YouSaid · the spoken record

Shyam Sankar

lines on the record: 90
first: 2026-03-10
most recent: 2026-03-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Admit a kid that we're going to have to subsidize to come here, and that opened the entire future. And I think if you look later in life, okay, maybe people have cynical reasons to help you further along. They think there might be something. It's like, there's nothing in it for her. It's just a profound act of kindness that fundamentally changed my life.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The greatest thing, which is covered in the story is Miss Ethel Danhoff, was the head of admissions for this private school in Orlando. My dad took me for a tour of the school. Having learned that it's the best school and that was the other fixation my dad has that education was how you were going to achieve some prosperity. I'm going to give my son every opportunity I possibly can. Turns out we'd missed the admission window by a mile and everything was done. And I was actually very reluctant to go even on this trip and see the school. I was very happy at the school I was at. But when I saw the science facilities there, I was like, I need to go here. I need to learn this stuff. This is inspiring. So now I was all spun up and excited. And of course, I'm learning, hey, you totally screwed this up and you'll have to wait a year. And Miss Stanhoff, no data. It's not like I had some standardized test scores or something. She's like, give this kid the admission test. Just do it. And maybe she had a modicum of data after that test. But we were a family that needed financial aid. So it's like, here it is.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would be hard to overstate the impact that Dad and his example had on me. You had such a selfless man who just gave everything to his family, could weather any humiliation in service of his children and his wife. And I think when you're a kid, you learn this stuff subconsciously. Thing dad did annoying, or you don't fully appreciate it, but it's like the culmination of all these events over time actually profoundly shape who you are. And I hope I can set an example that inspires my kids to do the same sort of thing. And I think a lot of fatherhood is being a man that inspires your family to be better”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, John Boyd's advice to other officers, other uniform service members you can either be somebody or you can do something, but you can't really have both. And if you're going to be somebody, you got to play this game and it's all theater, but you're going to get promoted and you're going to get the acolytes and you're going to get the rewards of doing that and you're going to feel good about yourself or you actually do something and it's going to feel really shitty and no one's going to appreciate it, but you're going to have the intrinsic reward of knowing that you did something.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Used to weigh on me. Part of it is like, okay, you've been doing it for 20 years. How long can this stuff keep weighing on you? But I think it would be fair to say it weighs on every new employee when they come in. There's some journey of dealing with this. I think it's also the lot of the man in the arena. It can end with John Boyd. To do or to be. Are you trying to be someone? Are you trying to do something? We're trying to do something.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that our companies are actually the best in the world and functioning and competitive, that's how you underwrite freedom and prosperity.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that energy is what you're fighting against. Our diagnosis of this problem, if he thought about these institutions, let's give the C-suite government or private sector the benefit of the doubt. They have the steering wheel and they're diligently trying to steer the steering wheel. What they don't understand is it's a jungle cruise prop from Disneyland. It's not connected to anything. And then you have the people down below who are looking up and saying, how could my leaders be so dumb? That is where that nihilism starts. What is the point of this operating system? Why are we trying to make these decisions better? Are we trying to create something that's more responsive for the people who are leading these institutions and the people who do the work? And so much of the 20th century has been this wild managerial revolution that has concentrated power away from both these ends to an amorphous middle blob. That's where all the disconnection happens in the steering wheel. So reasserting that in a way that like our institutions work for the people that they're designed to serve.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, we don't really think of ourselves a defense company. We're a software company. I think the fact that half of our businesses in government, two-thirds of that half is in defense is actually more normal to historical pattern that we've talked about here than the present. But the part that I think a lot of outsiders misunderstand is they somehow think we're either in the business of collecting data or doing surveillance. That is probably the part that's least well understood about what we're doing. We're engaging with the problems as they exist. So you can say, what is the problem that exists? The core problem that we're set up to solve is the legitimacy of our institutions. Why doors fall off planes? Why does it seem like our basic government services don't work? If you don't address those problems, if you don't build that state capacity, private sector, public sector, if you don't help these institutions get better, it breeds nihilism. It breeds this sense that we should just burn it all to the ground. There's nothing worth investing in. And that doesn't actually work. It's strictly a worse world.