This Is Palantir's Vision for Changing How the US Does Defense Spending

SPEAKER_2 (0:02)

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Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

Tracy, you know my Twitter handle at the store.

Tracy Alloway (0:28)

I'm vaguely familiar with it, yes.

Joe Weisenthal (0:29)

I always mention it. Do you know how, where I got it from?

Tracy Alloway (0:33)

Oh, that's a good question. I know you had it when you first started writing about the market. And I know you've said at various points in time that you kind of regret using it, is that right?

Joe Weisenthal (0:43)

When I joined Twitter in 2008, and I didn't think it was going to be a very big deal for any reason. It was just the name of my old blog at the time, and that was the name when people just did screen names. It was just the name of a blog. The name means nothing to me. But before I was ever a journalist or even thought that I would get into journalism professionally, I had this blog, the stalwart.com.

Tracy Alloway (1:03)

If you thought Twitter wasn't going to be that serious, I feel like you could have chosen a much worse name than the stalwart.

Joe Weisenthal (1:09)

But anyway, I had this blog, the stalwart.com. It was actually, I had a co-author on it who went to do great things. Anyway, you know how like we sometimes tweet, it's like, hey, we're going to be in some city, who wants to get a drink? I was visiting San Francisco in like 2006, and I posted a thing, and I think I had about 200 readers of my blog. I said, does anyone want to get a dim sum in San Francisco and I got two people responded and show up.

Tracy Alloway (1:35)

That's not a terrible hit, right?

Joe Weisenthal (1:37)

No, it's not bad.

Tracy Alloway (1:38)

Two out of 200?

Joe Weisenthal (1:39)

Yeah, that's right. It's not bad at all. But anyway, one of those people who actually showed up to get dimsum, and a few friends of mine showed up, is going to be coming on the podcast today. One of those two.

Tracy Alloway (1:50)

See, it's about quality, not quantity, Joe.

Joe Weisenthal (1:52)

That's right.

Tracy Alloway (1:53)

The two people that showed up are useful to you.

Joe Weisenthal (1:56)

That's right. I went on, I stayed in media, and I did the blogging, and podcasting, and journalism thing, and another became the CTO of one of the hottest companies in the entire world. Some interesting people at that lunch in Chinatown and San Francisco.

Tracy Alloway (2:12)

What did you tell him over Dim Sum?

Joe Weisenthal (2:15)

I don't remember. Anyway, this is a very inward-facing intro, but to zoom forward, we've wanted to do more on defense in the year 2025, and how we spend money, etc. Anyway, it turns out that this person, this guy who came to Dim Sum in 2006, is a great person to talk about defense because he recently wrote a piece called The Defense Reformation, 18 theses about how we currently spend money on defense in this country, and why the way we do it is insufficient for this new world, especially with all of these geopolitical tensions. Of course, he works for a company that might benefit from a change in how we do spending on defense. We're going to be speaking with Shyam Sankar. He is the CTO of Palantir, one of the hottest companies in the world, but which I'm still trying to wrap my head around exactly what they do, but we're maybe going to learn that and how they, or Shyam specifically, envisions changing how we do defense and how Palantir could play a role in it. So Shyam, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. It's nice to talk to you again after almost 20 years.

Shyam Sankar (3:24)

It's a pleasure to be on. Yeah, it's great to hear you again.

Joe Weisenthal (3:26)

Okay, here's a question. So I watched these videos on YouTube about Palantir products, and it looks very sort of like Minority Report, where it's like these big walls of screens, and they zoom in on something, and they're like, oh, and here's an asset in the South China Sea, and why are these ships here? And someone's looking up, is that really what you guys sell? Like, is it really this Minority Report, not, I know it's not Minority Report pre-crime, but these sort of visualizations, give me the sort of, what does Palantir actually sell?

Shyam Sankar (3:57)

Well, the cynical way to think about Palantir is that it took something as sexy as James Bond to motivate engineers to work on a problem as boring as data integration. But I do think that is the seminal problem. It's not that we don't have this information, it's that we don't have it in a way that we can easily access it to make a decision. I like saying, you know, maybe 10 years ago, the idea that data was the new oil became very popularized. I strongly disagree with that. I think data is the new snake oil. It's not inherently valuable. What really matters are the decisions we as humans make. And am I making a better decision? Am I getting into a continuous learning loop of how I will make that decision better tomorrow? That is something that Colonel John Boyd would recognize as the OODA loop, the Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, a piece of tradecraft he developed to beat MIG fighters in dogfighting. But it's really like the human decision making process and how we see ourselves and win as a consequence of being better at it than our competitors in the commercial sector or our adversaries in the military space.