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
So I'm not trying to favor one type over the other, but we're going to need more of all of these types of energy. Would you like to see more nuclear? Yes, I would. Why? I think turning our back on the atom was one of the gravest mistakes for our rate of progress. Nuclear is largely expensive right now because we've regulated ourselves to death. The designs that we have are very safe.
Hyman Rickover, when he was building the nuclear navy, his safety standards were set so high, higher than civilian safety standards. because his litmus test was my son will be in this sub. How safe does it have to be for my son to be in this sub?
If you compare that to the Soviet submariners, for every six months they served, they had six months of rest in Sochi to regenerate their bone marrow because they were irradiated to all hell. So there's a way of doing it. You get the right people, the right design, the right founder mode leadership.
This stuff is safe, and it's abundant, and it's clean, and we can get it at scale, and you can build it in all sorts of places. And we have to be thinking about this from a competitive advantage perspective. I'm not sure it's a perfectly linear extrapolation, but in order for our shipbuilding to be competitive,
You need more than just building government warships because to this point of a diversified R&D base, a workforce that knows how to do these things, you need scale, right? As we all know, the one shipyard in China alone has more than all the shipbuilding capacity of all the U.S. combined, right? They have 250 times the shipbuilding capacity that we do.
I'm not sure that we need to match them, but we need to be able to produce ships. When we say we're going to have two subs a year, we need to have two subs a year, not 1.1.
I think it's all of the above. So they're not building 250 times the number of warships, but the ability to produce commercial ships enables them to drive down the cost of producing the warships and enables them to produce the warships at a speed that's relevant to building their Navy up to be big enough to keep us out of the theater or to create dilemmas and problems that we have to deal with.
And so I think we should be thinking about how, what would be, it's just a thought experiment, but what would be required for commercial shipping, ship construction in America to be competitive on the world stage? I think we have to take an asymmetric approach because if we're just doing labor versus labor, we're going to lose that. But if we say, actually, we're going to build the first
commercial nuclear cargo fleet. It's going to have the lowest cost of operation. It's going to be able to be in service much longer.
And we're going to leverage the Navy's unique knowledge of how to do this in order to power this American prosperity that's going to then drive up the volume in shipyards, drive up the capital requirements and the ability to leverage capital markets to build new shipyards, bigger shipyards, to do the facilitation. Because right now, all that investment is on the American taxpayer.
And that's why we struggle with it. Like, how much should the taxpayer keep dumping into these shipyards? The answer is always more, but we're getting less for our money every single time. And the way out of this problem is to realize that monopsony, the government as a sole buyer, is actually the problem. That's how we got into this problem to begin with.
The world used to be very different when the Berlin Wall still stood, just came down. Only 6% of major weapons system spending went to defense specialists. The other 94% went to what I call as dual purpose companies. Too much is said about dual use. A missile is single use. You need Palmer to build lethal effects that only the government is the buyer of. But dual purpose.
Chrysler used to build cars and missiles. Ford built satellites until 1990. General Mills, the cereal company, built torpedoes and inertial guidance systems in their mechanics division. No shit. Everything they learned about building machinery to process cereal, they were able to leverage in the service of national security to make our war fighters more lethal.
And what happened was that over time, the government became such a difficult buyer to work with. All sorts of esoteric rules that only matter for the government, all sorts of auditing, all sorts of bureaucracy, that people tried to figure out how to exit that business. And that started in the 70s. Boardrooms started talking about it. It accelerated in the 80s.
And then when the Last Supper happened in 1993, there was this dinner in the Pentagon. We used to have 51 major defense primes. Well, they got the 15 largest together, they had a dinner and they said, we need a peace dividend, we've won the Cold War, we're gonna slash defense spending. So for every dollar we used to spend, we're gonna spend 33 cents and it's gonna happen all at once.
you guys are not all going to survive. You have our permission to consolidate, to merge, to try to find commercial lines of business, like do what you need to do. And we let that happen until 1999 when we blocked the merger of Lockheed and Northrop. That was the last, we said, okay, this is too much. So we went from 51 down to five. The popular narrative. What are the five?
Northrop, Lockheed, GD, Boeing, and Raytheon. The popular narrative is this is when we lost competition in the industrial base. 51 down to five, you have less people to pick from. That definitely happened, but I don't think it's the dominant problem. The dominant problem is really that the consolidation bred conformity.
You had companies that were almost like test tube babies, artificial mergers, no single unified culture. They became essentially almost like state-owned enterprises, extensions of the government, just doing the government's bidding. There was not enough heresy, not enough crazy ideas that pushed the envelope, not enough Kelly Johnsons of the world. It drove out the founders.
Founders cannot work in a conformist environment. They are heretics by their very nature. And it drove the founders to other industries like tech. The reason for immense optimism in this moment. So that 6% today is 86%. So the 6% that used to go to only defense specialists has ballooned into 86% that go to defense specialists. So these companies have very little commercial business.
They are kind of on the Galapagos Islands. They've built specialist entities that only know how to sell and interact with the government. And this is part of our, and this is- So that's the key.
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