Boz to the Future: The Power of Innovation, Heresy, and Fighting for the Future with Palantir’s Shyam Sankar

Welcome back to another episode of Boz to the Future. In the latest episode, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth talks to Shyam Sankar — CTO of Palantir Technologies, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, and author of Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III.

After fleeing an armed robbery in Nigeria, Shyam's family settled close to Florida’s Space Coast, where a front-row seat for Space shuttle missions fostered his lifelong dedication to American innovation. He also became deeply optimistic about technology and brought that attitude with him to Palantir in 2006 as employee number 13 and the company’s first forward deployed engineer. Today, he leads technology at what has become one of the world's most valuable defense and AI companies — and also serves with Boz in the U.S. Army Reserve’s Detachment 201, otherwise known as the Executive Innovation Corps. It’s work they both agree comes at a critical fork in the road for the United States. 

Detachment 201 is now a year old and Boz and Shyam used that milestone as an opportunity to reflect on the culture of sacrifice that’s prized in the modern military, especially within the Army’s enlisted personnel.

As someone whose 24/7/365 organizational philosophy is closely aligned to many of Boz’s core product principles at Meta, Shyam was the perfect guest for a podcast about envisioning and building the future. And together, he and Boz enthused about the fuel they get from contributing to America’s entrepreneurial spirit as the U.S. celebrates its 250th anniversary.

They also weighed AI’s disruption of the 20th century's slow-moving managerial revolution, and why the U.S. needs to treat AI as a critical tool empowering real-world execution if the country wants to lead the world in frontier AI. They also saluted the long history of heretical thinking in driving key military breakthroughs from the Higgins boat to the Sidewinder missile. 

Watch the episode on Meta's YouTube channel, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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