Revisiting The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: Be A Traveler & Adventurer
Man, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is a great movie. I’ve written about it before. Starring & directed by Ben Stiller, the synopsis is “A timid magazine photo manager lives life vicariously through daydreams, embarking on a true life adventure.” He visits Greenland, Iceland, Yemen, Afghanistan and climbs the Himalayas. The scenery is amazing, truly breathtaking. He rides a helicopter, fights off a shark, skateboards across wild landscapes, escapes an erupting volcano, meets Afghan Warlords.
No surprise his daydreams disappear. He is “Indiana Jones becomes the lead singer of the Strokes.” And we all come along for the ride as we witness his transformation from a boring meek man to a confident, cool adventurer traveler. His posture literally changes.
I think the reason I really enjoyed this movie was that he reminded me of myself when I was growing up. I felt trapped in Vancouver, bored and helpless. So what do you do? You daydream. Like a lot. And like Walter Mitty as I left my comfortable environment and really started to see the world and actually do stuff, these silly daydreams disappeared. By traveling, doing, experiencing, I manifested things into my life. I made my daydreams reality just like Water Mitty.
I’m so glad this movie exists. It came out in 2013 which was such a different time in the world. When we were probably at peak globalization, the world was our oyster and the future seemed bright and endless. It’s like a time capsule for a world that doesn’t exist anymore.
So I highly recommend it. And for those who want to change their lives. Who wants to be better just like Walter Mitty, do as he does. Get out into the world. Travel and have some grand adventures. You won’t regret it.
The Rise of the new Renaissance Man
I don’t think anyone can disagree that we are in the midst of rapid change in all aspects of society. And it’s only going to get more intense. That is why specialists are toast. We will see the rise of super generalists.
Hispanic Nomad gives a great take on X for this. Actually a great guide on some initial skills to work on: https://x.com/hispanicnomad/status/2018456652882854070.
“The modern world rewards specialists.
But difficult times demand renaissance men.
Here are the skills you need to master in 2026:
Combat sports - discipline, confidence, and the ability to protect yourself
Digital income - build location-independent revenue streams
Gardening - produce your own food when supply chains fail
Multiple languages - access opportunities across borders
International tax optimization - keep what you earn
Basic medical knowledge - treat yourself when doctors aren't available
Cooking - nutrition and self-sufficiency in any country
Technical repair skills - fix things instead of depending on others
Navigation without GPS - survive when technology fails
Financial literacy - protect your wealth through economic chaos
The jack-of-all-trades loses to the specialist in stable times.
But when systems collapse, the renaissance man survives while specialists starve”
Net net: Renaissance men rule in times of chaos. It’s gonna be a nutty time, so go build and stack some skills.
The Modern Deal Guy: The New Finance Solopreneur
The phrase "modern deal guy" ties directly to Jeremy Giffon, "We're firmly in the “deal guy” era. You can raise venture to make deals, you can do foreign policy via deals, build frontier tech via deals." It’s been popularized by him and Will Manidis, two guys, who I consider some of the smartest private investors around.
This reflects a broader cultural/trend observation in tech, finance, and even geopolitics: success increasingly comes from deal-making, networks, structuring transactions, and leveraging connections rather than just building from scratch or traditional VC paths. A related post from another user captures the vibe: "the modern deal guy traffics first in arcane networks and only secondarily in capital... only a few can find you the best tailor north of 44th, the best loan workout guy in SF, the perfect pdf for your current crisis."
Basically you are a solopreneur but one who tracks in deal flow. A one person merchant bank leveraging the technology at one’s fingertips now. It’s a fascinating concept that only comes to the fore in times of massive technological, economic and geopolitical change. The brave, insightful and connected takes advantage of this potential short term disequilibrium aka opportunity in the market. The modern deal guy is perfectly set up to take advantage of any glitch in the matrix.They have no institutional baggage or bureaucracy holding them back, so they can move quickly.
For example, I have a friend of a friend who is an ex-supply chain guy working with a Central Asian country to build out a local auto manufacturing industry. He gets a cut of all the income generated from each of these factories he sets up. Imagine getting a percentage of this. This could net billions of dollars to him. Literal billions.
Or the many individuals getting stock or secondaries allocation of hot companies like SpaceX, Stripe, Anduril or Anthropic and raising $$ via SPVs to invest. You sometimes get management fees but most of the time, you only get paid carry. Basically where you share the upside returns. I’m a bit concerned at the wild west nature of SPVs in 2025 & 2026 but it’s illustrative of the modern deal guy concept.
I know people who have made a crap ton of money sending potential candidate companies to PE firms for possible acquisition. A kind of affiliate referral fee play but with much bigger percentages and numbers.
All of these examples are outcome driven. You don’t get paid until the deal happens. It’s literally eating what you kill. This is the ultimate edge of capitalism. Asymmetric risk at its finest. You can just do things! :)
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 17th, 2026
“When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.”--Willie Nelson
"Startup activity itself remains strong. It has never been cheaper to build a product. The tools available to founders, especially AI-driven tools, dramatically lower the cost of experimentation and iteration. Robotics and intelligent hardware are also emerging as significant long-term trends.
We are at the beginning of another innovation cycle. Venture capital plays a role in a small fraction of startup formation. While VC is still digesting the excesses of the COVID-era bubble and concentrating capital in AI, particularly in large foundation model companies, entrepreneurship more broadly is alive and well.
The number of newly VC-backed startups may be down. The number of new startups, however, is not. The long-term outlook for builders remains bright."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/02/21/o-startup-where-are-thou-vc/
2. A masterclass in investing. Andrew Reed shares lots of learnings and experience working at Sequoia Capital.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JReNZ9X2IE0
3."maintain good posture. stand tall. get up from your desk and walk around, stretch, do light exercises.
do these things to reclaim your self respect. be a sovereign person. do not be owned by evil companies or influence. do not listen to the critics. build your life systems. make them habits. don’t let yourself talk you out of it. as you gain strength, it will require less energy to maintain."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-183942857
4."Real status - as it always has - comes from separating yourself from the masses and doing things they do not and ideally cannot do.
In the near future, that will increasingly mean being OFFLINE as much as possible.
Invisibility and ignorance will become not only luxury items, but virtues — noble and holy ones — acquired and refined through offline living.
Those who have no idea what’s happening online, or in the world for that matter, will be truly alive and elite.
Now, arguably this has always been the case with the upper upper echelons (as argued by Russel above), but in the last couple decades, the classes just below the absolute upper elite have been deriving status through online fame and ‘followings’
But…now that everyone is online…things are changing..
And the beautiful thing about value is that it always migrates to the zone of greatest scarcity."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-184949077
5."You are the genetically upgraded version of both your parents combined. Their best traits are alive in you, stacked on top of tools they never got to touch. The internet alone hands you more knowledge than the entire library system they grew up next to. You have AI, global reach, remote income, mentors you’ll never shake hands with but who can reroute your entire life with a single piece of advice. You have options that would’ve made your parents’ heads spin at your age.
The question is whether you keep running their outdated software or start writing your own code. Fulfilling your own upgraded and Dynastic Destiny.
And writing your own starts with the most uncomfortable thing a grown man can do.
Killing the boy inside him who still needs to hear his mother say it’s okay or his father approve before he makes a single move."
https://www.thefinalman.com/p/you-must-kill-the-boy-parents-edition
6."We keep hearing that AI will make execution easy. Code generation, content creation, workflow automation — the cost of building and shipping is collapsing toward zero. Great. But if execution becomes trivially cheap, the entire game shifts to prediction. Knowing what to build becomes the only competitive advantage. And what if the things most worth predicting are exactly the things that can’t be predicted?
This has practical implications. Companies banking on AI to replace strategic judgment are likely to be disappointed. The organizations that win won’t be the ones with the best prediction models. They’ll be the ones that combine cheap execution with rapid iteration — running the irreducible computation faster than their competitors by actually doing things and learning from what happens.
In other words, the future might not belong to those who predict best. It might belong to those who experiment fastest.
AI makes the experiments cheaper. But nobody gets to skip them."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/ais-dirty-secret-some-things-cant
7."Which game you play is obviously important and, often, the answer to many of your problems lies in finding a new game. Join a new team, find a new mountain to climb. Stop wasting time trying to fit your square ass into a circular hole. But more often than not, it’s how you play the game, and your approach, that matters more.
Psychology trumps strategy 80% of the time. Or in other words, knowing what to do is easy, especially in the age of free, infinite information: the hard part is doing it. That’s why fat people have bookshelves full of health, diet and fitness books or programs and courses that they signed up for but never followed through on. The hardest part is always the psychology and your outlook."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-151502957
8.Another OG and insider of insiders of Silicon Valley. Bret Taylor is at the center of all things enterprise and AI in SV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJwiP0zqVp4
9.A wide ranging conversation to understand global macro. The USD, Reindustrialization and the growing importance of the Office of Strategic Capital.
Put this together with Michael Every and you will have a good sense of the future of the world economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xcaycr8iMKs&t=221s
10."The fear of the future is directly proportional to how small your ambitions are. If your plan is to keep doing exactly what you’re doing, any change is terrifying. If your plan is dramatically bigger, change is the best news you’ve ever gotten.
Red Robin just proved it in the public markets. Their stock collapsed 96% because management chose the spreadsheet over the customer. That’s what happens when you optimize for the 1.05x present instead of the 10x future you could be building."
https://garryslist.org/posts/red-robin-died-by-spreadsheet-don-t-make-the-same-mistake
11."When my partner and I were watching the Gala last night, he said it felt too tech-infused—it reminded him of The Jetsons, the 1960s cartoon with its relentless, cheerful obsession with a technological utopia. I think he's underselling it. What I see in China right now is closer to Victorian Britain: a society exuding moral seriousness and deep belief in modernization and technological uplift.
What connects these stories is what they reveal about disposition. The Chinese society, from a world-renowned auteur to the hundreds of millions watching the Gala, is broadly, strikingly optimistic about AI. The reflexive existential dread so pervasive in Western discourse is largely absent."
https://afraw.substack.com/p/an-ai-maxi-new-year
12. "If you want to inherit (or want your heirs or favored philanthropic causes to inherit) a non-negligible share of the pie—that is, if you are concerned with your place in the future distribution, rather than your absolute future budget—the broad implications of this section are straightforward. While you are not among the world’s richest actors, start accumulating capital as early as possible.
Get into (or start) those private firms with the AI intangibles. Invest unusually risk-tolerantly: you will probably go bust, but it is your only hope of catching up. Especially among illiquid investments, prioritize those in which the capital is mobile and not quickly bottlenecked by natural resources, if there is a risk that some shock or tax will hit the country where it is located. And if you do make it to the top, save almost everything; invest it in the precise way that balances the need to keep growing with the need to avoid going bust; and try hard to tie your hands and the hands of your inheritors."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-182789127
13.More Michael Every geopolitics and global macro. Understanding the world we are in. Lots of wars, lots of chaos, Neo mercantilism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RHH5feN3iM
14."The Gundo has a vibe. It’s young, testosterone-rich, patriotic and somewhat Christian. Some of this feels like theater to me, and, frankly, The Gundo receives too much attention. It’s not really the thing.
The thing is Los Angeles and its mass of interconnected cities."
https://www.corememory.com/p/los-angeles-is-fantastic-america-manufacturing
15."I guess I’m neither a short term investor or a long-term investor, maybe call it being a mid-term investor that sometime does long-term investing.
Ideally, these would be in under-followed businesses with strong leadership in it’s niche if you’re willing to look under the hood. I like to think of Japanese companies as Dennis Rodman, seemingly doing crazy Sh*t, but often just very misunderstood and INSANELY good at what they do. There are many Dennis Rodmans.
Typically, I’m looking for decent growth with a catalyst. My general belief is that investing is about investing in change and getting that right. This change is important here because it invites a new class of incremental investors. Which I’ve learnt to appreciate it to be crucial to the discovery process of undervalued (and underfollowed) businesses. More on this later. I like companies where there is no ‘consensus’ to begin with, and my favourite opportunity is when a company with no consensus ends up having some kind of consensus - which implies increased following on the company."
https://madeinjapan.substack.com/p/how-japanese-investors-think
16."If you can’t draft 18-year-olds in mass to fight overseas, you use technology and companies (like Palantir) to narrow the decision loop and kill chain to increase your force projection.
For tech investors, this makes Japan the ultimate structural bull case for military AI, robotics, and edge computing.
A Japanese rearmament is going to look very different. And much different than a post-Meiji Restoration style build up. Its largely tech based. But it also needs specialized resources too.
The political mandate for this revision is stronger than at any point since 1947. Takaichi is popular, her coalition partner is hawkish, and the opposition remains fragmented.
It's a big opportunity to get changes rolling. Great alpha for business and political analysis if you watch how the government funds, scales, and justifies this."
https://pplsartofwar.substack.com/p/ghosts-of-the-rising-sun
17."Not meditate more. Not journal. Not optimise your morning routine.
Raise. The. Stakes.
You likely haven’t pushed yourself hard physically for years, even decades.
And a hard gym session is a good start, but it doesn’t hold a candle to when you give your brain no choice but to lock in.
Martial Arts
Adventure & Expedition
Pushing your body to physical exhaustion
Each of these can also be tools to take your mind away from a gruelling business week, a nagging boss or just allow you to get out of your head for once in your life…
In a world where it’s pre-frontal cortex dominant, we need to maintain the ability to get out of our logical brain & into the primitive side of it."
https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/how-to-enter-flow-state
18."A great many Westerners regard AI (or perhaps more accurately, the billionaires who control it) with a mixture of deep suspicion and open hostility. A third of Americans surveyed believe the technology has the potential to end life on Earth. Contrast this to a Nikkei BP survey conducted at the end of 2025. “Japan is optimistic about AI, with 44% believing it is not a threat, unusual for a developed country.” (Apparently they missed the survey where 87% (!) of Chinese claimed to trust AI.) Whatever the case, if Japan is really more upbeat about AI than citizens of the English-speaking world, why might that be?
And I suspect that the fact Japan isn’t on the bleeding edge is the real answer to the question. Being behind the curve gives Japan a freedom to experiment with AI in ways that the disrupted West can’t. I’ve written about how Japan is a “super Galapagos,” meaning that having fallen behind other advanced nations is proving a kind of secret superpower; this is another facet of that thesis. Because of it, AI hasn’t disrupted Japanese society in the way it has the US. With no domestic Japanese AI mega-companies, there simply isn’t anyone capable of forcing the technology down throats, as is happening in the US. In 2025, six out of ten Americans surveyed said they wanted more control over how AI was used in their lives."
https://blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/japans-ai-affinity
19.A different narrative of geopolitics and global macro. Valuable to balance the pro-US narrative. Truth is usually somewhere in the middle. Reality is China is a fearsome competitor which the West created partially thru pure hubris, greed and incompetence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zlCVj6f27k
20."If you’re following the traditional path — going through the career center at your university, signing up on a list, waiting for a recruiter to sit through 30 people in 20-minute slots — you look like a cog. You look mass-produced. For that group, AI looks frightening, and maybe it should.
But if you are blazing your own trail, using the techniques in the book, becoming what I call a candidate of one — someone whose path looks completely unique because you’ve built it intentionally — then every tool in this book is amplified by AI. Learning has never been easier than right now, in the entire history of the world. If you’re running toward it, if you’re becoming the most AI-aware person in your field, this thing is nothing but a superpower."
21.“In the meantime, Palantir as a whole, which began as a mix between the brainchild of Thiel, the creation of Cohen, and the cult of Karp, had started more and more to become the culture of Shyam, who’d slipped off the chain of a boy scout personality. Teams of engineers working on a new product got used to him stopping by to use it, build a demo, break it, and write a report on what was wrong with it. Ten-thousand-word critiques of products or ideas, which came to be known as “Shyam Bombs,” would get emailed to every person in the company in the middle of the night, on weekend afternoons, or when everyone thought he was at a dinner he’d apparently decided to skip.
