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BT Ben Thompson Ben Thompson Writes Stratechery, a subscription newsletter analyzing the business strategy behind tech and media companies, and has built a reputation for framing how platfo...

“What if you're wrong that actually it's not just the next two years that matter? There's such an excuse that comes with, 'actually, I don't need to make any trade-offs because there are no trade-offs because there's no long term.' All that matters is the next three years. And when you have this mindset, you throw away your chip industry, you throw away your ecosystem advantages … because it doesn't matter.”

Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

“What if you're wrong that actually it's not just the next two years that matter? There's such an excuse that comes with, 'actually, I don't need to make any trade-offs because there are no trade-offs because there's no long term.' All that matters is the next three years. And when you have this mindset, you throw away your chip industry, you throw away your ecosystem advantages … because it doesn't matter.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson

Context

Thompson describes the logic of the chip-ban hardliners: recursive self-improvement is coming, superintelligence ends the game, so only the next few years count. He argues that belief lets people wave away long-run costs.

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Transcript

Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson Around 1:07:54 into the episode
Ben Thompson

mindset. What if you're wrong?

Andrew Sharp

What if you're wrong about the chip ban?

Ben Thompson

What if you're wrong that actually the world, it's not just the next two years that matter? Like there's such an excuse that comes with, actually, I don't need to make any trade-offs because there are no trade-offs because there's no long term. Yeah. All that matters is the next three years. And when you have this mindset, you throw away your chip industry, you throw away your ecosystem advantages in the fullness of time, like over the next or in the very, very long run, because it doesn't matter. You just have an excuse to do all these sorts of things. And meanwhile, you have, so I think you had a fusion. You had the EA Doomer anthropic sort of area, which believes this. Then you had the actual real national security apparatus is super anti-China and is like, you know, all they're thinking about is war with China.

Andrew Sharp

And members of the Trump administration, I would say the majority of the Trump issues. Well, this is totally different Jensen. Right.

Ben Thompson

So it's bipartisan. Like, because usually that national security

Andrew Sharp

well, I mean, Jensen really torched his relationship with members of the intelligence apparatus on the left under Biden. Right. And then under Trump, it's been friendlier, but people like Marco Rubio, people like Scott Besson, I think everybody's been sort of tapping their foot saying, when are we…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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“If NVIDIA never got to be a bullet train, they just built the fastest freaking car on the planet. Which meant no good governance, no succession plan, none of this. But that's also why they were such a dynamic company.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson “Succession planning isn't just, it's not identifying who's the next Steve Jobs. What it is, is professionalizing the organization so it is an entity in its own right. It's not an exoskeleton that depends on the guy in the middle.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson