually think it comes up a lot for us right now. And this is a bit of a, it didn't intend to be a segment, but it is.

14:48the AI space is changing so rapidly in all sectors. Obviously the FX government as well. There are like a set of people who have become absolutely condescent in their capabilities because of the capabilities that are being unlocked through AI tools. There's a way to say it. And there's a set of other people for whom this is like a scary thing. And it is so interesting. Super talented people and the willingness to embrace change to create change is one sphere of it, heretics and heroes, but also another one just to accept change. There's an entire additional layer of people who, if you're just willing to try to entertain the idea of a different way of working, that's also pretty great. This is a real philosophical question that I don't know if we have an answer to. How do you prevent the sclerosis that appears to infect

15:49every large thing. Or maybe it's every long running thing. I'm not sure. Maybe it's both. Maybe it's large and long running by the worst scenario because you hit these moments of stability. And I would argue that speaking on the industry side, we had this very long period of stability. You know, 2012 to maybe 2020, maybe 2018, the mobile revolution's happening. It's totally gangbusters. Everything's totally insane.

16:122022 till now before AI hit, it was kind of a quiet period. And when you have a quiet period, you just consolidate gains and you just like get really efficient at that thing. And then you're kind of ironically out of position for the next shift. Can it be done? Can you have something at scale that's also dynamic? Or do you need a war equivalent, like a equivalent of contact? Well, I think it's like the entropy of the universe is against you, right? It's always going to you know, like the universe is trying to make you more sclerotic and kind of structurally set in place. And so you can either take it on yourself as an institution to have these kind of micro revolutions that are happening. You can encourage the heresy. You can empower people to do it. So you're just always, that's your like constant pushback on that entropy. And then occasionally the macro conditions are such that actually rebellion doesn't make sense because everything's kind of working. And then you do need something more structural, more violent.

17:03that you're reorganizing around. One of the advantages the military has is far from perfect, but is the primacy of winning. The nature of what you're doing is there is one winner and one loser, and you don't intend to be the loser. And I think in the business context, sometimes the consequences can seem less severe, and therefore maybe the impetus for change requires more to muster. Yeah, and that's exactly right. It is interesting. Sheryl Sandberg used to always say this thing. She used to say that, you know, companies don't fail by hitting these ambitious goals and missing them. They fail hitting their goals all the way down. Yeah. And I won't name any of these. You should name some companies that you could have thought of. We all can think of these companies. And there are companies that lasted for 10 or 15 years after you and I would have said, oh, that company's dead. They're done. But there are still people every day going to work and grinding. And so yeah, it's not nearly the same caliber of consequence as you get in a conflict scenario.

17:59And part of what led me to write the 18 theses, we could think of the book as the long-form version of that is, I felt like that was what's happening. We were kind of managing our way down. If the goal of the department is deterrence, okay, we had the annexation of Crimea in 14, with the militarization of the Spratly Islands in 15. We had Iran with breakout capability to get the bomb in 17. We've had a pogrom in Israel. We've had the Houthis holding the Red Sea hostage, so global trade hostage. And then of course we had the invasion of Ukraine.

18:29And so it's very hard to look at these things and saying, yeah, our adversaries feel like global stability is in their best interest. They're kind of the opposite. How closely related? Another thing that you talk about a lot is kind of artists calling out at a factory. This is one of your concepts around really software teams. But like, I mean, is this part under the same umbrella for you? Like, what does it mean? Like, for me at least, certainly I want to embrace the creativity of the people. And I believe...

18:56We have so many founder myths in our industry and a lot of them are well-deserved In Steve Jobs, maybe chief among them, but I still believe even for a jobs like the collective creativity of all the people underneath that apparatus is what We're experiencing when we use these products completely agree Talk to me more about like what is it? We are calling that factory like there's real implications for this because I think everything wants to become a factory because factories feel so reliable. Yeah It's predictable. It seems easier to manage. It is easier to manage, but you may be managing towards the relevance. And I think the premise of the artist's colony is that you want to maximize that individual. It doesn't make sense to yell at Dalí to paint more like Monet. Dalí is Dalí. How do you get him to be as awesome as he can be? And how do you create the psychological safety and space for people? Because every piece of artwork is not monotonically improving in quality. The artist goes through waves and cycles.