Fatwas” were new Shyam-issued rules or ideas followed by an invitation to argue with him about it with the whole company cc’d. To prove the “flatness” of the organization, he began a practice of prompting junior hires to tell him, with his face inches away, to go fuck himself. “Save the Shire,” “Metabolize pain, excrete product,” “There are no silver bullets, just millions of lead ones,” and other enduring Palantir memes began as Shyam-isms. He had each of the company’s lawyers officially retitled “Legal Ninja.” He started wearing the blazer with the hoodie sewn in.
“Shyam’s personality is very much built into the culture of the brutality with which we look at problems, which is what made the FDE structure actually scalable,” Karp told me. “His ability to understand what a product looks like, the way in which he intuits, and just as importantly anti-intuits what’s working and what’s not, and being very honest about it—I’ve seen people really struggle with that, but it’s just not something Shyam struggles with.”
“Shyam invented the term Forward Deployed Engineer and all the nomenclature that goes with it, but also the principles that outlined what it meant to be one,” Jain said. “He just poured his heart and soul into what users were trying to do in the field to identify what we actually needed to build to win, and then worked closely with Bob and me to figure out how to turn that into bigger product movements. And then all the other byproducts of that, like the real radical transparency in our culture, the spirit of building from the front line back to the product, the freedom for junior engineers and senior leadership to get in substantive fights with each other in front of everyone. Those were all things Shyam developed.”
“If you don’t know him, it seems like he’s being a little brash or aggressive,” said Ted Mabrey. “But the reason he can do it is because it’s not personal at all. He completely depersonalizes it.”
https://colossus.com/article/the-patriot-shyam-sankar-palantir/
22."As companies invest more in storytelling, I’m excited to see a shift from traditional marketing to light-hearted entertainment. Silly stunts. Celebrity collabs. Experiences and activations.
Whether you’re thinking outside of the box as a scrappy early stage company with little funding or have raised a monster round with lots of cash to spend, it’s time to think bigger and more creatively."
https://brianne.substack.com/p/films-and-stunts-are-the-future-of
23.The future of AI directly from one of the top people driving it forward. Dario of Anthropic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1E9IZfvGMA
24.This was my summer in Europe last year!
"It is important not to feel guilty. Wasting a morning only works when done with conviction. If you find yourself fretting about “shoulds” or “to-dos,” find the nearest cafe and order another coffee and stay exactly where you are. You are not being lazy, you are investing in the leisure. In the mental space where new ideas happen to wander in, wearing a linen shirt and asking if this seat is taken."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-170344327
25.The bull case for emerging markets. Re-allocation away from America due to capricious American economic and foreign policy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y73GC21dVhA&t=2s
26."Humans are inputting more and more information. Spawning more AI. The AI then gets better and better. And. Spawns more AI. Sam Altman, later stated (paraphrased) “how much energy does a human need to perform as well as an AI - food etc”
All of this is telling you the same. We’re spawning mini computer people who are able to do tasks better than a 15 year old. Soon better than a 25 year old. Soon better than PHDs and working 24/7/365 with no 1099, no feelings, no complaints and at a fraction of the cost.
How to Insulate: There is no way to fully insulate from AI. Looking at X it has become a bunch of AI slop. People plug in all this long form garbage, change some words and hit send. This will work on 95% of the population because they cannot discern the difference. The remaining 5% will simply hang out with each other and there is your “have vs. have not” separation.
Easiest for Majority: If you’re just looking to make money and “survive” (not thrive) you want to follow the red tape. This means you want to work in an industry that is extremely regulated. The safest one is probably healthcare. People do not want to talk to a robot when they learn about a death, cancer diagnosis and other emotionally charged events. If you want to live a “normal” life, health care is probably your best bet
Autist Note: The theme is hardest to get to with a computer. If you wanted other examples it would be air traffic controller, electrician, heavy machinery operator, therapist/psychologist etc. Things that require human interaction + can’t be done with a screen. The problem with a lot of these is that it makes it extremely hard to spin up a business if you are working on an airplane engine or confined to a hospital wing
Second Easiest: If your goal is to get rich + find a W-2 to pay the bills, we would go into sales. This is getting trickier by the day but is one of the only options for people who are serious about making it.
In a real sales role, you are required to transfer emotion.
Ideally you are selling an expensive item: 1) a car, 2) a house, 3) servers and 4) anything else with an average selling price of $25,000+. When people buy expensive items, they do not want to listen to some computer opinion. They want to speak with someone who has tangible experience beyond boiler plate comparisons in a table. Hint: you better know a lot more than the standard info spit out by AI! This typically means you need to sell the latest and greatest version at all times - since AI won’t know the specs.
Third - Difficult Decision Maker: Some have asked us what we mean by judgement/social trends. This is a big leap from where AI currently is. AI has a hard time predicting “what will land”. AI is great at giving you a billion options (say 20 amazing ad copy/creatives). It does a terrible job deciding where those creatives should go, who to target and why/when.
You’re actually seeing this live with all the AI trading bots. They don’t work and are constantly losing money.
Think about it. The only reason you’re reading this website in the first place is to think about tomorrow not yesterday. The vast majority of stuff out there is based on yesterday and automated forecasts about tomorrow… based on yesterday (using AI garbage in/garbage out material).
Look at your industry and practice becoming the decision maker in it. Are you able to predict who gets laid off next? Are you able to forecast who the most talented junior is? Hone this skill now. It will make or break you in about 5 years or so."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/macro-update-insulation-from-ai-and
27."In the R&D phase you have a large problem with an unbounded solution space, it takes incredible creativity to constantly re-frame, re-design, and re-think every approach and proposed solution. That creativity requires space to think, and a long leash to run at problems, break things, and fix them. As Zuck says: “Move fast and break things”.
The unavoidable yet unintended consequences are that timelines are squishy, end requirements fluctuate, and little effort is put into documenting anything because ‘its going to change next week anyways’. This is healthy; this is good; this is necessary.
However, it is in direct opposition with what makes manufacturing businesses successful. Manufacturing hates change, loves process, and lives on reliability of every portion of the business between the customer and the delivery. When supply chains are 6months long, and production plans bring it to 10months, reliability and predicability of every process is key to hitting deliverables. Discipline is needed to hold each team accountable to their due date on the 1000+ line Gantt chart."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-175456610
28.Direct takes on the world from Doomberg: AI, Canada & US tussle, energy and politics. Blue collar is gold collar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-BVZDwCnxY&t=117s
29.Trying to understand Stablecoins and its new role in re-establishing USD hegemony.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzTPVr_Xk3k
30. "Silicon Valley is a fast-moving ecosystem, but relationships still take time to develop. Many founders come to San Francisco for a weekend or a week, hoping to “tap into the magic.” But a week isn’t long enough.
Because San Francisco serendipity works in hops."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/tapping-into-the-serendipity-of-silicon-valley
31."This is why for a man, one of the most freeing thresholds he can cross is the point at which his survival no longer depends on people he does not like, trust, or respect.
To be financially self-reliant - to know that your bills, groceries and fundamental necessities are secured by money you generate on your own terms without dependence on bullshit workplace and institutional cultures is a profound behavioural self-affirmation that gives a man a type of confidence and natural swagger that simply cannot be counterfeited.
The true man then, in his fullest expression, does not work from within the system: but from outside of it."
https://thesovereigncitadel.com/p/the-price-of-a-paycheque
32."Ukraine? This is an existential fight. Either they stay in until they can recapture most if not all that was lost, or if they are lucky, they will be forced into a peace as a rump state centered on former Austro-Hungarian Galicia and a vassal of Russia like Belarus.
How long could they stay in? Ukraine has a history of sacrifice few in the west understand…except for 19th century Paraguay.
By the end of the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1871), a war that lasted five years, three months, two weeks, and two days. Estimates vary, but the conservative modern estimate is that somewhere around 40-60% of the Paraguayan population was killed. After the war, there were 4 women for every 1 man, 20 to 1 in some areas where the fighting was the worst.
Ukraine in 2026 has a population of 39.5 million. 40% of that population is 15.8 million.
Loss figures are all over the place, but are generally in the mid-six figures. There is A LOT more killing that could be done if the national will to fight is there, and if the weapons and money continue to flow.
Do the European nations have the will to continue supporting Ukraine’s fight? Will the U.S.? Will the BRICS and North Korea continue to support Russia?"
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/the-russo-ukrainian-war-hits-four
33. "But even Alibaba at $231b was a fifth to a tenth the size of SpaceX’s target. The market has never absorbed a trillion-dollar IPO where liquidity was the goal."
https://tomtunguz.com/largest-ipos-market-cap-and-float/
34."In other words, the new war strategy is clear: minimize your own losses and maximize those of your opponent, even if that means trading territory to do it. And while this strategy has in theory been emerging for well over a year, it is only now moving from a theoretical concept that often did not consistently appear in practice, into something that is clearly becoming an utmost priority.
That doesn’t mean a miraculous turn in the war, nor an end to Ukraine’s struggles with insufficient manpower. But it very clearly shifts the focus toward making it possible for Ukraine to survive a much longer war that could go on for several more years - and making it harder for Russia to do the same."
https://stationzero.substack.com/p/three-shifts-that-are-redefining
35."Taipei is spending billions of dollars to reinforce the military’s existing inventory of locally-made Hsiung Feng anti-ship missiles with American-made Harpoon anti-ship missiles. Both missiles are subsonic, boast tiny radars for terminal guidance and hug the wavetops to avoid interception as they range between 75 and 160 miles in search of enemy ships.
Both can be launched from the surface or from the air.
As part of a $2-billion deal the Taiwanese inked with the Americans in 2020, Taiwan is getting 400 Harpoon Block II missiles along with 100 truck-mounted launchers and 25 mobile radars.
The first of the new missiles arrived in late September. The last should reach the island country in 2028. The Taiwanese army is spending millions of dollars building new bases to house the Harpoon batteries, but in wartime the batteries would disperse to fortified positions peppering the coast—some of them built by occupying Japanese forces during World War II.
This traditional air power—warplanes and missiles—would factor heavily in the counterlanding effort. But a new kind of air power could bolster the main effort. Two years ago, the Taiwanese defense ministry issued its first-ever tender for an aerial drone swarm. It asked local tech firms to produce an initial 3,000 small, single-use drones for $159 million.
That’s a lot of money for just a few thousand drones, but it’s worth noting what Taipei is trying to do with the tender. The country isn’t just trying to buy a batch of drones—it’s also trying to encourage the expansion of the local drone industry, so that the industry will be ready to build a lot more drones fast if a Chinese invasion force begins massing.
Ukraine is building a virtual wall of tiny explosive drones to defend against invading Russian forces. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian drones take flight every month, and now account for the majority of Russian losses. Taiwan clearly intends to copy that strategy—but for maritime defense.
The drone swarm could buy time for heavier firepower to come to bear. Heavier American firepower."
https://www.trenchart.us/p/can-taiwan-hold-out-long-enough
36.One of the greats when it comes to investing. Dan Sundheim previously CIO at Viking, now running D1. Lots of great insights and perspectives for a crossover investor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBtmTmCC0ZM&t=1396s
37. Crazy week in Silicon Valley. Good discussion on AI vs. physical world. Anthropic growth and good take on the Citrini report.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBE_9vGJBUM&t=497s
38."The mistake most people make is believing stability is the norm. It isn’t. Chaos is the default state of the world. Your ability to survive and thrive - depends on how well you move through it.
You don’t need to know what comes next, only that you have the ability to handle it when it arrives. That’s confidence and determination to use chaotic times to your advantage. Even to your benefit.
Confidence is not knowing the future - it is knowing that no future will arrive without you adapting to meet it."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-174662273
39.Lots of great takes on Silicon Valley news especially Saaspocalypse, investing in software & the Upfront Summit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff4-vkt5rYQ
40.A must watch. Druck, the best global macro investor on the planet. Insightful takes.
-some ai exposure but less than before
- long Japan & Korea equities
- bearish on US dollar
- long copper
- long gold as geopolitical trade (not monetary)
- short bonds
Living in a High Trust Society
I saw a Tweet that made me think:
“I was in Tokyo recently on a business trip.
I accidentally left my brand new MacBook on a park bench in Tokyo. I realized it 3 hours later. I sprinted back, panic mode fully engaged, assuming it was gone forever. It wasn't there.
I asked a nearby shopkeeper. He pointed to the bench. Someone had placed my laptop inside a plastic grocery bag and taped it to the bench so it wouldn't get wet in the drizzle. They didn't take it. They protected it. Culture is what you do when no one is watching.
What do you think would happen in your country if the same thing happened?”
Source: https://x.com/MrPitbull07/status/2018064416668029082
Well I can tell with certainty if this laptop would be gone if it was in America. The phenomenon described above could only happen in high trust societies. I would argue America and most of Western societies like Canada, UK and Western European countries are not high trust societies. Maybe they used to be but not anymore.
All you have to do is visit a place like Japan, Taiwan or South Korea and you will realize this truth very quickly. Perhaps it’s due to the homogeneity of the place, the “we are all in it together” feeling. Of a great community. Or maybe these countries just actually enforce laws and punish criminals like they do in Singapore or UAE. Or are basically a police surveillance state like in China.
You can walk around without worrying about the watch you are wearing or being open with your mobile phone. Leaving your computer on the table when you go to the bathroom. Or leaving your stuff in your car without it getting broken into. Things you can’t ever do in any major city in America, UK or Canada. I’m naturally paranoid and untrusting so maybe I thrive in these low trust societies. But you would think with all the wealth and opportunities we could do better. Or hope we can do better for the sake of our kids.
This is why it seems clear the West is going down. It’s because people have stopped caring. Or they have just gone all out for themselves now, acting in survival mode. Decline is a choice. I, for one, choose to fight the decline all around us. It’s almost always just a matter of will.
Gratitude is the Cure
I get so caught up in life sometimes. Business challenges, financial challenges, plenty of home life challenges. Couple this with the large amount of travel I need to do for business, which I might add I really love. But it can be tiring. I’m usually jetlagged, running around to meetings, overly caffeinated and sleeping odd hours.
My initial thought is to complain and do my own pity party. But then I remember, no one likes a complainer. Besides, what do I have to complain about? I GET to do this. I don’t HAVE to do this (most of the time at least). What I have are firstworld problems. Champagne problems even.
So I remind myself to be grateful. Grateful for all that I have. Grateful to have a family despite its challenges. Grateful to be fit, healthy and mobile. Grateful to travel. Grateful to earn money doing what I enjoy, working with people I love and respect. Grateful to be learning. Grateful to be alive to have problems to overcome. It doesn’t get better than this. It’s really as simple as that.
So be grateful. We are luckier than we realize.
Power of Novelty in Anti-Aging
I spent a lot of time on the road for my business. It’s tiring sometimes but overall, this is an amazing life and one I am addicted to. I think this is one of the factors for me that have enabled me to keep myself on top of the ever changing world of technology and business.
GritCult said this best:
“As I get older. I realise how important it is to be around novelty stimuli. New music, new movies. New places.
Constantly exploring and never stopping is I think the key to staying creating and the key to staying mentally young.
As people age. They become stiff physically and mentally. It requires actual effort to go out of your way to keep exploring and keeping up that adventure spirit. Because it is extremely easy to fall into a pattern and have the years zoom past.”
Source: https://x.com/GRITCULT/status/2007516352962277717
Probably why I love traveling so much. Or maybe why I need it. SF is awesome and it is good to have family time and a routine. But after 4 weeks on the ground I feel like I am rotting. Even if I am busy, meeting people, reading, listening to podcasts, I find my mind slipping into remote control. I need a new environment to jar me out of it.
