Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

My guest today is Walter Russell Mead. Walter is a columnist at the Wall Street Journal and the author of Special Providence and God and Gold, two of the best books written on American power.

He has spent decades studying how the United States came to dominate the world, and our conversation is about whether it can keep doing so.

Walter lays out the five step playbook that carried the Dutch, then the British, then America to global leadership, and why the same pattern keeps beating centralized continental powers.

We discuss how Trump turned fame into power, the four schools of American foreign policy and the rise of the tech Hamiltonians, what the drone war in Ukraine means for the Pentagon, and why the erosion of deterrence is the deeper story in the Middle East.

Please enjoy my conversation with Walter Russell Mead.

For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

-----

Become a Colossus member to get our quarterly print magazine and private audio experience, including exclusive profiles and early access to select episodes. Subscribe at ⁠colossus.com/subscribe⁠.

-----

⁠Ramp’s⁠ mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠ramp.com/invest⁠⁠ to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus.

-----

Trusted by thousands of businesses, ⁠Vanta⁠ continuously monitors your security posture and streamlines audits so you can win enterprise deals and build customer trust without the traditional overhead. Invest Like the Best listeners get a special offer of $1,000 off Vanta when you go to ⁠vanta.com/invest⁠.

-----

WorkOS⁠ is the infrastructure B2B and AI-native companies use to sell to enterprise. It covers everything enterprise security requires: SSO, SCIM, RBAC, Audit Logs, AI governance, and more. Trusted by 2,000+ fast-growing companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel.

-----

Rogo is the AI platform for finance. They're building agents for Wall Street that are trained to understand how bankers and investors actually do work: from diligence and modeling, to turning analysis into deliverables. To learn more, visit rogo.ai/invest.

-----

⁠Ridgeline⁠ has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Visit⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ridgeline.ai⁠.

-----

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant.

Timestamps:

(00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like the Best

(00:02:16) America and the World Today

(00:05:34) Trump’s Method of Power

(00:09:43) Why America Keeps Winning

(00:12:25) The Five-Point Plan for Global Dominance

(00:20:11) China and American Power

(00:22:10) The Risk of American Isolationism

(00:25:50) Technology and Global Power

(00:28:42) Riding the Technological Wild Horse

(00:34:29) Four Schools of American Foreign Policy

(00:40:22) The Rise of Tech Hamiltonians

(00:43:51) India and the Next Great Powers

(00:48:54) The Risks of the Information Revolution

(00:51:30) How Technology Is Changing War

(00:55:06) Taiwan

(00:57:20) The Future of American Society

(01:00:44) What It Means to Be American

(01:03:25) Iran and the Middle East

(01:06:28) The Erosion of Deterrence

(01:08:53) America’s Role in the Next 20 Years

(01:12:08) AI and Global Power

(01:14:26) Reasons for Optimism

(01:16:33) The Kindest Thing

My guest today is Sarah Guo, founder and managing partner of Conviction, the venture firm she built to back AI-native companies from their earliest days.

Sarah has become one of the most sought-after early-stage investors in AI, often the first check into the companies defining the frontier.

In this conversation, we go inside that frontier: what the small group of people actually building AI believe right now, why some of the field's best researchers are wrestling with their own sense of purpose, and how close we are to robots in the home and a genuine acceleration in scientific discovery.

At the center is Sarah's conviction that no single company will own the future of AI, and what that means for founders, investors, and anyone allocating their time and resources in a world moving this fast.

Our managing editor Dom Cooke wrote a profile of Sarah for Colossus, "Sarah's Wager," on how she built the firm closest to the AI frontier and why she's now betting against its biggest companies.

Please enjoy this conversation with Sarah Guo.

For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

-----

Become a Colossus member to get our quarterly print magazine and private audio experience, including exclusive profiles and early access to select episodes. Subscribe at ⁠colossus.com/subscribe⁠.

-----

⁠Ramp’s⁠ mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠ramp.com/invest⁠⁠ to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus.

-----

Trusted by thousands of businesses, ⁠Vanta⁠ continuously monitors your security posture and streamlines audits so you can win enterprise deals and build customer trust without the traditional overhead. Invest Like the Best listeners get a special offer of $1,000 off Vanta when you go to ⁠vanta.com/invest⁠.

-----

WorkOS⁠ is the infrastructure B2B and AI-native companies use to sell to enterprise. It covers everything enterprise security requires: SSO, SCIM, RBAC, Audit Logs, AI governance, and more. Trusted by 2,000+ fast-growing companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel.