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at all the great military innovations through history, Churchill built the tank as the head of the Royal Navy because the British Army wasn't smart enough to realize that horses were not going to win the next war. So he called it a landship because he could only build ships. So it was a landship. But that's not a one-off. Literally, every major military innovation, including the Sidewinder missile, which was a rogue project that some guy built with lighters with a new sort of seeker that totally humiliated the Air Force's missile in Vietnam and became, now we think of it as the standard. When Bill Perry became the Assistant Secretary of Defense, he was staring down this thing. It's like, hey, I can either try to fix the system and lose implied. Or I can take the two things I really care about and make sure they work, GPS and stealth. At every crossroad, it's the person who just wants to engage with the system. We lose. And the person who's willing to just put it all on the line to make it work. And it was kind of a call to, if you're a latent heretic in the department, if you're a latent heretic,”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I was to synthesize it, we've lost deterrence. The reason this is not going to go the way World War II did is we don't have the industrial base we had in World War II. We have to recognize what our unique American strengths. The person is the program. Don't forget that Edward Hall built the Minuteman and Shriever was the Air Force General that oversaw our ICBMs and that we call it the Apollo program, but it was actually Gene Krantz's program and the primacy of those people and getting the right people in those roles is determinative to the success. It would be like thinking you could found a company by recipe as opposed to like the company's future is determined by the founders. That's like almost the congenital limiter on what is actually possible. And of all cultures, we should understand that. And then downstream of that, we should recognize there is no process out of this. The reason we're screwed right now is we prayed at the altar of process. We thought if we followed this requirements process, if we do this thing, if we just let the bureaucracy work, it will lead to a good result. And the only thing that leads to is decline.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say I'm a bit reluctant about the shift, but I can't look my kids in the eye and not say that I'm ringing the bell, that we're in an undeclared state of emergency. Really the first major public thing I put out there was the 18 theses, which is to say, like, we're an emergency. We've lost deterrence. I've been doing this for roughly 19 years at that point. Here is my diagnostic of what's wrong. The shot clock is ticking. We have got to coalesce around this problem. Now, a note of profound optimism. I've seen more change in the Department of War in the last year than the prior 19 years to the point of Americans do the right thing having exhausted all the other options. We are definitely in the place where we are starting to do the right things and the first derivative and even the second derivative is positive, going faster and faster here.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How quickly can I deliver value for my customers? How quickly can I deliver enterprise autonomy or fundamentally change my customers' businesses? And not only has that number been awesome, I'd say two years ago we could do that inside of eight weeks. Now it feels like a week that rate is compounding dramatically.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think that the value is going to accrue at the chips layer and at the ontology layer. If you squint at the stack, I'll skip over some parts of this, but you have chips, you have the model providers, you have AI infrastructure, which is where we think the ontology sits. And then you have AI applications. And what you've observed about there is the model companies have to run up the stack away from just providing a pure model because the model is commoditized. It's really everything they build around the model that is a solution that they're going to try to build value off of. When you look at the AI Pure Play applications, they're running down. As they start to scale their businesses, have to do with more customers, more of their customers' data. They're reinventing the AI infrastructure, essentially AIP from first principles, recognizing why they need it. Now, of course, there's some divine intervention. We built this platform over the last 20 years.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And place them in places where they can go forth and do badass shit. And we can all learn together by doing that. It's been actually really fun with the rate of transformation for AI and what it's really enabled to be possible.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only way you can do that is by disrupting yourself to the point of institutionalizing rebellion and holding that up. It is the perpetual motor of self-disruption. I think about it as the most valuable thing is not to defend moats or something, but it's to go charge after the new opportunity. One of the things I think is unique about AI is how much it plays to the beginner's mind. Obviously, the first adopters of AI for us were the youngest hires. To the point of generate momentum, I didn't really bother with the people who were cynical or dismissive of it. I let the young people generate just overwhelming productivity that almost in some sense humiliated or inspired other people to get on board. And there's a similar phenomenon. There was like a weird, almost like out-of-body experience that someone who's been there 20 years or someone who had been in Palenter for three years is like, you know what, the best people are doing this are really the young people, by which he meant people who'd been there three months and that recognition of, so here we have someone who's not a gatekeeper. He's actually trying to find the insurgents and empower them.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inspire us with the thing that you've built. And then if you have a culture that is just profoundly truth seeking and the truth is so charismatic that now that I've seen it, I can't unsee it. This is obviously the right answer. Let's go. It's not as hard as it may sound to move and pivot on these things.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Celebrating the heretics, celebrating the successes, creating venues where everyone has some ability to revolt. Every employee's first AMA with me, I end it by telling them to tell me to fuck off to my face. It's very uncomfortable for them, actually. They're almost not sure if this is like entrapping them into something that's going to get them in trouble. But how can you say you have a flat culture if you can't tell the boss to fuck off with a small gesture, but it's trying to set the conditions to understand like, hey, we are a company that's committed to taking the very best idea regardless of where it comes from and then putting all of our wood behind those arrows. And most of those ideas are usually some variants from what we're currently doing. Otherwise, it'd already be the current best idea. You got to be careful how much you institutionalize. But we've institutionalized minimally two times a year. We have these weeks of revolt where people are allowed to go build whatever they want. We're almost, I like, want the people to have a chip on their shoulder. The whole point is to prove that we've been up and doing it wrong.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Orienting people to that. The other part I'd say is you can't move the whole company at once. Even a company as small as ours, there's only 4,500 people. Every change is itself a mini insurgency inside the company. Now, I would think about it like you're campaigning. Who are the people who already believe what you're saying? How do you add incremental weight behind what they're doing? How do you help them succeed more? Are you trying to generate momentum? Are you trying to deal with the drag of bringing everyone along? My experience has been momentum is the thing that aligns the whole company. And so you should be waking up every day in the midst of these pivots just working on momentum. People will catch up.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always degrees of these things, but the first order issue, I'd say, is it hard because you want to exist in a business that isn't painful? There's a great Greg Lamon quote who's a world championship cyclist, and someone was asking him about a championship performance, and he almost looked incredulous and he was like, you know, it doesn't get easier. You just go faster. And so what do you think a championship performance feels like? It feels shitty. It's really painful. It's really hard. And your ability to win is basically can you survive more pain than your competitors can. So then there's this weird phenomenon where if you're doing something world class, it's really painful. Also, if you're totally failing, it's really painful. So then having some discrimination to know which of these two worlds am I in, and the worst world to be in is where you have no signal is like you're just plodding along, but it's managed decline is really what's happening. So then is the pain we're experiencing generating results or not?”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most foreign decisions from my seat is really what projects are worth outside investment that we think are going to define the future of what our customers need and therefore the future of the business over the next five years. So then how do you get the right talent on those projects? How do you discover what those projects are? I like to think about it. It's like my backlog is something I reprioritized dynamically relative to reality. Here's my roadmap. Here's all the things I want. It's like a approximation at a point in time of what I think are the most valuable things to build. The second some new data comes in. I'm going to rip that up and reprioritize it. Having a culture that lets you do that, because that is really fucking painful. Like people don't like it. The world is shaking up. It generates a lot of chaos, but it's the right thing to do. So then managing that so that your culture enables you to do that, the cost of doing it is worth it because the return was so outsized. That's the whole business.