19:49create, you know, like being kind of marked to market every second is anti-creative. You can't have that sort of environment. So how do you create an environment that maximizes that human's potential and a long enough arc that they can be creative? Part of that is letting them focus on their strengths. You know, I think there's the factory metaphor, the error between you and your role.

20:12is experienced by your weaknesses. Like, hey, I had to find this role, you're not quite doing the role versus saying, this is who you are, let's build a role around you. And I think working on your weaknesses is by and large a waste of time. Like your terminal impact on humanity, on this planet, you wanna make things great, it's gonna come from your superpowers, your strengths. And so I wanna get you in that.

20:31most levered position to do that. And that means necessarily what you're saying is like there is, there can't be just like one founder. It's really a team. If you, I'll use a nerdy metaphor from my youth, like the X-Men, they were all kind of uniquely flawed in certain ways. But when you stack them together, they're the powerful force. Yeah. This is for you to have a psychological safety and the importance of that. Otherwise, people will not only will you being kind of put them in a factory role because it gives you certainty, which you value at a high level.

21:01But also, they will also kind of net gravity into that role because it gives them certainty. Yeah. So, how do you create the psychological safety when there is so much exogenous change, so much uncertainty? And I'm not even talking about our industry's, you know, layoffs and I think there's a lot of jobs out there. Even just like the tools are changing. Yeah. Some people are so enthusiastic, some people aren't. What do you do to encourage that safety? How do you like foster it over the long period? Well, you get them excited about doing great things.

21:29rather than getting, you know, sometimes you can kind of get too tonal. Obviously you need a plan. You need maybe something resembling an OKR, like some decomp. But hopefully not that. But yes, some kind of a structure. Yeah. But where's that structure coming from? Right? If the structure doesn't have some sort of external greatness towards it, some sort of ambitious thing you want to go create in the world, it kind of becomes very limiting.

21:51And so how do you create the space to make the primacy being like the thing they're excited that's kind of suey generous about going out there and doing and then creating a structure that serves that? Maybe the military would call that task organizing, right? Like there are problems in the world you want to solve. How do you line up behind that and do that? And the more often you can do that actually, that's one way of fighting the entropy of the factory, of the sclerosis, of bureaucracy. Yeah, it is also, there's something really perverse about when people are excited about a vision and pursuing it and they run into bureaucratic barriers. They're just gonna get, they just like how much, how much do they want it versus how annoying is it to get? It's like such a real problem. The first order effect is exactly that, which is like, okay, I can't even do what I want. The second order effect is learned helplessness. I shouldn't even think about things that I could do better because that's a waste of time. Yeah, this happens a lot when you get into these risk analyses.

22:46It starts to become someone else's job. And then you're like, you're not even challenging. You just accept that whatever, whatever reporting they give you and say these increasing disconnected functions where the person assessing the risk has no real vision for what the product is trying to accomplish and how good it could be. The person knows how good it could be, has no real ownership over the risks of it. And you end up with these like very, very conservative kind of corporate constructs. And it's really so heartbreaking.

23:14to anybody who cares passionately about creating this value in the world. Yeah, I mean, these are not the laws of physics. They're kind of the organization of man. And in Middle Earth, of course, Palantir's a word from the Lord of the Rings, the orks spawned the seams in the earth, right? And I think all the problems that institutions tend to have are the seams between teams. You have great people inside of a team. The team is probably functional. And if it's not, you know how to fix that. That's right. But it's really the seams between teams where things can get pathological.

23:41Yeah, and, and this is one of my, I can't really put it on scale, which is so hard. The scale of great work requiring large numbers of people just kind of creates and necessitates seams because you need to have some structure by which those people are integrated into it. It is one of my great enthusiasms for AI actually. I have this kind of framework I posted internally, which is like when, you know, when software gets cheap, process gets expensive. Yeah, you know, today.

24:07There's a bunch of processes that we have that don't feel expensive, because the length of time that it takes to write the code is longer than the cycle time of the process. But when that length of time, right, to write the code goes down by 10x, the process now feels enormously expensive. It's enormously expensive. It's the long, it's been suddenly the long pull. It's the old like Warren Buffet line, you know, when the, when the tide goes out, we see who's not wearing shorts. It's like, it's like, and it's like, oh man. And arguably that process was always bad. It's just like it was masked by this other thing.