-----

Rogo is the AI platform for finance. They're building agents for Wall Street that are trained to understand how bankers and investors actually do work: from diligence and modeling, to turning analysis into deliverables. To learn more, visit rogo.ai/invest.

-----

⁠Ridgeline⁠ has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Visit⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ridgeline.ai⁠.

-----

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant.

Timestamps:

(00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like the Best

(00:02:16) Investing Without a Backtest

(00:03:31) The AI Wager

(00:06:16) Building the Best Investment Firm

(00:08:37) Finding Non-Obvious AI Opportunities

(00:11:00) The Frontier AI Talent Race

(00:13:50) Compute as the Constraint

(00:19:10) The Future of Robotics

(00:22:15) Making Investment Decisions

(00:26:13) How Sarah Spends Her Time

(00:28:15) Raising a Venture Fund

(00:30:49) Lessons From Her Parents

(00:34:38) The Case for Open Source AI

(00:39:01) Abundant Intelligence Isn't Inevitable

(00:40:55) Compute Independence

(00:43:14) Debates Inside Conviction

(00:45:27) AI's Opportunity in Biology

(00:48:58) Why Conviction

(00:50:31) Finding Truth and Taking Risk

(00:54:16) What Changes in the Next Year

(00:56:46) The Kindest Thing

My guest today is Neil Movva, founder of Sail. Sail is building what Neil calls a token factory, an inference company designed for a specific kind of future, one where AI agents run in the background for hours or days at a time rather than answering a human in real time.

In that world, latency matters less and cost matters more, and Neil has built the whole company around driving the cost of a token as low as it can possibly go.

What makes this conversation special is that it is one of the most detailed tours I have ever done through the full stack of intelligence, the software, the chips, and the power, and how all three connect.

Along the way we cover the trade-off between speed and cost that lives inside every GPU, his scavenger strategy for buying the chips and power nobody else wants, his contrarian view on Nvidia, and why the premium the frontier labs charge for being three to six months ahead may not last.

Please enjoy my conversation with Neil Movva.

For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

-----

Become a Colossus member to get our quarterly print magazine and private audio experience, including exclusive profiles and early access to select episodes. Subscribe at ⁠colossus.com/subscribe⁠.

-----

⁠Ramp’s⁠ mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠ramp.com/invest⁠⁠ to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus.

-----

Trusted by thousands of businesses, ⁠Vanta⁠ continuously monitors your security posture and streamlines audits so you can win enterprise deals and build customer trust without the traditional overhead. Invest Like the Best listeners get a special offer of $1,000 off Vanta when you go to ⁠vanta.com/invest⁠.

-----

WorkOS⁠ is the infrastructure B2B and AI-native companies use to sell to enterprise. It covers everything enterprise security requires: SSO, SCIM, RBAC, Audit Logs, AI governance, and more. Trusted by 2,000+ fast-growing companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel.

-----

Rogo is the AI platform for finance. They're building agents for Wall Street that are trained to understand how bankers and investors actually do work: from diligence and modeling, to turning analysis into deliverables. To learn more, visit rogo.ai/invest.

-----

⁠Ridgeline⁠ has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Visit⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ridgeline.ai⁠.

-----

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant.

Timestamps:

(00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like The Best

(00:02:20) Neil Movva

(00:03:22) Building a Token Factory

(00:05:32) The Rise of Long-Running Agents

(00:08:47) Deep Research and Cybersecurity

(00:15:12) The Full Stack of Intelligence

(00:20:03) Throughput Versus Latency

(00:24:58) The Future of AI Chips

(00:33:19) Why Transformers Work

(00:36:43) The Future of Data

(00:44:05) The Market for AI Chips

(00:47:56) Is the AI Boom Different?

(00:51:08) Reinventing the Data Center

(00:56:43) Scavenging Power

(01:01:04) Where Compute Is Most Inefficient

(01:07:02) Open Versus Closed Models

(01:10:37) A Trillion Tokens a Day

(01:12:42) The Contrarian Case on NVIDIA

(01:14:38) Advice for AI Hardware Founders

My guest today is Ben Thompson, the founder and author of Stratechery. Ben is one of my favorite business thinkers and I love talking to him about everything happening in markets and technology.

We go through every important company, including OpenAI, Nvidia, Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. We also discuss why he thinks it would be dangerous for the United States to win the AI race outright, what container shipping and the railroads of the 1870s tell us about the buildout, and why the binding constraint on all of this may be capital rather than compute.

Please enjoy my conversation with Ben Thompson.

For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

-----

Become a Colossus member to get our quarterly print magazine and private audio experience, including exclusive profiles and early access to select episodes. Subscribe at ⁠colossus.com/subscribe⁠.