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatsoever that requires flag bearers. It requires people who are true believers. So it starts with recruiting. Not every human has a disposition that they want to be part of a cult, essentially. Some of them are just structurally mercenaries and they're evaluating everything in life really through the lens of what's my next job? You want to try to build your company with people who really think of the present job as the calling. That engenders. Both how the world does work and what is required to win today.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some problems require sustained effort. So if you can pivot really quickly, maybe you pivot it to solving the problem, but that means you can pivot away from solving the problem and get distracted and lose sight of what you're trying to accomplish here. It's like a feature bug. It's not an unequivocal feature. But if you're in a competition, you want to play to your strengths. And that usually involves things that the adversary is unable to do. It helps that with the nature of populating the US was that all the heretics from the old world came here. So we have an unfair advantage on that. In terms of maintaining a culture, the critical lesson I've learned over and over again is the entropy of the universe is against you. If you don't invest in your culture every single day, you will lose it. There's nothing about culture that is self-sustaining that's as true for America, the country as it is for your company. And then the best cultures are really almost cult-like. Your culture is highly differentiated. It should actually kind of be hard for someone to inorganically insert into your culture. Otherwise, it's not a very differentiated culture.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The entire economy looks like that. I think it's a consequence of being really the sole superpower and the Pentagon, the old Pentagon in particular being the last bastion of communism except for Cuba. Every country gave up on communism, including Russia and China except for Cuba and the Department of Defense that made it both a bad business and then seemingly no threat. So you could just be a prosperity company. You'd be a single purpose company that just cared about being a company. I'm not sure that's actually a stable or healthy society or civilization that we have to recognize that we have obligations across freedom and prosperity.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Narrow ideas. Like, this is a narrow idea, but I would try to blow it up. Okay, you want to bring pharmaceutical production back to the US? If you try to do that for generics, the business case will never work. It's too hard. It's too much of a subsidy. But what you really want is you want to redevelop a skilled workforce that understands how to make drugs again. And you want the production capacity that in a time of crisis, you could go from, say, making branded drugs to generics. So why don't we manipulate patent length and say, look, drug companies, if you make your worldwide supply of your branded drugs here in the US, I will extend your patent length such that you recover two extra CapEx investment to go do that. That's a simple business case that every pharma company would underwrite in a heartbeat, and it provides the catalyst to go generate that capacity. I think there are a lot of things in the American economy that look like that. If we go back to the story I was saying between prosperity and freedom that Chrysler built minivans and missiles and Ford built satellites until 1990, General Mills, Kodak, like you just go down the list.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“U.S. capital stack, one of our other advantages of over $100 billion invested in the projects that they're doing that are actually changing how the department thinks about the future, this is the window in the moment for the stuff to happen. Increasingly in conversations that I have in the Pentagon, I hear some of these new entrants are talked about as plan A. It's not plan B. It's not, hey, we'll see. Maybe this will work in the future. It's like, no, this is the plan and we'll have to have backups if that doesn't work. is unrecognizable from the world I started in 2006.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you have no skin in the game. And yeah, you're still able to make a small number of exquisite things, but that system is anti heresy. You can only do the conventional thing that the government's agreeing that you should do. You think about the Higgins boat, Andrew Higgins built that boat on his own. There was no spec. In fact, that's why the Navy kept rejecting it. It wasn't the Navy's idea. But then 92% of all boats in World War II are the Higgins boat. The heresy is the boat that won the war. How do you create an economic incentive where that's the case? And I think companies like Andrew are pioneering that on the hardware side where it's like, hey, I'm building a product. These are my specs. These are my opinions. I'm absorbing the risk. You should buy it if you like it or not. Part of the reason for profound optimism right now is I would not have started all this advocacy if I thought I was just screaming into the wind. It's like having done this for 20 years for the first solid 10 years we were alone in the darkness. It was like SpaceX on the launch side and us. And then if you look at the present moment, there are now hundreds of founders who are building in the national interest with a”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two incentives. One is recognition that