So if you find yourself slowing down physically or mentally. Or just need new ideas. Travel. Go to another city. Go to another state or another country. It’s a quick & very effective boost for your brain. Travel is a cheat code.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 10th, 2026
“Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.”-- Kahil Gibran
"We are conditioned to seek “External Validation” for our ideas. If people like it, we think it’s good. If they ignore it, we think it’s a failure. This is a Strategic Error. When you rely on the crowd to tell you what is valuable, you are outsourcing your Taste to the average. And the average is, by definition, mediocre. Praise is a cage that forces you to repeat your past successes; criticism is a wall that prevents your future ones. Both are noise."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-validation-trap
2.US Navy forward positioning in Australia as plan B ie. when the breakdown of globalization is in full effect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UeDdWm-8-s
3.Klarna CEO is on the bleeding edge of adopting AI. Klarna has been leading the charge of AI in his company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7vIRAFSXmk&t=2169s
4."Scarcity generates pleasure, anxiety, and purpose. But a world that is post-scarcity in the sense that there is more than enough material resources for everyone will still have another form of scarcity—people’s respect, admiration, attention, desire, and love.
The bad news about a post-scarcity utopia is that we will still be unhappy much of the time. The good news is that our lives will still have meaning."
https://smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net/p/assistant-to-the-regional-manager
5.Managing the world's biggest sovereign wealth fund. Learning from the best investors & how to thrive in the age of AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyvuM3J9QqQ
6. Fun convo this week. Openclaw, Ferrari & Jony Ives & Winter Olympics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x43XMee7-Kk
7.Lots of implications of India and others taking apart the Oil Shadow fleet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJdFi0rvj8M
8."It’s easy to sneer at the folly of billionaires and tyrants surrounded by yes-men stumbling into preventable catastrophes.
Harder to acknowledge that we ourselves are vulnerable to the same forces which blind us from our own self-authored missteps, surrounded by those who see our flaws clearly but chose silence over uncomfortable conversations.
Now pause and turn the mirror inward one more level.
Consider not just the times you stayed silent about someone else’s unforced error higher up the gradient - but the times you committed a preventable error, perhaps years ago, that only became clear in hindsight through delayed consequences, external events, or someone finally letting slip what they’d long observed."
https://kaichang.substack.com/p/the-distortion-field-why-power-makes
9.The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (+ Pakistan-Turkey-Egypt) versus UAE (+Israel-Ethiopia, maybe India?). Growing rivalry in the MENA region.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3G6tDycuz8
10.Some good takes on investing in AI by the 8 VC team.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aETqFYCrIoA
11.Lots of great frameworks and perspectives on how to do comms right for founders. We are in the age of narrative and founders have a huge advantage if they do this right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9Njb8Lw5Xc
12."One of the most overlooked lessons from If Russia Wins is that deterrence in the 21st century is as much an industrial and financial challenge as a military one. Masala’s scenario does not hinge on technological surprise, but on speed, scale, and endurance: Russia rebuilds its military capacity faster than Western policymakers expect, while Europe’s defence ecosystem remains fragmented, under-capitalised, and slow to adapt.
The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that modern deterrence depends not only on traditional military hardware but on technological innovations: unmanned systems, AI-enabled targeting, secure communications, cyber defence, satellite intelligence, and agile manufacturing. These are domains where startups and private capital can outperform traditional defence contractors."
https://resiliencemedia.co/if-russia-wins-lessons-for-the-uk-and-europe/
13.Some good insights on geopolitics right now. From one of top analysts from BCA Research.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYrdjsOKqO8
14.Geopolitical uncertainty. Some diversification outside of the USA is probably a good idea, particularly in Emerging markets like Latam, India & Eastern Europe and SE Asia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYrdjsOKqO8
15.Kind of dark but a cold hard look at the world. The leadership of Canada, the UK and EU are a "tornado of incompetence."
In the US, our leadership is just ultra corrupt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeMkxlJfIb4
16.All things AI, energy & Semiconductor chips. This was a fascinating convo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqBMzuzxZog
17.This show helps you make sense of the crazy news in Silicon Valley. Always worth watching every week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVfDfse13es
18."If you can get the same objective results from hitting the gym 3 times per week, why would you want to get that same outcome training twice a day, 7 days a week?
When you start to think in this lens, it allows you to think more about output over how many hours you clock in.
It’s time to start admiring the man who gets what he wants as effortlessly as possible.
Who surgically works to build results.
Who doesn’t waste years, ‘doing it his way’, but instead learns from world class mentors & practitioners who can speed up their development.
If you’re in a phase of your life now where all you feel you’re doing is grinding, sit back & really analyse…. Is this mode of operating really giving me results?"
https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/why-grinding-is-overrated
19."But for many who outwardly appear successful and agentic, their agency is actually narrowly contained within psychological ‘hidden walls’. Other domains and challenges which are patently important are never even considered as targets of action because there has been no subconscious reification of personal efficacy in these domains.
Wealthy and powerful men will live their whole lives in ugly places which need beautification, sterile communities which need family formation, and social groups with declining standards which need to be reversed. But in these domains, they self-conceptualize as object, rather than agent. They don’t even think about changing them, let alone mounting a head-on attack.
Whatever your views on them, true agency is exemplified in our age by figures like Trump and Elon. In 2015, Trump presented a vision of America’s future which was completely at odds with orthodoxy, and the execution of which alienated him from polite society. He wasn’t even a politician—but he did it.
Pretty much all of Elon’s enterprises are characterized by attempting radical breakthroughs in languishing domains—most of which he is not a personal expert in before he gets involved; and yet he consistently finds tremendous success. Buying Twitter to personally guarantee free speech is high agency.
Most of us will not be the next Trump or Elon. But we can calibrate ambitions accordingly."
https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/our-low-agency-elite
20.Was an educational conversation on the economy. Good for global macro investors. “The world is run by thieves.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC3eM69jn0Y
21."When does life change drastically?
The general answer is that it happens once you escape "survival mode". Those with a tougher upbringing will have a harder time getting out of it than those who had it easier. To explain our point further, if your parents always had to think about how they would put food on the table. There is a good chance that you were consistently operating in survival mode.
On the other hand if you grew up in more comfortable surroundings where you went skiing once a year or always had a travel abroad… There is a good chance your parents didn’t operate fully in survival mode. To get back to our point. Once you get out of survival mode, you finally have time to think about the things you never considered before. This is where mental, mindset and other woo-woo stuff make sense. Why? Because you finally have time to think about them instead of worrying about whether you can pay the bills."
https://www.beautyofsaas.com/p/faq-how-to-escape-the-mediocrity-and-rise-above-the-average
22."Skills are for interactive conversations. Code is for agents. Skills are easier to debug. When a skill fails, you know exactly where to look. When an agent chains ten function calls & the output is wrong, you’re hunting through logs."
https://tomtunguz.com/9-observations-using-ai-agents/
23."Nothing ever happens unless you cause it to.
Nothing good ever just falls into your lap.
You have to make your own luck.
You have to take ownership of your own life."
https://substack.com/@colejaczko/p-188521648
24.I always get energized when I listen to David Senra. "The Hard way is the Right way."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PBgbS0N86I
25. "In the end, the real threat to taste isn’t AI - it’s the way content keeps trying to package it. The more we polish it for virality, the more we strip it of what made it powerful in the first place.
Developing taste means actively resisting the gravitational pull of popular consensus and algorithmic predictability. It means allowing yourself to be guided by intuition and curiosity rather than the expectation of external validation. It means being conscious and careful about the clothes you buy, the books you read, the music you listen to. Above all, it means learning.
Taste doesn’t just come from liking things.
It comes from disliking things - and knowing why."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-169036769
26."I am talking, of course, about the status game.
This game is inside us. We can’t help but play it. For millions of years, high status meant better mates, more food, greater security. Low status meant genetic extinction, inceldom, zero hoes.
Status-seeking is hardwired into our brains. It is universal, but its expression is context-dependent. What codes as high status varies by ecological niche. In the Stone Age, Cro-Magnon man would stomp, yell, and flex in front of women. This was scarcely more sophisticated than a silverback gorilla thumping his chest. Me strong. Me loud. Me get woman.
Suffice to say, this ooga booga behavior wouldn’t be appreciated by members of the Royal Sydney Yacht Club. In rarefied environments, displays of raw strength are vulgar. They signal an unfortunate proximity to the brutish classes. But in other ecological niches, chest-thumping codes as ‘alpha’ rather than apish. El monstruo Texano drives around in a RAM and injects steroids. Like his paleolithic ancestors, he signals status through physical dominance. In the American south, this is an adaptive strategy. In America’s coastal regions, it is uncouth, proleish, and irredeemably low status.
In short, status is contextual. What’s considered high-status in one environment can be irredeemably low-status in another. There isn’t a singular way to be high status. To quote W. David Marx, ‘There is a Hollywood entertainment mogul way of being high status that is distinct from that of Texan oil magnates.’"
https://substack.com/home/post/p-174511393
27.I know there is a negative slant from loser mainstream media on the tech industry. But I also get the reason people hate the tech bros. This article exemplifies both leanings. FTR as long time SV guy: Roy Lee and his ilk are awful POSs.
"What I discovered, though, is that behind all these small complaints, there’s something much more serious. Roy Lee is not like other people. He belongs to a new and possibly permanent overclass. One of the pervasive new doctrines of Silicon Valley is that we’re in the early stages of a bifurcation event. Some people will do incredibly well in the new AI era. They will become rich and powerful beyond anything we can currently imagine. But other people—a lot of other people—will become useless. They will be consigned to the same miserable fate as the people currently muttering on the streets of San Francisco, cold and helpless in a world they no longer understand. The skills that could lift you out of the new permanent underclass are not the skills that mattered before.
For a long time, the tech industry liked to think of itself as a meritocracy: it rewarded qualities like intelligence, competence, and expertise. But all that barely matters anymore. Even at big firms like Google, a quarter of the code is now written by AI. Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines.
The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it. AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experience it is that gives you this hunger. Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley"
https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee/
28."Fortunately for the Taiwanese, there’s a possible workaround for the ammo problem. Taiwan may be struggling to stash enough artillery rounds, but there’s nothing stopping it from stockpiling a new alternative: tiny explosive drones. Taiwan’s high-tech industry could produce these in huge numbers and without outside help.
These drones would be even more important in the alarming scenario where Taiwan fought alone—even if it only temporarily fought alone. But a pivot to drones should begin now."
29."Every mistake above is actually the same mistake: confusing access to the commodity with a competitive advantage.
Intelligence is the commodity. I want that to land, so I’ll say it one more time as plainly as I can: the thing everyone is racing to adopt is the thing that will differentiate absolutely no one.
What won’t be commoditized:
distribution
domain knowledge
customer trust
brand, and
the ability to aim intelligence at exactly the right problem in a specific market.
That’s it. That’s the whole list. And it’s a short one."
https://vikrantduggal.substack.com/p/intelligence-is-cheap-now
30."But what is Project Vault, precisely? Think of it less as a government program and more as a structured insurance product for American industry. Participating manufacturers pay upfront commitment fees, essentially a security premium, in exchange for guaranteed access to stockpiled raw materials during defined market disruptions. They cover storage costs. They can draw down inventory for normal operations, provided they replenish it. The architecture borrows from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but the ambition is considerably broader: all 60 minerals on the U.S. Geological Survey’s Critical Minerals List, covering everything from lithium to rare earths, the inputs that underpin modern manufacturing, defense systems, and the clean energy transition.
Critically, and this is a distinction worth understanding, Project Vault is not the National Defense Stockpile. It is not, primarily, a military program. It is demand-led, built around civilian and commercial industry, a point made plain by the roster of initial participants: Boeing, GE Vernova, Clarios, and Western Digital. General Motors, Stellantis, Corning, and Google have reportedly expressed interest. With the exception of Boeing’s defense arm, this is, at its core, a commercial play dressed in the language of national security.
The private capital in the deal flows from three trading houses — Hartree Partners, Mercuria Energy Americas, and Traxys — firms whose core competency is exactly the kind of global commodity logistics that a program of this complexity demands. They will serve as the procurement engine, sourcing and moving raw materials through supply chains that the federal government has historically shown little aptitude for managing directly."
https://matthewbernard776320.substack.com/p/project-vault
31.Lots of good takes this week. The continuing AI wars in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CewrGGMjRI
32.I've had my issues with Chamath but this is pretty wise stuff. You can learn from anyone, even if you dislike them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-LAT4HjWPo
33."For the European services that failed to foresee the invasion, a period of soul-searching followed. One European intelligence officer said they were furious over the failure and had pushed internally for an inquiry into what could have been done better. “The whole raison d’etre of an intelligence service is to predict when the next war will come,” said the officer. “And we completely messed it up.”
Huw Dylan, a historian of intelligence at King’s College London, said there was a long history of intelligence analysts being unwilling to predict that future events will create a dramatic break with the past. People could not imagine what a major European land war would look like in the 21st century, so assumed it was unlikely to happen. Additionally, scepticism is usually the safer option. “If you’re predicting something that has massive implications, you’ve got more to answer for if you get it wrong,” he said.
The Ukraine failure has started to change that. As one German official put it: “The main thing we took away from all of this was that we need to work with worst-case scenarios much more than we did before.”
Now, as the world has entered a new era of uncertainty, there are more worst-case scenarios to ponder. Recent European military exercises have focused on how to maintain order after massive attacks on power and communications infrastructure that cause civil unrest. For the first time in a century, Canada is modelling potential responses to a US invasion.
For many, the key intelligence lesson from Ukraine was stark: do not rule things out, just because they might once have seemed impossible."
34.Michael Every is one of the best geopolitical analysts around. This was pretty helpful to figure out where Europe may be going. The likelihood of fragmentation is high. Trump doing reverse Perestroika in the USA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlklWpxw7zo
35.Helping to decipher Trump's moves globally and at home. Lots of huge implications and various scenarios via "reverse Perestroika". This is a must to watch for global macro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JHrddtDqbA
36."What happens when the skill you spent your life learning can be done at 80% proficiency by a novice in a matter of minutes. We’re already there across most disciplines. AI and robotics will eventually flatten all surface-level skills.
The skills that will matter in the future will be things like judgement, taste, the ability to make connections across disciplines, story telling and moral/ethical reasoning. Going back to the car example, the skills you will need will more closely mirror a navigator than that of the actual driver.
Taste, judgement, cross-disciplinary connections, story-telling and moral reasoning are much harder to foster. These require life experience, failures, interests in many different areas and a lot of time spent in contemplation. It will require you to understand how you actually view the world, what you stand for and who you are."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-188351223
37."The future is a fiction. The past is a graveyard. The only reality is the current system. Build for the kill, not for the history books."
Mountainhead
I decided to watch the HBO movie so you don’t need to. It was made by the creators of “Succession”. This time it’s a story about the weekend getaway between 3 tech multi-billionaire friends & their near billionaire host while the world burns down around them due to the products they released. Yet ironically their wealth and net-worth continues to grow. Troddling around the world like giants.
And like in “Succession”, you pretty much end up hating all the characters who are just awful people. Insecure, self-righteous, callous & surprising catty too. Maybe even with a lot of sociopathy & megalomania. Self serving for sure. All plotting against each other. Caricatures of what bored, rich douchebags with infinite resources would do. “I know everyone and I can do everything” is literally one of the lines.
It’s just a movie but it seems to reflect all the animus that Hollywood and media seems to hold toward the tech industry, especially Silicon Valley elites. The movie's dialogue include well-used Silicon Valley terms like decel, first principles, disintermediation, decentralization, AI doomerism or transhumanism. Mockingly I might add.
And I get it. I’ve been in Silicon Valley for a long time. It’s a literal bubble, filled with brilliant, ambitious and somewhat deluded people. People who think they can create something from nothing. The amount of wealth creation here is ridiculous. Unfortunately this rise has led to incredible insularity and a lack of understanding of the rest of the American populace. There is such a focus on technology and wealth that there is little thinking about the negative impacts across society of the tech being created.
Add the arrogance from the incredible wealth and it seems to explain the anger and hatred that the rest of America and people from other industries feel. It started happening with mobile phones and social media. It’s only coming to the head with AI. No one wants to be disrupted. This disruption that is coming for white collar jobs will match the pain that globalization & outsourcing brought to manufacturing.