-----

⁠Ramp’s⁠ mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠ramp.com/invest⁠⁠ to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus.

-----

Trusted by thousands of businesses, ⁠Vanta⁠ continuously monitors your security posture and streamlines audits so you can win enterprise deals and build customer trust without the traditional overhead. Invest Like the Best listeners get a special offer of $1,000 off Vanta when you go to ⁠vanta.com/invest⁠.

-----

WorkOS⁠ is the infrastructure B2B and AI-native companies use to sell to enterprise. It covers everything enterprise security requires: SSO, SCIM, RBAC, Audit Logs, AI governance, and more. Trusted by 2,000+ fast-growing companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel.

-----

Rogo is the AI platform for finance. They're building agents for Wall Street that are trained to understand how bankers and investors actually do work: from diligence and modeling, to turning analysis into deliverables. To learn more, visit rogo.ai/invest.

-----

⁠Ridgeline⁠ has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Visit⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ridgeline.ai⁠.

-----

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant.

Timestamps:

(00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like The Best

(00:02:16) Winning the AI Race With China

(00:08:28) Timing, Capital, and the Railroads

(00:11:34) Berkshire, Google, and Absolute Profits

(00:14:23) Verifiable and Unverifiable Domains

(00:20:20) Aggregation Theory in the AI Era

(00:22:06) The Real Cost of Inference

(00:25:40) Why Consumer AI Needs Advertising

(00:30:08) Compute Shortages and Commodity Markets

(00:35:46) Memory Cycles and Boom Bust Dynamics

(00:42:08) TSMC, Intel, and Where Risk Goes

(00:44:51) The Best Setups in Big Tech

(00:52:14) The Frontier Model Contenders

(00:54:27) Microsoft's IBM Playbook

(01:00:45) Meta, Attention, and Advertising

(01:07:29) NVIDIA, Commodities, and Power

My guest today is Eric Vishria, a General Partner at Benchmark.

Eric has spent his career in software and cloud, and few people know the history of these markets as well as he does. What makes him special is his ability to use that history to make sense of today.

We discuss what the rise of AWS teaches us about AI, what he has learned from investing in Fireworks, Sierra, and Cerebras, and how the criteria for winning have changed for founders and investors.

Please enjoy my conversation with Eric Vishria.

For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

-----

Become a Colossus member to get our quarterly print magazine and private audio experience, including exclusive profiles and early access to select episodes. Subscribe at ⁠colossus.com/subscribe⁠.

-----

⁠Ramp’s⁠ mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠ramp.com/invest⁠⁠ to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus.

-----

Trusted by thousands of businesses, ⁠Vanta⁠ continuously monitors your security posture and streamlines audits so you can win enterprise deals and build customer trust without the traditional overhead. Invest Like the Best listeners get a special offer of $1,000 off Vanta when you go to ⁠vanta.com/invest⁠.

-----

WorkOS⁠ is the infrastructure B2B and AI-native companies use to sell to enterprise. It covers everything enterprise security requires: SSO, SCIM, RBAC, Audit Logs, AI governance, and more. Trusted by 2,000+ fast-growing companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel.

-----

Rogo is the AI platform for finance. They're building agents for Wall Street that are trained to understand how bankers and investors actually do work: from diligence and modeling, to turning analysis into deliverables. To learn more, visit rogo.ai/invest.

-----

⁠Ridgeline⁠ has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Visit⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ridgeline.ai⁠.

-----

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant.

Timestamps:

(00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like The Best

(00:02:20) Learning the World Through Fireworks

(00:05:42) AWS Was Going to Eat Everything

(00:07:40) The Zero-Sum Thinking Trap

(00:09:01) Comparing Cloud and AI Adoption

(00:11:03) Becoming Enterprise's AI Sherpa

(00:13:05) Building Sandcastles

(00:14:55) The Return to Being Technical

(00:17:13) The Shifting Competitive Frontier

(00:22:10) Why the Old Playbook Fails

(00:27:53) Energy as the Binding Constraint

(00:29:38) The Cerebras Story

(00:37:57) The Virtue of Productive Naivete

(00:39:19) What Robotics Still Needs

(00:45:58) What Makes a Great Board Partner

(00:51:13) Raising A Growth Fund

(00:55:39) What the Big Winners Taught Him

(00:57:37) Hard Work Versus the Hole-in-One

(00:58:38) The Best Reasons to Go Public

(01:01:09) Debates Inside Benchmark

(01:02:16) What If It All Works

(01:03:35) What Geoff Hinton Got Wrong