we need the heretics. I think Hyman Rickover enjoyed a celebrity for a big period of time and just being known as the guy who did this is itself a sort of reward. Then the second part of this is definitely financial. Like one of the arguments I've been making is the cynical view of defense industrial complex in particular is something like these are greedy warmongers. Well, they picked the wrong industry then because on the greedy side, you should be in tech. You should be in some other business. These are crappy businesses. They have 9% operating margins or something. They're valued to like less than two times revenue. So we actually need to make our primes more valuable. That would help us continue to attract the heretics. How do you make the primes more valuable? The facil critique of the primes is somehow they're the problem. The system's the problem. The primes are just downstream of the consequence of the incentives the government gives. And I think the worst incentive is cost plus contracting. Your upside is capitated. You're not supposed to take any risks. The government basically pays for your R&D.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we ourselves do not know what we're going to do. That's our key strength. That comes back to the heretics. Where does that unpredictability come from? Because it's not our bureaucracy. Our bureaucracy is incredibly predictable. It's not the steady eddy managed decline. It's the crazies.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a great question. Their principal asymmetric advantage is long term planning. They actually can't pivot on a dime. So let's go back to Gulf War One, which we're talking about with John Boyd. They saw the devastating violence we were able to do in basically four days to the fourth largest army in the world. They said, okay, we have to systematically map all the critical dependencies of America's military technology and invest against it. And they have been doing that since 91. The frog has kind of boiled in some sense. And it's a little bit of an easier game because they're playing a home game. But that's the map they've been on. And it's been a steady journey. If you look back, they've broadcast their intent the whole time. There's no surprises that were there ever. Our asymmetric advantages that were crazy. The AI phenomenon was not in their long-range plan. It wasn't in our long-range plan. But when it happened, our whole economy pivoted on a dime. And even the Chinese models, those were a result of distillation. And so our ability then to be unpredictable.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through all the means because they're going to wage it where they have asymmetric strength. The American Calvinist sensibility is structurally positive some. We're going to turn the other cheek time and time again over and over again. But there will be some line. There'll be some point at which we just react. And when we react, the best quote I have from the Admiral that I like is it's no longer John Boyd's Oodeloup observe orient decide act. It's the American Oodalop. Observe overreact, destroy, apologize. What we want to do is prevent this from happening by having enough deterrence that we're not provoked to being in a position where we even need to react.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“America must fail. Just see this through simple acts. If you look at agriculture, it is totally their prerogative. It's a business decision whether you want to buy American soybeans or not or you want to buy Brazilian soybeans. I do not begrudge them one bit. It's totally different thing when you're trying to smuggle in agricultural funguses so we can't grow soybeans. Now if you start going down to the laundry list of what's actually happening, that's the shape of what's happening. There are formidable adversary in the sense that our conception of war is kinetic. It's the lone heroic cowboy against the odds winning through heroism. Their conception of war is deception. It's the general who tricked the adversary to get into the valley and then flooded it. It's a cultural thing. You want to win without firing a shot. So a lot of the things that are happening are below what we would consider the threshold of conflict, but it absolutely is conflict. And the nerve system, system destruction, warfare. It's waging war.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We won World War II, we spent our own money to rebuild Germany and Japan. Microelectronics moved to Southeast Asia, as Apple China documents and chipwars documents because we helped move it there. Yes, we got cheaper goods in return, but the economic development of these countries, they're flourishing in order to create global stability was part of the calculus. Same thing with admitting China to the World Trade Organization. The problem is they cheated the whole way through. And even if you go back to a pre-Dang Xiaoping era, they call us the big enemy. I think part of it is our own naivety, our own belief that capitalism and human flourishing is a natural consequence of prosperity. So, okay, they're saying these things, but as they get richer, they're going to change their perspective on these things. And we're all going to find some way of having a positive some view on the world. That's essentially what didn't happen. I think the challenge for us with the CCP is that it's not enough for China to be prosperous.