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
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And then you have this sort of nihilism. It breeds this nihilism, like nothing works. We should tear it all down. And sometimes that's the answer. But also, you have to kind of wake up. There has to be some force waking up trying to make these institutions actually functional. And that's what we see. our software doing.
It's actually creating a steering wheel for the C-suite that is connected directly to the people who do the work. And that gives you a basis to understand what is happening. When I provide steering input, is it actually going to result in changes? How do I iterate on my policy and my strategy? When I have a question like how many tanks are in the army, I should know that in three seconds.
And that lets me know, do I need more or not? And I can move on to the next problem, the next problem. If I have to wait three weeks to answer that, you can just see how the whole system just gets gunked up. Nothing actually works. You don't understand that the quality on assembly of doors is not working. And therefore, we're going to have problems.
And small problems that can be solved become big problems that people will struggle to solve. This breeds a legitimation crisis. The legitimacy of our institutions is based on the fact that they work.
How do you spend $11 billion on high-speed rail in California and have 1,600 feet of track that goes nowhere with a government institution that's really proud of how many jobs they created by doing this? You compare that to SpaceX. They've only spent $9.6 billion, and they put more than 300 rockets into orbit. Or we spent $40 billion on rural broadband and have no rural broadband.
We've spent $80 billion on electric chargers, and I think we had like eight. So there's something wrong. Part of the disease that we're facing is this idea that all you need to do is cut a check. Like money will just solve the problem. You know, money enables the founder personalities. Money enables people to do the work. It's the front end of enabling the work. And it's the back end.
It's the reward for having done the work. But someone's got to do the work. And you got to be really good at doing the work. And that's like, that's art. That's craft. You know, it's not a commodity. It's not mindless. You don't just outsource it. And we need people to be proud of that and our efficacy in doing that.
You know, you think about I think the counterfactual, if you just say like, we didn't have Hyman Rickover, we had someone else, or we had DATMA back then, and we rotated people in and out of driving the nuclear Navy every two or three years, it wouldn't have worked. And so when we look at so many of things, why does the F-35, we conceived of it in the mid 90s, and it's just kind of working now.
Why should it take 30 years when Kelly Johnson could build as a single human at Skunk Works? He's the founder of Skunk Works. He could build 41 airframes in his career. He could build the U2 in 13 months.
I do. I mean, the reason I've been writing about it is that I'm wildly optimistic that we're on the verge of changing it. I feel like it's a little bit like a ketchup bottle. You know, you shake it, you shake it, you shake it, nothing comes out, and then it comes out all at once. Like, this has been building. And people can kind of feel this subconsciously.
They can see it in the parts of the American economy that are working. which frankly are the only parts of the economy, you know, look at Europe, nothing's actually working over there. So like the parts of the world economy that are working look like this, the parts that don't, you see it with when Doge goes to DC, like there's a lot of noise, certainly from the other side around Doge,
But it's been amazing. You have people who are the NBA athletes of technology walking around kind of realizing like, oh, that's a seventh grade basketball team over there. And people who can call balls and strikes. And conversely, you can be like, that person in government is a genius. They're not empowered. We need to empower. This is the person who actually knows the right answers. We pull that.
Doge has the ability to make those calls and to do so with taste. And that realignment is profoundly needed. Why do you think there is so much pushback on that?
It's not supposed to work this way. We were following the playbook. We had a playbook. There's a system. It's this belief in process over outcomes. And it's profane to have to blow up all the process and to believe that everything that we believed in the past didn't actually work, or that there would be another way of organizing yourself that would be superior and would work better.
And I think that's the subconscious undertone of the pushback. And then people, this, you know, it's like the best engineers are, like I said, with Hyman Rickover, he was hated by the Navy, but he was a national treasure. And can you hold that contradiction that, okay, yes, the engineer said something that hurt your feelings, but they're right. Can you hold that contradiction?
Are you optimizing the outcome? Because if you care about the outcome, that's easy to get over. It's like, yeah, you're right. So it's ego. It's all ego. What a shame, man. I think the results will speak for themselves. And I've seen this so many times. Once the bureaucracy gets out the way, you can often solve these problems inside of 30 days.
So, and I think that's the, I know those guys, that's what they're focused on every day, which is just delivering results, keeping their head down, delivering results. And, you know, I think it's, they're a national treasure.
From a technical perspective, we could have done it 30 years ago. I think from a political will perspective, it took President Trump's political will and the mandate that he got with the election in order to make it happen. And you still see the amount of pushback that there is.
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