Rickover’s Playbook: Building Hard Things Inside the State

Summary

ChinaTalk: "Rickover’s Playbook: Building Hard Things Inside the State"

Overview

In this episode, host Jordan Schneider is joined by Charles Yang (founder, Center for Industrial Strategy & AI researcher) and Emmett Pen (FAI) to discuss Admiral Hyman Rickover—a pivotal but underappreciated figure who revolutionized the U.S. Navy and America’s approach to building extraordinarily complex technologies within government. Their conversation unpacks Rickover’s remarkable personal journey, his profound impact on nuclear technology and military bureaucracies, and what his playbook might teach today’s policymakers and innovators struggling to "build hard things" in the public sphere.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Rickover Matters

• Charles Yang (00:42): Rickover remains an underrated figure whose influence spans shipbuilding, nuclear energy, and even workforce education. “He was a prominent voice...way before anyone was really talking about it.”
• Emmett Pen (01:10): Rickover is “a skeleton key for understanding the major shifts in American industry and governance over the 20th century”—a figure whose contradictions (ambition, abrasiveness, brilliance, and ambivalence) are essential for understanding modern America.
• Jordan Schneider (02:18): His story is not just one of technical achievement but is also an archetypal immigrant and Jewish-American journey, akin to the likes of Robert Moses in terms of both accomplishment and controversy.

2. Rickover’s Unlikely Origin Story

• The group details Rickover’s harrowing entry to the U.S. through Ellis Island, his humble beginnings in Chicago, and his backdoor admission to the Naval Academy as an ESL student falling asleep in class—but who grinds his way in anyway (03:30–05:58).
• Memorable quote (Schneider, 04:30): “This titan of the 20th century…almost didn’t even make it into the US to begin with.”
• Early career: First 20 years, Rickover is purely a hard-working, somewhat abrasive engineering officer—no ties to nuclear work (05:58–07:58).

3. The Nuclear Pivot

• Sent to Oak Ridge after WWII, Rickover seizes the Navy’s nuclear future, organizing and codifying the Manhattan Project’s scattered technical knowledge (06:52–10:32).
• Emmett Pen (09:00): “None of the knowledge…was organized... Rickover who organized all of that and got it into shape to be an effective learning library.”
• Pioneer of nuclear education—founding key institutions/training pipelines that seeded the U.S. nuclear workforce.

4. Master of Bureaucratic Jujutsu

• Rickover, despite being unpopular, manipulates Navy and AEC structures, wearing “two hats” to consolidate power, move resources, and write memos between agencies to himself (11:45–13:38).
• Emmett Pen (12:42): “He figured out…he could like write memoranda to himself from one branch to another so that he could expedite things.”
• Compared repeatedly to Robert Moses for his ability to wield—and even embody—institutions.

5. Leadership Style: Inspiration and Intimidation

• Personally interviewed all key submarine officers; built fierce loyalty among those he mentored; reserved “sharp elbows” for anyone outside his immediate circle—the Navy, the Pentagon, and especially contractors (14:36–16:23).
• Charles Yang (14:36): “He kind of reminds me of Elon Musk…especially during the early days of Tesla and SpaceX, it feels very similar.”
• Rickover’s aggressive approach is tempered by his genuine concern for the safety and wellbeing of submariners—his “I want to send my own son on this ship” standard (13:39).

Notable Anecdotes:

• The sawn-off interview chair (22:00, 68:43).
• Requiring candidates to lose weight, hike (even in a goat pen!), demonstrate honesty, or endure bizarre psychological pressure (24:34–26:10; see Carter’s interview story at 66:48–69:39).

6. Navigating Institutional Antibodies

• Congress ultimately becomes Rickover’s lifeline after the Navy tries to push him out for his unconventional approach—his relationships with Congressional committees and their secretive nature provide crucial protection (16:36–19:23).
• The culture clash—his disregard for military pomp and WASPish traditions as a Jewish immigrant, and clever exploitation of outsider status (22:00–24:00).
• Schneider (19:24): “The sorts of civilians who could save you when you start to trigger antibodies of your branch or broader bureaucracy.”

7. Technological Choices and Implementation

• Rickover’s signature: prioritize practicality, safety, and reliability (“easy mode”—standardizing on light water reactors even if it sacrificed theoretical efficiency) (41:04–42:02).
• Navigated scientific vs. engineering mindsets—“You guys are scientists. You’re not serious. We're here to build a reactor.” (42:02–43:46).

8. Founding the Nuclear Navy & Civilian Nuclear Power

• Built the world’s first operational power reactor for a submarine in six years (38:32–40:12).
• Drove industry to create new materials (e.g., zirconium), sometimes with extreme “commercial abuse” tactics—throwing parts, threatening to withhold payments, or berating CEOs (54:09–74:24).

9. Philosophy, Duty, and Social Vision

• Fiercely critical of American consumerism and the commercial sector’s ability to handle nuclear responsibly; saw engineers as a "professional class" with a duty akin to doctors (29:26–36:53).
• Was a Renaissance man—valued humanities alongside engineering; recited poetry; expected cultural as well as technical literacy from his officers.
• Grew more skeptical in late career—delivered a famous “degrowth” speech emphasizing societal responsibility and inspired Jimmy Carter’s cautious approach to nuclear energy as president (35:05–58:07).

10. Lasting Legacy and Archival Revival

• Rickover’s organizational templates, safety culture, and talent pipeline still dominate the Navy and much of civilian nuclear power globally (49:04–54:41).
• Charles Yang’s archival effort—thousands of pages of Rickover’s speeches and testimony are being digitized to guide current and future public sector innovators (58:07–61:57).
• Invaluable source for anyone interested in "building hard things"—whether in defense procurement, bureaucracy, or national industrial policy.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On bureaucracy and authority:
  “If you’re gonna sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you, but the bureaucracy won’t.” — Recurring Rickover wisdom, read in the closing poem (75:10).
• On lessons for today:
  “What does it take to accomplish something really meaningful in this world? It’s a lot of focus.” — Charles Yang (28:45)
• On public responsibility:
  “He was a big fan of… the Hippocratic Oath, the idea that a professional class had a responsibility to the people that it served, that went beyond legal contract or profit motive.” — Charles Yang (35:05)
• On leadership and self-knowledge:
  Carter recounts Rickover’s most famous interview question:
  “Did you do your best?”—and when Carter answers “No,” Rickover just asks: “Why not?” (68:41–69:39)
• On talent:
  “If this is the best, it’s not enough. And this is the most important thing we do.” — Charles Yang (72:10), explaining Rickover’s relentless standards for nuclear Navy officers.

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |-----------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:42 | Why Rickover matters (Charles, Emmett, Jordan opening pitches) | | 03:30 | Rickover’s immigration and rough Chicago upbringing | | 06:52 | Transition to nuclear—sent to Oak Ridge | | 09:31 | Founding nuclear education pipeline | | 11:45 | Bureaucratic maneuvering; building dual roles in Navy & AEC | | 14:36 | Leadership style; interviewing and hazing officers | | 19:23 | Congress as Rickover’s lifeline | | 22:00 | Hazing, the infamous “sawn chair” anecdotes | | 35:05 | Rickover’s philosophy on technology, democracy, and responsibility | | 38:32 | Pre-nuclear vs. nuclear submarine impact | | 41:04 | Pragmatism: why the light water reactor was chosen; scientist vs engineer | | 49:04 | Shippingport reactor, cascading global influence in civilian nuclear power | | 54:09 | Strong-arming industry; creating new materials technologies | | 58:07 | Rickover’s archival revival & importance for modern policy | | 66:48 | Carter’s memoir: details of his Rickover interview experience | | 68:41 | Rickover’s psychological pressure and insistence on honesty | | 75:10 | Closing poem on The Rickover Interview |

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Further Reading & Resources

• Rickover Effect by Theodore Rockwell (firsthand account by a close lieutenant) (62:19)
• Running Critical (detailed look at late-career controversies)
• Rickover and the Nuclear Navy by Duncan & Hewlett (official DOE history; deep technical detail)
• Engineer of Power (Jewish American Lives series) by Marc Wortman (well-rounded biography)
• Blind Man’s Bluff (An Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage—contextual history of subs)
• The Rickover Archive (digitization project led by Charles Yang; speeches and testimonies)

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Takeaways for Modern Policymakers & Innovators

• Building “hard things” in the public sector requires:

  • Fierce technical focus and personal dedication
  • Mastery of bureaucratic power and institutional navigation
  • Ruthless commitment to talent and standards
  • Deep devotion to public responsibility and safety
  • Willingness to fight both inside and outside the system

• Rickover’s blend of inspiration, intimidation, bureaucracy-hacking, and concern for the public good provides a unique, still-relevant playbook for “builders” in government and industry today.

