America’s edge is cultivating unconventional talent

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 25:41

   are epic in their own right, but they started at Palantir in many cases. And so I want to dive into, you brought up the NeuroDivergent Fellowship. It's one of my favorite things you've ever done. You've done a lot of great things, but I think it's one of the most extraordinary stands that you've taken in the company, but you've always looked for people who are different and somehow cultivated them and brought together people who are Democrats, Republicans, on the right, on the left, people who are of all walks of life.

2. 26:06

   How do you lead such a diverse group of people, especially at scale, like at the scale you are? Well, I mean, it's always hard to know when you're, like, I view myself as an artist. So you're really, it's like, well, how do you create the art and it's funny because i i mean i look i i like the freedom money gives me and i i certainly don't want to like do some bullshit philanthropy to prove that i'm good when because i did something bad because i think what we do is very important um but it's like at the end of the day it's like an artistic thing but you know i had it's always helpful i had my parents are among the most talented people I've ever met. And I feel they don't agree with me that, you know, like they should have, they could, like, it's kind of weird. I'm so famous, put it that way. And then there's

3. 27:10

   the American thing where we are, I really believe in the magical, liberating, inalienable right for all of us to be individuals and that's what i see as particularly moral and special in the world i don't like these things that like i've been famously anti-woke but in the thing i find offensive about it is actually that it's people pretending to be different while all being the same and so i don't like uh so i tend to gravitate towards people who are unique and yeah i don't really care their politics i care about like their ability to think and do um there is an aptitude thing where can you recognize somebody who is truly unique in something you've not done yourself is Thank you.

4. 28:00

   just something you're born with um i i do think it's a form of neurodivergence like outlier iq is it in a certain way it's not that different than being autistic like you just can't you're not gonna you're not gonna decomp a problem the way somebody who is all just normal smart will um and i find that very very charismatic the trick to doing it is you have to it's this very hard thing where somebody who is the best i i believe the palantirians while managed a palantir and sometimes in many and most cases presumably after a palantir i am helping them to express something that only they can do at that moment and if you look at our products and what we've done it is actually true even what we're doing in in like right now all across the middle east and obviously in america each single product at each single part was built by the one person in the

5. 28:57

   the world that could have done it. But that, and then I have to somehow get them to do things that they don't actually think are valuable, but on their terms. And that's basically my job, because at that level of aptitude, you can't just say, do this idiot. Cause they're like, why would I do that? You're the idiot. Uh, and so, um, and, and then what I think is very special about the Palantirians, ex-Palantirians and current Palantirians is when you're at Palantir, you're not learning to to actually follow my playbook you're learning to follow your playbook where i'm inserting some things that may not have occurred to you maybe you don't know i'm doing that to make sure that your playbook gets rid of your dyslexia basically i'm anti-dyslexifying your playbook but around you and if you take like the i don't know there's so many really important

6. 29:50

   ex-Palantirians, what you'll see is they're a kind of classic people and they're not going to build the same company Palantir was. They're also not going to build the same company of the, an ex-personalist Palantir. And that's why they play such a disproportional role. And at the end of the day, that's why Palantir is like playing such a big role because like Foundry, PG, Apollo, Ontology, the management of Ontology, Maven, which is like, you know, we've just like been able to target in a way no other country can was like the other countries are like what the happened here like we were thinking afghanistan like what is this meaning our retreat like meaning and like like america has re-established deterrence that actually just happened it's happened in the last year like that right left center i don't care what party you're in in

7. 30:45

   private obviously you can't say this in public in private that is a phenomenal asset that america now has that it did not have and there are lots of reasons for it but a one maybe not the most important is a concatenation of the most unusual in some cases otherwise maybe not fully functional talent built around building something that was an absolutely scandalous unpopular dream rejected by many people called maven and that's how this country by the way if we are going to outperform the rest of the world uh our single advantage is to augment neurodivergent highly individual people to be their absolutely unique best and protect their first second fourth and Fifth Amendment rights so that they don't get screwed.

8. 31:38

   Absolutely.