No wonder most major AI Labs CEOs are not doing any public appearances anymore. They see the techlash coming as one of the billionaires says: “because really we are in a moment of tremendous creative destruction….A great turning…..nations are teetering and I think we play a role.”
Watching Mountainhead reminded me that unless we start going back to basics: doing good, building great products, not the gambling and Enshittification of products for a quick buck, we will probably deserve everything coming for us. Mobs with pitchforks. This movie is a not so subtle warning. “Winners take all, loser takes a fall.”
Purehearted
“Based on a true story. Majimu, an office worker in Naha City, embarks on a journey to make a new type of rum using Okinawan sugarcane.”
I mean with a description like this, how can you not be intrigued. Basically it’s a dramatized “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” but for rum. Super random and something I’d ONLY trust the Japanese to do right. Why is it that the Japanese are able to take a concept and turn it into the ultimate apex of the craft. Making something as close to perfection as humanly possible: whether sushi, sake, French pastries, wine, tofu, green tea or whatever. It’s incredible. The care. The craftsmanship.
Majimu decides to apply for her company’s in-house ventures competition after trying a foreign rum. She realized there is no local rum. She gets inspired to make it. Okinawan rum using freshly squeezed sugarcane: in a style called Rhum Agricole. “Why does delicious alcohol make you feel so happy?”
Her entrepreneurial journey begins and like all journeys it’s a rough start. She is discouraged by her family: “it ain’t an easy thing to do, making stuff for people’s mouths.” But she makes it past the first round and starts to learn about the details of rum and figure out where to find the top ingredients around Okinawa. An example of “You can just do things.”
Like many Japanese people, Majimu goes all in on her dream. Detailed research and plans. As they said in the movie: “it’s not a pipe dream if you take action.”
She crushes it and makes it past phase 2 but as usual runs into challenges. Reality. She needs to figure out a distiller, suppliers and a license. Convincing a stubborn village headman on her idea.
But she is determined: “I know nothing about making alcohol. I don’t know how hard it is to create a product but I’m determined to make one Okinawa can be proud of…..All I want is to make Okinawan rum.” She gathers believers along the way. Early believers. No startup ever succeeds without this happening.
She draws inspiration from her family’s tofu business. “You need to know the face of the person making it. Make sure you get the most important things right.” The basics: The founder matters. Founder driven sales and founder driven customer support. Founder driven product. The founder is everything.
We are entering a world where people are tired of buying from big faceless corporations. Small & personal is better. And customers will pay a premium for it. Especially if there is a personal touch and relationship with the founder. One of the overlooked advantages of early stage startups. The best founders are purists. They really care and it shows. They are obsessive and relentless like Majimu.
“We need more than knowledge. We need someone who is with us all of the way. I’m sure now.” You need to create a movement. A religion. A cult even. This is how you manifest ideas into reality. She even finds a distiller that shares her same values & love of the product.
“Making alcohol is like raising a child. It changes and develops every day so you’ve got to give it love and attention. That’s my duty as a parent…..a winemaker can only produce a limited amount during their lifetime so I want my wine to be loved and shared by everyone. That’s why with every bottle, I put my heart into it….and I always will.”
This mindset is why Japanese products rock. This is why startups rock. What an inspiration.
“If you try to do something. You can do anything. If you don’t try something, you’ll never be anything. Those who are purehearted, without fail, through whatever, they’ll have their wishes granted. And flourish forever.”
F1: The Movie
Damn that was a great movie. I’ve always liked Brad Pitt and have a passing interest in F1 as a cultural phenomenon. This movie really captured it well. The thrill of being a modern day gladiator in modern form. Competing against others and yourself at the dangerous edge of extreme speed. I also get why ownership of F1 teams are the sport of billionaires and big PE funds. It is expensive to run a team.
Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a former Formula 1 driver that never fulfilled his great promise but ends up driving at racing championships like Le Mans, NASCAR and even was a NYC taxi driver. He is literally a modern day knight errant traveling around the world but driving, not fighting.
But 30 years later he is recruited back to an F1 team run by his old friend Ruben as a Hail Mary. Ruben sells him:
“I’m offering you an open seat on Formula One. The only place you can say one day if you win, you are the absolute best in the world.”
Hayes is intrigued and asks his waitress:
“Hey, let me ask you something. Close friend of yours made you an offer that was 100%, positively too good to be true. What do you do?”
The waitress asks: “Well, how much we talking about?”
He responds: “Not about the money.”
She says: “So what is it about?”
He responds: “Hmmmmm.”
It took the rest of the movie to figure it out. It’s about ego. But also self worth. Pride. Proving beyond a doubt you are the top of the top. That you are beyond a doubt the best.
He also talks about Flow states:
“It’s rare. But sometimes, there’s this moment, in the car where everything goes quiet, my heartbeat slows, it’s peaceful. And I can see everything and no one…..no one can touch me. And I am chasing that moment every time I get in the car. I don’t know when I’ll find it again. But man, I want to. I want to. Cause in that moment, I’m flying.” Probably one of the best descriptions of finding flow.
And if you want to get a view into peak single masculine life, this movie is it.
“What the hell you smiling about man? Did you win something? There’s 20 other drivers still out on that track and you’re in here posing for that nonsense. Do you think any one of them respect us? Do you? They need to learn that no one gets past us without a fight. No one.”
“Plan C is for combat. Combat! Combat! Combat!”
He has to pull the team together, a younger hard charging driver Joshua Pearce who is troubled by the financial issues of the team, his future and the competition of the new driver.
His mom gives Joshua good advice: “Don’t mind that. Focus on you. You can spend your whole life worrying about other people but your time is right now.”
His mom asks him: “you still love it?”
He responds: “Of course I still love it.”
She says: “Remember what your father used to say: Put your head down and drive.”
Seems like great advice for all of us right now. Get focused. It’s Q2 and there is work to be done. And watch F1 and be inspired. It’s never too late to make a comeback.
As Sonny Hayes says: “Create your own breaks. Hope is not a strategy.”
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 3rd, 2026
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." — George Orwell
"frontier-tech corridors are the next great American economic engine - and the time to shape who benefits from that engine is right now, whether we are ready or not. As AI, and great-power competition reorder the global economy, the United States is already sliding into a new epoch; if we do not deliberately connect our people and our states to that future of work, we risk locking in a generation of under-prepared workers, stranded regions, and justified malaise about what comes next.
The frontier-tech corridor is a model meant to solve that problem of economic disconnect: to give states and regions a concrete way to align their industrial base, their talent pipelines, and accordingly their governance models with the frontier technologies that will define the next sixty years.
In the United States, services now account for roughly four‑fifths of GDP; finance, insurance, and real estate alone contribute about 21 percent, health care nearly 18 percent, while manufacturing has fallen into the single digits. For reference, China and Korea went the other way. China’s secondary industry - manufacturing plus construction - still makes up around 38 percent of its economy, with manufacturing by itself in the high‑20s as a share of GDP, even as services rise toward the mid‑50s. South Korea keeps roughly 30 percent of its GDP in manufacturing value‑added, the second‑highest share in the OECD, with services closer to the low‑60s. On the defense side, as mentioned the United States spends a little under 3 percent of GDP on its military, China has hovered below 2 percent (speculated), and Korea around 2.6 percent - but both Asian competitors are stacking that defense effort on top of far more muscular industrial bases.
Over the last three decades, our neo‑liberal model encouraged U.S. firms to offshore a large share of the hard work of making things - electronics, ships, machine tools - while we deepened our specializations in finance, software, and health care; China and Korea treated manufacturing and dual‑use industry as national projects. Wright’s Law takes an institutional form here: the nations that actually build at scale accumulate line workers, technicians, and engineers who get better with every unit shipped, and they now over‑index not just in exports but in engineering-intensive research, and patents across the very technologies that will define the next fifty years."
https://innoblepursuit.substack.com/p/frontier-tech-corridor-southeast
2."The strong man is not the one who fights every battle. It’s the one who waits until the fight is worth his time. He doesn't throw himself into martyrdom to prove he has a spine. He survives. He grows. He watches. And when it's time to collect the debt, he does it with interest.
You don’t have to stand your ground every single time it’s challenged. Sometimes the wisest option is letting things go, only to attack when your boundaries are truly crossed and broken.
If you were to fight every battle every time available, you’d constantly be in war. Battle-torn, cortisol-maxxed to the roof. Zero enjoyment for anything beautiful in this world. But you absolutely cannot avoid conflict. You must be conflict-ready."
https://substack.com/@finalman/p-161414752
3.Whatever you think of Elon Musk, he has built an incredible business machine in Tesla and SpaceX and Xai.
Lots of insights on how he runs his businesses and shows his first principles engineering thinking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYXbuik3dgA
4."If your time isn’t yours, your money isn’t either.
True wealth is:
– Building in the shadows
– Growing without noise
– Owning your hours, minute by minute
Money’s just the key.
The door is time."
https://substack.com/@luxlifestylelab/p-170072842
5."Let’s be real: Burnout doesn’t discriminate by net worth. Today’s top business owners know that health isn’t a luxury. it’s leverage.
From boardrooms to beachside workcations, the modern entrepreneur is optimizing not just for profits, but for peace. Because the real flex? Feeling sharp, focused, and calm no matter what the day throws at you."
https://substack.com/@luxlifestylelab/p-170303236
6."The ultimate signal of elite status is the ability to run a multi-million dollar empire from a single high-end backpack. It signals that your Intelligence and your Systems are your only real assets. While the “new rich” show off their mansions, the Sovereign shows off their Zero-Anchor Lifestyle."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-ownership-trap
7."The bet has risks. Energy at 21x P/E isn’t cheap by historical standards, it’s expensive. The sector typically trades at 10-15x. Grid buildouts face 3-year transformer lead times & 10-year permitting cycles. If AI monetization disappoints, hyperscalers will cut capex as fast as they deployed it. Ask anyone who held fiber stocks in 2001.
In 2026, the market is betting on hard infrastructure."
https://tomtunguz.com/rotation-software-energy-materials/
8."In the Army, soldiers undergo rigorous training to instill discipline and a strong work ethic that transcends individual interests. In civilian life, that same focus can drive you to excel in school, work, or personal goals.
When you develop discipline, you set high standards for yourself, hold yourself accountable, and get stuff done even when you’re not feeling it. Over time, you’ll notice you feel more confident walking into any situation, because you’ve trained yourself to handle challenges—much like a well-trained unit ready for any mission."
https://gbnt1952.substack.com/p/boot-camp-for-life
9."Saizeriya is the people's champ, supporting Japanese families, students, anyone really, for decades. You won't be able to find food of this quality for $2-3 USD a plate in any other developed economy. Yet they're profitable and continuing to grow double digits. There's really 2 elements: Cost advantage + Quality.
The cost advantage isn't just one thing, like Amazon or Costco. it's doing a thousand small things right to operate a restaurant chain with an industrial level of efficiency without compromising on quality. They've really thought in first principles and really went up the supply chain to rethink cost AND quality. The extent they are going to do this is impressive."
https://madeinjapan.substack.com/p/saizeriyans-at-the-gate
10.Excellent discussion this week, particularly on the impact of AI and what you can do to prepare. That and global macro & getting hard assets. This reminds me of these guys at their best during pandemic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnaegIpkenA
11.This speech was excellent. Direct but hopeful. A call to action for unity, ramping defense & reindustrialization for Western Civilization. Decline is a choice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HtGx-GWgZU
12."Entrepreneurs should deeply integrate advanced AI tools into the workflow of every team member. If someone isn’t willing to adopt them, that’s a real issue. The companies that fully embrace these tools will move faster, learn faster, and compound progress more quickly.
It may feel uncomfortable at first. But over time, founders and teams who put AI at the center of their workflow will increase their velocity and accelerate progress toward their vision.
Don’t wait. Make AI foundational—personally and across your startup."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/02/14/ai-is-a-super-power-start-treating-it-like-one/
13."True elegance is a lifestyle, not a performance.
It’s about aligning appearance, behavior, and communication in a way that feels natural.never forced.
When mastered, elegance becomes your silent business card, working for you long before you say a word.
Elegance is the most powerful form of quiet influence."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-7-rules-of-true-elegance-a-complete
14."In a world obsessed with luxury consumption, quiet intellectualism offers a compelling alternative, focusing on depth and meaning over superficiality. This path is not about flashy logos or extravagant possessions, but about the profound satisfaction of getting lost in a book, unraveling a complex idea, or mastering a new skill. True wealth is not a public image you project, but a personal fortress you build within yourself."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-allure-of-quiet-intellectualism
15."These past couple of years have taught me a lot about how to build a life outside a high tax country and I want to lay out what I think is the best way to go about it all. If you’re sitting in Australia or any Western country feeling squeezed by taxes, cost of living, and that growing sense that the harder you work and the more successful you become, the more headwind you cop.
What is a Sovereign Individual?
A sovereign individual is someone who structures their life across borders, legally, to reduce dependency on any single government, minimise taxation through jurisdictional choice, and increase personal freedom, mobility, and economic opportunity.
South America is the answer to start building something freer, and, quite frankly, a lot more fun, in 2026 (although it’s certainly not for everyone)."
https://www.geologotrader.com/p/how-to-become-a-sovereign-individual
16.Everything is about energy and cheap energy at that. This is leading geopolitical de-risking and diversification. Massive investment into infrastructure and hard assets is happening in the West.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piXBXRXHiQA
17.Everything that worked in the last 50 years for investing will not work going forward. Hard assets aka industrials, energy & commodities. Hard power is sovereignty in a “might is right” world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VdSlnBxhUM
18."The ultimate signal of elite status is a massive change in business direction or lifestyle that is never announced only observed. You don’t post a “rebranding” thread. You don’t explain the “new vision.” You simply start operating at the new level. Those who are meant to be in your Phalanx will see the result; the rest don’t matter."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-feedback-loop-of-silence
19."The Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) taught me that there is always a recovery, despite the prognosis at the time. And by focusing purely on a company’s fundamentals I could distance myself from the noise. For well-managed, cash-rich companies, crises throw up many opportunities. There will always be crises so one needs to be positioned to get through them and emerge stronger. The best managements will do that for you."
https://www.readideabrunch.com/p/idea-brunch-with-james-hay-of-pangolin
20."To make these substrates rigid, heat-resistant, and electrically stable, manufacturers use woven glass fiber fabric (T-Glass) as the structural reinforcement material, similar to how rebar reinforces concrete. This gets combined with resin to create the layers of the substrate.
For the most advanced AI chips, you need the highest-grade glass fiber because these chips run extremely hot, need ultra-precise signal routing, and can’t tolerate any warping or electrical interference.
Nittobo’s T-Glass is apparently the only material meeting these extreme specifications at scale.
So when you control 90% of this specialized glass fiber, you effectively control a critical choke point in the entire AI chip supply chain; the structural foundation every advanced chip needs to actually function."
https://www.polymathinvestor.com/p/investing-in-the-antipodes-of-the
21."Yes, intelligent machines will soon supersede us in a whole range of ways. But we are still the creatures who created, and listen to, the Brandenburg Concertos. Who read Shakespeare. Who marvel at nature. Who can say to one another: I know how you feel.
Perhaps in time, and via the new machine lifeforms we seem to be creating now, the world in which all that happens may indeed pass into history. But we don’t have to embrace that outcome, or hasten it. We can fight for the human way of seeing. And if we fight, I think we’ll find a way through."
https://www.newworldsamehumans.xyz/p/what-you-are-that-machines-are-not
22."From 2020 to 2025, there were 5,700 AI & ML acquisitions. Only 21% disclosed a deal value. The remaining 4,500 share a pattern : small teams absorbed into larger companies. No fanfare. No valuation headlines. Just talent migrating from startup to incumbent.
It’s cheaper to buy a team than to compete for hires or build from scratch."
https://tomtunguz.com/ai-acqui-hire-wave/
23."This is the new literacy. Not prompt engineering. Not learning to code. The essential skill of the AI era is probabilistic thinking — the ability to assess confidence levels, estimate expected value, and make decisions under uncertainty. It’s knowing when to fold a losing hand and when to push your chips in.