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Closing Thought

Rickover’s life and legacy, as vividly recounted by Charles Yang, Emmett Pen, and Jordan Schneider, stand as both blueprint and warning for anyone seeking to do the impossible inside a bureaucracy. As Rickover would say—perhaps from behind a shortened chair or through a question that keeps you up at night—“Did you do your best?”

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[For archives, resources, and more reading on Rickover, visit the Nimitz Library or the Center for Industrial Strategy.]

Transcript

[Jordan Schneider]

Admiral Rickover, America's most famous, perhaps most influential admiral of the second half of the 20th century, to discuss his unbelievable life story, dramatic impact on the Cold War, and implications for the future of what the US Government should do when it tries to build hard things. We have on today two lovely guests. Charles Yang, founder of the center for Industrial Strategy and also does AI science stuff at Renaissance Philanthropy, as well as Emmett Pen of FAI. Welcome, Rickoverheads, to ChinaTalk. Two minutes from each of you on why we should care about Hyman Rickover.

[Charles Yang]

I think he is really undiscovered, sort of underrated gem of the 20th century. And any issue that I think people in D.C. care about today, be it shipbuilding, nuclear energy, and even broader stuff when you think about cultural revival like workforce education. He was a prominent voice on all of those topics, topics way before anyone was really talking about it. And I think much of what he has to say is still relevant today.

[Emmett Pen]

Yeah. So I'll give my pitch. I think to me, Rickover is something of a skeleton key for understanding the major shifts in what happens in American industry and governance over the course of the 20th century. It is through him that all of the greatest tensions, cultural, industrial, commercial, political, reverberate, both at a personal level and in terms of the things that he created and birthed, like the, you know, U.S. naval submarines that were run by nuclear and civilian nuclear power. He is a ambiguous and ambivalent figure in terms of his relationship to his own life's work. And I think that makes him both an object of fascination just from a pure biographical standpoint and to echo Charles here, somebody who it is very important to study in terms of his unique effectiveness despite all of these contradictions, even within him.

[Jordan Schneider]

Let me do my pitch from a bit of a more personal angle. He's an incredible immigrant story, an incredible Jewish American story. He's a very difficult personality and a sort of fascinating one, full of contradictions. When I was reading biographies of him, I got a lot of kind of Robert Moses energy of, on the one hand, this, like, doer who accomplished incredible things, and on the other one, who just really didn't care about what other people thought or what their feelings were or the eggs or even lives or maybe not lives, but the eggs that had to get the eggs and careers that had to get broken in the process to achieve the goals that he set out to do. He also, like Robert Moses, had enormous longevity from like, you know, his 30s until I think they. I think Reagan forced him, forced him to retire when he was 82. This man was responsible for one of the, you know, core pieces of the American nuclear triad. And to kind of have that. That reign as a general is like, something that doesn't really happen in American. In the. In the US System. So for. For all those reasons, let's bring it back to Hyman Rickover. The K came later. The K came after Ellis Island. So we were still with a C. We've got programs in Russia. This guy's from, like, village, right? We are not from town. We are from village. The dad comes over first. And the way it works back then is if you were a dependent, so a woman or a child, you needed to have a man who vouch for you as a relation or someone be your, like, financial support so you weren't a burden on the state or whatever. You had 10 days once you landed in Ellis island for that person to come and pick you up. And the mother sent a. To gave money to someone to send a telegram to the dad. That person pocketed the money. So the. The husband didn't get the message. And it was the 10th day. They got stamped, deported. Their time ran out. But someone from their village happened to recognize the mother and ran out, like, the same day. They, like, negotiated one more day. The dad finally comes. So this, like, you know, titan of the 20th century first almost didn't even make it into the US to begin with. They moved. They moved to Chicago. He is in high school, has. He has to work as a telegram boy from, like, 3pm to 9pm every single day. He's falling asleep in class. Um, he ends up being a. You know, one of the people he's delivering telegrams for is a U.S. representative. He hears that he can get free college by going to a military academy. And then there was, like, a little backroom dealing. Someone wanted to get out of being drafted, and Rickover ended up taking that person's place. The problem is there were still entrance exams and this. You know, we got an ESL kid here who was sleeping through half of school, even though in his. In his. I think he was valedictorian or something. They put knowledge on his yearbook, but he had two months to, like, study for it. He didn't. He didn't eat or sleep. He just. He passed by, like, you got, like, a 2.6 out of 4. And he said it was the happiest moment of his life until he got the. He got the reactor to work, but. All right, Charles, why don't you take it from there? I'm sorry. I just thought that was Incredible.

[Charles Yang]

So he goes to the U.S. naval Academy and he graduates. Not top of his class. He's like top quartile, I think. But he was not by any measures a standout graduate. He is deployed on a number of different ships, both surface ships, as well as a formative time on one of the first submarines where he learns about the perils of diesel submarines. At the time. They were filled with fumes. They were really not. They were basically surface ships that could sometimes go underwater very slowly and for only very brief amounts of times, powered by the battery packs that they had at the time. So at a very, very early part of his career, he learned to appreciate the challenges of diesel gen submarines. He did postgraduate school, had a couple detours and stints. He became an engineering officer. That's also a notable piece. So he was an engineering duty officer, which is a very different career track. Not the traditional track to sort of a flag officer, basically.

[Jordan Schneider]

Because he pissed too many people off, right?

[Charles Yang]

Yes, but he was a very good engineer. He was an electrical engineer. He rewired an entire battleship's electrical system and telephone system. But yes, he did also develop early on in his career a habit of pissing people off. But I think what's really notable to me is that's like 20 years of his career. First 20 years of his career. He has nothing, it has nothing to do with nuclear. He's just like an engineering officer who's a good engineer. And then in 1946, he is sent to the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge because the war has ended and the Manhattan Project run out of. The army had been controlling this, this new technology, nuclear. And the Navy was like, we got to get in on this. So they send five officers, one of them is Rick, to Oak Ridge. And Rickover discovers this thing and he's like, this is it. This is the thing I'm gonna do. And that's what he spends the rest of his career doing. But it really, it was. I think it's a really interesting career arc. Right. Of someone who is just heads down, good at their job, sort of abrasive personality, and then finds the thing at like age 40 and then goes on to spend the rest of his career. And we can talk about all the stuff he did after that.

[Emmett Pen]

Yeah, I think, you know, one. One thing that I'd like to. To add to this that I think really lays bare the type of guy Rickover was and sort of the situation he found by the time it gets to Oak Ridge, technically the Navy had already tried to develop some sort of Nuclear program. But General Leslie Groves during the Manhattan Project was like, all that belongs to me now. Like, I don't know what you guys thought you were going to do, but I'm about to make a huge bomb. So that's mine now. So they're really Rickovers there to restart this program for the Navy. And he is allowed to go there only because the Navy promises everybody else who's going with him that Rickover's not going to be in charge because he's so difficult and demanding. And as soon as they show up in Oak Ridge, he's like, by the way, I'm going to be writing all of the personal reviews of you guys, which basically means he's like, effectively in charge of what's about to happen there. And he does a masterful job. Because I think something people don't appreciate is that none of the knowledge about what had happened at the Manhattan Project, the science that went into it, any of that was organized or codified in any way. You know, they were at a breakneck pace there. They were doing things, you know, behind the scenes, and nobody had organized any of the material into, like, a pedagogical instrument for people who wanted to learn about nuclear. And it was Rickover who organized all of that and got it into shape to be an effective learning library for anybody who wanted to enter into nuclear.

[Charles Yang]

And I think it's worth adding, I mean, to that point, just to clarify a little, he basically wrote a lot of the first papers, publications that outlined the basic principles that the Manhattan Project had developed for manipulating the. Harnessing the power of the atom. I think to analogize it would be like if the Navy or the military sent five guys to San Francisco to embed in every single one of these big AI labs. And they were the first ones to really crystallize in public what these techniques are. And then another theme that'll be constantly, I think, throughout his career. He started very early on, I think in 1947, 48, the first schools for nuclear technology. So he started the MIT master's in nuclear engineering, and he started the Oak Ridge School of Reactor Technology. And those were the first really places where an engineer could go and learn about this new technology. Because Rickover understood, you know, he had this vision from 1946 that they were going to build an entire new industry. And if you are going to do that, you need people who understand how to work with this technology. So that education and workforce part, I think you can see very early on his career, and it's something he continues to Talk about later on as well.

