#288 Shyam Sankar - Are We Sleepwalking Into World War 3?

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**Shawn Ryan** (1:03)
Shyam, welcome back, man.

**Shyam Sankar** (1:05)
Thanks for having me, Shawn. It's great to be back.

**Shawn Ryan** (1:07)
I owe you a huge thank you. So the last time you were here, you wore a hooded blazer. So I saw it and I was like, what the fuck is that thing? It's amazing. So now I got a whole wardrobe of them.

**Shyam Sankar** (1:19)
I love it.

**Shawn Ryan** (1:21)
Yeah, man. So thank you.
But yeah, it's good to have you back. I'm pumped about our conversation today, and I know you got the new book coming out and everything, but what have you been up to?

**Shyam Sankar** (1:33)
Oh, man. A lot's gone on in the world since we last met, and a lot's gone on for us. I think trying to be a positive advocate for what I think is the future of AI for the American worker. I think essentially the American people are being lied to there, and I've earned an opinion working with American workers on the front line, whether it's the factory floor or the ICU ward, trying to bring back the bonds between our industrial base, like the private sector and government again.
I think the work that we've done with Detachment 201 and commissioning is part of that. Then of course, this moment that we've had over the last year to really fix the Department of War, fix how we buy things, how we prepare for war so that we can preserve peace, really empowering the heretics, the crazy ideas. It's been a full out last 12 months.

**Shawn Ryan** (2:23)
Sounds like it. Are you looking for real estate in Miami now?

**Shyam Sankar** (2:29)
Well, I already have a spot in South Florida, so I'm set.

**Shawn Ryan** (2:32)
Right on, right on. What prompted that? Headquarters is moving to Miami. It just came out a couple days ago, right?

**Shyam Sankar** (2:40)
Yeah. I think it's important to be in a state where your reps are actually going to rep you. I think that's part of it that matters. Then you can think about, okay, what are the places we could go from Denver?
Miami or really Florida had the best both combination of legal and positioning perspectives for us. It's the right place. We want to be like the 50th company to go to Austin or something. Austin is great. We have an office there. We love Austin. We love Texas. But Miami felt like the right home for us.

**Shawn Ryan** (3:08)
Right on, man. Congratulations on all that. That's awesome. Speaking of AI, did you see this new China robot AI video? Have you seen that?

**Shyam Sankar** (3:20)
I haven't seen the latest. Catch me up.

**Shawn Ryan** (3:23)
I don't even know what to say, but it's like the latest. Everybody's wondering if this is a huge advancement. Damn, I don't have my phone on me. Otherwise, I'd pull it up and show you. But they basically choreographed all these robots doing like some choreographed dance display thing, and everybody's going on about it. Then there was that stuff with Claude that came out about the Claude bots going and trying to figure out how to get long-term memory. Do you have any insight on that?

**Shyam Sankar** (3:54)
I think it's very hard to separate fact from fiction with these things, because you can egg the agents on to doing very specific things to tell a dystopic story, like what's going on in the prompting with the mult-book bots.
My lived experience using these things operationally is that nothing crazy like this is happening. That actually it's much more contained, it's much more sane. It really is more like an Iron Man suit for the American worker than it is a headless, godless machine that's just roving around doing. You know, this is, maybe we should start here. It's like the ways in which I think the American people are really being lied to about AI is that you have, on one hand, incredible doomers. Like, hey, this thing, it's going to lead to like mass unemployment, 50% of entry-level jobs are going to be destroyed inside of a year or two. And on the other hand, you have like essentially this phantasm, it's going to lead to a utopia, like untold abundance. I think neither of these things are right. They're really, and they're wrong for the same reason, which is they assume there's no human agency. You know, AI doesn't do anything. Humans use AI to do something. And the reality is that the future of AI has not been determined. It is being determined every single day based on the decisions we're making. We can choose to use it to build AI slop or new forms of addiction and gambling. We can choose it to re-industrialize the country and bring prosperity to the American worker. Those decisions are being made every single day. We should use our agency as humans to decide what we value. And it's very clear what we ought to value. Then there's another part of this, which is age old. Who are we listening to in AI? We're committing the same fallacy we have in the past, which is we're listening to the people who invented the technology, not the people who are using the technology.