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 these two lines of propaganda, even though they seem contradictory, they have one thing in common, which is saying we're not competing because either we're irrelevant or we've already won. But it was designed to obfuscate the fact that we are competing every single day and viciously. And that's the clarity that we need as the American people to realize that we're in a competition.
Today, it's an economic competition. Let's do everything we can to make sure it remains only an economic competition that requires us to invest in deterrence. The Chinese were kind of surprised that we did nothing when they militarized the Spratly Islands after telling us to our face that they were not going to do it.
And this is the part where I think their miscalculus comes in because the sort of Midwestern, we positive some, we're fair people. You know, we seek peace. So we'll take you at your word and we'll treat you well. But at some point, you'll break that. And then, you know, as one admiral once told me, then the American OODA loop comes out, you know, observe, overreact, destroy, apologize.
And so how do we... how do we manage this so that we are actually conveying and managing the threat appropriately?
It would be very bad. And I mean- Right now, it would also be very bad for them. And so what are they doing? They're trying to produce their own indigenous chips, their own GPUs. They want their own NVIDIA. We've curtailed their access. Of course, they're getting around sanction evasion. They're buying from Malaysia, buying from Singapore. But we've made it hard for them.
We're creating dilemmas and problems. So they're trying to make themselves self-sufficient. We need to be investing in the same things along strategic areas. It can include our allies. Sometimes I worry that friend-shoring is like a half measure. It's kind of an easy out.
Like, yes, I'm not trying to exclude our allies from being part of the solution here, but everything that we can make at home in America, we should make at home in America. Now, the pathing really matters. When we were mobilizing for World War II, we took Bill Knudsen, a Danish emigre, direct commissioned him a three-star general, and he was in charge of war mobilization.
He had a lot of room and a lot of flexibility. And FDR actually put him in charge as a civilian in 38, I think, is when it happened. In 38, we have to remember, there was not consensus in America that we should be involved in this European matter. The strong sense of we got to do this, we should be isolationist here. There's conflicting views.
But what FDR realized is it takes time to build factories. Like I need an option. Like maybe we should be isolationist. But what I definitely don't want to do is be isolationist because the cupboard is bare. So how do we mobilize so that we can provide credible deterrent? And I think this is not about wartime mobilization. It's about mobilizing so that there is not a war.
And that is really mobilizing our re-industrialization. And that was kind of a term, I've been talking about this for five years now, but back then it seemed like a far off fantasy. People thought it was a little crazy. This term has entered the mainstream. You will see it on Fox News. Reindustrialization is a theme. There are serious people who are investing serious capital to do this.
When we get the American private capital markets behind this, which is starting to happen, it's going to be unstoppable.
And to the point of confidence in your team, they're thinking about that. I've heard proposals that are around changing the depreciation and amortization schedule for factories and investments. So how do I use the financial math to encourage the capital markets to view these things differently? fundamental deregulation. How do we change NEPA?
How do we change the regulation permitting processes so that it doesn't take you four years of waiting for a bureaucrat to tell you that you didn't dot the right I or cross the right T, but four minutes to get the approval to go. This is what unleashing American energy is about. What does a factory run on? Like the cost of energy is a material input to everything, right?
It is the first input into all the goods and services we buy. You bring the cost of energy down, it is a massive deflationary force. And what we are the largest energy producer in the world. Like, the resources we have, we need to just get out of our own way on this and not have a regressive mindset around like, oh, you know, using energy is bad.
Actually, the basis of modern civilization is energy, and the more energy you use, the better your standard of living is, the more things are possible. I feel like that's not a contrarian thing to say anymore. You would have had pitchforks and protests if you said that five years ago. And now people are like, yeah, well, obviously that's true. How do we get after that?
You see the tech community investing in things like fusion and fission and small modular reactors and people who recognize the reason to be super optimistic, particularly on energy, is that the AI companies are going to be crippled if they're not able to have the energy that's needed to run their AI, which means they are investing in it themselves off their own balance sheet.
They're not waiting for a utility to do this or that. They're going to be building energy production behind the meter. Wow. It's not even going to the grid. It's like captive energy for their data center. And a lot of that is just the bureaucratic BS of how long does it take? Oracle was just talking about how one state utility company was saying, oh, we could get you this energy in the 2030s.
2030s? You know, it's like, we should be talking, we need to measure everything in months. This is really the core thing that's gonna solve our problems is being impatient. Like we need to be thinking about what can we be doing now? What can get done? And that's what I love, the focus of this administration is very much, these are the things that must be delivered inside of this administration.
That then changes how you think about solving these problems. It forces you to realize that the playbook and the process is totally screwed. It's never going to get there. It was never going to work anyways, but now it's just clear it's not going to deliver on the time. How do we reinvent ourselves in this moment to go make it work? What kind of energy should we be looking at? All types.
Like, I mean, if you really look at, you know, we need more natural gas. We need to make investments in nuclear. It's going to take longer. We, sure, bring on more renewables, but look at the reliability around base load, the variability, the battery storage means that we need to be practical.
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