[Emmett Pen]

Yeah, his, his almost obsession with education is an abiding aspect of his entire career. And so from there, and maybe Charles and I can switch off and filling in details here, you know, he becomes the father of the nuclear Navy, which is filled with hilarious anecdotes about what it was like to work for and with Hyman Rickover because he has to bring in Westinghouse and other private entities to figure out how to do this. And he wants to do basically like not of what these guys think is appropriate. Right. Like Westinghouse says, well, what we'll do is we'll string out the entire thing, you know, the entire reactor so that we know that all the parts work and then we'll wad it up into the tube and see if we can get in work after that recover is like, absolutely not. We're just cramming it in the tube, you know, and seeing if it can work in the submarine first. Like we're not going to do, we're doing it all at once. We're just going to leap into this because we need to know if this can actually stand up to being in a sub. You know, when they test equipment by depth charging it. One of his favorite things to do do was to get all the wrecked gear and send it back to the manufacturers with personal notes being like, oh, indestructible, huh? Well, take a look at this hunk of crap.

[Charles Yang]

I think it's also worth for someone, a bureaucrat nerd like me. Early on when Rickover went to Manhattan Project, he had these five guys who he assumed control over. But he was not the lead on nuclear in the Navy. He had a very complicated sort of power struggle which he was very successful at manipulating the Navy bureaucracy. I think this speaks to, you know, he spent 20 years in the Navy, so he, he deeply understood the people and this organization and he, within a year after he left Oak Ridge, his one year assignment, he managed to assert control both over the Navy's naval project and within the Atomic Energy Commission, which was the civilian side that was stood up to manage the Manhattan Project apparatus that existed. And so he created this very unique dual structure very early from the beginning that would allow him to sort of monopolize power around nuclear. And it's a structure that still exists today. Ultimately, it's a legacy that continues where naval reactors is both within the of Energy, the civilian agency, and deeply embedded within the Navy in the Department of Department of War.

[Emmett Pen]

Yeah, and to add a little more color on how gifted he was at juicing both of these entities for his needs is he figured out that, you know, because he wore these two hats with the AEC and the Navy, that he could like write memoranda to himself from one branch to another so that he could expedite things. And that also if one of them wouldn't give him money, he could figure out how to strong arm the other into giving him the money and resour he needed in order to get these subs working. It's really, really masterful. David Lilienthal, who was, ran the TVA under FDR and then was the first commissioner of the aec, the first chairman of the aec, said that and this was a dude who like fought the utilities like in a bare knuckle bout in the Deep South. Liliethal said that Rickover had the sharpest elbows he'd ever seen in politics.

[Charles Yang]

Kind of a Robert Moses like figure again.

[Jordan Schneider]

Yeah, exactly. You know, when I was reading that part of the arc, it very much felt like, oh, Robert Moses getting on all these commissions and like, you know, becoming the guy who managed the toll money and was always moving money from bucket to bucket. But the sort of. Maybe let's talk a little bit about the interpersonal aspect of this because he did have this like nose for bureaucratic design and he would, you know, do all this like, hazing. But at the same time he really, he really did seem to care about the submariners. Like he made sure that the boats had good TVs in them and well, while other folks were pushing for, you know, maybe not quite as tight safety requirements, he wanted to make sure that his line was like, I want to know, you know, I want to send my son on this ship or what have you. But like Charles and Emmett, what were the sort of different interpersonal modes that Rickover switched into in order to build this, you know, power center?

[Charles Yang]

Yeah, I mean, he kind of reminds me of Elon Musk in some way. When you see how like Elon treats his engineers back, especially during the early days of Tesla and SpaceX, it feels very similar in the sense that like Rickover, well, like Elon Rickover came first. But Rickover interviewed every single one of his line officers, even until the very end of his career. So by the end, when he was, you know, 80, thousands of submarine officers who had then gone on to other parts of the Navy had been personally interviewed by him, personally hired by him in a very, you know, hazing like process, like Emmett said. So that's, that's sort of one part of it but he would take very good care of his, his engineers, his men, if they were loyal to him. So in many cases, many of them would step off the career path to stay within naval reactors. Because usually the Navy to this day, which I think is not necessarily a great practice, encourages officers to rotate and sort of go to different parts of the naval apparatus in order to move up the chain. And Rickover had an incredible, you know, propensity, you know, you call it inspiration, call it sort of coercion to get his best men to stay with him throughout their entire careers in one place, which was quite unusual at the time. So he definitely inspired, I mean, a degree of loyalty that is really impressive. And that's why you see there's tons of books, you know, written by former Rick overheads. On the other hand, if you were anyone outside of naval reactors, you were, I mean, these were the sharpest elbows that, that were coming out. Except actually, I would say Congress. Congress, I feel like, never got a sharp elbow from Rick River. He was very deferential, always respected. Article 1. But if you were anyone, even the chief naval officer, anyone above him within dod, any of you that, I mean, God forbid, if you were a defense contractor who worked for Rickover, it was brutal, sort of, I mean, one could call it bullying, but at the very least, intense management of those who worked on, supported him.

[Jordan Schneider]

Well, it was Congress that actually allowed his career to continue. I mean, there was a moment where the admiralty was not gonna promote him and he was going to be kicked out of the service. When you guys want to tell that story.

[Emmett Pen]

Yeah, so that happens in 1952. So importantly, this is the year before Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace speech, which is what's ultimately going to hand Rick over the civilian nuclear project. And the important thing to understand about the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy is that it is a really close knit bunch of insiders for nuclear, because nuclear was not, did not have a lot of public publicly available information because it was our edge, our weapon that had won the war. And we wanted to keep that as close to the government as possible. Hence the Atomic Energy Commission's dual mandate, which was both to educate and promote nuclear power and to regulate it at the same time, both for military and civilian means. So the JCAE became a vital lifeline for Rickover, dealing with these senators because they were some of the only other ones in government who knew anything about what nuclear was and what any of these branches were up to in harnessing and manipulating its power. They knew even more than the executive by the Time Eisenhower came into office and Rickover loved to show up, not in uniform, talk smack about Navy bureaucracy and Navy leadership, crack up all his homies on the jcae, and they came to really love him. And because he had also done such a great job of training all of these fiercely loyal engineers in the officer corps, he had a bunch of supporters that could basically ask the JCAE to intervene on his behalf when he was going to get sort of shuffled into retirement. And essentially, a bunch of these people went to the press and were like, if we lose this guy, if we lose our nuclear edge or whatever, he's the only guy that gets it. And the Navy realized that they were going to lose sovereignty over their own hiring processes, perhaps to Congress, and they were like, all right, fine, we're just gonna. We're just gonna promote him rather than, you know, like, have ourselves pried open. And to be clear, he is the only person in American history that has ever had that type of leverage over branch of the military, politically speaking. So it speaks to the level of loyalty he could cultivate, the way he could be, the way his sense of humor could charm people, his resentment about drill and dress, and his, you know, sort of him flouting that all the time. What were liabilities in the Navy ultimately became assets when dealing with civilian entities. And it was those entities that gave him his power in the Navy, ultimately. Yeah.

[Jordan Schneider]

From which book is this? What's the Jewish Lives one?

[Emmett Pen]

That's Wortman's book. Engineer.

[Jordan Schneider]

From the. From the Wortman book. The description of his testimony was that Rickover's largely unscripted testimony, delivered without the Navy's prior approval and without accompanying deputies, surprised the committee members. They appreciated his candor and laughed at his witty barbs directed at superior officers and the Navy's slow bureaucratic ways. You know, it's. It's interesting, right, because, like, you. You have to kind of cross some threshold in order to be a prominent enough captain or one star to start getting exposure to the sorts of civilians who could save you when you start to trigger the antibodies of. Of your branch or broader bureaucracy. I mean, I think, like, the closest thing we kind of got in modern memory was Petraeus for, like, a hot minute maybe in the, like, 2004-2006 era. I mean, very different personalities, but he was able to kind of relate and win allies among, you know, the John McCains of the world in a way that your replacement level flag officer couldn't. But it was. It's striking to me how close a run it is. And how sort of the cards were so stacked against this person to have someone with such a kind of distinct vision of how they wanted to pursue their career in the Navy. You know, Charles earlier mentioned this idea of being an engineering officer as opposed to someone who was oriented around like, you know, being in charge of the carrier fleet or, you know, on the deck of the battleship or what have you it to go this way. You almost need to be like so extra and so amazing in order to like make yourself so undeniable. Because there's just so much, so much working, working at cross purposes against. Against these sorts of folks with this type of vision.

[Charles Yang]

Yeah. And when I think about models of disruption and what does Rickover bring, it is really important. That's why I emphasized earlier he spent 20 years in the Navy, first as an engineering officer. He had built up this base of support and a reputation for taking on very difficult engineering tasks. So even when he was starting out in 1946, after he left Oak Ridge with really nothing, there was already existing base of support for him because he said, I want to take on this big nuclear project, which the Navy and parts of the Navy Baroxy didn't like him. But there were other parts that recognized that this guy is a really good engineer. And from that base of support, he was able to then leverage into a broader base of support with Congress. But it didn't, you know, it didn't come out of nowhere. It came out of a very long career already of demonstrating that technical excellence. So it is very unique, I think, sort of path for. For someone like Rick Ober.

