Invest Like the Best

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 × 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.