24:36On the flip side, AI exposes those things, now you can attack those. And also, maybe it actually obvates the need for some of those things. Things that you and I would have thought five years ago were very important. Hey, we have this big piece of infrastructure. We don't want to build it twice. Now I'm like, build it twice. Totally trying to build this twice. We'll reconcile later on once there's a winner or once we start to see the workloads and what they're similar with. But yeah, go ahead and build it twice. One of my great hopes.

25:04for AI and one of the things I'm working on instead of meta is how to transition us as an organization, how we work. And so I'm thinking a lot about process. I'm thinking a lot about psychological safety for our employees. I'm thinking a lot about how to give them empowerment, how to empower them, give them great vision that we're all excited about, get everyone bought in on that, give them like the great tools that they can go use to do that. And then also you got to give them the space to take risk and the space to do it. I just think AI is going to be this huge game changer for us.

25:29I agree. I mean, in many ways, I think of AI as like the antidote to the 20th century's managerial revolution. Yeah. There was no way for us to scale except for process, which required management. Now, actually the most valuable people are the ones with the specific knowledge. Yeah. And getting them levered up to do these things. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. Yeah. Because the quadratic, we've never solved the quadratic overhead that comes with like an organization chart. It's like, we've never solved it. It's like, it's just a burden at all times. Okay. I'm going to give one thing I will mention on this though.

25:57It's a very uneven revolution, the AI revolution. It's very jagged in the terms of the day. Where are you finding tremendous success with it and where do you think it's like the surprising behind? Well, there's two observations that have first is you're just kind of surprised by how much specific, I'll call them vocational, as in experts in their field at the front line are able to accomplish with this, that not every one of those people at the front line is that human. That's right.

26:23And so then empowering them to build things that actually the rest of their colleagues are able to use that the second dimension of this is it This is like a vector it has a magnitude and a direction and One of the challenges with AI it makes you so productive you got to make sure the direction Yeah, is correct because you can get off, you know, and there's something about it It's so charismatic. It's so there's a hedonic loop you can get in where you're like I feel so productive this stuff is magical You know, then the onus is much more on you to think about am I actually doing the thing that's valuable, valuable and productive. It's such a good point. My experience of this in my own like coding sessions is actually I feel like I'm doing, you would think, oh, I've got this tool that takes a bunch of hours of my work and collapses it down. You would think then that my life would get easier. No, no, no. I'm actually now only spending my time on the hard parts.

27:17Like coding was a thing I knew how to do. I was an expert at it. I was really good at it and I could do it very fluidly. And I almost sounded like meditative, right? Like it was a very chill thing. It was such a nice thing to do. I miss it like emotionally in that sense, you know? And I'm like, it's a little sad that it's going to be a lost art at some point, you know, or a more arcane art, I should say not lost, but arcane art. And so now all I'm doing is making the hardest decisions of like what this product needs to be and like what I really want. And previously, More than I realized I was figuring that out as I went and I was going off kind of half cocked the beginning But as I'm coding you're kind of trying these things and you're kind of starting to like it's coming into zone Progressive rendering into a real sharp shape and now instead of what I get is a very sharp picture of a terrible thing That I absolutely don't want to ship or like anyone ever see that I built yeah in a dammit I need to do way more specification of front and then way more testing on the back

28:13Whereas before it was kind of like all feathered into the process. But yeah, I'm intellectually cooked at the end of a vibe coding session. Because it's all the hard work. I'm doing only the work that I uniquely can do. It's kind of the human equivalent. Like so, you know, when we invent electricity, it was magical that we could produce these electrons. And the first step was you'd like incrementally introduce a tool into a factory. And at some point you're like, oh, I got to redesign my factory around electrons. And there's a little bit of like how.

28:42how the artisan thought about building things, they were struggling, but really all the emphasis went into thinking about the machine tools that you're going to build that set you up. Yeah. Yeah. And here again, we come a little bit full circle. I learned a lot about that from Freedom's Forge, you know, sort of Bill Knudsen and Henry Kaiser, the shipbuilders, Kaiser was a great shipbuilder who did actually found Kaiser Prenente as the first ever healthcare integrated to his company. And I really had not thought about yet.