[Emmett Pen]

Yeah. And I think, you know, as much as he hazed his officers. Right. So if he'd interview you, he was a very short guy. He's like 5:2, very slight in build. And he sanded down the front two legs of the chair in front of his desk in his office. So that whenever an officer had to go in for these interviews, they'd be trying to not to slide down the front of it. And they would also look almost a little bit shorter than him, you know, so as much as he did stuff like that to people, you know, the Navy did many things to humiliate Rickover. You know, even when he was at Annapolis as a student, you know, the hazing there was real. I mean, it was in many ways a good old boys club. And he was an immigrant Jew. So sort of like the appeal of all of the dress and pomp and circumstance he felt was this waspish like conspiracy against him. And maybe in Some cases it was. There's some debate in the scholarship about the nature or whether or not he faced true blue antisemitism. Either way, he was an outsider and was treated as. At one point in his career, they move him into a former women's rest restroom for his office, and I think it still has, like, the women's sign on the door, you know, and he'd always make, you know, and he'd always make, like, comments about it to people like, yeah, this is how much the Navy likes me. You know. And so I think to add to Charles's point about the extent to which he had come to understand and deeply know how these bureaucratic entities and systems work, he had also to overcome the wor that they could do to someone like him, which I think, you know, harbored or instilled greater intimacy with the defects of these systems themselves. It also meant that, you know, he had a ton of grit. You know, we say, I think when we talk about people's excellence, Rickover was truly excellent. He was a great man. We act as if that is this bulldozer over adversity, because it looks like that in hindsight. But while Rickover was experiencing this stuff, even though he had a thick skin, it is clear in some of the interviews he gives and in some of the private letters he's written that he did find some of it, frankly, humiliating and deeply wounding. It's just that he could put up with it. So it's not as if his excellence rescued him from human emotions. He still had to put up with a human heart like the rest of us do.

[Charles Yang]

I mean, you talk about the chair a little bit. Yeah, there's tons of. Just to give a little bit more color, maybe on his personality. I mean, he was. He would ask things like, so. So first, he was the final interviewer for all officers across the naval reactor complex. So every submariner, every sort of engineer was. Would be interviewed by him. So he interviewed thousands of people by the end of his career. And there are so many just incredible anecdotes about the kinds of interview questions he would ask that I think it's worth hashing out a little bit or just giving some more color. There's. There's one example of an officer who come in, and the first thing Rickover basically says is, you're overweight. How overweight do you think you are? And he's like, obviously a very unexpected question, but the guy estimates maybe 10, 10 pounds, 15 pounds. He's like, okay, lose those 10, 15 pounds. Come back in a month, when you're done that, and then you're hired. So that was essentially his hiring criteria. There's another example of someone who said they liked hiking. And then Rick river was like, oh, have you ever hiked this place called Goat Mountain? And they're like, no, I have it. He's like, go hike Goat Mountain, then and says, okay, easy enough. The candidate goes out and it turns out Goat Mountain is in a zoo. It's like a mountain for literal goats in a zoo. And so this guy has to jump. You know, he does it. He jumps in to the goat pen, climbs this little mountain, takes a picture and then. And then he, Rick river asked, you know, why weren't you number one? Like, did you really give it your best? And really pressed him on that specific point. So it's in the interview questions, I think you see one particular way of thinking about, you know, talent. What does it mean to create a team around you that has sort of the right attitude? And it's another part, I think, another part of his flavor as a person.

[Emmett Pen]

Yeah. And how he cultivated that in fierce loyalty, despite some of his, frankly, out of pocket treatment of some of these guys at times, like locking them in closets as a pungent tactic and stuff like that. But Carter, in one of his memoirs, is very. It might even be in why not the Best. He's very clearly clear that Rickover is second only to his father in terms of men who've impacted and shaped his life. And that would become very, very influential on Carter around the time of the 70s energy crisis, which we'll get to a little bit later in terms of like, Rickover's career and where he ends up and how he affects American policy later on in his life, especially energy policy. But yeah, I mean, there are so many times in reading these things where you realize that it was just absolutely life changing for these men to work for Rickover. And some of them had a higher threshold for it than others. You know, there's this story of this guy being like, look, Admiral, you know, my wife would like, I haven't been on vacation in like six or seven years. You know, my wife would really like to go on a two week vacation. And Rickover just looks at him and says, if I don't need you for two weeks, I don't need you at all. And the guy was like, I for sure have to get out of the Navy.

[Jordan Schneider]

Yeah, well, I mean, and that was the thing about submariners and nuclear submarines in particular is because these boats could go much further for much Longer than any other, you know, than any other submarine. And so, like, you know, these would, these would end marriage after marriage, after marriage. You know, you read Blind Man's Bluff and you hear about these like crazy 4 month, 5 month treks. It's like, you know, it's like you're Magellan or something going, you know, going all the way around and you're sneaking through the, you know, so you're seeking through the Bering Strait, you're going under the Arctic. You're trying to track some, some Russian sub or some Soviet submarine. And you know, Rickover, he's, he's. He's practicing what he preaches. He has a kid he probably never sees is working, you know, six and a half days a week.

[Charles Yang]

Week.

[Jordan Schneider]

But it was a, you know, it was as you were talking about with Elon, this was like an all in, you know, this was like an absolutely all in thing. And there were. He had very little patience for folks who, you know, wanted their, wanted their nice work, life balance. I don't know, Charles, what does that say about the nature of doing awesome engineering?

[Charles Yang]

I mean, he was a man of focus, if nothing else. Right. I mean, he spent his entire career in, you know, one company, you could say the Navy. But, you know, he, yeah, he was also. He inspired that dedication because he himself worked just as hard as, I mean, certainly harder than anyone else that was required beneath him that reported to him. So something I think about, you know, like, he built this entire complex that had a huge impact. And he did it by doing one thing for, I mean, starting from 40 onward within his career. And I think that's something that is part of the inspiration. Right? It's like, what does it take to accomplish something really meaningful in this world? It's a lot of focus. Yeah, that's my takeaway for it, at least for myself.

[Emmett Pen]

Yeah, I think he could have only survived in the Navy. I think one of the things that's important to emphasize when talking about Rickover is his contempt for the private sector and especially American consumer society. Rickover was somebody who thought that it would have been morally cleansing for America to have 10 more years of the Great Depression. You know, he believed that, you know, we were building a society that bred vice and laziness and self satisfaction. After he finished bringing the shipping port civilian nuclear plant online in two years. So from 55 to 57, right after he does the subs, he basically tells Congress, like, I just don't think the private sector could ever do this. Like, in no real way are we ready to build nuclear. He was like, look at how over budget this went. Now, you know, the Government Accountability Office went and found out that in part it went over budget because of Rickover. You know, but to him, his standard was the only standard. And he, he evinced what were old school capital P, progressive views about the nature of technology and, you know, and society. And like all great men, he had a very difficult relationship with a democratic society. Great men are as much a boon as they are a burden to it. They don't know what to do with somebody who stands apart at an elite level from everybody else because it sort of, it's a narrative violation for what underpins the founding mythos of any democracy. And Rickover really thought that engineers needed to be in greater control of society. While he was getting his master's in engineering at Columbia, he joined the technocracy movement, which harbored many of these same views. And it really dictated how he viewed American society. And to be clear, and this is what's so great about what Charles has helped made public through the Rickover corpus, he was not a guy who thought that we should only be doing the shape rotating. Certainly he thought that Americans should be well educated in science and that we were uneducated in science and perhaps especially engineering. And that was a major crisis for us in the machine age. But he was a guy who could recite classic English poetry from memory because he loved it. He was a guy that emphasized the need to wed science and the humanities in everything that he said. This standard is incredibly hard to meet when we talk about how hard Rickover worked. I his self education never stopped. He consumed book reviews, especially had file cabinets of all the articles that he read, would love to grill people on topics like that. His wife was like that. That's how they would spend their time together. And he passed that down to his own son. I mean, that was one of the most important elements, I think, is their relationship, if I remember correctly, is that he was very interested in his own child's intellectual development and that being an essential part of what it meant to become a full being. So when we take a look at Rickover, we realize that I think he has a lot to teach founders, engineers and everybody that is working on anything large and difficult today, but that there are these strange wrinkles in how he approached those projects over the course of time. I mean, there's this moment where David Lilienthal, who was the chairman of the aec, you know, after his time there, Lilienthal goes into the private sector and he had never met Rickover while he was at the aec. They just didn't deal with each other directly. He knew him by reputation. Rickover knew him by reputation. In 1956, after Rickover wins the shipping port deal, he bumps into Lilienthal on a train in Pennsylvania. And Lilienthal was obsessive about his journals. And so in his journals he records their conversation. They find like a private little booth on the train. They sit down, you know, Rickover like makes fun of him for being in the private sector now. You know that he's like, now morally lesser, that he's like trying to do this stuff. And then Lilienthal sort of gets his looks in and he's just like, I don't think that we're ever really going to do civilian nuclear power. And Rickover is like, I completely agree. He's like, I just don't think that this can really take off. He's like, I think it's too demanding. I think people think we're farther along than we are. I think it's going to be a huge lift. And then Lilithal takes it one step too far where he says, I don't think we should be doing it at all. And Rickover says, I completely disagree. There are two reasons to have a nuclear power program. One is for national prestige. In other words, for excellence, to demonstrate your excellence, which is super attractive. I'm like, couldn't agree more, pal. And he goes, the second reason, and this is where it gets strange. As he says, corporate America is so rapacious in its consumption of resources that the only thing that can slake its appetite is nuclear power. And so to spare the depletion of our national resources, we need to build nuclear power reactors. That is the like Teddy Roosevelt style, old school progressive conservation message. That's how deep that stuff went in to Rickover's character.

