Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Darren Farber, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: We're in a democracy. In a dictatorship, if you don't build magazine depth, and that's your job, you're dead. That mechanism of enforcement is pretty compelling. Here, we balance things like — will it be profitable, will it have duration, and Congress is giving one-year money. There are new efforts to create multi-year contracts for ordnance, which we've never done before. We really need it. We're changing the architecture to allow us to do more to add the magazine depth. We need to go faster for the purposes of filling the deterrence gap, so we can stop small incursions on the margins, especially with the Southeast Asian nations that we have cooperative peacekeeping agreements with — these bilateral agreements where we have to protect them, and they're being violated right now, like the Philippines, for example. So we have to do more there. It's getting better, and compared to anyone else in the West, we're still the best. It's just your adversary has a political structure that allows them to bring people to the precipice. But the illegitimacy of the Chinese — fundamentally an illegitimate power — is also our advantage, and we are making enormous strides in the clandestine services of co-opting that environment. [00:00:00] S0: Say more about that.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Darren Farber
[00:00:00] S0: Say more about that. [00:00:00] S1: Xi doesn't know who's on our side in his standing committee, or on his side. Every day he wakes up with the thought of, "Maybe I need to kill someone off." That is our edge. Our edge is that he is fundamentally illegitimate. The monopoly of power that is communism — their form of Marxism, of communism, is extremely powerful because of the apparatus of an enormous economy to pay off all these kinds of people, but they are illegitimate. Our ability to recruit, retain, and train had really degraded, and we had lost a lot of capability through a series of assets that were caught, but we have rebuilt that in a very meaningful way. I don't think Xi sleeps well at night. [00:00:00] S0: Is that very recent, that change?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Darren Farber
[00:00:00] S0: Is that very recent, that change? [00:00:00] S1: No. These things are built brick by brick. We have these government agencies where everyone goes into work every day, Monday to Sunday, and their job is, "How am I going to infiltrate this illegitimate political structure for the purposes of making it weak?" We have people, they drive their car in, and they have their sack lunch, and this is what they do every day. And ultimately, we break through. Why? Because every Chinese person in the standing committee has a relative somewhere in the United States, however many degrees removed, that owns a small business, that is doing well, is able to say and do what they want, and is able to fundamentally live free. We can't forget what makes us special and that we are the bug-out point for the world. Even for the people in the standing committee that are worried if they're on the outs, they have a plan to get here. We have weaknesses, but we also have enormous strengths, and their weaknesses are also enormous. It doesn't mean that they can't bring us to the precipice. Their mass is so much greater than us — their population size and what they can do industrially. But it is a dictatorship. It is a totalitarian regime. I don't even know how this is up for debate. The thread of that is lost. That's what we're talking about here. They are fundamentally strong and weak at the same time. We can hold both of those in the same vessel. I believe in our lifetime China will fall. I believe in our lifetime Iran will fall.
· Darren Farber, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: No. These things are built brick by brick. We have these government agencies where everyone goes into work every day, Monday to Sunday, and their job is, "How am I going to infiltrate this illegitimate political structure for the purposes of making it weak?" We have people, they drive their car in, and they have their sack lunch, and this is what they do every day. And ultimately, we break through. Why? Because every Chinese person in the standing committee has a relative somewhere in the United States, however many degrees removed, that owns a small business, that is doing well, is able to say and do what they want, and is able to fundamentally live free. We can't forget what makes us special and that we are the bug-out point for the world. Even for the people in the standing committee that are worried if they're on the outs, they have a plan to get here. We have weaknesses, but we also have enormous strengths, and their weaknesses are also enormous. It doesn't mean that they can't bring us to the precipice. Their mass is so much greater than us — their population size and what they can do industrially. But it is a dictatorship. It is a totalitarian regime. I don't even know how this is up for debate. The thread of that is lost. That's what we're talking about here. They are fundamentally strong and weak at the same time. We can hold both of those in the same vessel. I believe in our lifetime China will fall. I believe in our lifetime Iran will fall. [00:00:00] S0: What does it mean for China to fall? I know what it means for Iran to fall.
· Darren Farber
[00:00:00] S1: I believe it will be run like Taiwan. I believe it will fall. We grew up with this concept of the Soviet Union. It had this enormous technical capability. It's this monolith. It lasted several generations, and then all of a sudden it fell. It looked super strong right up until the last moment. There were planning documents circulating at the Pentagon about how strong they were two weeks before they fell. Their constitution, their concept of a constitution, is fundamentally corrupt. That monopoly of power saying that these people are going to permanently be in charge — you know it to be wrong. The question is, does it last 50 years? Does it last a hundred years? It does fall, because it's fundamentally illegitimate. The Chinese Communist Party is illegitimate. They are an illegitimate dictatorship. I believe in the natural order of humanity and freedom — that at some point it's the natural state that ultimately prevails. But our enemies use our freedoms so successfully against us, and the real issue of our time will be — as they use these freedoms against us, how will we have to fence them in to prevent them from being completely polluted? The psyop of social media on us, what they do against us in that — it's enormous, and we're kind of allowing it under the rubric of our freedoms. So are we going to have to degrade a portion of our freedoms in order to protect ourselves? This is going to be the real hard part against a very motivated and sociopathic adversary that's illegitimate.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: What's an example of a degradation of our freedom for protection?