Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus along with all of our podcasts at colossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:15)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of PositiveSum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit PSUMVC.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:43)
My guest today is Shyam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir Technologies. I think you'll find by listening to Shyam that the business itself, their mission and how they built it and indeed him and his life are completely fascinating. We talk about his entire worldview, which I find personally the most interesting. This need to re-industrialize the United States after decades of moving so much of our production and as he would argue, therefore our learning of how to innovate and make things off of our own shores. We talk about the history of heretics, people who have against the odds design solutions that have driven so much of our success around the world. Please enjoy my conversation with Shyam Sankar.
Shyam, I think the most fun place for me to begin, because it's an area that you're interested in and I'm fascinated by, is a history of people in American military lore who you call heretics. You refer to them as heretics, people like Hyman Rickover and Andrew Higgins, who designed 90 percent of the boats that landed at Normandy. John Boyd, who invented the OODA loop, which are one of the great biographies of a military figure that I've ever read. Talk to us a little bit about how you would define a heretic in your use of that term and why you're so interested in that group of people in US history.

**Shyam Sankar** (3:55)
Well, I think they're really founders. They're founder figures. They get obsessed with delivering something that it makes no sense because they're fighting, particularly in the military context, you're like fighting the bureaucracy, you're going to end your career, you pay extreme prices for it.
So there's almost like a pathological obsession with winning, which I really relate to both personally, but also that's what I see in great founders. In the present moment, it's really important to like encourage the hidden heretics who are in the military today to recognize your heresy matters. And frankly, if you look back at history, the only shit that ever worked, the things that helped us win all the wars, were the things that the heretics actually did. Nothing that went through the machine delivered anything. I think all change comes from these heretics, and they only later become heroes. If you think about Billy Mitchell, who invented the Air Force, he was court-martialed and died penalized and depressed. Only after his death did we invent the Air Force based on his original heresy. I'm just fascinated with what motivates these folks to keep doing this. And I guess I relish a little bit in their rebellion and the victory that the rebellion brings about.