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now we're on a trajectory to do it. So I think part of it is just starting. I would love to bring everything back. I think making a marginal improvement of even 10% dramatically reduces the adversary's leverage.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Parts of our economy don't recognize that actually this isn't going to keep working. You're going to lose everything, not just something. It's why I feel I need an urgent call to action to say, we are in an undeclared state of emergency. And it's not just manufacturing the physical things we think about. I even think about this in terms of drugs. 80% of our generic drugs come from China in one way or another, whether it's the APIs or the finished product themselves. That is a huge problem. Today, your child has an ear infection. That's pretty trivial. You think I'll have some generic antibiotics and it'll go away. If you have great power competition with China and the will of the American people to fight when they have to really condemn, hey, my five-year-old might die of an ear infection. So we need to take these things much more seriously and further down the supply chain. I'm glad we're starting rare earths, but there you could say we had to get punched in the face to mobilize around it. Maybe one of the galling things we should all think about is we've been staring at this rare earths problem for the better part of 15 years. We more or less had solved it for like 2 billion bucks. It's roughly a rounding error relative to everything that we're doing.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And probably the last piece I'd say is AI is David's slingshot here. If we can give the American worker superpowers, if you can make the American worker 50 times more productive than a worker anywhere else, you're going to change the efficient frontier of what can be made here. I think as a consequence, we should be re-industrialization maximalist. The free traders out there like to say like maybe we can friend shore or whatever. I think that stuff can let us off the hook too easily, fails to solve the problem. The other example I'll give you from Patrick McGee's book, Apple and China, is that great book. People love to say something like, well, we don't have the machine tools engineers in America. You could hardly get two people in a room to talk about it. You could fill a whole stadium in China. But then you look, Apple has spent the equivalent on an inflation-adjusted basis in the last five years of two and a half Marshall Plans building talent and capacity in China. How about we try to spend one Marshall Plan here? I think the problem is we're not even trying, in part because we're daunted, in part because...”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the whole car. Wushi went from being basically a cheap pair of hands for pipetting contract research in the pharma industry to actually now 50% of all clinical trials are drugs that are created in China. So we have seeded the innovation. It's not that it's taken away from us. We just seeded it because we had completely incorrect preset. So now we have to reattack that. We should do this with some asymmetric advantage. I think we have a couple of them. I don't think it's true that we're not great at building things in this country. Look at Elon and the progeny of Elon. We do know how to manufacture things here. And we're going to have to think about manufacturing things in new and novel ways. In addition, it doesn't all have to be new. It's like Ford, General Motors. These are world-class manufacturers too. We have that capability. But we also have new ways of thinking about this with much deeper, vertically integrated production, thinking about the production process itself as something that's more iterative and software-like that you're going to keep upgrading, co-locating R&D with production itself. So I think these sorts of trade crafts are the things that we can lean on.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You said is exactly right. It is daunting but critical. So we have no choice but to lean into that and start. The best time to start would have been yesterday. The next best time is today. Let me also give the case for why it's critical because I think we're screwed if we don't do this. The biggest lie that we bought from globalization is this concept of we will do the innovation and they will do the production. What you have to recognize that innovation is itself a consequence of productivity. To put it in terms that I think our audience here would understand most directly, what motivated Google to do the research behind the attention is all you need paper in 2017. If you ask them, they'll say, well, the team was working on an incremental 3% improvement to Google Translate. You cannot think of something more banal leading to something more revolutionary than that. So if you don't have the input stimulus on improving production, you're actually not going to be able to capture the innovation. And that's literally what we're seeing play out in the marketplace today, which is, okay, they went from making a battery to making.