Invest Like the Best

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 × 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 × 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 × 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.