The people who will struggle are the ones who demand certainty before acting. They’ll wait for AI to be “perfect” and miss the window. The people who will win are the ones who understand that perfection isn’t the standard — positive expected value is. They’ll make more bets, lose some, win more, and compound those gains over time.
So if you want to prepare for an AI-driven future, don’t just learn how the technology works. Learn how to think in probabilities. Read about Bayesian reasoning. Study decision theory. Or, frankly, just go play some poker. The table has more to teach you about the next economy than most business books ever will."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/if-you-want-to-win-in-an-ai-world
24."In a frontier‑tech economy, most of the work that matters will not be happening in conference rooms. As Elon Musk likes to remind his own engineers, the factory (the machine that builds the machine) is harder than the product itself, and it demands more smart people, not fewer. Shipfitters and composite technicians, mechatronics operators and depot maintainers may never need a bachelor’s degree, but they will need to read digital work orders, interpret schematics, and troubleshoot software‑enabled equipment.
Start with K‑12 performance and not with factories: if the South’s children cannot read and do basic math, they will never be able to claim the blue‑collar frontier‑tech jobs coming to their backyards. The irony, and the opportunity is that states like Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee are now leading the country in early‑grade literacy recovery, quietly building the foundations of a technically capable workforce.
If they can sustain this turn and pair it with real pathways into apprenticeships and technical colleges, then within a decade the corridor will graduate a much larger share of working‑class kids who are actually capable of doing frontier‑tech work, right when the nation most needs them. The rest of this section is about that foundation: the Southern surge in literacy, and what it means for the blue‑collar reservoir that sits beneath the corridor."
https://innoblepursuit.substack.com/p/two-pipelines-three-theaters-one
25.Optimistic for the future based on this convo. Dispatches from the Munich Security Conference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zD3lWdWDMgA
26.How to build an effective sales culture. Lots of good points here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXGLftcRHAE
27."The US is the most attractive market for new high-end technologies and has the best innovation ecosystem. The market wants to create these technologies; the barrier is activation energy.
It seems clear that hardware entrepreneurs have (re)learned that iteration speed and hardware-rich development are a more effective way to create new things. Vertical integration is now the dominant solution in mind share. The downside is that it requires tens of millions of dollars and numerous highly skilled employees to kick off. It works for Elon, but not everyone has that skill set.
Amazon Web Services enabled software startups to begin without having to set up on-premises servers, lowering the activation energy. Instant quote, short lead time manufacturing companies and services can do the same for many hardware startups and tinkerers.
The emphasis on speed is because the model only works if the latency is low. The gravity model for frontier technology is much stronger than for existing products. Leading engineers become more productive, iteration cycles shorten, and new ideas become reality faster. Not only does fast service and lightning logistics help convert existing customers, but it also helps create the downstream manufacturers of tomorrow."
https://www.austinvernon.site/blog/manufacturing.html
28.Italy is winning. Milan particularly as an international city.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67KqRfgyP7M
29.Zurich is the epitome of stealth wealth. Quiet money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw1KzQ_9V0Q
30.This is a really cool & important company. Metal Manufacturing with Machina Labs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQpwOkDUHvg
31."Beyond That The Common Thread? Data, energy, computing. These three things are needed to power AI/robots in the future. Therefore you should calculate how much data, energy and computing you own. Being negative on tech over the next decade is insane to us. Owning those three things = owning the new workforce.
If you want a set and forget stock portfolio it probably looks like this: QQQ, SMH, AI/Data stocks (META, GOOGL etc.) and Data Center/Solar/Nuclear exposure.
If you have anything in those three categories we’re not going to debate with you. The big picture is what you need.
On the W-2 Side: Since we’re in the first stage of this “junior co-worker” vibe, this means you’re going to slowly thin out middle roles (fancy for not generating revenue or making decisions). Your job is to position yourself for accountability and judgement. Use all the advanced AI tools you can find to appear capable of future judgement/accountability. Being fast at filling in excel sheets is no longer valuable."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/indicators-for-the-bottom-aie-com
32."As the capabilities improve, it is inevitable that every company will have the ability to automate most functions. For now, there are levels, and a set of companies are pushing the frontier of what’s possible. Human taste and decision-making will be more important than ever as AI does more of the grunt work."
https://nbt.substack.com/p/automate-the-entire-company
33."At this point, I don’t think we will hire another human for at least a year or two at our firm, but our efficiency will increase by at least 10% a month – the equivalent of two new full-timers.
Why?
Because it’s easier, faster, and more cost-efficient to set up replicants.
The replicants burn $1,000 in tokens a month (but never ask for a raise).
The replicants don’t make mistakes.
The replicants will get 10% better at their jobs each week, which typically takes humans about a year.
The replicants don’t complain, they train."
https://jcalfromallin.substack.com/p/openclaw-and-the-great-hiring-hiatus
34."If you find yourself entering a category with dozens of nearly identical competitors, pause. The problem may already be solved. You may be refining.If you find yourself confronting a bottleneck that others avoid because it is slow, complex, or governed by hard science, pay attention. That is where leverage hides.
Innovation, at its finest, is not aesthetic restlessness. It is structural defiance.
We must not build AI for the sake of AI, but build where a constraint dies, a category is created or an industry is transformed."
https://droninghead.substack.com/p/constraint-is-the-real-frontier
35.This was incredibly helpful for founder CEOs, lots of great management and leadership insights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UyitfSbY6c
36.A reality check for us in the West. Emerging Markets are booming and China has lots of advantages now. A global macro perspective.
No Apologies
I noticed I say “sorry” a lot. When I run into someone or do something wrong. Or even when someone runs into me or it’s someone else’s fault. WTF? It led me down a long thought chain to understand where this is coming from. I think it’s the weak overly polite Canadian in me. I grew up in Canada and lived there for 21+ years.
I also think it’s from the last decade or two where the Western culture for some reason started to promote weak, inoffensive apologetic men. Or even the ridiculous woke cancel culture, where you had to go on some apology tour if a tweet or something you said 10 years ago offended some rando or set of randos.
This is the system that the matrix propagates. It keeps the populace in check. It’s a pernicious form of societal control. Keeps you docile. You have wide swathes of weaklings now in the UK and Canada. America too. Every Western country. Rudderless passengers in their own meaningless lives. It’s harsh but it’s true.
Language is programming. Specific language leads to specific behavior. Talk like the weak, you are weak. The reverse is true too. You have to “act as if.”
However, if you observe the real world, everyone you know who has accomplished anything or done anything of impact was not afraid of ruffling feathers. I mean you don’t have to be a complete dick all the time as I see in Silicon Valley or Wall Street but sometimes you have to break some eggs to make an omelette. Fortune favors the bold as they say.
Going forward I’ll always be polite but no more “I’m sorry”. The only people I’ll ever apologize to are my family, my friends and business partners. I owe them my best and I also know I sometimes am not at that level or there when I am needed. But for anyone else, no more. If you don’t like it, I don’t care, F—k off!
I’ve finally realized weak behavior and apologizing does not serve me well. Not in the past. Definitely not now. You are just signaling to the predators you are the prey. And as we are operating in a world where it’s the law of the jungle, as prey you are now more likely to get eaten. It is what it is.
So no more apologies anymore. This is what I think is critical reprogramming. No more slave mindset. Onwards and upwards.
Aristocrat Hours: Work Like a Lion Part Deux
I’m a big believer of 996 and crazy work hours. Especially if you are in your twenties and thirties.
When I hear a twenty-something talk about work-life balance, I think they are stupid, probably deluded and maybe even retarded. WTF? You have the energy and the whole life ahead of you.
You literally don’t know anything about how the world works and you have to prove yourself. Prove yourself to yourself and to others. These are foundational: the skills, the reputation and relationships. So you have to grind when you are younger. That is the way the world works.
But this is different when you get into your mid-late 40s. At least it was for me. You probably know more. You have less energy, despite biohacking, exercise and other things. So you have to be more strategic and focused. I heard the term “Aristocrat Hours” from my friend Arjun. Basically 10 am to 3 pm. Hours where you work. The rest of the time it’s yours to spend on whatever you want to do. Reading, writing, family time, exercise, walks in nature. It’s about sustainability. It makes sense to me. I want to work till the end of my life. My retirement plan is death. That means I need to be able to do this for at least another 40 years. I might add you can’t do this as an employee, only if you are self employed or run a business.
In my business it’s about staying relevant and understanding what is happening in technology, startups and geopolitics and global macro. That means like investors of old, you have lots of downtime to read, write and think. To parse the signal from the noise as they say. Finding the reality. This is critical to stay on top of things and get new ideas. Or at minimum understand what is going on and how to position yourself and business accordingly.
That doesn’t mean I don’t grind or turn it on when I need to. You work like a lion as I wrote about before. There are days and weeks (sometimes even months, like in the summer) of relatively low activity, followed by periods of intense activity and work weeks. Like 100-120 hour work weeks, just like in my good old days. Aristocrat hours enable this, slow pace for a while as you build knowledge and energy that gets expended on the right activities in a short period of time. Rinse and repeat.
I’ve learned a lot of this mindset and tips from Lux Life Style Labs: https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/. I highly recommend them. As they wrote, it’s about effectiveness, not efficiency.
“We have been sold the lie of “Productivity.” We are obsessed with doing things faster, better, and cheaper. But if you are moving at 200 mph in the wrong direction, your efficiency is just accelerating your failure. Most people spend their lives optimizing tasks that shouldn’t exist in the first place. This is “Busy-Work” dressed in high-end software.
The Thesis in One Line: It is better to do the right thing slowly than the wrong thing at the speed of light.
The curator doesn’t manage time; they manage Leverage. They refuse to participate in the “Efficiency Race.”
The concept of Aristocrat Hours helps you sustain and become more effective in life.
Get The F-ing Money Part Deux: Money Matters
This is a regular reminder. 24-36 months to really make it. Don’t do dodgy, immoral stuff. You need to do it right, unlike all the stupid scammers and kids out there.
Money matters for survival. For taking care of your family and community at large. But it goes beyond that. It gives your point of view and vision weight.
Chamath Palihapitiya, ex-FB exec, investor extraordinaire said it best at a talk he did at Stanford University: https://x.com/F_Compounders/status/2016568450047483971
“So, that's what you have to do, you gotta go and get it. If you control the capital and you have a point of view, you can now, not be a sell out. (sic)
Whatever your world view is, you should be spending time to think about what that is. So that when you control some of these purse strings, you push that view into the world. I will never judge you, and you should not judge me for what that worldview is.
But the point is the more diversity of those views, the more rational actors we have and the more of a balanced, fair system, that is what diversity really means to me.
It doesn't mean let's manage back to a quota, it doesn't mean, okay, we need a black guy, a brown guy, we need a few, that's not what it means. This is what it means, right?...
You have a very unique worldview that matters. In the absence of capital, you're irrelevant, with capital, you're powerful. And then you decide in small ways, in medium size ways, in large ways, right, and it just depends on the scale of capital that you have.
And so that's what's necessary now in capitalism, which is that we have to come back to what is it really?
Is it an economic system, yes. But it is a philosophy as well, right?
And it's a philosophy that says we will vote for the change we intend based on the views that we have. And when you look at the most successful people that operate in these tentacles, that's what they do. Look at the Koch brothers, that's what they do. They have built a network of influence based on capital. Their world view is propagated into the world at an unbelievably aggressive rate that has been compounding for decades, that is genius.
It is genius, it doesn't matter whether you agree with their world view. Irrespective of what you think of the Kochs. You want both views out in the world at scale. Well right now, you have this and you don't have this. And there are many examples of that. And so get the money and don't lose your moral compass when you do.”
If this is not a case for making lots of money, not sure what is. Money is power. Money is influence. Money is leverage. Money is a tool for making the world and future you want to see. God knows we need it.
So go get the F–king Money! Do some good to the world with it.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads April 26th, 2026
"The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm... It's the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle." — Napoleon Hill
A concerning conversation. End of an era and looming civil war in America.
There is a big difference between wealth and money. Move to places where there is safety, civility and your $$ is treated well. Be prepared to move and go to where the opportunities are. Gonna be a wild next half decade as the cycle turns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eskzPuh_5w&t=1065s
2. An interview with Joe Tsai of Alibaba. Smart dude although symbolic of the old global system that is now ended. It will be interesting to see how he navigates this running Alibaba in China, yet having lots of assets in America and being of Taiwanese descent in a world of growing China-USA rivalry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbV1sMfv9TQ
3. Understanding the complicated Middle East region and how UAE punches above their weight geopolitical. By creating connectivity, dependencies & weaponizing chokepoints via air cargo, financial assets, banking & owning ports via DP World.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQgUflzxejs
4. "Every platform shift compresses the distance between user & value. The web required a URL & a browser. Mobile required a download & a homescreen slot. Skills require a sentence."
https://tomtunguz.com/can-you-fly-that-thing/
5."In the final years of the Fourth Turning, according to the The Fourth Turning framework, societies enter a period of intensifying stress in which long-standing institutions lose legitimacy faster than they can be reformed. Political systems polarize, financial structures strain, and public trust in elites collapses. What begins as diffuse anxiety hardens into decisive confrontation—often triggered by a catalyzing crisis such as war, financial collapse, or systemic failure. Compromise becomes rare; history accelerates. The defining feature of this phase is not chaos for its own sake, but forced choice: societies must decide what is worth preserving, what must be dismantled, and what new rules will govern collective life.
The beneficiaries are highly asymmetric. Those tied to the existing order—financialized elites, bureaucratic institutions, over-leveraged systems, and cultural gatekeepers—tend to lose power, credibility, and wealth. The Fourth Turning is hostile to rent-seeking and abstraction; it punishes systems that grew detached from productive reality. In contrast, people and entities aligned with real assets, national cohesion, and practical competence often gain. This includes builders rather than financiers, producers rather than speculators, and actors capable of operating amid volatility—whether that means industrial capacity, energy, food, metals, defense, or social leadership rooted in tangible outcomes. Younger generations, especially those forced to mature quickly under crisis conditions, often rise into leadership faster than in prior eras."
https://robertsinn.substack.com/p/ray-dalio-how-to-survive-the-coming
6. The crazy story of CZ of Binance. What a journey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQwXgxJxwnw
7. Markets work until they don't. New mineral strategy by the US to break dependence on China, long overdue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSYPubDjK9E
8."The global innovation system is not breaking. It is reorganizing.
The conversations at the World Government Summit pointed toward a clear conclusion. The future will not be won by those who assume a return to frictionless globalization. It will belong to those who can operate fluently across borders, stages, and systems, building companies that are grounded where they operate, but informed by the world beyond them.
In an age of fracture, local context is the new advantage."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/innovation-in-an-age-of-fracture
9.One of the most differentiated new VC funds with the distribution/audience/super brand of the Paul brothers. The Anti-Fund. Longtime SV OG Geoff Woo is pretty awesome too. Lifemaxxing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMzYK_kqm8M
10.I'm enjoying this series: interviewing power couples: in this case, the Lonsdales.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo5hTYmoQI4&t=481s
11."Thinking thru scenarios now for the on-going war in Ukraine:
First, let’s start with thinking thru the motivations of the individual players."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/ukraine-scenarios-for-peace-and-war
12. "NATO is fine. The alliance is fine. Know that people and institutions are looking to exploit any opportunity to promote division. Don’t be distracted because we argue like brothers and gossip like old women. We’re long-standing friends who get on each other’s nerves, but we stick together more often than not because the rest of the neighborhood is dangerous."
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/all-euro-nato-reporting-is-suspect
13."This may all sound very transactional, but getting access to the people, events and opportunities that can accelerate your business is an essential part of being a successful founder.
When it comes to startups, distribution wins. And networking is how founders distribute themselves.