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That are just incredible. You can't look at that and think anything other than this is an artist. This is like divine what he's able to do. And so much of what I think we've gotten wrong is those things were messy and chaotic and hard and frictionful. And over time, we've tried to install lots of process to make these things less messy, less chaotic as a consequence, though, they end up not working. We need a little more crazy back to get these things to work”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe some of you should exit the defense business altogether and know that some of you may go out of business and we're not going to save you. And this just set off a merger frenzy that led from the consolidation from 51 down to 5. Now, most people look at this and I think they take away the wrong conclusion, which is like, oh, this is when we lost competition. When we had competition, it was much more dynamic. I think the much more profound consequences, this is the moment of profound financialization and conformity in the industrial base. You lost the crazy people. They went to tech. They went to other parts of our economy where there was enough positive some energy and growth. And it wasn't just about dividends and buyback ratios and financial engineering. It was about real engineering. The world-class engineers, why should we celebrate a Hyman Rickover or Kelly Johnson? Kelly Johnson was the founder of Skunk Works at Lockheed. In his lifetime, he built 41 airframes. That is insane, many of which we still fly today. He built the U-2 in 13 months. The timelines we're talking about.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other part of it is the nature of the industrial base. We think about it as north of Grumman much more accurately it was Jack Northrop. It was Leroy Grumman. It was William Lear. It was Henry Ford. It was Henry Kaiser. You had founder figures. They were their own sort of heretics. What we would recognize in the valley today, that's where this talent was. It was in the industrial companies of America. And we were betting on these people, not just their institutions, to deliver this sort of capability. In 1993, there was a very famous dinner at the Pentagon called The Last Supper. We had won the Cold War. I think in a democracy, it's very reasonable for the people to say we want to spend less on defense. What exactly is our threat? So we slashed the defense budget. And in this dinner, the Secretary of Defense told a subset, I think it was 15 of the 51 primes. We had 51 primes. Today we have five. They told him, you're all not going to survive. The budget's getting cut. We give you permission to consolidate.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That they were doing on production material, equipment, machine tooling could be leveraged and was subsidizing our national security, that we recognize that freedom and prosperity were two sides of the same coin. We're so far away from that world today. General Mills, the serial company, used to build torpedoes and inertial guidance systems, Kodak, film company, also was a key supplier to Corona, which was our first spy satellite. But this is the industrial base that one World War II won the early Cold War and really deterred our adversaries. And it's only a consequence of becoming the sole superpower that everything changed. And it changed in two ways. One, that 6% number today is 86%. So 86% of major weapons systems come from defense specialists only.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Adversary, the Germans were actually better engineers than we were. They just made a very small number of very exquisite things. Now, if you come to the present moment, we sound like the Germans. We make a very small number of truly exquisite eye-wateringly exquisite things. And our adversary is the world's best at mass production. So this should give us all a little bit of discomfort here. The second part of this is the nature of the industrial base. Today we call it the defense industrial base. I think it used to be the American industrial base until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Only 6% of spending on major weapon systems went to defense specialists, i.e. companies that only did business with the defense department. Most of that spending, 94%, went to what I call as dual purpose companies. A missile is single use. There's no dual use missile. But the idea that Chrysler would build missiles and minivans meant that all the R&D.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were the best at mass production. Effectively, our country invented it. And in order to create an industrial base, we took the number two at GM, who was previously the number two at Ford Bill Knutson, who was a Danish emigr ⁇, who was really the perfector of mass production. And we direct commissioned him at three-star general, and we put him in charge of war mobilization. And Knudsen was a world-class engineer. And what do we do? We gave him the authority to go meet other world-class engineers all around America. We had one key advantage in World War II in terms of timing, which is that we had Len lease. There was a period of time that we actually mobilized production when we were not fighting. We were building stuff that we gave to our allies, to the Brits in particular, and the Soviets. But that allowed us to build factories and retool existing factories and hit a production ramp so that after Pearl Harbor happened, we were basically at full rate production and were able to go after these things and put this in context of our.