Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· 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?
· Darren Farber
[00:00:00] S1: This concept of when you're in the four walls of the country, there's the general expectation of a freedom of speech. That creates the freedom for disinformation. Now that you can amplify disinformation through the concept of freedom of speech, do you create this alternative world where people are disconnected from reality? Think about where people get their news from. There are no gates on any of this anymore. It's not something the Founders could have ever contemplated. They are true geniuses in that the gridlock is super intentional. Compare us to every other parliamentary democracy in the West. Every parliamentary democracy in the West has a ceremonial senate. In the UK, it's the House of Lords. They don't have real power. House of Commons has the power, and then when the party of power is in power, it is a monopoly of power because they also choose the prime minister. You don't vote for the prime minister in a parliamentary democracy. In the United States, our upper body is completely separate with a different term that's longer by design. Right there you have a separation of powers, and then the executive is technically voted on by the people. It is the purest expression of democracy. You vote for the president directly, and the vice president. You put them down. You have an executive branch that is separated from the party. This president and previous presidents do things that the parties don't like, and you do not get that in parliamentary democracies. Parliamentary democracies are more susceptible to being overtaken in these mass hysteria moments into things like fascism — these directions where the gridlock was designed to prevent someone from co-opting the activity, and it makes us slow to respond. But the overarching architecture is we are fundamentally legitimate, and these guys are not legitimate. When people talk about, "Their society's eclipsing ours," I'm like, "Dude, are you high? You are not free there. You can't say what you want."
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: A very popular book these days, and justifiably so, is Freedom's Forge, about the mobilization around World War II — the story of how our industrial base moved so fast to arm companies retooling themselves. It's a great book. The history of peacetime mobilizations in democratic societies is mixed or bad. I guess we're not in peacetime right now, but we're not in some global-scale war. What are the things that you hope happen from here for the US to be the best overall positioned in the world?