Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:00:01 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:01] S0: Ramp is the only platform built to make your finance team leaner, faster, and better, saving businesses 5% annually on average so you can stay focused on growth. Ramp just opened for business in The United Kingdom. So if you're running running a business in The UK, you can now use Ramp's AI powered finance platform to manage cards, expenses, bills, approvals, and accounting all in one place. I run my business on Ramp and so should you. Learn more at ramp.com/invest. Rogo is the AI platform purpose built for financial institutions serving tens of thousands of bankers and investors at hundreds of leading firms worldwide. Rogo's AI agents autonomously execute large chunk of your firm's workflows. They can screen deals, draft SIEMs, run buyer outreach, and due diligence on data rooms, all with full security and compliance handled. Every action feeds Rogo intelligence, the firm's context layer, turning years of deal experience into a secure, governed institutional memory that makes each new transaction stronger than the last. To learn more, visit rogo.com/invest. OpenAI, Cursor, Antti, and Vercel all have something in common. They all use WorkOS. To achieve enterprise adoption at scale, you have to deliver on core capabilities like SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and audit logs. Instead of spending months building these mission critical capabilities yourself, you can just use WorkOS APIs to gain all of them on day zero. Visit workos.com to get started. Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like The Best. This show is an open ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and wanna go deeper, check out Colossus, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus along with all of our podcasts at colossus.com.
00:01:54 · S1, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:01:54] S1: Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of positive sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc. [00:02:22] S0: Walter, I've been looking forward to this for many, many months. We're introduced through Jeremy Stern, who runs Colossus, who I know credits you with a lot of his skill in writing and thinking about the world. I've been so excited to do this with you. We've got such a wide range of topics that I thought it would be appropriate to begin by having you frame your view of America in the world today. In very, very broad strokes, you've written a lot about how and why The UK and then sort of us as the successor in America have sort of won the last several hundred years of global affairs. I'd love you to talk about the sweep of that winning. How you conceive
00:02:57 · Walter Russell Mead, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:02:57] S2: of us and our role in the world today. It's a really interesting time because on the one hand, the Pax Americana that we kind of developed after 1945 and then refurbished in 1990, the end of the Cold War, is really in crisis, but if you step back a little bit, American power is not in crisis. The networks that we built up, the way of dealing with the world, the institutionalized relations with Europe and so on, those are all burning or crumbling, but The United States as a power, it seems to me, is if anything, thanks to the information revolution and sort of this extraordinary raises in productivity that I believe we have experienced and are about to experience, I think we're still charging ahead. It's this odd picture of a dynamic country in a collapsing world system. The Trump presidency has kind of exaggerated a lot of the disruption. I'm optimistic about America's position medium to long term. I do think we're in rough waters right now. [00:04:02] S0: What do you mean by collapsing world system?
00:04:02 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Walter Russell Mead
[00:04:02] S0: What do you mean by collapsing world system? [00:04:04] S2: Well, you think about the World Trade Organization, we used to have this rules based system for trade. Now your tariff is more or less what President Trump wakes up in the morning and thinks it should be. As a country, we exercise more of our power through institutions, the NATO alliance, the UN even at times, and we're not doing that. Since World War II, it's been sort of a principle of American foreign policy that we want to be steady, predictable, you want everybody to know where America's red lines are, you want everybody to be able to rely. If we made a commitment in 1955, unless we announce with great fanfare that it's changing, it's still there. So we're trying to provide this bedrock of solidity in the world, and we're obviously not trying to do that anymore for President Trump. I think he believes he maximizes his advantages by being completely unpredictable and also crossing a lot of lines so that past presidents probably would not have said things like, Okay, if you don't raise your defense budget, we're going to double your tariffs, or something of that kind, and try to solve problems through channels. Trump would make the argument that didn't work, and so he's now completely trashing the institutional networks that for a very long time were the vessels of American power, and I think he's doing it in a way that's going to be very hard for his successors to rebuild.
00:05:39 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Walter Russell Mead
[00:05:39] S0: How would you teach someone else his method? You've written a lot about this. I'm very curious how you framed it. He's an interesting president, no doubt whether you're for or against what he's been doing. How would you teach his method to somebody that was curious to learn how he operates? So distinctive. [00:05:55] S2: He really is a genius. He's discovered, I think, one of the secrets of power in the contemporary world, which is he's managed to turn fame into power, drama into power, and to do it in ways that leave him completely free to act. If you lie enough, the marginal cost of your ten thousandth lie is nothing, while the marginal law of your first, second or third, the marginal cost is very high. All of the normal constraints on political figures, reputational and so on, he does not pay. In some ways I think President Clinton first discovered that shame only matters if you let it. Shame is an emotion that exists in other people's minds. A lot of people thought when the Monica Lewinsky thing came out, he would have no choice but to resign, this was so overwhelming, so dreadful. He basically realized, no, if you just keep putting one in front of the other, you just pass through it. The dogs will bark, but the caravan will move on. Trump has deployed that concept industrial scale. [00:07:09] S0: You talk about this notion of speech and spectacle. Can you say more just about what you mean there?
00:07:09 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Walter Russell Mead
[00:07:09] S0: You talk about this notion of speech and spectacle. Can you say more just about what you mean there? [00:07:13] S2: The Donald Trump show is the most compelling entertainment, infotainment spectacle that humanity has ever seen. Since the dawn of time, no living human being has occupied the amount of bandwidth of the human race that Donald Trump does, and we can say, global media and so on, but you know, it's very hard to think ever of a single ruler who just dominated everything. Anywhere you go in the world today, I don't care where it is, what you hear is Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. Some people hate Trump, some people love Trump, some people laugh at Trump, some people are astonished by Trump, some people spend their lives thinking about their contempt for Trump, but he remains the center of everything. And he sees that as the key to his unique power. A lot of people thought that when he lost in 2020, it would go away, that that was it. He was just about as dominant out of office as he had been in office. At what he does, he is as good as Napoleon was at what he did. I observed that Napoleon also lost at Waterloo and ended in exile, so this is no guarantee that it will be what Trump would consider a happy ending to the whole spectacle, but he is a major historic figure who has developed a new understanding of how power works in an era of mass communications and social media, and the rest of us are just trying to deal with it. [00:08:43] S0: How do you think the world is or will be the most different because of his role in it?