Shyam Sankar
speaker
319 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 6 May
Shyam Sankar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But I think we could just start here and start filling in the holes that we have with capabilities and technologies from allies.
I'll take both sides of that because I feel like I really do. I have a view of it, which is few people should argue with this idea of taking the world's best. But so much of the H-1B program has also been abused to take average.
Right, and so then that kind of, you lose the moral high ground on the entirety of the program.
And so, yeah, like, you know, that's what's amazing about America, that we can continue to incorporate the world's best who want to come here, who believe that America's a shining city on the hill, who want to assimilate, who want to be American. But we have to do so in a way that also is clear-eyed about our economic prosperity, that we're doing this in the service of the American people.
It's not just that we want them to come here and be prosperous. As a consequence of them being prosperous, they're creating jobs, they're creating innovation, they're creating economic security. And I think large swaths of the program are used by certain companies to essentially hire cheap labor they probably could have been hiring here and should be hiring here. And so...
You know, both things can be true. There have been abuses and we want the very best to be here.
Well, fusion, so fission is how do you split the atom? Fission, excuse me. So fission, nuclear fission is how do you split the atom to generate power? Fusion is what our sun does, which is how do you like jam hydrogen molecules together to create energy? Um helium but in doing so it also releases energy huge amounts of energy We don't have commercial grade fusion yet.
That's that's more r d Um, but fission is a tried and true technology all of our all the nuclear that when we think about nuclear we're really talking about fission um, and we are experimenting with what's called small modular reactors. How do you go from what is otherwise a huge $30 billion multi-decade power plant and make these things smaller, more modular?
They're essentially pre-assembled, so you can put them where you need them. They require less infrastructure, substantially less time to build, and the designs are modern in a way that it's default safe. You don't have a risk of a meltdown.
The physics just don't work the same way that these legacy old systems do, which frankly, we've had the technology for a while, but because of our, I mean, understandable fear around it, we backed away from the atom and it became politically, we just started investing in other things.
I think it'll be harder for households to do that.
I'm hoping that the tech company's enormous appetite for cheap power is going to provide the necessary demand stimulus to the economy to go build these things again and provide the necessary stimulus for the government to reform the permitting process so that we can be clear-eyed and focused on the cost of power, the time it takes to build these things.
But you're going to need, talk about another industry that lacks founders. These public utilities are basically also run like state-owned enterprises. So where is that innovation going to come from? Well, it's going to come from the small modular reactor company or the nontraditional power provider who's behind the meter.
That means that they're just providing their power directly to this data center. They're not trying to put it on the grid for everyone else to use. So there's less regulation, less... bureaucratic coordination as a consequence of doing that. But by doing that, eventually, that power is going to be there. And any excess power, you're going to want to connect to the grid at some point.
So that's going to drive the stimulus to modernize the grid infrastructure as well. We've really underinvested in the grid. We probably have a couple trillion dollars. of investment we need to make, but we haven't been able to spin this chicken or egg thing.
As we get economic value out of being, hopefully, the world leader in the application of AI, I think it will make the other side of the equation clearer of why the modernization needs to happen.
You know, I like to quip it. At some fundamental level, you either believe in free markets or you don't. And especially when you look at the government having, you know, post-Cold War, like...
everyone has given up on communism including the Russians and the Chinese except for Cuba and The US government essentially like we have five-year centralized plans and DoD We call it the fight app like literally we have a five-year plan that looks very very Soviet in terms of how we think the world's gonna work It's this centrally unplanned approach so if we can start building stuff behind the grid behind the behind the meter and
And if we can do the permitting reform that's necessary that this administration is focused on, it's going to enable new entrants to start creating power and reduce the monopoly that historically the utilities have had, which as a theory of change means like they have to react to this.
So they're either going to slowly find themselves shriveling and shrinking, or they're going to reinvigorate themselves and show up to compete and be like, okay, these guys were the first movers and we can do it. There's kind of a theory of the economy that's actually at any given epoch, there's only maybe five to 10 live players, you know, founder driven institutions, really innovative.
Showing 221–240 of 319 · page 12 of 16
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