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CS Cliff Sosin On Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy)

“I found it helpful to assume everyone has really great intelligence and ask what's left. The pushback is often some version of, but you don't understand how hard this is, and you don't understand how complicated this is. … And my hand-wavy and approximately right response is, okay, sure, but that's all just intelligence. And to follow this logic all the way through to the end is if intelligence becomes cheap and ubiquitous, what you want to own are the complements to intelligence.”

Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) · Money & Markets · October 2026

“I found it helpful to assume everyone has really great intelligence and ask what's left. The pushback is often some version of, but you don't understand how hard this is, and you don't understand how complicated this is. … And my hand-wavy and approximately right response is, okay, sure, but that's all just intelligence. And to follow this logic all the way through to the end is if intelligence becomes cheap and ubiquitous, what you want to own are the complements to intelligence.” — Cliff Sosin, Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy)

Context

The investor laid out the thesis of the episode: if everyone has a team of 200-IQ agents in their pocket, what's left to own? His list of complements is data, attention, emotional attachment, physical proximity, scale and, more cynically, regulatory capture. Businesses that depend on customer lethargy are the ones he expects to suffer.

Transcript

Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) Around 03:37 into the episode
Cliff Sosin

…There are many, many circumstances where simulation is super useful for approximations. And in those circumstances, you can use intelligence to solve them. But there are many more where it doesn't work. And so intelligence is limited in that fundamental unknowableness, I guess, about the universe.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

So back to this notion of it's just intelligence. What does that mean about where you think we're going from a more practical standpoint?

Cliff Sosin

…of intelligence. And so as I've been thinking about companies and investments, I found it helpful to assume everyone has really great intelligence and ask what's left. The pushback is often some version of, but you don't understand how hard this is, and you don't understand how complicated this is, and you don't understand how many smart people have had to think for so long about this. And my hand-wavy and approximately right response is, okay, sure, but that's all just intelligence. And to follow this logic all the way through to the end is if intelligence becomes cheap and ubiquitous, what you want to own are the complements to intelligence. And so the complements to intelligence are their data, attention, love, affection, whatever sort of emotional attachment you want. It's physical proximity, it's scale. It's a little cynical, but if it's regulatory capture, it's these sorts of things where for some businesses, what happens is their finite ability to deploy intelligence, be it economics, just the cost of it, they're only a certain…

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Maybe pick Meta or something as the perfect example of a company that I think you believe owns perfect complements to ubiquitous cheap intelligence, just to bring the example to life.

Cliff Sosin

I'm actually going to set aside for a moment Muse and agents and that whole thing and focus on the business. And the core business at Meta is personalized TV. Personalized TV. It used to be social media, but now it's personalized TV. And it turns out that people really like watching Instagram or…

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

I want to talk about the labs. So back to the original point, I think lots of great investors would say intelligence, specifically frontier intelligence, is not a commodity. Historically, the conversation has been about the gap in intelligence between closed source and open source. Increasingly…

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

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