[Charles Yang]

I mean, by the end, at some point we should talk about the actual subs and nukes. But I think his final testimony to Congress, I mean, he gets pretty deep growth there. I mean, it's sort of a strain that's present throughout. But the most famous one of his speeches is his retirement speech where he gives a pretty degrowth or vision, I think, of sort of energy that's quite different than how we think about it now. But to your early point, Emmett, I mean, he was, yeah, he was a Renaissance man in a lot of ways. And so even the. Some of his less well known speeches that came out of this Rakeover corpus are around his views of democracy and Technology and the relationship that they have with one another, and more importantly, the responsibility for those who develop technology. So he was a big fan of, like, the Hippocratic Oath, for instance, the idea that a professional class had a responsibility to the people that it served, that beyond a legal contract between the government and a contractor, for instance. And so he would talk a lot about, for engineers, the importance of developing their technology responsibly, even beyond sort of any profit motive. But at the same time, like you said, he had this view that we need an educated citizenry, not just for workforce and for building things, but also just. Just so we can understand and make sense of the world that we live in. I think that is still a message that is very relevant today. So he was. And actually, another piece that's sort of still coming out early in the research, I think, just in the past several years from more archival work others have done around Rickover, is the importance of his wife, who was his first wife, who was sort of a European noble, born and bore a lot from Rickover's intense sort of work schedule, but was really part of his intellectual foundation on a lot of these more humanistic topics. So there's a lesson in there as well, perhaps.

[Jordan Schneider]

All right, let's talk boats.

[Emmett Pen]

As funny as some of the efficiency and diesel reworking stuff is like pissing everybody off on the boat by turning the power so low the lights feel dim and power the water pressure so down it just dribbles out of the shower just so he could get the boats more efficient. I think that's the most important thing, like top level, to learn about what it was like to man a Rickover boat in the 40s. But by the time he starts working on naval submarines, I. You know, Charles, happy to hand this off to you. Yeah.

[Charles Yang]

I think it's worth starting with just how different submarines were before nuclear, which I mentioned a little bit earlier. Right. So these were powered by diesel fuel. So you to carry all this diesel fuel with you on the submarine. And it's much more difficult to run a ship submerged than it is on the surface. And so submarines during World War II, they were really surface vessels that occasionally submerged for very brief periods of time at very slow speeds. So they could not even catch up to a convoy. They would just have to right on the surface and risk detection. If they came across convoy, they would submerge and hope the convoy sort of came along in the right direction for them to attack because they could not catch up in terms of maneuvers. They were also incredibly dangerous, partly because they're carrying a large amount of flammable fuel. And also because when they submerged they were running on battery packs, which the batteries back then were quite unreliable. And actually when Rickover served on a submarine early in his career, there was a notable fire that broke out actually on a submarine that he received later as a commendation for helping put out. But it impressed upon him and I think for everyone. I mean, the submarines of the diesel era were quite dangerous and quite unpleasant. I mean, there were all these fumes and loud. And loud. Yeah, it's hard to hear anything. I mean, especially when you think about sonar.

[Jordan Schneider]

Right.

[Emmett Pen]

Which is all about, say, and easy to pick up because of that.

[Charles Yang]

Yeah, exactly. And so when Rickover came to Oak Ridge and he discovered this nuclear technology, his, his direction, and I think he can claim credit for arguably pulling forward the developing nuclear submarines by five to 10 years. Westinghouse was, you know, let's, let's just start with the on land reactor, you know, forget the ship thing, just, let's just build one first and then maybe we'll put it on a surface ship and then maybe we'll put it on a submarine. And so the Navy consensus view was a Navy nuclear powered submarine was, was 10, 15 years away in 1946. And Rickover said, no, we're going to put on submarine and that's going to be the first thing that we do. So he was able to go, I think from 1946 when he went to Oak Ridge, to when the first Mark 1 reactor, which was designed, it was not on a submarine, but had the exact same sort of envelope and design as the eventual Mark two that would go on the first nuclear submarine. That was six years, six years from we can blow stuff up to we can harness this thing to run in a very tight operating condition. It's quite remarkable, I have to say. And a lot of, even just from Mark 1 that reactor development slowed. Things like Idaho National Lab was first, it was first developed out in Idaho, which was originally a nuclear test site, now now site of a famous national lab. A lot of the original power labs, atomic energy labs that are still used by the Navy were developed. And of course the first contract which went to electric boat for that submarine was also. So a lot of these early elements that come together later on were developed in the first six years that Rickover went from discovering nuclear technology and we as a country discovering it to we put it on a submari, which was incredibly, incredibly difficult.

[Emmett Pen]

And I think one of the things that demonstrates how practical he was about this is he said, I'm going to start with the propeller because we need to know what sort of power output we actually need to get these things moving. I'm not going to do just, let's just build the thing and then figure out how it feeds into the implement that we need. He's like, no, no, no. We're going to start with the thing that we need and then figure out out how what we're about to build gets it to work. And, you know, there were a lot of different reactor designs that were in the offing, you know, and one of the things that he started to notice is that there were certain reactor designs that use different coolants, you know, molten salt, you know, and stuff like that.

[Charles Yang]

A lot of stuff we're trying out now again.

[Emmett Pen]

A lot of stuff we're trying out now again. Yeah, in part because we have some operating experience with them now, you know. You know, I'd really love to see one of these technologies win in a way that it didn't earlier. But he looked at that and he said, that sounds like that's for people who work in a lab. But I don't work in a lab. I work in the Navy. And the people who are on the sub aren't in a lab, they're in a sub. So we're going to play easy mode and we're going to use water as the coolant. And we're just going to do this because this is the closest we can get to something that's practical that I know that I can stamp out for the Navy. That's what we're going to do. I like, I'll trade on certain levels of theoretical efficiency and all of these other things that are more sophisticated and perhaps interesting. But in order to get something that I know is absolutely safe, absolutely reliable and easier to maintain, and I think.

[Charles Yang]

It'S worth remarking just to say it more clearly. The first nuclear reactor built, I would say, in the world was put in a submarine. With the exception there's like the pile in Chicago. There's some other. Sure. You know, one could argue what constitutes a reactor. But I would say the first, you know, real substantial power reactor, Substantial power was something we put in a submarine, which is. Which is a crazy sort of outcome. Right. That's not at all what you would expect logically from the path of history or technology development. And that's, I mean, Rick, over bending the arc of technology. But it is, I think, I think to Emmett's point, he does have a disdain for the scientists he makes A very clear dichotomy between scientists and engineers and that he is in the latter camp and he has very little patience for those in the former. And this comes out early on because Rick river is pulling together his team. He's amassing power in the naval bureaucracy. And the question comes up, who's going to build the reactor? At the time, the Atomic Energy Commission, the civilian side, and all of the Manhattan Project labs, which then now become the DOE national labs were also jockeying for power. So it's not just the Navy that was like, no, not the subs. The surface vessel fleet was also fighting for power. It was also the broader civilian apparatus. I was like, who's going to own this nuclear development? And Rickover had this big struggle in 1947 and 1948 that he ended up winning with Argonne National Lab, essentially, which wanted to own the development of nuclear reactors because they'd done the pile and they were the civilian side. And Rickover essentially just said, you guys are scientists. You're not serious. We're here to build a reactor. You can go do whatever you want, but we're building reactor. We're working with industrial contractors. And he did it. But I think it speaks to sort of a sort of cultural view of science versus engineering that's also relevant today when we think about, you know, the US Scientific base, but then the US Industrial base, and sort of, how do those translate to one another?

[Emmett Pen]

Totally. And one of the things that was. That's important to realize is that atomic energy, unlike every other innovation in American history up till then, was strictly a government affair. Right. So, you know, everything else comes out of the private sector. Everything else comes out of. In a way, it kind of makes sense that the submarine is the first thing we do because it's an immediate military application of what started off as a military technology developed by the government. And that's all to say that nuclear historically is sort of in this different class of things that it has to deal with to become a civilian commercial technology eventually compared to everything we had had experience with up until then. And I think that is part of what made Rickover not just the right guy, but the right guy at the right time and the right place.

[Jordan Schneider]

I want to come back to this scientist versus engineers thing. There's a famous quote of Rickover meeting Edward Teller. Famous, I think, maybe Nobel Prize winner, but he invented the hydrogen bomb, was a key scientist in Los Alamos. He says, I am Captain Rickover. I am stupid. Which on the one hand is like, yeah, he wants to learn from this genius. But on the other hand, he has this enormous ego as well as this engineering sense of what tech pathways he can go down. And yeah, it's nice for these PhDs and geniuses to be inventing cool stuff, but when it comes to actually doing the thing, the person you want running it is not Edward Teller, but a Hyman Rickover.

[Charles Yang]

And I think it's worth, I mean the other part of this that Emmett was sort of alluding to, and this is, I think speaks to both Rickover's engineering mindset, but his view of engineering as a public d is when he thinks about safety. I think Rickover was very acutely aware of the political economy of nuclear. Essentially he recognized that any accident at all would have enormous repercussions for the public view of nuclear and more importantly Congress's willingness to continue funding his nuclear subs. And so I think that is a lot of how you see that path dependency where Rickover was someone who brought it an incredible degree of stringency around radiation safety and around the safety factors they used on these nuclear reactors, including informing his first decision around going with light water reactor ultimately for the first design. But I think that is also maybe, you know, building a nuclear bomb is very hard, but it is sort of a different hard than not just building a reactor, but building a system that allows us to live and work next to reactors, including putting, you know, active duty military right next to a nuclear reactor for four months underwater. What the public is willing to tolerate with that. And I think that's another part of some sort of part of Rickover's philosophy that you still see in some ways today in the safety apparatus around naval reactors.

[Emmett Pen]

Yeah, I think, you know, the bomb just has to go off once. You know, like that's one of the major differences. You know, the nuclear reactor has to like stay critical, keep running, you know, and that's a different management and maintenance task, not just efficient task. And I really want to emphasize here, I'm so glad that Charles brought up his sensitivity to what the public would accept, what Congress would accept. There is, I think, this cult of flouting the public and what it will accept and being like just deal with whatever we do. And while Rickover had some of those tyrannical aspects, he also had this higher sense of duty that I think in Franklin augmented his level of political sophistication with what he was doing. He understood what buy in was going to look like. He understood that congressmen had the reputations on the line when it came to this. Even if people didn't fully understand what was happening in that joint committee, he was somebody who is a realist about, and sometimes a bit of a pessimist about what the pressures of public opinion could do, do to engineering achievements and their continuance. And I think that made him very, very savvy, savvier than most.

[Charles Yang]

And I think it's worth, I mean, reflecting on again this moment we're in right now, just like in the 50s today, polling and sort of willingness to do nuclear is again at a popular majority, which has been not always the case for the past 60 years. And Rickover, in that moment that he was in, successfully leveraged that into, you know, the nuclear build out that we saw both for the submarine force and for the civilian energy side. That has been a huge boon. And I think we are in a similar moment again where the public is willing to invest in nuclear development more on the civilian side now. And there is, I think, to your point, Emmett, a sort of, there are sometimes a casualness with which it is treated. And I think it's worth learning the lesson of Rick, or not over learning, but at least taking note that Rickover was very aware of. Take he this, yeah, take heed that this, this, this grace the public has given us in this moment can be removed at any moment.

[Emmett Pen]

And it indeed was after a while, you know, but before that happened, I think we can sort of talk a little bit about what happened, how he came to be the guy who does shipping port. We already talked about how he wins his, you know, admiralty, you know, which was instrumental in that. But I think the other thing people should realize is that getting the shipping port dealing to deploy the first civilian nuclear reactor. Eisenhower is trying to figure out how to do several things simultaneously. One is how to sort of snatch utopia from the jaws of doom with the atom, which leads to the atom for peace speech and this search in the government to figure out how to leverage nuclear power for civilian purposes, for medical research, for power. And Eisenhower also has to do this other thing, which is balance the budget. That was in an era where the American people actually really cared about whether or not the budget was balanced and sought politicians who would do that. People were frustrated at that point with the 20 years of sort of democratic hegemony that had so grown the federal government out and then thus increased its spending. And Eisenhower also had to figure out how to fight the Cold War at the same time. And so that resulted in him canceling what was going to be a program for reactors for carrier ships. That program would be taken up later on. And the consolation prize to Rickover, who was going to win that, was doing civilian nuclear power. And he was smart enough to hang in there and not pick up his ball and go home. He was like, all right, I didn't get the thing that I wanted, but I at least still get to do this. And I can determine the outcome here. I can really shape this. And to go back to what we were talking about, his dedication to education as part of what he was doing, the way that the engineers trained up to work on the shipping port contract was by going over to the initial light water reactors he built for the Navy and training themselves on how those things operated.

[Charles Yang]

Right.

[Emmett Pen]

And then this reactor he builds in two years in Pennsylvania, which is owned by Duquesne Power and Light, that becomes a training ground for the rest of the nuclear industry, who all go there to figure out how this technology works. So when we talk about Rickover as the father of nuclear, not just the nuclear navy, but civilian nuclear, what you need to realize is most of the global fleet of civilian nuclear reactors are light water reactors. It's like almost over 90% or something like that. We're talking hundreds of reactors. That comes out of Rickover's decisions. This is the first truly only civilian power reactor. Some power reactors had kind of existed before. You know, Russia builds one, the UK builds one, not necessarily for civilian purposes. This is the first truly civilian reactor that gets built and it becomes the world's training ground for how to deploy this technology. I think that is, I don't, I think that we don't even talk about that level of influence because it's hard to even capture what kind of cascading influence that is.

[Charles Yang]

Yeah, I mean, in the first right. 10 years of Rick over discovering nuclear, he builds the world's first nuclear substantial nuclear power reactor and puts in a submarine, and then he goes and builds the world's first civilian nuclear power plant that returns substantial electricity back to the grid. And not only that, I mean, this two sort of compound off one another in a very unique way. It's very rare that you have, you know, civilians learning from military projects and then going on and pointing that in such a, such a short timeframe. Another example of his dedication to this sort of hands on training that happens around the same time is, I think in the early 1950s, Canada was trying out a nuclear reactor that had a spill, an accident. I don't think anyone ended up dying from it. But Rickover says, we're going to send like 100 guys over there, and they end up sending like hundreds of their staff over the course of like a year and a half, half to help out with the spill, obviously. And more importantly, Rickover's motivation is this is the world's first, you know, sort of nuclear accident, you could say, where there is a small but non trivial amount of radiation spill and we should go and learn from how the Canadians are doing it, what we could be doing. And so he's very opportunistic when it think when it comes to training, he views it as a priority. First Mark. Right. This was when they were still building Mark 1, I think. And so while they're trying to build the first nuclear reactor to put in a submarine, which is already a crazy workload and vision, he's sending people off to Canada to go learn about radiation spills. So even then he's sort of laying the groundwork for this global industry and the responsibility that he thinks it should have in its training when it thinks about its management of this technology.

[Emmett Pen]

Yeah. And also strong arming private industry into creating whole new verticals. Right. So one of the things that became important for the shipping port reactor was zirconium. And there was only like a shoebox of it existed like in the world.

[Charles Yang]

He invented several elements, essentially, in an industrial sense. There were several elements that were brought into existence because of Rick Rich.

[Emmett Pen]

And it was something like a thousand dollars a pound, but he was going to need it by the ton. And so he's like, Westinghouse, I will destroy you somehow if you don't figure out how to turn this into an actual industry. And like years later, after Westinghouse did stand up an entire zirconium mining industry to support this Congress is like, so what was that about? And the Westinghouse exec was like, well, I mean, Rickover made us do it.

[Jordan Schneider]

What do you guys want to close on?