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we need to view that as a single strike and the deterrence capability against a peer adversary is can you generate that strike every single day until the enemy submits to your will? You think about Maduro, it also shows our capability. Like literally the raid happened the day the Chinese were in town. Maduro has all these Chinese and Russian weapons, Venezuela, and they don't seem to work at all. And that sends a very strong message to everyone who else who thinks that their security is coming from buying Chinese and Russian weapons. Now, I think we trace back, and this is what I really wrote about in the 18th thesis. So if we start, we say we've lost deterrence. Let's be clear-eyed about that. In the last year, we started regaining it. What happened? Because we had it for a long time. We were the sole superpower in the 90s, and we spend a fair amount every year on defense. People want to talk about narrow things like acquisition reform or the mix of weapons. I think it comes back to people. It comes back to the heretics. At the Donna World War II,”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think the structural challenge we have is actually something that we just need to observe from a distance from the military we have today per se, which is the whole point of the military is to deter our adversaries from conflict. If you look back over the last 10 years, we've not been able to deter a lot of conflict. We had the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the militarization of the Spratly Islands after they told President Obama, we will not militarize it. They militarized Sproutley Islands. We've had a pogrom in Israel. We've had the invasion of Ukraine. We have unprecedented gray zone phase zero operations by the Chinese and the South China Sea. I would say arguably in the last year, we've started to restore deterrence. Whatever you think about it, Midnight Hammer was massively deterring operation. Maduro was massively deterring. You have it on multiple levels. With midnight hammer, it's obviously the overwhelming strength, the precision of what we're able to do, the incredible complexity of the operations no other military in the world could have done that.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are the best military in the world? Our uniform service members are better than we deserve. Actually, I had someone tell me, Hey, when are you going to stop being shocked at how good this E4 is at building this app or doing this thing? It's like the amount of talent is eye watering. I think we encumber them in a lot of process. We deprive them of a lot of agency. And I certainly have a lot of critique.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being both a commercial and government oriented company is that the intrinsic rewards on the government side are so high, so motivating, it enables you to get through and solve really hard problems in a way that is kind of like a rising tide for the whole business.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot more non market forces in the military. The military is the only institution in the world that profoundly divides up supply and demand. The beating heart of most companies is that integration, that sales and operation planning process, you have the combatant commands, we call them, that deal real world events. You're fighting Russia, that's the European command, UCON. And then you have the services like the army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, et cetera. Their job is to man train and equip. That's the supply side. a group that has no responsibility for demand essentially deciding what to build, how much to build, how am I going to man train and equip this. And then they present these forces to the combatant commands and say, this is what you have to solve this problem. That adds an additional level of complexity. So if the demand side says, hey, I really want this, this is the capability we need, they can't buy it. So how do you kind of square that? So I think you have all these other non-market forces to deal with. But I think one of the things that is really advantageous to”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“which is production planning so quality to production planning to then in service now you have the greatest data asset possible for this tail as this plane enters service how do i help maximize the uptime of this asset for my customers how am i going to compete against the other aerospace manufacturer that's the natural evolution that we see with most customers you start with one problem but of course they exist in the context of this connect decision chain”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hey, I'll give this guy some training, and he'll learn how to figure it out. It's teething pain, it'll go away. And what is a recurring issue that is actually a design defect that I need to go work with my suppliers or upstream? How quickly you can solve that becomes fundamental to the shape of the ramp and the cost of the ramp? The first thing we did is we just started sitting with users on the final assembly line in Toulouse. These are wrench turners, effectively. And understanding, hey, what makes your life suck? What's hard about this? What's the challenge in working on these nonconformities? Basically, they're going through Excel. They're looking at reports in SAP, trying to figure out how do I bucket all these issues that are coming in. So we just help them automate all of that. And the ontology at that point was really related to parts sequencing of work, defect rates, everything related to quality. Once you had this immense quality asset, though, you were able actually to pivot it to realize, okay, now I'm up the learning curve. It naturally leads to the next problem.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source