Skip to playerSkip to main content
  • 15 hours ago
Transcript
00:00Your reaction please to the president's statement earlier. Well it's great to be with you. I think
00:04this is really a conflict that's been brewing for the better part of 50 years. The Chinese are
00:10showing their hands and it comes down to a fundamental philosophy they have as an outgrowth
00:14of the warring states period. That's when Sun Tzu wrote Art of War which is that there has to be
00:18only one hegemon you know and so it's not enough for China to prosper. America must fall and that
00:25this is the tension in the relationship. It's not how Americans view the world. We have a very
00:28positive some view. No country has done more to alleviate poverty in China than America but
00:34reciprocally no country has done more to undermine American prosperity than China has. And you have
00:40said time and time again that we are at some sort of undeclared Cold War. Do you see at the moment this
00:47ratcheting up of leverage ahead of again eventually some sort of meeting and some sort of deal or do
00:53you think rare earths are going to become increasingly hard for the western nations to ask? I think it's
00:57going to spread from rare earths to many other things. We have to remember that Chinese make 50%
01:01of our generic drugs. You know what is it going to be like for the average American to choose between
01:05fighting for freedom and prosperity and watching their five-year-old suffer potentially die from a
01:10trivial ear infection. You know there's a whole swath of capabilities. It's you know we've so narrowly
01:15focused in the American mindset on the military dimension. But really this is an industrial dimension. We have to
01:20remember that China has subsidized their industry to the tune of roughly five percent of GDP a year. You
01:26know so their businesses are not principally about competing in a fair and open market. Their businesses
01:31are about driving shutdown economics. How do I create an industrial base that's so strong that it drives the
01:36industrial bases of other countries out of business. Your focus is and has been re-industrialization. But I think there'd be a lot of
01:44value in explaining the role Palant is playing in that. Be it you know from a strictly defense point of view. But you also work you know with the
01:53private sector. Yeah more than half the business is commercial. Right. 50 different industries from energy and mining and pharmaceuticals. We build every Chrysler and BMW and Airbus Airframe and HD
02:03Hyundai ship. And one of the real lessons here is you have to lean into your asymmetric advantages. And the David versus Goliath battle the Chinese absolutely have pound for pound more industrial capacity today. Well what are asymmetric
02:14advantages. We definitely have the best software as a nation in the world. We also have AI. And AI is not about AI. It's not about AGI. It's not about
02:23transhumanism. AI is about applying it towards all the other weaknesses that we have. How do you make the American worker 50 times more
02:30productive. The normative value here is to give the American worker superpowers so that you can re-industrialize. So that all the things that today we
02:36perceive being beyond the efficient frontier of being made in America can be done here. You can look at an example of Panasonic Energy and their battery
02:43factory in Sparks, Nevada. You have a three year apprenticeship journey to go from being someone you hire off the street mostly in Reno.
02:52They're coming from casino to managing this high end exquisite Japanese technology. Well with AI that's three months. You know so you can see how it drives
03:00prosperity, employment, retooling. It changes the very nature of our economy. And I reject the message that's coming up the street here from
03:08Silicon Valley. The ivory tower dumerism that is just going to result in mass unemployment. I live on the factory floor. You know I live in the ICU beds. The nurses are the first people to
03:18adopt this. It gives them more time to be with the patient or the submarine industrial parts manufacturer where they have more time making the parts less time munging the data to do it. I see a renaissance of how AI is actually
03:27empowering the blue collar worker to get more done. I want to bring us back to the headlines from the president in China. But in March you have a book coming out called mobilize. I haven't read it. It's not out but it might my
03:39interpretation is that you basically want to have some kind of national efforts for deterrence. And I'm trying to understand deterrence of what's well I think about it is the greatest risk to our country is not homicide. I'm not worried about the Chinese per se.
03:54It's suicide. It's that we lose the plot on what's actually happening. We're not focused enough on American greatness that we don't believe in the need to aspire to do great
04:03things. Reindustrialization is part of that. If we're focused on moving the ball forward in this country every single day we're going to be fine. We're not today. And but I think that it's coming
04:14increasingly into focus. There is this desire to run fast and break things once again a little bit in the world of defense and AI. And there has been
04:23reporting that perhaps some of the technology that is being built between where we sit right now Andrew and Palantir communications and
04:29GCT was perhaps going too fast into the armed forces hands and there was questioning about its efficacy and its reliability. That has been
04:36pushed back. There has been a view that maybe that was old news that had been reported on by Reuters. What do you make of the
04:42reporting and can you bring us up to speed with how diligent you are about the safety of the use of what you build. Yeah. Well we're incredibly
04:48diligent about it. I think you if anything we need to move even faster still. It is old news and inaccurate
04:54reporting. There are no vulnerabilities in the software but we need to lean into this idea. This is the
04:59fundamental lesson of Ukraine. It is not what your weapon system does today. It is how quickly it adapts to
05:03what it needs to do tomorrow. What we should be training with practicing fighting around is adaptability not the
05:09zero derivative but the first derivative and the person with the best first derivative is going to win. That's John Boyd's
05:14OODA loop encapsulated right there. I think what's so interesting is how global you can go for us
05:18and there Palantir is the bedrock of what software is being built in the United Kingdom at the moment
05:23we think what's happening just internationally. What the news is breaking today is an internationally
05:28driven story because Reuters has been cut off to Europe from China not just to the US. How do you feel
05:34about geopolitics writ large at this moment how Palantir is feeding into a Western strength or not? I think
05:40that's the exact right question. Who is buying the Iranian oil? Who's keeping Iran afloat
05:44right now? The Chinese are. You know who is building we like to say Ukraine's building four
05:48to five million drones a year. Ukraine's assembling four to five million drones here. The Chinese are
05:52building the parts for those drones. The Chinese are building drones on both sides here. Wan Li the
05:57foreign minister has told Ursula von der Leyen the Chinese have no interest in settling the Ukraine
06:01conflict. They view it as a proxy war with the West. They've been very explicit. We ought to listen to
06:06them and take them literally. Strom in a world where the relationship between the US and China
06:13deteriorates. The critics of Palantir say this is great for Palantir. This is what you want. You
06:19will thrive in an environment where there is conflict economic or otherwise. Is that a fair sort of
06:26criticism or is it something you say oh we absolutely accept that? The vast majority of our business will
06:32continue to be commercial. The commercial business is growing twice as fast as the government business.
06:36No one with children seeks conflict in this world. This is the world we live in. We lost deterrence in
06:432014. The Russians took Crimea. In 2015 the Chinese militarizes black Spratly Islands. We don't intend to
06:49be useful idiots that are along for the ride who are not saying what's actually happening. You could have
06:53made the same arguments in the 30s around the Nazis. Oh you're a warmonger. You're a warmonger. Well
06:58turns out the Nazis were a real problem.
Be the first to comment
Add your comment

Recommended