If you spend time getting to know people who are well-connected and they see that you are genuine, high-value and have something to contribute (assuming that you are, in fact, all of those things), before you know it, you’ll start to find yourself nodding at the bouncer on your way in."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/the-bouncer-at-the-nightclub
14.Global macro with Luke Gromen. Trying to understand the rise of gold and the rise of mercantilism and the importance of critical minerals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc-swyVCDPo
15.Lots of good takes on recent news like Super Bowl ads, Saaspocalypse and BTC sell off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbQUsC8_QoA
16. "Look at the four areas of your life: Work, Health, Family, Friends. Pick the one that will build your legacy and turn the other three down to Low. For the next 30 days, do not apologize for your absence. Use that reclaimed energy to force a Systemic Breakthrough.
Stop trying to be “well-rounded.” A circle has no edge. Be a spear: sharp, narrow, and designed to puncture the status quo."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-balance
17."This isn’t temporary hype. Copper prices have already hit unprecedented levels, reflecting genuine supply fears rather than froth. Retail interest is picking up—FOMO is creeping in—but institutions drove the early moves. Equities in the sector are rotating higher as leverage to the metal becomes apparent. Miners with scale, low costs, and de-risked projects stand to capture outsized gains.
The broader implications are profound. Copper isn’t just wiring; it’s foundational to modern civilization. Shortages threaten economic stability, energy security, AI ambitions, even national defense. Trump has upped the US defence budget by 50 percent. Other countries are following suit. Munitions, drones, 6G networks—all are copper-intensive. And this global rearmament competes directly with civilian needs.
Two years ago, copper was about $3.80 a pound. A year ago it was around $4.50. As I write this, it’s approaching $6. The dollar, burdened by debt and printed promises, will continue its slide against hard assets like gold, silver, and copper. Prices could easily spike in the coming years. We’ve entered an era where physical reality trumps paper illusions."
https://frankgiustra.com/posts/is-copper-at-the-start-of-the-next-supercycle/
18."Your life is the canvas, and game is one of many brushstrokes. One brushstroke without the others leaves you incomplete. But when they work together, when you have built something worth seeing and you know how to invite her into it, you become the kind of man most guys do not even know exists. The kind who does not struggle because everything he has built does half the work before he even opens his mouth.
A real life James Bond and Bruce Wayne.
Today’s post is about a very significant brushstroke for your masterpiece of a canvas. Building a life so textured, so full, so undeniably magnetic that every move you make lands harder than it has any right to."
https://www.thefinalman.com/p/how-to-build-a-life-so-good-she-begs
19."What I’m describing is a version of the power law. It’s impossible to ignore as a venture capitalist, where a few investments and companies drive the majority of returns. It’s hard to internalize this sort of exponential function as a human (at least, it has been for me). But it’s out there, in all sorts of places. A few stories that command the most attention. A few cities in which most of GDP is concentrated. A few people that have the most wealth. Power, in the hands of a few.
What keeps me up is that I believe AI is already exacerbating this dynamic, and will only continue to, as any exponential function is want to do. Since my post over the weekend about agentic engineering and how code generation has become much more autonomous since the start of the year, I’ve heard from a number of founders and companies, most of whom think that they are in the “bucket 2” I describe: “Those who are learning what’s possible by already generating a lot of code.” They may be, but the gap between them and the small set of companies in bucket 1 is huge."
https://nbt.substack.com/p/levels-of-greatness
20.Guest appearance from Atlassian cofounder. So many great nuggets to understand what's happening in the Age of AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdunfbobxaY&t=1615s
21."Becoming a venture capitalist is a very weird story for almost everybody. It’s a rare subset of finance where people stumble into it rather than taking a well trodden, planned path, for the most part. That was true for me."
https://www.newinternet.tech/p/how-i-became-a-venture-capitalist
22. Always learn new stuff from Zeihan, don't always agree with his takes but this is interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ribrY5okACk&t=2361s
23.Lots of good insights on the drone market from this convo. Zipline has been under the radar until now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF5Ocop7A_I
24.This was a helpful discussion: lots of frameworks and insights on investing at series A stage investing from A16Z. How you evaluate founders too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq0JSbuIppQ
25.Understanding the new Risk board. Globalization is over, we are now in a Neo-Mercantalist world. Very important to understand what the future may look like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sTkt0dtxF4
26."Medical students, aspiring entrepreneurs, and sartorially confused Zoomers don’t choose their role models at random, however. In his 2015 book The Secret of Our Success, Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich argued that what sets humans apart from other species is our capacity for cultural learning. According to Henrich, role models are “storage units” for cultural survival skills, and we’re hardwired to identify high-prestige role models.
Explaining a scenario where players had the choice to contribute money (or not) to a community project, Henrich wrote, “When the high-prestige player had the opportunity to contribute money first, he or she tended to contribute to, and thus cooperate in, the joint effort, and then the following low-prestige player usually did as well. So, everyone won.” But when the low-prestige player went first, they tended not to contribute, and then, neither did the high-prestige player. In effect, high-prestige people can initiate/veto collaboration, giving them power to set a group’s agenda, whereas low-prestige people have limited veto power and often follow the lead of … a role model."
https://www.profgalloway.com/role-models/
27. I like listening to Doomberg, his takes are always sober and rational. Helpful to question my own views on what is happening and where the world is going.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSAN5JmgvAk
28. "Every paradigm shift in enterprise technology produces a land grab — and, inevitably, a shakeout. Cloud computing launched thousands of SaaS startups between 2005 and 2015; most were absorbed, acqui-hired, or zeroed out, while a small cohort graduated into durable, category-defining platforms. We expect the same pattern in Vertical AI, but with greater ultimate market opportunity, faster potential growth, creative new monetization models, greater early capital efficiency, and — for all those reasons — unprecedented levels of competition.
The wedge that enables much of the current generation of app-layer startups is cheap intelligence. The trap for AI Services founders is mistaking a scalable wedge for a defensible business. The companies that will endure are those that use the current window, while cost differentials are large, adoption is nascent, and incumbents are slow to embed themselves so deeply in their customers’ operations that switching becomes structurally painful, not just inconvenient. As we wrote in “Early-Stage VC in the Age of Vertical AI,” the profiles of Vertical AI company-building are forcing investors and founders alike to reimagine what success looks like. This is no exception.
This is not a new idea. It is, in fact, the oldest idea in enterprise software, rediscovered. What’s new is the surface area: SaaS companies could embed in a few workflows and capture data from the screens users interact with. AI-native platforms can embed in every workflow, capture data from every interaction — whether a human is present or not — and build compounding intelligence that makes the product better the longer it runs. The opportunity to build “load-bearing infrastructure” has never been greater. Neither has the temptation to settle for being a “cheaper vendor.”
As Benchmark Capital and Wealthfront co-founder Andy Rachleff argued, the “value hypothesis” of a startup — the what, the who, and the how of demand — is "seldom correct" on the first attempt, because founders must discover who is truly desperate for their product… not just who says they're interested. This is also why we’ve argued that when megafunds suggest that market winners are obvious within two years of founding, these are logical, if not self-serving, positions for their fund models, but not how markets behave or category-winners emerge.
Customers are always interested in cheaper services, and AI can help deliver them. What customers truly want — and what they’ll pay to retain — is a system that knows their business better than they do: one that compounds institutional knowledge, connects them to their ecosystem, and becomes more internally valuable with every interaction. Building that system is harder than reselling cheap inference. But it’s the only thing worth building."
https://insights.euclid.vc/p/who-gets-to-eat
29."Most of the time, a high valuation is a debt, not a prize. It forces you to hit massive goals just to stay alive. If your price grows faster than your business, you lose the power to make your own choices. You become a prisoner of the expectations you accepted.
For investors, the cost at the start determines the win at the end. A great business is a bad deal if you pay too much for it.
True success comes when the price of the company stays close to the truth of the work. When those stay in line, everyone wins. When they don’t, the math will eventually settle the score."
https://www.thevccorner.com/p/brex-exit-venture-capital-math
30."The adage “invest in what you know” is increasingly possible today. As a result, market participation is no longer a specialized profession. It's a mass-participation culture with its own status games, memes, heroes, villains, subcultures and language. Because of their newfound expressivity and accessibility, financial markets are increasingly intertwined with culture. And culture, from trends to events to political outcomes, is increasingly expressed through markets."
https://x.com/jessewldn/status/2022291132080644339
31.Enjoyed this discussion: what's happening in VC LP land and tech journalism land. Good takes. Charles is a smart and kind man, a rare combo in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mue5kE4UVLE
32.The father of "Geomacro", less "sell American assets" and more time to "buy rest of world assets" like Europe with extra money or move a little bit abroad. Strong case for looking at some European sectors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61a6TZQyG-8
33.Always watch this show weekly to get a pulse and make sense of the culture and zeitgeist happening here in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUA7ue5vB1E
34. Sober takes on geopolitics and the movement to a multipolar world. WW3 started in 2014 and the rise of gold as reserves in many central banks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQa6mNXcM4s
35."It’s the Universe’s way of testing you to see if you’re one of the Real Ones.
You can get to the level where you’re essentially permanently successful, but you have to suffer first.
And part of the way the Universe makes you suffer is by giving you a taste of the way things could be…right before it rips it all away from you.
You advance a few levels and then drop right back to where you were.
Unlike before (during the Eternal Grind Stage of the true beginner), you now know what you’re missing out on because you’ve (briefly) lived it.
Going back to suffering and working hard for no money when you’ve felt how things could be is a total nightmare.
It’s one of the ‘dropping-off points’ where tons of people throw in the towel for good.
The re-humbling process CRUSHES people. They retreat back to the corporate world with their tail between their legs, begging for a life of stability.
But some people get a taste of how things could be and it motivates them to get back to (and even surpass) that level.
If you can push through it then you’ll know for a fact that you’re one of the Real Ones."
https://www.tetramarketing.io/p/the-downside-of-elevating-your-lifestyle
Get The F–ing Money: Personal Finance Advice for the Young Man (and Old)
Money is something I’ve always fought hard for. Bad scarcity mindset, lack of confidence and lots of fear of not having it. It’s led to broken relationships and lots of anxiety & stress. Unnecessarily I might add. And I came up during a time which was a much nicer, prosperous globalized world where the world was literally your oyster. I can’t imagine what it would be like for young men in their teens and twenties now, looking out at their future. To make it now as a young man requires so much more focus, toughness and creativity.
That’s why I keep going to watch Andrew Tate interviews because he is the guide for many young men these days for better or worse. I watched an interview he did with Bradley Martyn and Tate did a great breakdown on what’s happening right now. And why it’s so tough out there.
Bradley: “What would you say because I know a lot of young men follow you and a lot of young men are interested in what you have to say about success and finding success. You found yours. What would you say are some of the most important things men can do right now if they're in their early 20s to figure out what they can be successful at because a lot of guys are wandering.
Andrew: Yep. They are wandering. And not only are they wandering, they're also gambling. The system is completely broken. I think it's very important before we have these conversations we understand that the system that you and I grew up in and the system that especially our parents grew up in is fundamentally completely now totally
broken.
The idea that you can go to school, get a degree, go get a good job, work hard at your job, get a promotion, start to save money, compound your money in the bank over time to buy a property which you own is bullsh-t. All gone. Never going to happen. You're never going to get a degree, which puts you $200,000 in debt, then get a job and pay off that student debt and then save enough money to now buy a house and then pay off that house. You're talking by the time you're 70, you'll still be paying this crap off. Yeah. So, there's no way this works anymore.
The traditional system that everybody was supposed to invest in which was good for society because 1) it educated people 2) gave everyone a path gave everyone hope 3) gave everyone stability 4) gave everyone a home which gave them a vested interest in their societies. All of that's gone so young people today are effectively gambling. When I speak to young men what they are doing basically is memecoins or crypto or literal gambling in a casino because they realize the game is so rigged they can't work their way out. They have to get lucky.
If you add into the fact that AI is accelerating and even more importantly a lot of the world's money is becoming heavily monopolized and I see this all the time, there are less and less small independent companies and there are more and more branches of Black Rock and Vanguard and these huge super conglomerates which are just sucking up all of the world's liquidity and all of the money is going to them. So you're living in a world where you have to gamble your way out. If you try and start a company, you're competing with monsters. And AI is coming and replacing jobs in real time.
Yeah. So, it's an extremely difficult position to be in. And unfortunately for young people, it's only going to get worse. So, every day you waste, I think the first lesson if you're a 22-y old trying to escape now. is that every day you waste, the game gets harder. So, you need to act now. You don't have three years. Your biggest weapon now in the world is time.”
It’s not a pretty take but I think he is exactly correct here. And it gets even worse as Tate continues. But he has some good recommendations which he starts with here:
“And that's why you actually need to resist, I believe, traditional education. It's not that they steal $200,000 from you. It's that they steal four years from you. Time. Four years ago, ChatGPT didn't exist. You don't have four years to learn from a textbook from 1996. The biggest waste of time on the planet. So, you don't have time because the game's rigged against you.”
The second thing is that I think that every generation has its wealth, its large wealth generation event. I think that each age bracket of people had something that happened when they were alive that gave them the chance to generate a whole bunch of wealth. And for our parents primarily, it was property. People in the generation above us, they could buy cheap homes. Yeah. And the homes exploded up in value.
And I think in the world we live in today, there’s only thing that's still cheap. In fact, it's cheaper than it's ever been. We already touched on this, information. Because you don't have to go to school to get information, and you don't have to get a degree to get information. And you don't have to hire someone who has the information to get information. You could just ask your phone. So, information is the new gold rush. It's the new cheapest thing that you can get hold of and everyone has access to it. It's true.
But most people are lazy. Most people are stupid. And if you get some good information and you get first movers advantage, you actually take action and do things before other people, there's still a way you can make money. But it's just having the perspicacity, my favorite word, to pay attention to opportunities all of the time and actually have the agency to act on them and to be quick because the world is so fast now you don't even have time. You don't even have a day to make a business plan.
So, how do you know what to look for? Well, I'll tell you some ways I make. So in the age of financialized capitalism which is where we are, the most difficult thing about making money in the world today is that you need money to make. And this is what makes it so difficult to do because if you have no money in the first place how do you make money. Any Dip sh-t now can turn 10 million into 20 million. They just buy stocks and wait. That's it. It's not even hard. I mean Bitcoin's not doing what it's supposed to do but if you have enough belief you can buy Bitcoin and wait. Yeah.
You know, in the olden days, if I said double your money, you had to take that money, go build factories and hire staff and sell whatever product you were producing to double your money. You haven't got to do that now. And the reason you don't have to do that is because you're buying into a monopoly. If you buy Amazon stock, you're effectively shutting down mom and pop shops all around the country because you're buying into the monopoly, which is crushing all the mom and pop shops because they can't compete.
So, everything's becoming monopolized. It's very difficult. So to make money, you have to find an opportunity or find a way to make your first chunk of money because it's easier than ever to turn money into money, but you need money in the first place and it's harder than ever to make money from zero. I think a lot of the money now comes from the arbitrage on the lack of knowledge in simple things. So if you can speak to boomers and basically use chat GPT for them, you can get paid.
But it's getting off zero, which is the hardest thing. But a lot of it just takes agency. And there is an arbitrage now between the generation above us, which don't know how to use all of the things that the 17-year-olds know how to use. And I think this is where the money is. And that's going to disappear as the older people die. It's going to be harder for someone who is now currently five years old once they get 15 to call you and I and try and convince us to do something on a computer because we know how to use computers.
So right now currently as we sit in as we sit here if you were to ask me
the best way to make money in the world today, it is to take advantage of the fact that there is a large subsection of the population that not only have all the money. But secondly, don't know how to do a lot of things that most young people already know how to do. And if you can leverage that correctly you can actually make quite a lot of money simply. That's the best way to make money in the world today. And that's going to change because how to make money changes every 10 or 15 years.
Like I said before, not too long ago, 20, 30, 40 years ago, property was the way. Now, I think that is the way. What comes next, I don't know what's going to happen when every single person on the planet and the entire generation below us is grown up. We're grown up. Everyone knows how to use AI. Everyone understands what crypto is. Everyone's already done their own investing. Then how do you make money then? I don't know. But right now there's a huge arbitrage. So that's where the money is.”
