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
They set the pace, they define what's possible. And the other companies in the economy are sort of mimetically different. copying, they're imitating them. And that's OK, because it provides the necessary stimulus for the whole thing to kind of work. And I think the problem we found ourselves in, let's say the last 20 years, is outside of tech largely, there have been no live players.
these parts of the economy have kind of shrunk and shriveled and become, they're only dead players. And so the reinjection of some live players is how we'll reinvigorate this. Andrel is a live player for hardware defense primes, right? And the other primes have to respond to that. And that, if you're going to have hope in them, some of them may not.
But the ones who want to survive are going to respond to that. Similarly in utilities, the small modular reactor companies, the upstarts are going to be the live players that drive the change. And this, I feel like it's such an exciting time because you start to see the emergence of these live players.
People are coming out of their shell and cocoon and, you know, you can point to things that are worth investing in. The capital markets are starting to see that. They're starting to put capital behind these founders. You know, it's a great time for the American revival.
What usually happens is at first you just laugh at them. So we're in this phase of like, well, it's never gonna work. You know, the fish is in water. The fish doesn't understand what could possibly be outside the water. So, you know, yeah, for the utility company and the rules they live by and the bureaucracy they've ensconced themselves in, it is never gonna work.
They couldn't do it today, you know, but these guys are throwing away the rule book. They're not gonna follow the same rules and subject themselves to the same bureaucracy and have the same slow decision-making process. They're gonna do it differently. And once this starts working, they're going to have to respond. So three of the five Andral co-founders worked for me.
And they are world-class talent. In my interaction with some of the primes, the thing they love to say is something like, Andral's like the Theranos of defense. Andral's a fraud. And I was really scratching my head. It's like, why do they believe this? It's so obviously not true, just to be 100% clear. It's like, obviously not true. These guys are crushing it.
And my conclusion was it's because they can't imagine of a different way of doing it. Therefore, if there's a company doing it a different way, it must be a fraud. It can't work. So as Andrew starts to just keep crushing it out there, they will realize there's a different way. They will have to realize there's a different way of doing it. They'll have to respond to these things.
And that's the reinvention stimulus that the economy needs.
I think it both looks exactly like the past and completely different. So the part that's exactly like the past is I think that the kind of fundamentals of the OODA loop, that it is about decision advantage and speed, is the same thing. Those principles are not changing. The most valuable application of technology then is going to be towards that end. So why is lethal autonomy so valuable?
You could say we've had that for a while. If you're flying in a fighter jet, it is your computer that is telling you that there is an enemy on your radar that you can't see. You're trusting the computer. That sounds like autonomy to me.
And then when you release, when you press fire control there, the kind of terminal guidance is happening through an autonomous system, through the computer on the projectile. Okay, so now we're talking about, let's just start there. It's a difference of kind. I'm sorry, it's not a difference of kind. It's a difference of degree. We already have systems like this.
We're just talking about supercharging it, doing substantially more with it. And what is the more? The more is a much shorter term. decision-making lifecycle at much greater scale. And you start to see that with these first-player FPV drones. I think the Russians are losing roughly 1,500 people a day to these little drones that Ukrainians are flying. So at some point- 1,500 people a day? Wow.
It's tough. That's effective. So if you start thinking about that, it's like, well, that's the equivalent of small arms, really. It's like part of the innovation now is, okay, this drone has become the equivalent of small arms. But doctrinally, and that's how the Ukrainians treat it. It's like the E3, E4 who has fire control on that weapon, right? But for us, you know, we're not at war.
We haven't changed our doctrine. Like we would think of... The authorities on that is something the equivalent of a tomahawk, like a cruise missile. It's going to go way up the chain. And of course, if the balloon goes up, we'll throw all that away and we'll reinvent our doctrine. But I think we should be getting ahead of that now and start thinking about what are small arms now?
Because it's not just your M4. So that's one piece of it. And then I think that also implies that the fighting force is going to have to be more technical. They're not going to have to be coders. But the responsibility, just like if you're going through Green Beret qualification, you learn everything about the gun. You know how to assemble it, disassemble it.
They're going to be that level of proficiency you're going to need for a set of technical capabilities that are going to be decisive on the battle space. It's going to extend to electronic warfare and cyber attacks and space-based access and communication. all the way to the end lethal effects.
I do think we're going to have to invest in, and this is where you need the outside tech mentality in kind of an Apple-like experience here. You know, yesterday when I was at Bragg, part of this capability exercise that General Praga put on talking to the different MOSs, you know, the special ops medic was like, my job is the best job. You know, the weapons officer, my job is the best job.
Well, the commo guy was like, my job is the worst job. When everything works, no one even knows I'm around, and the second things stop working, you know, it's all my fault. And what I saw in that was cognitive burden. Basically, like, we... How often does your internet go down at home? How often do you have to think about these things? The amount of investment, your iPhone just kind of works.
And we are doing a great disservice to these commo officers or NCOs by the burden we place on them to have to manage these things versus what our technology could actually be doing. So we have to redraw that front line so they can actually focus on the decisions that make the beer taste better, so to speak. The decisions that actually matter on the battle space.
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