29:09That was right, even at that far after the Industrial Revolution. The majority of tools, the majority of manufacturers using were still hand-built tools that were very specific and there were still a lot of craftsmen who were using those tools. So then you go through this like hyper loop of like, cool, let's figure out, get to get the best craftsmen, what tools they use, get the best tool makers, what tools they use. How can we scale these like, to your point, it was literally like, it would be a one family.

29:35in a barn somewhere in Indiana who's making this one tool that turns it to be very critical for airplane mass manufacturing. And you're like, how can we help you have one of the biggest businesses in the next five years? They didn't even want that. They weren't even trying for that. They're just like, oh, we're doing this now. Very interesting how much the Industrial Revolution had lagged even that far post. And then it took a crisis to kind of kick it into gear. I will say with the AI tooling, we're on the very forward foot. Actually, It's almost unbelievable how much our, and I'm very proud of us for this, our discipline, software engineering has leaned into our own disruption. We really are living our values here. I kind of joked with somebody recently, it's kind of like that big water planet from Interstellar and there's a giant wave coming and everyone's running away from the wave. And we're just like running towards the wave. Like no, no plan, no surfboard. We're just like, this thing is awesome. Have you seen how big this wave is? We're just sprinting directly towards it. I think on faith that like the

30:35the real skill of our work is actually the thought process by which we take a problem, decompose it, figure out how to deliver the value to consumers to users in the end. And like that's the true value. The true value was never like the actual 100. But I am like quite proud of us. I think very, very few industries would as a whole lean this hard into their own disruption.

31:02At a grassroots level, you know, that's right institutional effort. It's actually the individual that's right almost yeah, it is something I kind of find Fasting it's it's up. It's now that everyone's had lean to it. It's been great It was one of those periods. I remember so what did you graduate college? Oh three oh three I was oh four so you and I were kind of this cohort I would say like oh two to oh six of like the internet native cohorts who came out of college and I went to Microsoft had a great job at Microsoft I love my time there but it was very obvious to me and my friends, my buddies who I'd graduated with, who also went to Microsoft that like, oh, we understand the internet way better. This is setting aside any natural proclivity I have to believing I'm great. This is even the most humble person like, oh, wow, I think we know this, but I think they don't get it. It would be years until they did get it. We would have all gone on to different jobs and all gone on to do frankly amazing things.

31:59there's no chance that I think statistically, like the class of 04 was like mathematically better than the class of 2000, the class of 2008. It's just that we came up with this bubble, this disruptive bubble. And as a consequence, we're like advantaged in the internet 2.0 kind of birth. And we've seen, I'm sure you have seen it at Palantir as well. We've seen the new college grads the last couple of years, likewise being AI native.

32:28But it does feel like every company, whereas in our generation, we could look at all the legacy companies not adapting or telling themselves a story that they were adapting and not. Do you think that you're actually adapting? Are we the dinosaurs? I guess, are we the dinosaurs now? Are we misperceiving? Because Microsoft thought they were staying on top of the internet. And I knew, maybe not, because I have that memory in my head and Andy Grove's perennial warning to never, always be paranoid, only the paranoid survive. Am I actually able to like stay connected to this disruption? I don't know, do you think, how do you think Palantir's doing on that? I think we're doing pretty well. I mean, maybe the structural force that's advantaging all of us is itself the internet. Yeah, that's fair. The diffusion of knowledge and tradecraft and technique is no longer vulcanized within an institution. That's a good point. So, and then also just the natural human FOMO, since you can see that's happening, you know, it's like you want to be part of this. If the internet kind of felt like a separate thing.

33:28from computers at that era. So I think it'd be hard not to. I mean, the question in the medium term is going to be, who's just token maxing? Who exited to a hedonic loop? Who's actually figured out interesting novel trade crap? How do you apply this stuff to turn this magic genius to value? Yeah, it's a dynamic time. A year ago, if you look at the leaders, they're completely different than today's leaders. Two years ago, completely different again.