[Emmett Pen]

So I think we try to take the measure of what Rickover's legacy is. We have a few different things we've already discussed. Right. Some of them are very tangible. Some of them are, you know, the light water fleet. Globally, America's frankly, still superior nuclear Navy. Navy, which produces astonishing engineers and officers and NCOs, et cetera, who come out of that program, who are in the nuclear industry today trying to revive this technology for commercial deployment and who always have my admiration. There's all of that. And then I will say he also has this legacy. And it might be quieter, but I think it is still very potent. And how he influenced Jimmy Carter in the crux of the 1970s, when Carter is trying to figure out how to go through the energy crisis. And he is talking to people as diverse as, of course, Rickover, who he sees as his mentor. But even people like Christopher Lash, the cultural critic Jimmy Carter is a big fan of his book the Culture of Narcissism, invites Lash to a private dinner with all these other people like Daniel Bell, and he' he's realizing that America's consumer society is linked to its energy economy and that the energy crisis in the 70s with OPEC and stuff like that and stagflation is going to mean this sort of moral cultural conflict for America. And Rickover. And this is the beginning of his sort of dumorous turn against the atom, which is also the sunset of his control over it, which I think is an important aspect of what's going on here too, is that he's getting older. He knows he's not going to be able to run it forever. But he advises Carter against really continuing commitments to nuclear, which by then had seen a lot of overruns. The business case for nuclear had been greatly damaged by the flatlining of demand for power growth in America as a result of stagflation and all of this. And it opened Carter up to people like Amory Lovins, who had ideas about the grid running completely on wind and solar and things like this and sort of leaving a lot of industrial society behind and greatly shaped things like some of the acts that Carter passed, like Purpa and stuff like that in the latter half of the 70s. And so that, I think, is part of Rickover's cultural impact as experienced through what Carter made possible. And I think that, you know, there were two wolves inside Rickover and now there are two wolves inside us. And that's our relationship to grow growth to what we think technology is for and who it benefits, and also who we are as people who seek to build again in a way that we haven't since Rickover was at the top of his game. And so I think that those are really, really important parts of his legacy. And Charles, I kind of want to pose this to you a little bit. I want to give you a frame here, because I think that we are about to see a substantial Rickover revival, and that is in part due to your remarkable archival work with the Nimitz Library. And I'd love it if you could talk about his legacy in terms of the time and care you're giving to making his papers known.

[Charles Yang]

Yeah. So I can give a little bit of context on the archives. Well, actually, first, Jordan, maybe I don't know if it'd be helpful. I want to kind of run through how this is relevant to a bunch of different potential people in one sentence each. I think, for instance, if you care about defense procurement. Right. Reform, there are including in the corpus that we have hours and hours of his testimony to Congress about how defense procurement reform should be done, about how defense cost accounting should be changed. And he does not have an unblemished record, but he has at least a very interesting one when it comes to thinking about how do we build and engage the government, engage with large contractors to build ships and submarines, if you care about even lawyers versus engineers, something Dan Wang brought. And Dan Wang profiled Rick over in his book as well, which I think is going to help contribute to this pending Rickover revival. But Rickover had a whole speech about lawyers versus engineers. Very like. So these sort of modes are all that we're talking about now. Rickover was talking about even back then. Just a few more, if you want to think about how to work in bureaucracy like the policy entrepreneurs of this world. Rickover has obviously extensive writing about his own experience and the creative things that he did that still endure to this day. And maybe just one last one, if thinking about nuclear and its history and its safety and its relationship with the public is obviously something that he wrote a lot about. Again, sometimes with that degrowther sort of mindset, but other times in I think, very politically astute ways that some of which we've forgotten and it's worth bringing back to. And all of this is surfaced from the Rickover archives that were donated by his estate to the Nimitz Library at the Naval Academy two years ago, I think two or three years ago. And so what we were able to do last year is go to the Nimitz Library and publicly scan about 2,000 pages worth of his speeches and some of his testimony and make those publicly available. Now, there's two things. One, I'm planning on updating the website shortly to make it more readable in sort of HTML form. And you can get soon. This would have been better if we had this time with an actual thing, but soon I think we'll set up a service where you can get one Rickover speech in your inbox every week or something. But the other thing is the Rickover corpus that we have right now is still incomplete. There are still thousands of pages of congressional testimony, speeches and letters that he put out, which are still sort of essentially hidden behind the archival walls in their files. And so if there's, you know, we talked about how this is relevant for defense procurement reform lovers or for energy wonks or for people thinking about cultural revival and education. If anyone is interested in funding more of that kind of work from Rickover, that's another sort of piece that still remains, is to finish the digitization of those archives and continue to disseminate those materials so that more people can learn from the lessons of Rick over.

[Emmett Pen]

Yeah, I want to spark the football on that a little bit. Open your wallets. Folks like this is hugely, hugely important, I think to American history and to our own self understanding. And that if we allow Rickover's work to go only partially stewarded in the public eye, we are losing out on our own heritage in a huge way. And I no longer think that in our demoralized cultural milieu we can allow our ourselves to be so casual with the riches of our own achievements. And to me, that is what is spiritually important about what Charles is doing. I think that even this conversation is a great step forward to putting people who have built this country into an ideological Mount Rushmore for us to understand who we are, are and where we're going.

[Charles Yang]

You heard it here from Emmett. Penny first, guys, we gotta digitize the Rickover archives. Sorry to sort of sabotage your podcast short and turn into a fundraising podcast.

[Jordan Schneider]

I'm not sorry. This is what we're here for. Charles, we wouldn't have you on if we didn't let you make the pitch. Beyond the primary sources. Why don't you give us a little tour through the secondary literature. What other books should people consider checking out?

[Charles Yang]

Ooh, the Rickover Effect is quite good. By Rockwell. He was one of Rickover's lieutenants and also so an Eng. So it is told from the perspective of obvious someone who had dedicated large parts of their career to Rickover. For a more critical read, something I'm working on right now is Running Critical which details the later part of Rickover's career and his engagement with General Dynamics and Electric Boat and the controversy around that massive cost overrun in that submarine program and for perhaps those are sort of generally accessible to. I think anyone interested in this. If you want the deepest wonkiest dive the Department of Energy has has official historians or at least used to. I don't know if they still do, but there is a 5, 500 page book called Rickover in the Nuclear Navy by Duncan and getting another author. Duncan? Yeah, I think it's Duncan and Hewlett. It was written 30 years ago I think. But it's the official DOE history of Rick over in the nuclear navy. Cool. 400 in an office.

[Emmett Pen]

That, to me, does suffer from a lack of specificity.

[Charles Yang]

No, it doesn't. Not any of his speeches, which are all 10 to 15, 20 pages. And they are. I mean, they're quite fun to read. And that might be perhaps the best place to start.

[Emmett Pen]

Yeah, I think that there's another one that I think it's anecdotes called like, Rising Tide or something like that. That's from another person that served with him. These are available at the Naval Institute, by the way. I think you can order it through the bookstore still. There's another one that has, like, a black cover and Rickover's, like, tinted in blue on the front of it. And it might just be called Hyman Rickover. And then I. I think for like, the layperson, one of the most accessible is the Wortman book that's part of the Jewish American Live series from Riel University press. It's about 250 pages, and I think it does. It's the most well rounded of the biographies I've experienced. So you get a lot of Rickover the man, in addition to his achievements and I think is a great starting place for anybody who's interested and perhaps an ending place for anybody who just wants a taste and then wants to move on.

[Jordan Schneider]

So, yeah, and I'm just going to shout out Blind Man's An Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage, which came out in 1998. It's written by these two journalists who basically interviewed every commander and anyone who's kind of involved in the Cold War submarine program. And because the Cold War was over, even got to go to Russia and interview some of the Soviet boats that were sort of being tailed and bumped into by all these American subs who were trying to track them. It's just a fun kind of like, you know, Rickover is like, you know, hovering over the entire arc. But looking at the sort of Cold War nuclear substory from the bottom up and looking at more about, like, kind of what missions they were going on and how those missions fed into the broader strategic and espionage balance, I found to be a fun kind of correlate to all of the sort of engineering and bureaucratic history that Rickover had to fight through in order to allow these submariners to do the things they did over the course of the Cold War.

[Charles Yang]

I mean, to your point, Jordan, about the story of the subs, I think if you spend any time digging into the 20th century, mid 20th century. You will bump into Rick Ovrin. So he will be hovering around the periphery. And that's how I ran into him, was these sort of random mentions of this guy who was involved in nuclear. And I just kept hearing the name Rickover. And then, and then I read the book and then. And then it was. That was the start of the journey. But he is someone who one cannot escape, if you really want to understand. I think, to Emmett's point, that the heritage that we inherit and where we. Where we came from in that 20th century conflict.

[Jordan Schneider]

What was his favorite type of music?

[Emmett Pen]

I think I have vague memories of him being a listener of classical.

[Charles Yang]

Yeah, he definitely. He definitely knew all of the. The sort of genres of antiquity. I don't know how to put it. The symphonies.

[Jordan Schneider]

We'll throw some AIs onto the corpus and see what we find. Charles Emmett, thank you so much for being a part of Chinatalk.

[Emmett Pen]

Thanks for having me on.

[Charles Yang]

Yeah, this is fun.

[Jordan Schneider]

Okay, so we're back.

[Charles Yang]

We're back, y'. All.

[Emmett Pen]

You thought it was over, but we're fucking. Okay.

[Jordan Schneider]

This is great. I want to just read this.

[Charles Yang]

So this is.

