Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Walter Russell Mead

Mead sees a dynamic United States inside a collapsing Pax Americana, with information-revolution productivity keeping American power resilient.The investable question is whether “infostructure” can let AI and remote/hybrid work renew the ownership society while adapting to Ukraine’s drone-driven obsolescence.Taiwan’s “soft blockade” and Japan’s strategic awakening offer geopolitical variables as Trump’s unpredictability continues to erode institutional networks.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Darren Farber

Farber defines victory in Iran as reopening the Strait of Hormuz while preventing its military and terror-export network from rebuilding through oil profits, requiring greater magazine depth and potentially an amphibious force.Defense markets are already testing neoprime targeting and signals intelligence in combat, but projection beyond drones remains unproven; multi-year authorities and Manhattan Project-scale spending could catalyze capacity, while Taiwan’s election remains a near-term geopolitical risk.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Alan Waxman

Waxman attributes private-credit stress to a factory model that industrialized fundraising and investing after 2018, with FRE multiples rising from 10–15x to 25–30x+ as underwriting standards weakened.Perpetual private BDC redemptions exceeding the 5% limit are not yet systemic in his view, but AI could reprice every industry, making matched liabilities, governed inflows, and strategy breadth critical.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × William Hockey

Column combines a bank’s regulatory permissions with software economics, earning 90%+ of revenue from per-API-call infrastructure for payments, deposits, and credit across fintech and emerging markets.Hockey’s debt-funded acquisition and near-bankruptcy experience shaped an earnings-funded, employee-owned model, while AI may reward banks and distribution-heavy brands; the open question is which specialized financial rails can compound without venture capital.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Shyam Sankar

Shyam Sankar argues that military innovation comes from heretics who build outside bureaucracy, while defense-specialist spending rose from 6% of major weapon-systems spending in the Cold War era to 86% today.His reindustrialization thesis links production capacity to innovation and AI productivity, with hundreds of founders now treated as “plan A” inside the Pentagon and more than $100B invested in their projects, making execution and cost-plus contracting key signals to monitor.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × John Arnold

China’s NIO built a robotic factory from shovel to first car in 17 months, with suppliers within 200 miles, highlighting a speed and supply-chain advantage over aging US plants.US energy demand is clear through 2030 but permitting is the bottleneck; delivered solar PPAs remain 50%+ above 2020 lows, while advanced geothermal is Arnold’s five-year call.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Dan Wang

Dan Wang argues China’s engineering state has a scale-up advantage, with 70M manufacturing workers, roughly 90% of solar production, and faster industrial deployment, while America retains stronger pluralism and zero-to-one innovation.China’s structural equity discount reflects policy unpredictability, capital controls, Cayman entities, and Taiwan-sanctions risk, but a five-year AI toss-up and China’s 500 GW solar buildout make deployment, manufacturing, and peace the key variables.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Mark Bertolini

Oscar Health is pursuing a defined-benefit-to-defined-contribution shift in healthcare, targeting 125 million people through individual ACA plans, while its cloud-native platform and “almost two dozen” LLMs support lower operating costs and disease-management economics.The CHOICE provision’s Senate removal over a $30B tax score underscores regulatory resistance, while Bertolini’s Aetna record—75% lower end-of-life costs and 652% eight-year TSR—illustrates the potential payoff from operational and benefit redesign.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy × Marc Andreessen

DeepSeek R1 makes frontier reasoning open, self-hostable, and roughly 30X cheaper, pressuring proprietary labs and NVIDIA while potentially expanding demand through Jevons Paradox.The shift intensifies U.S.–China competition over open technology infrastructure, with export controls, copyright, supply-chain dependence, and autonomous weapons creating catalysts and unresolved geopolitical risks.