33:58So, inside the space, there's all these jockeying. And the strategic positions that everyone is in are so varied. You know, like for us in Microsoft, AI just kind of helps our existing businesses a lot, which is like pretty easy. Actually, volunteer too. I mean, it's just like you have a business that very much benefits from just having smarter things that work on top of data. Like this is very straight down the middle for you guys. Then there's other companies where it's like, wow.

34:26You're great at i but it's extremely disruptive to your business you know uh because people aren't using the conventional ways that you are making so it is it doesn't feel like it's a dynamic time but.

34:37everybody seems to be embracing it to the fullest extent possible. I think there's an element not to not to come back to the kind of American greatness, but you know, if you look at the the global marketplace, there is a way in which I see the inductive roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty aspect of what's happening in the American commercial sector as being is kind of a unique phenomena. Like I think Europeans are very much studying the phenomenon. There's a lot of caution and hesitation. And you know, we're just, I don't want to say we're yoloing it, but we're trying stuff, you know, and we're learning by doing.

35:06It is. And we're the biggest infrastructure build out in our lifetimes, you know, even bigger than the internet itself, you know, getting not not to railroad levels as a percentage of GDP. That would be an incredible feat. I was like, we'll ever do that again. Maybe that's hard. That would be something. But but unlike, you know, dollar adjusted terms, it's worth that kind of scale now. And I'm quite proud of us. You know, we're suddenly making progress on things like nuclear, which I think, you know, if you want to you know, have green energy and also have abundance like that is a tremendously important critical technology, which was just felt like for most of our lifetimes. Impossible. Impossible. And suddenly it's like in the realm. Yeah, it's a very interesting time in that sense and the degree to which people are rallying this. Again, my podcast isn't normally the place that I like do this kind of advocacy, but we just launched this thing, this America's Workforce Academy, where we're putting over a hundred million dollars into a fund.

36:01for people to come, get trained in a program, get a certificate that's gonna allow them to get a guaranteed job at a data center build out. And the reason we're, and we're doing it, and it's not just because we're good dudes, though we are. We're doing it because America needs these trades people to remain competitive globally on this critical technology. Yeah, it'll be the limiting factor. And it's also a way for...

36:23People to like participate in the AI economy like this is like this is these are real a dollars going to real American people in a very like World War two kind of ask like intense build-out period And of course these are these are trades jobs that after the build-out phase continue to be valuable in communities around the world So I it's very like what it is kind of a funny return in a way of a fun period of American dynamism including having a major geopolitical rival Well, how are you thinking about, you know, the role that China plays relative to AI models in America? It's a complicated role. I mean, I think, first of all, you know, the Chinese are kind of the best at long range planning. If you really look at their enormous, it's the largest military build out in history ever. And it started in 1991 with the Gulf War. That's right. And they saw how quickly the US Army, the US military destroyed the fourth largest army in the world. And they said, that can't happen to us. And so it's...

37:20you know, for basically 30, 40 years, they've been investing systematically in ways of countering force projection that drive global stability. Meanwhile, we might have gotten a little overconfident following 1991's kind of... Absolutely, we learned the wrong lessons. Wars will be short, we don't need material, the industrial base doesn't matter. So I think that's one piece of it.

37:41The reason I started with the long range planning is AI was not in their plan. It wasn't in our plan. But one of our strengths is how uniquely adaptable the plasticity of the American economy and workforce. And so I think for them, like countering the enormous amount of prosperity and leverage that was going to give us was very important, which kind of speaks to why they had to steal through distillation these models and then just give it away. It's a way of just commoditizing your compliments. And I think that we're going to be stuck in this sort of, you know, the distance between them and our frontier models is going to be a function of how hard we make distillation attacks. I think, though, that they are probably a little more focused on the sharp end of, well, what really matters is not the frontier model per se, but can I actually implement these things for economic value? How is it changing my economy? How does it change my workforce? And I think we have a unique opportunity, not only to continue leading in the frontier, but to lean into that as well.

38:38What's the relationship then between the frontier models and safety? So on one hand, you know, if you take that and I do your incentive is like, well, we need to keep pouring gas on our frontier advancements to make sure that they're trailing and obviously just protecting against distillation attacks and whatever legal protection we can put there so that they're trailing models. We maintain a lead kind of globally.

39:04But at the same time, there's obviously a lot of concerns, certainly among consumers, like, hey, are these things safe? What's the risks about them? And there's obviously, we're here in DC. It's a popular topic on the Hill. You've got states doing different things. How do you balance those things? Well, there are definitely concerns about risks. I don't really love the safety word because it can turn into essentially like a fearing of, an othering and fearing of a thing. Yeah. Okay, there are risks. Do we have risk to jobs? We can debate that.

39:32maybe in some ways, how do you manage that? Do we have risk to cybersecurity? Absolutely, it's very clear. And to your point about process now being in the way, we were basically protected because finding vulnerabilities was so hard. Your complete lack of cyber hygiene and patching or whatever, it didn't really matter. Now it's like, the tide has come out and turns out everyone's naked. That's right. So I think it's going to force us to adapt around it. And I think you want to...

39:56have some sensible way of letting this stuff diffuse into the economy. You want to make sure your critical infrastructure is protected, your government is protected. But you also don't want to turn your back on prosperity. I think one of the greatest mistakes we made in the 70s was turning our back on the atom. And it came out of a fear of safetyism. This is the analogy I've been shopping. I really worry that if you can create this body of experts and all safety sounds great, and you can actually make something as great as nuclear power, unprofitable, and then you kill it.

40:25And then you end up in a situation where we're dealing with the consequences of burning coal instead, which is many more deaths. Many, many, many, many more deaths. And the gathering of the coal and the burning of the coal and the pollution it creates, every part of that is bad. And meanwhile, we know from other countries that you absolutely could have continued to pursue a path of atomic power that was safe and effective. And that exactly is an algae I've been using a bunch. And I do find it hard to do. I think your point on controlling the diffusion rate.

40:53Actually seems perfectly fine because you're now taking a fixed level You're actually getting to determine when the starting gun hits for Chinese distillation. So that's kind of a very reasonable very manageable thing I also think that the jobs thing and I I'm so sympathetic to the people who have uncertainty here It doesn't totally track, you know, I agree. I mean I raise it as a concern but empirically that's not what's happening. No, it's never happened We've never in human history never created a tool that didn't create more The tool that created productivity and efficiency gains that didn't end up with more jobs over time, even a relatively short period of time. My favorite example of this is, you know, we had a role, I won't say which one, and we were developing AI tools for it. And the AI tools helped the people in this role. Turns out we're spending about a third of the time on what they were good at, their expertise. Two thirds of the time on the overhead required to do that. We could, turns out we could do AI to make this part much more efficient. They go from one third to two thirds. Well, for the same amount of salary.

41:51you want to hire twice as many of them now, because you're actually getting for the same bucket of money, and these are people who are in a revenue orientation. So it's like, oh, cool. So I can get twice as much revenue. I now want to hire twice as many people. I have an example of that in manufacturing, where one of our customers used AI to help automate the production planning and quoting process, which used to be essentially two weeks of downtime in the factory.

42:16takes, you know, two tenths of a second now, they had so much more work to do, they hired a third shift. Yeah, yeah. And those, that's hard to account for. That's right. And I think if you just step back and think about technology generally, we love to think of them as concept driven revolutions when they're really tools driven revolution. Yeah, that's right. You know, Galileo did not invent the telescope, he used the telescope as a tool. And the tool user is Better position to tell you about the impact. Yeah, that's right. And but in the present moment, we're listening a lot to the concept creators. That's right. And so I think, and the people of course who are benefiting from the impact are kind of the frontline users who are doing this. They're not the people who get to write op-eds. They're not the people on TV talking about this stuff. That's right. Yeah, and I respect it's uneven. There will be some roles that like actually don't make sense anymore. This has always been the case. You know, it's funny I was in, and we'll get to Hollywood in a second for you. I was in Hollywood talking to somebody and like one of the things that, you know, rotoscopers.

43:09It's a very tough job. It's not a good, it's like it's not a job that you like really is a high cashier job. It's really gritty work. That's a job that probably doesn't exist in a long term, but there are many, many jobs of a history of the movie industry that over time have kind of gone away. It's that we replaced them with other jobs. We made more films as a consequence. We've done more things. And so I'm sympathetic that to an individual, this matters a lot.

