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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And to tie it back to founder mode, my own support for President Trump is when I had a three-hour dinner with him in presence of a few other folks, and what I felt profoundly was a founder personality.
This is a person who was going to throw away the manager playbook, who actually had an intuitive understanding of the things that were broken and what to do about them, was going to make contrarian calls and actually cares about the outcome.
I'm not. I think there will be some volatility. I've been looking at the markets, kind of thinking about how much of this is the market reacting to the playbook. It's like prophylaxis. Before the pain is even felt, they're like, but we take as an axiomatic given from our economic theory that this is a bad thing, versus empirically, it's already resulted in badness.
I think there's going to be some chop between here and there. But the ultimate thing about the founder playbook, it's not that founders are always right, but it's that they are first intuitionally driven, and then often can only fully explain their intuition over time. And so you have to decide, is the rebuttable presumption going to be we're going to lean in and try what the founder is saying?
Or are we going to resist every step? Is the burden of proof such that I will not take any action until I perfectly understand everything or not? And I think no great things are accomplished that way. It's too slow. The OODA loop's too long. It takes too long to bring everyone along. So I'm in a suspension of disbelief mode.
And I would say Scott Besant is a very smart person. Human, very smart macro trader, you know, part of an elite, there's probably like on the order of 10 people in the world like him or a current treasury secretary. And, you know, I basically, it comes down to confidence in the team. I have a lot of confidence in the team.
Well, the U.S. and our allies is really our focus. So, you know, we have most of Western European intelligence organizations use our software. You know, some of that is, look, they're subscale in many ways. So I don't want to call it philanthropy, but it's the right thing to do. After the Bataclan massacre, we volunteered to help the French out massively.
And they took I think that was actually kind of a mark to market moment of we need the help. A lot of these European countries have their own indigenous industrial base, which they're very proud of, but it's not at the level of the US industrial base.
And so there's always a conflation of what part of my industrial base is a jobs program and what part is supposed to provide deterrence and lethality to protect my nation. And so I think we're really happy with that level of work here. Australia, Japan, the US and our allies.
I think the way I think about it is that we want to make any sort of kinetic or even non-kinetic economic action against Taiwan too risky for our counterparts in China. We want to push out. If the Davidson window ends at 27, our goal is to make that 28, then make it 29 and 30 and just keep making it harder and harder and too risky for the CCP to do anything. That's the optimality.
That's the primacy of winning. It's a mindset that's like, we're not trying to solve the problem. We're trying to make sure they can't move on Taiwan. Could you be a little more descriptive on how would we do that? We have to make it not survivable or unpredictable of what the outcome is going to be.
And I think the way the CCP works, the amount of certainty they're going to need is pretty high for an operation. And if they know exactly what we're going to do, they're going to figure out a counter plan. They're the best at long-range planning. They have a 50-year plan, and it's actually really well thought through. They're good at that.
But I think the fundamental American strength, like why I think we'll win in the end, is that we're crazy. We don't know what we're going to do. When we get punched in the face, we don't even know what we're going to do. So how could they?
And so I think we have to kind of bring that craziness left of the balloon going up and make sure that the level of unpredictability that we're creating in that battle space means that we stay in competition and never get to crisis or conflict.
For the leading edge, very. And I think that's the important part of our head strategy. We have to, you know, I heard that Intel and TSMC are announcing a new joint venture. We need to bring, this is part of the broader need for reindustrializing the nation. You know, we are, we probably have two weeks of pharmaceutical supplies. Most of these pharmaceuticals are made in the upstream ingredients.
The APIs are made in China. If we just start going through the things we need to ensure our American prosperity, too many of them are in the hands of our lethal adversary.
Yeah, the reverse opium war, as I call it. Yeah.
I think we do not yet have clarity of the threat amongst the American people. The national security community is not confused. They understand it is the priority threat. And I think part of this might just come down to our media and our culture. What was the last movie you saw that showed America is the good guy and the CCP is the bad guy?
You know, when I was a child, even the Worldwide Wrestling Federation had the Iron Shake. We had the Iranians as the back, that was the heel, right? There was a USSR heel. We had a very clear sense of who our adversaries were and that we were competing every day.
If you look at the essential Chinese propaganda, which we kind of imposed on ourselves with their ascendancy into the World Trade Organization, it's taken two forms. One is we're so weak, there's nothing to worry about here. We're so weak. The other is we've already won. There's nothing to worry about here because you've already lost the competition.
Showing 121–140 of 319 · page 7 of 16
← Previous
Next →