If you made it this far, I think it becomes much clearer on what you have to do. Have agency, take action. Find a customer segment, figure out their problem, and figure out a solution. Sell. Repeat rinse. Simple, not easy. Go forth young man. Works for old men too.
Stay Grounded: Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself Part Deux
I keep thinking about the day when I get massive liquidity. I keep thinking about what I’d do. As an introvert, I’d stop meeting people, cut my circle. Do all the things wealthy people do, vacation at luxury resorts, fly private, have a personal trainer & shopper, and probably never leave my house if I did not have to.
I’d really enjoy my introvert time but I know I’d just end up rotting mentally and physically. I did some version of this back in 2012-2013 and I got bored after 2 months with a little bit of liquidity and ended up re-engaging with reality. I read something on X that explained why you need to do regular people stuff, whether it was true or not, it rings true: https://x.com/HamptonAc_/status/2016134704504746060
"I fly commercial because the second you start thinking you're too good to sit next to regular people, you stop understanding what they actually want." Said he built his company selling to normal restaurant owners. People working 80 hour weeks just to keep their spot open. "If I start flying private and staying in penthouses, I forget what their life looks like. I forget what problems actually matter to them."
The moment you separate yourself from the people you're selling to, you lose your edge. Proximity to reality is more valuable than comfort". I asked if he's ever tempted to buy the flashy cars, the beach house, and the whole flex. "I bought a nicer house. I travel more. But I'm not trying to look rich. I'm trying to stay useful" He said the wealthiest people he knows are the most paranoid about losing touch. "They know the second they stop understanding normal problems, they become irrelevant."
Completely 100% makes sense. This is not just about business either. This is about regular everyday life too. Don’t get disconnected to people. Don’t become an out of touch rich person. These are the people who lose touch with reality, and start making really bad decisions. They are also the first to get eaten, figuratively and literally.
Surviving An Uncertain Future: Building Lighthouse Skills
I find myself really anxious these days. It’s such a weird time. There are so many changes and I’ve never been great with uncertainty in my life. Massive technological changes, I mean AI is literally going to rip through white collar jobs. Even bigger socio-economic changes as the K-shaped economy fractures our society. Geopolitical stresses and global macro are crazy at the moment too. No wonder everyone feels like the world is ending.
First of all, you need to have the right mindset. That you can overcome any and every one of these issues. You have no choice. People rely on you. You have to have determination that you will thrive. You have to expect to work harder than you have ever worked before.
And this is where X comes to the rescue. I always end up with some piece of advice or recommendations that really help. Sahil Bloom posted a great write up on Lighthouse Skills https://x.com/SahilBloom/status/2015775632911692209
If you need to focus, focus on building skills that will last the test of time. He writes:
“Further, there are timeless skills—those that are likely to remain valuable and relevant across a wide array of future states.
I call these Lighthouse Skills:
Sales: Sales is the most useful meta-skill for life. No matter what path you choose to go down, you need to learn to sell: Sell yourself, sell your story, sell your product, sell your vision, sell your ideas. My richest friends aren't the ones with the highest IQs. They just know how to sell. They aren't afraid of being told no. They keep refining the message until they get to a yes.
Storytelling: Become exceptional at aggregating data and communicating it simply and effectively. Data in, story out. Learn to pick up on cues from listeners that signal the story is connecting (eyes lighting up, leaning in posture, etc.). Iterate accordingly.
Clear Communication: The ability to clearly communicate (with computers and humans) is going to stand out. AI is going to amplify the output capacity of the clear communicator by 100x.
Emotional Intelligence: Human interpersonal skills are arguably going to become the most important skills in a future where more and more of our lives are run through technology. The ability to create meaningful, real connection with other humans will stand out even more than it does today. Note: I plan to write a full piece on how to become more emotionally intelligent. Reply YES if you're interested in reading it!
Public Speaking: Strong, confident public speaking builds authority and improves status. It's not just about presentations in front of a large audience. It applies to normal conversations and small group settings just as much as the huge conference hall.
Taste: Good taste is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. It requires a level of forward-thinking to be in front of trends to capture value before the market squeezes out the opportunity.
Clear Thinking: Gather data, process it thoughtfully, make a decision, iterate accordingly. Avoid the "that's just the way we do things" mentality and question underlying assumptions. As the pace of change accelerates, maintaining rational, clear thinking will be more valuable than ever before.
The goal is to focus on developing a set of skills and attributes that are relevant and valuable in a range of potential futures.”
Hard to add to these, but I would say learn AI tools & agents, test everything. AI will be a massive leverage for humans. It already is. People with AI will beat people without AI.
Get good at copy writing. Get good at project management and organization. Even more important is to build a community and network of like-minded people.
Developing these Lighthouse Skills will give you the confidence and enable you to overcome any challenges that the future throws at you. As Sahil said even better than me: "The one who can tolerate and embrace the most uncertainty is the one who will eventually win."
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads April 19th, 2026
“Spring is the time of plans and projects”--Leo Tolstoy
Important discussion from two guys on the frontlines of defensetech in Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6efOuq5x7I
2."Ukrainian soldiers complain that U.S. companies lack an understanding of electronic warfare, as well as the different types of air defense and other countermeasures that both sides use against the drone threat. If the U.S. is ever dragged into a large-scale war against a peer or near-peer adversary like China or Iran, it will be ill-equipped for a drone-heavy background like that in Ukraine."
3."Bessent has already shown his hand. Rising gold prices are not a problem to be solved. They are capacity being created.
Watch the gold price relative to fiscal stress. Watch central bank accumulation. Watch the language Treasury uses around asset-side policy. And watch which country moves first to formalize what markets already know.
In the next phase of currency competition, balance sheets will matter more than slogans. The United States has a trillion-dollar card it has not yet played."
https://tanviratna.substack.com/p/bessents-1-trillion-treasury-secret
4."America’s economy has become one giant bet on AI, with seven tech companies representing more than a third of the S&P 500. The concentration of economic power in so few hands renders those businesses uniquely vulnerable to a boycott, as consumers can focus on a short target list. Big Tech’s vulnerability is further multiplied by the subscription model, as valuations for subscription companies are typically 8x to 20x revenue.
One example: In 2022, Netflix reported losing just 200,000 subscribers in a single quarter, and that wiped out $50 billion in market cap overnight. (Netflix attributed the churn to increased competition and the lifting of pandemic restrictions that had kept people in front of their TVs.) The free gift with purchase? Consumers maximize political impact while minimizing household expenses. In America, 4 out of 5 adults spend nearly $200 per year on unused subscriptions. I had three HBO Max subscriptions … somehow.
Some of you have asked why we are targeting Amazon, my 2026 stock pick? Others want to know why we didn’t target Disney? A: I’d rather be effective than right. The companies at ground zero of Resist and Unsubscribe have an outsized influence over the national economy and our president. The stocks in the “blast zone” belong to consumer-facing companies we’ve identified as active enablers of ICE. Collectively, ground zero and blast zone businesses don’t represent the totality of complicity, but rather the jugular of American authoritarianism."
https://www.profgalloway.com/resistance-infrastructure/
5."But in general, I strongly recommend inverting the idea stage - focusing on demand before you focus on supply - because life is too short to build something people don’t want right now. This approach seems to be the lowest-risk way to build what people actually want, and a way to mostly avoid the infinite pre-PMF wilderness."
https://howtogrow.substack.com/p/inverting-the-idea-stage
6."And that’s taste as something that is not subjective but objective and universal—taste as the ability to identify quality.
That’s a topic rich enough to fill a whole other essay (or an entire book).
But regardless of whether or not you believe in this definition of taste, I think the best path there is the same: You make things. And as you make them, you try to be aware of how you make them. You try to speak your why—why “yes” to this and “no” to that."
https://every.to/p/what-is-taste-really
7. Lots of good stuff here: SpaceX acquisition of xAI + Clawcon & Wapo Layoffs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbhGfYsFUls
8."And Bessent, it seems was quite the player, albeit one who seems to have a knack for a holistic approach rather than a Systems-oriented one … and a player who now may have finally been given free rein to take aim at the game itself.
The real game.
After all, following the massive success—or catastrophic economic failure, depending on which side of the trade you were on—of the trade that made (or unmade) a decade in England, Bessent didn’t stop there, as he rose through the ranks to head the firm’s London office, then returned as Chief Investment Officer from 2011 to 2015, where he orchestrated multibillion-dollar bets like the successful short against the Japanese yen in 2013, reportedly adding another $10 billion to Soros’ coffers through trades that once more preyed on governmental fiscal vulnerabilities and exposed the fragility of their ongoing and long-running fiat manipulations; yet, in a twist that screams defection in the language of the narrative warfare I track most closely, Bessent parted ways in 2015 amid reported personal and professional frictions with the Soros dynasty—we’ll get back to that—founding Key Square Capital Management with a $2 billion seed from his former mentor, only to steer the hedge fund toward windfall profits during the 2022 market downturn by betting against overleveraged assets, demonstrating an uncanny knack for profiting from the very systemic instabilities he now seeks to eradicate.
To wit, from where I’m sitting, and despite optics to the contrary, this pattern of exploitation isn’t representative of mere opportunism; it’s the profile of a wolf who learned to hunt on the borders of the rival pack’s den, internalized the mechanics of soft power projection through currency warfare and hedge fund hegemony and emerged with a publicly-stated zeal for a “global economic reordering” that prioritizes Main Street’s resurgence over Wall Street’s dominance—as he articulated in his April 2024 address to the American Bankers Association, vowing that after four decades of elite enrichment, it was time for tax reforms like eliminating levies on tips, overtime and Social Security, coupled with deregulation and balanced tariffs to compel fair global trade and domestic onshoring, core pillars of Donald Trump’s Golden Age economic pitch.
And so, while Bessent’s history positions him as a key asset of those who both subsist on and who exploit the central banking cabal, he now stands as the key architect of its impending collapse, and perhaps a more consistent source of existential dread than Trump himself, and yet, a man who fits ‘The Donald’ template to a Trumpian T: an ex-insider who knows their rituals, their weaknesses and who harbors no loyalty to their perpetuation."
https://burningbright.substack.com/p/the-wolf-of-main-street
9.Kevin is one of the OGs in Silicon Valley: a rare top tier investor and operator. Super insightful conversation on investing in the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmKPCcbo2e0&t=2145s
10."Look at what Anthropic did when Clawdbot showed up. Open-source project that wrapped Claude into an always-on personal agent. Persistent memory, messaging integration, real computer access. 60,000 GitHub stars in weeks. The company that just caused a $285 billion selloff reacted to Clawdbot like it was an existential threat. Tightened enforcement on third-party harnesses. Pushed trademark claims. Forced a rebrand. Twice.
Why would the model maker panic about an open-source wrapper? Because the wrapper was capturing the value. The context, the memory, the user relationship.
The model does the work. The harness decides what work is worth doing. That’s where the margin lives.
Back to the bounce
The selloff fades. Markets overshoot on fear.
But the question remains. Who has a story.
US tech gets absurd multiples on narrative. Indian IT gets modest ones. Indian IT is arguably more capable at enterprise delivery than Palantir.
India doesn’t have the insane valuations. We’re far below. A company here getting even a fraction of Palantir’s multiple would look completely different. The opportunity is to position as the credible alternative that makes Palantir’s promises real at a fraction of the cost. Nobody in Indian IT is telling that story.
Markets don’t pay for value. They pay for the story about value."
https://mtrajan.substack.com/p/value-capture-has-nothing-to-do-with
11."The speed of a team is limited by its slowest member’s “concerns.” By removing the need for consensus, you restore Radical Velocity. It is better to move fast and be 10% wrong than to move at a crawl and be 100% “aligned” with a group of people who have nothing to lose."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-collaboration-myth
12.Biotech Prime: Learning about Pilgrim.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxj41-p8xyo
13.Lots of nuggets to understand Kongsberg, one of the top European Defense primes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6p-UAmfs_E&t=13s
14.I appreciate this week's discussion: Especially on the SaaS crisis and AI + Moltbook. These guys know what they are talking about on the tech industry topics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTiHheA40nI
15."The ultimate status symbol is remaining perfectly calm during a public crisis. When everyone expects you to explain, apologize, or “vibrate” with the chaos, you respond with a single, cold directive. This signals that your Internal Fortress is impenetrable. You are the eye of the storm."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-vulnerability-fetish
16."SaaS valuations have been under pressure for some time, particularly after the bubble of 2020 and 2021. The last few weeks have been especially dramatic and may represent an overcorrection. Even so, the valuation landscape for SaaS has changed permanently.
For these reasons and others, the future of SaaS fundraising and valuations will likely be more modest on a long-term basis. Entrepreneurs would do well to embrace this disruption: build AI-first SaaS companies with low cost structures, flexible pricing and packaging, and a focus on solving the hardest customer problems at dramatically lower cost.
The future is not fewer SaaS products—it’s ten times as many. And wherever there is opportunity, entrepreneurs will step in to fill the void."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/02/07/seven-reasons-saas-valuations-are-crumbling-in-the-age-of-ai/
17."The ultimate signal of a sovereign individual is the ability to end a long-term relationship or partnership the moment it becomes a net negative for the mission. No drama, no long explanations, no “second chances” that were never earned. A clean break signals that your time is a finite resource and you are the only one authorized to allocate it."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-loyalty-debt
18."A Golden Age is a period of intense innovation, category creation, velocity, and productivity that lasts typically several years. Golden Ages at companies have the property of attracting all the greatest talent in the industry, very quickly. That’s happening at Anthropic right now.
So now you see how the magic starts and ends. During Golden Ages, there is more work than people. And when they crash, it is because there are more people than work.
As soon as there wasn’t enough work, people began to fight over the work that was left. It kicked off a wave of empire building, territoriality, politicking, land grabs, and, as Lydia Ash taught me, Cookie Licking–a phrase folks at Microsoft had invented to accuse people of claiming work that they will never actually get around to doing."
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-anthropic-hive-mind-d01f768f3d7b
19."To the point: economies of scale and market dominance are key to competitiveness particularly for manufacturing companies exposed to global competition. Takaichi knows this very well, and is now taught by “Team Trump” more than by anyone else that Japan has got what it takes to be the engineering and industrial powerhouse that can help re-industrialize the United States. What Japan lacks is scale and genuine “National Champions”.
The idea of promoting both regional and national champions by state-sponsored M&A has been a longstanding dream of METI technocrats. Now the time has come.
Takaichi has made it very clear she favors greater regional empowering, even going so far as to agree to plan for a second capital city in Osaka. Even if the LDP wins a majority in the election and, technically, is no longer dependent on the Isshin Progressive Party to govern, I expect her commitment to regional government reform and a gradual re-design of central-to-local government to move into greater focus.
Specifically, here is what PM Takaichi’s fiscal policy changes are poised to focus on — greater autonomy of regional governments to pursue local industrial policy - its not about growing the budget, but about re-allocating it and, more importantly, changing the budget stewardship to empower the regions.
And yes, the national government will still get to direct the funds — regional gets to compete for projects deemed urgent and essential for national economic security reasons; they submit their plans, and the elite technocrats from METI and MoF decide the winners."
https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/beyond-the-takaichi-trade
20. "Taylor Sheridan is straddling the same divide in his popular western shows. In Yellowstone he deftly balances the two agendas. Kevin Costner (playing rancher John Dutton) is a flawed person, but we still sympathize with his love of the land and rugged determination. He is both dysfunctional and idealistic—those traits coexist in the same complicated person. So you can watch this series either way, as deconstructing the myth or building it back up.
We still live with that dilemma today.
Do we trust our gunslingers and authority figures? Or do we fear them? And allow me to point out the obvious—this is not just a question about cowboy movies. It’s a question about our society as a whole.
So do you vote for Gary Cooper as president, hoping for a courageous man of conviction. Or do you pick Clint Eastwood, because you need a cruel bastard to maintain law and order?