43:34On net a society. I really believe this is a massive job creation opportunity And an economic driver that's gonna benefit everybody But that's no comfort to somebody who specifically is affected and we have to figure out a good solution for those people. Yeah, yeah, actually The movie thing is you know, I want to hit on real quick I've had a weird number of movie related guests on the podcast, you know, I had Jim Cameron in here and Catmull was in here and A lot of this is because the relationship between movies and technology, especially the work that I do in immersive technology, is kind of blended together ever more. You also have a production company. And talk about that, because I do find this very fascinating. And I want to figure out, I've got to find a way to tag along some of these spells. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I started a production company to make movies that make you proud to be an American.

44:22You know, and I think really it stems from my own assimilation journey when I came here in the 80s like what does it mean to be in America? I was watching watching movies watching like Rambo 3 and Rock the 4 and Hunt for Red October and Yeah, it it you kind of I knew what it felt like to be an American before I knew our civics You know that came later and I think we have a lot to be proud of and I think particularly about the present kind of political moment where it's so divisive so so split politics so structurally zero sum I think we can We can get a lot further by reminding ourselves what we have in common and being proud of ourselves together in the broadest possible sense. I think there's also a broader aspect to this of like telling stories that are inspiring. Like what do you want to accomplish? I felt like Jurassic Park the original was so like biotechnology is amazing and yeah there are risks but look look at the possibilities we've done and by the time we got to like Jurassic Park 17 or whatever it was like a kind of a doomer narrative. Yeah totally. And for our children like I want them to see movies with heroes that are real heroes not drug-addled.

45:18like anti-heroes. That's right. Yeah, I agree with you so strongly on that. And I'm a huge movie buff. My wife and I kind of go every week to catch a film on date night. And so I kind of see everything. And it really has been a bummer how much, how anti-hero films and like these really kind of dark narratives taken over. And I'm not saying those aren't important and those don't have a place. They do and they always have. You know, you got Taxi Driver, you can go way back. We've always had those pieces.

45:46We actually did lose a whole piece of the canon where like it became not okay to build just like good old-fashioned like fun like Abbey's where it's like, hey, we're like, we're allowed to be the good guys. Like we are actually allowed and broadly speaking are, you know, good. And you know, if you even just go back to recent history, so.

46:03during the Vietnam War we had a lot of very negative nihilistic movies reflecting the national mood like why are we doing this what's going on and then in 73 George Lucas was like you know I'm tired of this like I just want to make a movie about boys chasing girls driving cars yeah we got American graffiti and I think that was really the palette cleanser that said to everyone like hey look we had this experience we learned from it yeah now let's go forth you know and I think there's a there's a moment to kind of galvanize the country together Is it interesting that film has retained such an important cache in society, setting culture, in spite of honestly like real declines in kind of viewership, but somehow like it has maintained that. Yeah, I think it's become harder. You know, you think about Topka and Maverick like so many people went to see that not just once, but over and over. Yeah, it's amazing.

46:51and it just shows you like the feeling. The feeling really matters and people are yearning for it. And there's something also about synchronous events. You know, today we can all consume content in our own ways, at our own schedule, and then having something that's meaningful enough that actually presents a synchronous event that we all experience together, even if we're experiencing separately. When I was in high school and, you know, you're reading these books and you at some point you're a snarky 16 year old and you're like, why am I reading this book? You know, it's this old book. And I got a great teacher.

47:20And, uh, oh man, I feel bad. I'm forgetting your name right now. But I had a great teacher and she was like, this is called cultural literacy. And what you want is in the future, you're going to be in a conversation and someone's going to reference Catcher in the Rye. Someone's going to reference an Arthur Miller play. And you want to be able to catch that, build on that, know what they're saying and build on top of that and be a part of the in-group of it. And, uh, it always stuck with me. And it's true. It's really true. And I've seen that time and time again. And every now and then, The way I know it's true is I'll stumble across a piece of media that was not in my canon, and then I'll see it, and a retroactively, a bunch of interactions I've had totally make sense. Totally make more sense now. But the first time I watched Casa Blanco, which was relatively later in life, was like probably 35. I was like, wow, I have been missing out on so many references that I had no idea were to this film.