[Jordan Schneider]

This is Jimmy Carter's memoir. Talking about his interview with Rickover. I approached the interview with a lot of trepidation, as prepared as well as possible by reading Current Events, Naval Tactics and other Issues. I entered his office and found him sitting behind a large desk with a single chair in front of it. He motioned it to me and immediately surprised me by asking what subject I wish to. To discuss. One after another. I selected those which I knew the most about at the time, including naval history, submarine battle tactics, electronics, and gunnery. In his case, he asked me questions with increasing difficulty until I was unable to answer them. He never smiled, always looked directly into my eyes and seemed to relish the obvious mental and physical discomfort. I later learned that the front two legs of the chair have been shortened, so it always felt as if I was sliding off. I mean, it's just like. Yeah, he's just giving the haze that he had to feel over the course of his Annapolis thing. Right. So interesting psychology going on here. When I responded that I read a lot of books, he cross examined me about them. We covered some plays by Shakespeare and Ibsen, novels by Faulkner and Hemingway, and a few novels recently on the best seller list, even going into detail about the Cane mutiny. When he asked what kind of music I preferred, I responded brashly that I enjoyed country music and jazz, but knew more about classical compositions. When he asked me my Favorite form. I told him that I really like piano concerts and offer opera. Rickover leaned forward and asked, what is your favorite opera? Tristan and Istan and Isold. Tristan and Isolde. Oh, God. And then he asked, which movement do you prefer? Fortunately, I was able to name the end ending known as Liba Stud or Love Death. I was thankful that my roommate and I had known this music and often played it at Annapolis.

[Emmett Pen]

This sounds like a characteristic Hyman Rickover.

[Jordan Schneider]

And then he closes with I stood 59th. Okay, where did you stand in your class of the Naval Academy? He asked. Sir, I stood 59th in a class of 820. After a short pause, he said, did you always do your best? I said, yes, sir, but I remembered who this. But I remembered who this was and all the many missed opportunities I had to study more, participate in class activities or strive to higher. Higher to higher level of military rank within the brigade. Finally, I gulped and said, sir, no, I didn't always do my best. He best. He looked at me for a long time and finally asked, why not? Then he turned the chair around to end the interview and began working on some papers in the table behind his desk. I sat there several minutes as he ignored me and then slowly left the room. I was disheartened on the way back to the submarine base where I told Rob Rosalyn, my wife, I had not done well at all. But I was soon notified that I've been chosen, probably because I answered his final question truthfully.

[Emmett Pen]

That sounds exactly right. I would also like to. So it may be added to the record, a guy asking Rickover for like a chair that he could actually sit in and a desk he could actually put files in and, you know, just general office equipment. Rickover exploded and said something, something like, oh, you know, name on the door, new rug on the floor and a comfy chair, and suddenly you're just a lazy slob who never gets anything done, huh?

[Charles Yang]

There's just.

[Jordan Schneider]

There's just something about that. The way he handled that Carter interview where it wasn't just hazing, right? I think he'd done this before and he knew that asking that sort of question, that sort of question from people would. There is like a soul cultivation aspect to that sort of two hour long interview where folks are really going to reflect on themselves. And you know, I think. I think everyone has different moments in their life where they're like, okay, here was this time where I was inspired to really push myself and go harder. And that's what he wanted to bring to these people. And the skill in which he was able to do that, probably because he came up through such a. Because he didn't have a silver spoon in his mouth. And he had so much struggle and so much adversity to overcome, which is not bullshit like college essay adversity, but everyone hating you, not even coming to America, speaking the language, barely getting into Annapolis. There's a remarkable aspect of the tough love, which he was able to give an entire. To, you know, the whole nuclear Navy.

[Emmett Pen]

That's ultimately. I think that, you know, these were in obviously, competence and intelligence assessments, but also character evaluations. And that the. One of the most important things that one of these candidates could reveal is honesty, especially when it didn't flatter. And I think that speaks to just how sharp and psychologically insightful Rickover was as a human being and his deep understanding of what it takes and who it takes to do something incredible.

[Charles Yang]

It's worth noting his lieutenants would. Would complain about his. His practice because he would reject tons of people. I mean, we're talking about all the successes, interviews, right, that were insane, all.

[Emmett Pen]

The planes that made it back.

[Charles Yang]

Yes. Yeah. And his lieutenant's like, look, we. We screened all these guys. These are the best officers in the Navy. And Ricker would say, you know, a, if this is the best, it's not enough. And B, this is the most important thing we do. You know, he really understood talent was the key to all of this. And so that's why he, you know, would interview all these officers, spend hours with them. There's also. I mean, the. The Carter ending is kind of a funny example of this interview, that kind of interview style. But he would also often, you know, in the middle of an interview, get a phone call and absolutely explode, usually because some project officer, site officer at a shipyard or lab was saying, so and so is starting to go wrong. And he would. He would explode. He'd be like, this is, you know, unacceptable. And then he put the phone down, and then he just returned to the interview, just complete calm. But, you know, they would see a little glimpse of the Rickover or something.

[Jordan Schneider]

I'm sure he turned it on just for them. Yeah.

[Charles Yang]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And. But if the situation was even particularly bad, he would say, I'm sorry, I need to go yell at this CEO, this. This, you know, Admiral, whoever, but please come back. I want to keep talking with you. And so he would make them wait, you know, in the hallway for hours sometimes, or then come the next day. So it was this very funny dichotomy of like, he really prioritized it. But he also didn't hide anything from people who hadn't even joined but who were just coming in the door to kind of show them what. What he was all about.

[Jordan Schneider]

Yeah, I want to tell this story.

[Emmett Pen]

The way he treated CEOs was crazy. Crazy, like storming into their office and making them write their goals and crayon on the wall so that he could hold them to them, stuff like that. I was just like, you know, the important thing to realize here is that, like, what. By the time he finished Shipping port, he was so hated by the utility industry. And it's like, vendors and contractors that to them, Shipping port was a demonstration of how nuclear couldn't work.

[Jordan Schneider]

All right, I think we're gonna. I think we're gonna have this be a part two. But let me just leave you with this one final, like, commercial abuse anecdote. This is from World War II. When a contractor. When contractor representatives brought in smaller components, Rickover sometimes hurled them into an office radiator to see if they broke. He handed back the parts with a curse, promising to withhold payment until they could withstand field conditions. Conditions.

[Charles Yang]

Yeah.

[Jordan Schneider]

Don't try this.

[Charles Yang]

Nuclear Rickover. This was just him as a guy. As an officer, yeah, that's in the Navy.

[Emmett Pen]

He's just doing it live. Like, that's. Like. That was before he had power. I think that that's the other important aspect. He was like this the whole time. There was never this moment where he wasn't doing this. Like, it wasn't like he had power. And then he luxuriated in it and. And relaxed his dress code standards. He would, like, barely so salute people when he boarded a boat. He would like. His uniform was never, like, fully together because he preferred civilian dress. Like, that's. He was doing it the whole time. He was always that guy.

[Jordan Schneider]

All right, we're calling it. Thanks again, guys.

[Narrator/Poet]

You show up at Crystal City, box lunch in your hand. They heard you in. In a windowless room just as the admiral planned. Don't speak till he speaks to you, they say with fearful lies and no excuse. Sir is not an answer. Don't even try that line. Oh, the kindly old gentleman wants to know, did you do your best? Did you really? Though he'll saw the legs right off your chair and watch you slide while you sit there. Welcome to. To the nuclear Navy Sun. The interview has just begun. You sit down in the hot seat. Something isn't right. The front legs have been shortened by a good 6 inches height. You're sliding off like butter while he's reading your whole file. He hasn't said a word yet and it's been a little while. Then he looks up. How'd you stand in your class at the academy? You puff your chest. 59th of 820. He doesn't blink, he doesn't smile. He lets the silence cook. Did you do your best? You gulp, you're shook. He told one kid, go piss me off if you think that you can. The kid swept every everything right off his desk and Rick over said, my man, he sent the dumb ones to the broom closet for a couple hours and cursed so loud the paint peeled off the Crystal City towers. He never used the elevator, walked up every stair so nobody in the building dared to ride one anywhere. If you're gonna sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you, but the bureaucracy won't. Jimmy Carter thought he'd nailed it. Top of the crop, 59th in his whole class. Surely Rickover would not stop to ask a simple question that would haunt him all his days, then turn his chair around without a word of praise. Carter wrote a whole book about it, called it why not the Best. The old man broke a precedent with one unanswered test. They told Reagan he was finished 81 and getting slow. They said be our special advisor a nice way of saying go. He looked the President of the United States dead in the eye said Mr. President, that is bullshit and he waved the man goodbye. So if you want to run reactors on the ships beneath the sea just remember God forgives but the Admiral will see he'll cut your chair he'll test your soul he'll send you to a closet but the devil's in the detail sun and so is your deposit so is your your deposit. So is your deposit.