#018 - Santi Ruiz | America's techno-industrial master plan
0:00
Show notes
Santi Ruiz is a policy researcher at the Institute for Progress and host of the Statecraft newsletter and podcast. He's one of the editors of the Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook, a comprehensive strategy document produced by three American think tanks to help the US compete with China's manufacturing dominance. The playbook outlines concrete policy proposals across frontier science, energy abundance, and national security—from creating special compute zones to reforming naval shipbuilding and accelerating geothermal development.
The Society for Technological Advancement (SoTA) is organising a hackathon on 31st May and 1st June focused on geoengineering and weather control. Click here to find out more.
Episode outline
- How China's 230x shipbuilding advantage over America represents an existential threat to Western naval power
- The X-Labs proposal to fund cutting-edge research institutions outside traditional universities using flexible block grants
- Special compute zones that would fast-track energy infrastructure for AI development in exchange for security commitments
- Why America's Loans Programs Office has funded every nuclear plant built this century and shouldn't be dismantled by DOGE
- How regulatory carve-outs for geothermal energy could unlock abundant clean power using proven oil and gas drilling techniques
- The critical minerals challenge where China could crash markets to destroy American mining operations
- Why American naval shipbuilding fails because design is outsourced instead of done in-house like it used to be
- Whether Britain should be America's lapdog or develop independent techno-industrial capacity focused on European threats
- How elite consensus matters more than popular mobilisation for implementing transformative policy changes
- The difference between financialisation that enables productive investment versus financialisation that replaces it
Mentioned in this episode:
The Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook: How to Kickstart America's Techno‑Industrial Renaissance
Why FORGE Works by Tom Ough for IFP
More episodes
Keep listening.
Episode 57
Speculative aesthetics in the algorithmic age
Mat Dryhurst
We are not in the King Charles III Space Station this week. We are in Harriet Green’s sister station, which is a less reliable bit of lore but a more useful studio. Into it comes Mat Dryhurst: English conceptual artist, Berlin resident, collaborator with...
Listen to episode
Episode 56
How to build a city on the moon
Nicholas Boys Smith
From the thatched-roofed orbital pub of the King Charles III Space Station — a structure Nicholas Boys Smith gamely declines to call a pastiche — Tom and Calum welcome the campaigner for architectural beauty, founder of Create Streets, and former co-chair,...
Listen to episode
Episode 55
The US has broken with decades of international consensus by issuing its own mining permits for the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a potato field of metallic nodules the size of Western Europe at the bottom of the Pacific. Tom, who has found his next...
Listen to episode