48:11cultural literacy, cultural relevance. One of the things that we play with that we think about a lot is like, hey, in the future, is everyone just looking at AI-generated content that is only for them? I think the answer is no. I think managers, I only want to look at the things that I'm sharing with people. Now, I do want to share memes with people on Instagram DM, and that's an important part of how I connect with certain networks that I'm in.

48:38And so means are it doesn't have to all be film. There's lots of different ways. But like the thing, the having the thing is not the point. Having an experience with another human around the thing is absolutely the point. And I really feel so strongly about this. I think this is I think the fact that movies are a mass event that create a cultural context that is like recent and modern. And by the way, long form shows on HBO or Netflix or whatever as well is so.

49:04Valuable disproportionately valuable to the culture relative to like whatever economic measurements we put on it Well said thank you. I kind of wrap that up in a boat. It didn't really toss that back to you so much Okay, we're gonna do a lightning round. This is fun. This is This was that July 4th movies Okay, Jaws or Independence Day Independence Day. I have to agree. I mean it's just I remember the going to see it in theaters. This is actually probably maybe the first movie. No, the Matrix where the first movie I went to see multiple times in theater. But into his day was one of those movies you're like, oh my gosh, I've had an experience. Yes. We also might be too old for Jaws. I do also remember being truly terrified of Jaws at the Universal Studios amusement park when I was like nine. So I think I had a negative initial. Well, it's a little, you know, it kind of like, there's a long time where like getting in the pool became scary. That's right. It totally, yeah. Jaws, yeah, it was really good. Sitting private Ryan or Forrest Gump?

49:58Both are excellent, but I'd have to go with saving private Ryan. I would go for a skimp. I can't get enough of that character and this is this is the real controversial one. We talked about it Top Gun or Top Gun Maverick. I gotta go with the original. This is a close one I The original is considered a perfect film like inside of filmmaking circles a buddy of mine is a script writer and Spent a lot of time on this was like he's like we've considered like the perfect script considered like it has everything that you want in every script. I Actually like Top Gun Maverick better And and I can't tell if it's just because it was like, you know, the timing thing. You maybe the timing was epic. That's part of it for sure. Top Gun Maverick, maybe it's just a goose doesn't die. It's like a spoiler alert for those of you who haven't seen it. Honestly, it might just be that goose doesn't die in that one. And I really hate goose dying. It's a real possibility. To be clear, I thought Top Gun Maverick was excellent. Yeah. No, I know you do. That's why I knew I gave you a, I knew I was giving you a tough one. It is interesting the.

50:58The army gave us a list of the most accurate films. So I'm going to do this last one. It's a tough one. Black Hawk Down. And if you haven't seen them, we can get rid of them. Black Hawk Down, Thin Red Line, Blast of the Mohicans from here to eternity. How do you rank those? I think Black Hawk Down is, you know, it's kind of, it's obviously speaking to a relatively present sort of military fight. Blast of the Mohicans.

51:26It's a hard to relate. Hard to remove. Yeah. But I mean, the level of detail. And, you know, I saw Blackhawk Down as a child and then I saw it again recently with my son. And I know a lot more about the military now and I would pick up on the fine details that are actually captured and preserved. But that was great. I actually did put Last of the Weekends first for me. I think I love Blackhawk Down. It's so intense. I mean, Blackhawk Down, you just feel like it's maybe the best movie I can think of in the genre where...

51:55Obviously, it's no actual approximation for having been in the scenario, but you just feel like you've gone through an emotional event. You feel like you went through an intense thing just there. But I was so shocked and thrilled to find last weekend's on this list, because I really had no construct of that. And I think it's a classic that holds up really well over time. Well, let's see. Shyam, we're wrapping up on time. Where should we find you? They want to learn about the book. They want to follow up on you. Where on the internet do they go to find you?

52:23Uh, you can find me on X at S Sankar. Um, and then, uh, I have a sub stack, Sean, Sean Sankar.com. I write about defense issues at first breakfast.com to play on the last supper and, uh, mobilize book. You can buy the book on Amazon. All right. Let's do it. Uh, thank you all. I am, of course, boss. This has been Bob's to the future. You can listen to it wherever you listen to find podcasts. Uh, thanks for tuning in and I will see you in the future.