Maybe the western film is a good place to explore these issues. It provides all the necessary archetypes, and is perhaps the purest setting where we can grasp the trade-offs between freedom and social order, independence and authority, toughness and benevolence, innocence and experience.
If that happened, the western story would have gone full circle. After rising in status as popular entertainment, it collapsed into cynicism and senseless violence. And now may be the moment when it returns to its legitimate place as a foundational myth—a kind of Iliad and Odyssey rolled together for the American psyche.
We need myths and stories. And, for better or worse, this is the one we’ve inherited. Let’s not abandon, but make the most of it."
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/what-i-learned-from-binge-watching
21."Trust is lubricant. It is the grease that lets the gears turn without grinding, the oil that prevents the machinery of cooperation from seizing. And because it is lubricant, it is invisible when it works. No one notices the oil until the engine burns out.
What does the market see? Trust does work markets might otherwise intermediate. Friction creates demand for products. When trust disappears, someone must sell its replacement. The lawyer who drafts the contract the handshake didn’t need. The compliance software that monitors the worker who was once trusted to do her job. The credentialing body that certifies the competence that reputation once established. The background check that investigates the neighbor who was once known. The audit that verifies the books that were once taken on faith. Each of these is a profitable service, and each becomes more profitable as trust erodes. There is now an entire industry—call it the friction industry—whose revenues depend on the continued destruction of the commons it has learned to replace.
Trust does not appear in GDP. Its absence does. When neighbors watch each other’s houses, no transaction occurs; when they install surveillance systems, GDP rises. When a handshake closes a deal, no lawyer bills; when contracts replace handshakes, the legal industry grows. The successful destruction of trust registers as economic growth—more services sold, more professionals employed, more activity to measure. A high-trust society looks, to the econometrician, poorer than a low-trust society frantically purchasing substitutes for what it has lost. We have built our measure of prosperity around what can be counted, and trust cannot be counted—only its expensive replacements can. This is how a civilization can impoverish itself while every metric shows it getting richer.
The economists call trust “social capital,” but the name obscures the crucial asymmetry. Trust is not like money. It is more like topsoil—built up over generations through countless small depositions, easily washed away in a single season of careless extraction, and once gone, recoverable only on timescales that mock human planning. The farmer who strip-mines his soil for a decade of bumper harvests will leave his children a desert. The society that strip-mines its trust for a generation of efficiency gains will leave its children something worse: institutions that still stand in their accustomed places but have been hollowed out from within, and a friction industry selling services to navigate the rubble.
Private equity has refined this extraction into a playbook called brand arbitrage. Acquire an institution that has accumulated reputational capital over generations—a regional hospital, a beloved newspaper, a century-old consumer brand. Extract value by cutting the quality that built the reputation while riding the residual trust. The brand will carry the degraded product for years before anyone notices. By the time trust has fully eroded, the fund has exited, returns secured. The shell remains. The commons has been enclosed."
https://thechoiceengine.substack.com/p/the-strip-mining-of-trust
22.Some global macro, why Trump picked Warsh for new Fed chairman. This and the Imperial Circle concept which is super helpful to understand how the US will weaponize capital.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtbwA2bWHBc
23.A perspective on global powers and geopolitics from the eyes of the Islamic world. 4 active blocs: US, EU, RU, CN, 4 passive blocs: Islamic, India, Africa, South America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DnMnpp8SkU
24.I appreciate these takes on venture capital and PE. The Slow Ventures guys just like the Founders Fund folks have super contrarian views which usually tend to be right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xClBbMQldg0
25."Even in the absence of a formal arms control treaty, a nuclear arms race on the scale of the Cold War, in which the Soviet Union and the United States added thousands of delivery vehicles and tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, is difficult to imagine. Russia, in particular, and the United States lack the industrial and financial capacity to pursue such an effort, especially amid competing defense-industrial priorities in the conventional domain.
From a European perspective, strengthening conventional defense and deterring Russian adventurism beyond Ukraine remain the top priorities. This does not change, even if a modest increase in deployed Russian nuclear warheads were to materialize."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/the-treaty-is-dead-relax
26."This wasn’t fickleness. It was economics. And it reveals why virality—once the holy grail of marketing strategy—has become economically worthless.
Death of virality can be traced to social media’s algorithmic personalization, exponential growth of content (and content creators), and corresponding fragmentation of culture.
More people, more content, smaller audiences."
https://andjelicaaa.substack.com/p/virality-is-dead
27."The stocks have largely recovered and analysts are being more sanguine about how important it is to keep track of inventory, product sales, accounting and other key enterprise data, not to mention how to secure that data. These key databases and applications aren’t likely to be vibe coded.
But, but, but: enterprise SaaS companies would be stupid to ignore the implications of the rise of “professional” vibe coding. There is emerging two classes of vibe coding: hobbyists building apps to deal with annoying tasks and professional programmers using it to reduce the drudge work of building systems. The latter category of vide coders could well change the fundamental dynamics of building and selling enterprise systems. That won’t happen overnight but it may well become a strategic issue for the existing players in the SaaS world."
https://salsop.substack.com/p/dear-silicon-valley-resistance-is
28."There is an opportunity here to lean into authenticity, and I’m going to embrace it. While others complain about AI ruining everything, let’s see what we can do here before becoming totally blackpilled on everything in the genre.
Again, this is good news for people with something to offer. The AI slop era is making genuine human insight more valuable, not less. You just need to prove you’re the real deal, and video/audio is the most effective way to do that. So that’s what we are gong to do."
https://www.dossier.today/p/how-the-dossier-will-stand-out-in
29."TLDR — moats are dynamic things that are actively evolved over time, not a singular breakthrough that sustains the company."
https://www.alsoblogposts.com/p/what-is-a-moat
30."If China cuts this supply off, all these other critical industries will be significantly impaired if not shut down entirely. What good is having a $200 billion subsidized Intel fabrication facility if the workers do not have access to cleanroom gloves?
Gloves, however, are a $0.03 commodity and therefore face a unique challenge when enticing private investment. Without public policy support, businesses will continue to spend a penny less per glove buying from China or other East Asian nations. This would leave many critical industries at risk.
The bottom line is that times have changed, but public policy has not fully caught up. We are too dependent on too many critical goods, leaving us too vulnerable. Only deliberate, mapped-out government action in support of specific industries will dig America out of its dependence hole. Yet the lingering influence of arguments favoring a more laissez-faire approach to national security perpetuates a chicken or egg argument that is causing endless delay and endangering the nation.
Goods are either critical or they are not. Rare earths are. Critical minerals are. Semiconductor chips are. And it is time for public policy to treat nitrile gloves as the critical goods that they are, through public policies that guarantee they can serve the national interest in times of need."
31.Some good data points from the folks at A16Z on the AI boom in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSohMpT24SI
32. "The founders who build $10B+ companies don’t have this problem. Because the company IS the point.
The number is exhaust from the engine, not the engine itself.
This is what we’re actually underwriting when we invest at inception.
At Antler, we write $500K commitments to a founder before they even make their first dollar. Before traction. Sometimes before they’ve picked a co-founder. I’m not underwriting a market or a product at this stage, those will change fifteen times before the Series A. I’m underwriting the founder’s relationship with the work, and their ability to do the work itself.
The ones who scare me the most, in the best way, barely talk about money. They talk about the customer. They talk about why the existing solution is broken and it’s personally offensive to them. They talk about the problem at 11pm on a Tuesday with the same intensity they had at 9am on Monday.
The ones who lead with “I want to build a billion-dollar company” make me nervous. Not because ambition is bad. But because that tells me the goal is the number, not the work. And the Hampton data now puts hard evidence behind something every experienced investor already feels: when the number is the goal, the founder runs out of fuel exactly when the company needs them most.
The best founders I’ve backed aren’t optimizing for an exit. They’re optimizing for the next thing they can make better. The exit, if and when it comes, is a consequence of the obsession, not the cause of it."
https://mondaymorning.substack.com/p/the-50-million-lie
33."Japan is in a real fiscal bind. The only way it will really be able to pay for expanded defense spending is to cut government spending in other areas — which, most of all, means benefits for the country’s burgeoning masses of elderly people. Cutting off grandma to build missiles doesn’t usually make for very good politics, but if anyone can persuade Japan’s people to accept the sacrifice, it’s probably Takaichi.
Fortunately, defense spending offers Japan some economic advantages beyond simply countering China. First of all, it offers the government the perfect excuse to wind down other, more inefficient forms of stimulus spending, like bailouts for failing companies. The Japanese economy doesn’t need stimulus at all at this point, of course, but some Japanese people will be afraid that growth will crater if spending drops. Diverting money from bailouts to defense will be good for productivity.
More importantly, defense spending will help revive Japan’s manufacturing sector, which has been under extreme pressure from Chinese competition in recent decades. Defense spending gives manufacturers a cushion from China’s export flood, and stimulates investment throughout the supply chain.
The defense imperative may also help bring Japan up from its position as a technological laggard. Japan has fallen behind, partly due to its weakness in software, partly due to the fact that most of Japan’s R&D is incremental stuff, performed by risk-averse corporations. Defense spending will allow Japan’s government to get into the game, funding bolder research efforts that benefit many companies instead of just one. It will also spur faster adoption of AI technology — out of sheer necessity — that will probably solve Japan’s software problems.
Finally, defense will be a great area for Japan to solicit greenfield investment — a big missing piece of Japan’s economy. American defense companies looking for places to make drones, ships, and missiles unencumbered by the U.S.’ legalistic regulatory state would be well-advised to build some factories in Japan, which can set them up quickly and easily, and where supply chains, labor quality, and infrastructure are all very good.
So while Takaichi has some big challenges ahead of her, she also has some big opportunities. It’s sad that Japan is being forced to leave behind its long pacifist moment. But with the right leadership, this necessary change could end up helping the country escape economic stagnation as well."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-takaichi-era-begins-for-real
34.One of the most insightful interviews on operating in the age of AI and learnings from some of the top people in Silicon Valley. Gokul is an SV OG and top tier operator and investor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUsb1FYOstA&t=2s
35."The market doesn’t pay for what you know; it pays for what you can execute without supervision.
The Skill-Stack Protocol: Utility, Velocity, Uniqueness.
The curator replaces “Credentials” with “Proof of Work” to ensure absolute market dominance.
1. The Proof of Work (PoW) Mandate: Stop telling people what you “studied.” Show them what you Built. A GitHub repository, a profitable newsletter, or a functioning marketing funnel is worth 1000 MBAs. If it doesn’t exist in the real world, it doesn’t count."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-education-trap
36."A key theme which has been a stabilising force for global markets in an increasingly uncertain world, and policies seen as batsh*t crazy from Trump, has been diversification, away from the U.S., whether that is in foreign affairs, defence or investment. And this diversification is being seen in the weakness of the dollar, coming despite those investment pledges noted above and U.S. growth exceptionism still.
The latter would suggest a stronger dollar but while leaders from the Gulf, Taiwan, Europe, et al, have been turning up in the White House, kissing the ring, and promising big investment in the US, they have doing the opposition in effect. They have been voting with their feet and investing away from the US, at home and in each other’s economies."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/trying-to-gauge-geopolitical-risk
37."This is where the yuan enters, not as a reserve asset to be worshipped, but as a settlement instrument to be used. The mechanism is straightforward in concept and profound in consequence. If your import dependence on China rises, your need to settle trade with China rises. Your willingness to hold working balances of yuan, or at least to access yuan liquidity via swaps and offshore markets, rises with it. You do not have to store your wealth in yuan to be pulled into a yuan linked circuit. You just have to transact.
China is not becoming the world’s reserve currency. It is becoming a regional settlement hub, and it is using manufacturing and exports as the engine of that settlement orbit.
That claim needs more than trade totals. It needs evidence that Beijing is intentionally shaping the currency’s reference frame.
China is not replacing the dollar as the world’s savings asset. It is constructing a regional settlement sphere where a growing share of real economy flows, goods, commodities, infrastructure, can clear without touching the dollar, and it is using manufacturing dominance and a managed stronger yuan posture to accelerate that shift.
This is a different kind of power than reserve currency status, but it is power nonetheless. It changes the marginal dynamics of trade invoicing. It gives Beijing leverage over crisis liquidity in its neighborhood. It weakens the automatic assumption that every meaningful cross border transaction must ultimately pass through a dollar bridge.
If Japan’s carry unwind is the tremor that shakes the legacy system, China’s export and yuan strategy is the slow pour of concrete setting a new foundation next door. One is a sudden stop. The other is a creeping reroute."
https://tanviratna.substack.com/p/is-china-bending-global-finance-without
38."The deeper issue is clear when examining the energetics layer of the munitions stack. Energetics—the explosives and propellants encased in shells, missiles, and rockets—are not simply another industrial input. They are a distinct class of material governed by uniquely restrictive handling and transportation standards. Finished explosives and many energetic intermediates are subject to stringent limitations on packaging, routing, shipment size, carrier certification, storage, and transfer.
As a result, energetics do not scale like metals, electronics, or structural components. Even when domestic production exists, movement remains expensive, slow, and capacity-limited, particularly as volumes increase. In crisis conditions, these constraints intensify. Insurance retreats, transport availability narrows, and regulatory waivers struggle to keep pace with operational need. The consequence is that production capacity can become functionally inaccessible long before factories reach physical limits. Throughput collapses not at the point of manufacture, but along the transportation spine that connects industrial nodes."
https://www.firstbreakfast.com/p/why-the-ammunition-surge-is-stalledand
39."We’re going to walk through what this means and how it signals some general bad choices being made by brands. Specifically, going for the largest population is rarely a good move at this point. We’re entering into the world of the sovereign individual which means you only care about the talented few, not the masses.
The day of marketing to the biggest population is on the decline since they will inevitably be on government support as AI eats up low paying positions.
Yes we realize this all sounds pretty brutal. Doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Also. We don’t really fault the advertisers for going after the only growing population. Seems logical if you’re not looking at second derivative impacts.
30 years ago a talented person could only make money in one industry. Now? A talented person can earn money off 10 different skills and (surprise, surprise) these people are typically in the top 1% of more than one activity! Competition simply rises exponentially.
As usual this is just viewed from our own lens. We’re max long digital immersion, degeneracy, loneliness and wealth disparity.
People misinterpret the Sovereign Individual for “USA is doomed”. It really doesn’t say that. In fact it suggests that it will be extremely polarizing and expensive. Sounds oddly familiar to today no?
The US is the best house in the bad neighborhood and strength + chaos can coexist for a long time. You can have huge amounts of debt and socio-economic dispersion before anything breaks. As long as NPCs have their chips + VR girlfriends + Sportsball, they won’t be rioting any time soon."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/demographic-destiny-usa-and-abroad
40."So the topline goal of the venture firm now is creating the best interface to help founders win. Everything else—how you staff a firm, how you deploy capital, what size funds you raise, how you help get deals done and broker power in service of founders—is downstream from that.
Mike Maples is famous for saying that your fund-size is your strategy. What’s also true is your fund-size is your belief in the future. It’s your bet on how big startup outcomes are going to be. It may have been “arrogant” to raise big funds over the last decade, but the belief was fundamentally correct. So when top firms continue to raise massive funds to deploy over the next decade, that’s them betting on the future and putting their money where their mouth is. Scaled Venture isn’t a corruption of the venture model: it’s the venture model finally growing up and adopting the characteristics of the companies they back.
Scaled and boutique will both be fine, it’s the middle that’s in trouble: the funds that are too big to afford to miss out on the mega-winners, but too small to compete with bigger firms who can structurally offer a better product for founders. a16z is unique in that it’s both sides of the barbell—a collection of specialized boutique firms benefiting from a scaled platform team.
The firms that can best partner with founders will win. That could mean a supersized reserve of capital, or unprecedented reach, or a huge platform of complementary services. Or it could mean irreplicable expertise, excellent counsel, or simply unbelievable risk tolerance.
There’s an old joke in venture capital where VCs think that every product can be improved, every great technology scaled, and every industry disrupted—except their own."