The Path to Happiness is Being material Asset-Lite
I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to take the family up to Whistler Blackcomb mountain for a family trip. Part of reconciliation. It was beautiful up there. My family had a fun time skiing while I worked at the hotel.
We packed light and rented everything. Took the shuttle bus up there from the airport, and pretty much worried about nothing. Didn’t have to carry heavy ski equipment around. It was great.
Ski trips with equipment, ski passes and everything are damn expensive. Monetarily and for your piece of mind. For your soul even. It always was in some ways but more so now. I never could have afforded this 15 years ago. How grateful I am to be here.
But the main insight, besides the fact that having money really matters, was that most of the things we were told we needed to own aka assets turned out to be liabilities. Your house. Your car. Ski equipment. Most of the material things you own. Most of these things can be rented as needed. Ownership is a trap.
And I think many young people grok this already. Rent and own as little as you need. A bare amount of clothes, a laptop, phone, gear, guns, weapons and bullets as an exception. Everything else should be put in real assets like investments in real estate, stocks, crypto, bonds, gold and even cash. The real ownership you should focus on is ownership ie. Equity in businesses. Cash flowing businesses or Silicon Valley growth ones. The more the better. Net net: Stack real assets, not fake ones.
Then use these assets to fund the lifestyle you and your family truly want. This is the way. Be material asset-lite but investment asset heavy. Seems obvious but this is clearly not how most people actually live.
The Brutal American: Custom Made for the Chaotic and Rough Times We are In
“Donald Trump and J. D. Vance have created a brand new stereotype for America: Not the quiet American, not the ugly American, but the brutal American,” @anneapplebaum wrote in the Atlantic (Source: https://x.com/TheAtlantic/status/1903722178463273263).
I believe she meant this as an insult. The irony is that this is being held up as a good thing by many Americans. I saw many follow on tweets with many frankly iconic American images of soldiers, tough movie stars or professional fighters with the comment: “Stop making us sound cool.” Very funny. But there is something to this.
Our enemies are on the rise. The CCP, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, are ruthless and brutal. To beat them, we need to be ruthless and brutal too. Soft power is fine but it’s worthless without being backed up by hard power.
Quoting @chilvaryguild: “you can count on your enemies to be cunning, committed, opportunistic, and brutal. You need to be preparing in every way possible. Half-heartedness stands no chance against these guys.”
(Source: https://x.com/ChivalryGuild/status/1904260609148866628)
Just look at most of the countries of European Union and Canada. No one takes them seriously despite their wealth. Having a limited military has not done them well at all. They cannot be counted on. I’ve said this before, the world is very cruel to the weak.
So here we are: “The Brutal American”. This is unfortunately what is needed to win in this new ugly competitive multipolar world. Losing is not an option.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Oct 5th, 2025
"Be moderate in order to taste the joys of life in abundance." —Epicurus
The K-shaped economy. Another great interview on the art of investing. This time from a distressed asset perspective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7E9euLwWtE
2. A timely discussion on China's military threat to Taiwan, real or not?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cY9UeyxStQ
3. Battery wars, electric tech stack is critical for the future. China is kicking our ass right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B9bh29wAb4
4. Know thy enemy. The CCP's PLA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz7zEaz4Olg
5. "The fact that the Russians probably have no territorial designs on Western Europe actually makes things more difficult, not less. If a conventional military confrontation were likely, then states like Poland and Rumania could build up their forces a little, and have limited contingents from other countries on their soil. But even then, it’s clear from the Ukraine experience that the Russians would simply use their superiority in missiles and drones to destroy western forces, together with their headquarters, logistic and repair depots, transport systems and government structures, without any risk of reprisal.
But that’s not the problem: a weak and divided collection of countries with very different strategic situations and priorities, sitting at varying distances from a major military power, is going to have to find some way of preserving as much of their freedom of political manoeuvre as possible. Yet this is almost certainly going to be on a national, or at least multilateral, basis, simply because the situations are so different. In this context, we’re not talking about war, but the use of military forces as cards on the table in any political bargaining, and every state will have a different collection of cards. Some may have none.
So for countries bordering Russia, or near it, building up ground forces somewhat, and preparing defensive fortifications could make sense as a gesture supporting political independence. It’s hard to see, though, why Belgium or Portugal should do the same. Countries further away will want to invest in assets to patrol their air and maritime borders: again, not to fight, but to provide visible indications of sovereignty. The British and French nuclear systems—perhaps the only genuinely powerful political factors in European defence—are going to have to play a rather different kind of role in the future, but at the moment we can’t say what that will be.
It’s hard to see any of this being centrally organised, or indeed organised at all. Some small countries will drift towards an accommodation with Russia because they see it as in their best interests. Others will try to preserve more independence, perhaps through ad hoc alliances. NATO, and to an extent the EU, will become ghost organisations, increasingly cut off from the real security questions that will be increasingly re-nationalised.
Such a transition will be enormously difficult and dangerous, and there will be furious resistance to it by those unwilling to leave fantasy land. The conviction that if you only make the money available everything can be bought will take a long time to disappear, as will parallel fantasies of re-industrialisation and rearmament. The fact that the US and European armaments industries simply can’t produce what might be needed, though obvious enough, will still come as a terrible shock."
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/it-gets-worse
6. "If you’ve been struggling to raise for a CapEx-heavy startup — you’re not crazy. The structure is broken, not your vision (most of the time).
There’s over $100B in non-dilutive capital sitting on the sidelines — ready to fund the next generation of industrial startups.
But most of it never reaches the builders who need it most.
Why?
Because we’re still asking capital-intensive startups to fund infrastructure, equipment, and factory buildouts with high-cost venture equity — even when they have real, financeable assets."
https://adastracapital.substack.com/p/stop-using-equity-to-buy-steel-unlocking
7. "Bryan urged the DoD to shift its mindset from being an industrial provider that designs, builds, and operates major systems to acting as a customer leveraging services from multiple sources. This transition would enable the DoD to operate its enterprise more effectively by integrating diverse, industry-provided capabilities."
https://defenseacquisition.substack.com/p/military-capabilities-as-a-service
8. A fun and really interesting episode of NIA this week. Lots of topical subjects discussed in cultural & creative businesses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk8wExXONWw
9. Lots of topical subjects this week in Silicon Valley. Excellent takes and educational views here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chulY4futpI
10. 100 Year Pivot. Geopolitics, the end of trust & the rise of Gold and BRICs. Direction of travel is moving away from the USD system in the long run by most central banks in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abGgk1Je7bI
11. "On the front line things have stabilised. Ukraine’s manpower shortages are being fillled to an extent by the use of drones. But both sides are now engaged in a longer term battle for military industrial/tech domination. Who can outproduce the other in drones and long range missiles - tanks, and men count less.
Russia is using longer range missile and drone attacks to degrade Ukraine’s military industrial complex. Both sides are awaiting the invent of a war defining technology that can deliver the knock out blow to the other. Neither has this yet, but one could, and we are seeing really rapid technological advance.
Europe could step up and outgun/out-tech Russia, but it is still making progress at a glacial pace. Given the long term threat from Russia they should be working overtime to dovetail their military industrial production and military tech innovation with Ukraine, but they are not doing enough. That’s a lack of leadership and strategic perspective.
The two sides are miles apart in terms of their perspectives: Putin wants the end of
Ukraine as an independent entity, and that’s obviously existential for Zelensky and Ukraine. Hard to see where the compromise is."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/ukraine-dont-hold-your-breath-on
12. "As technology erodes the value of human labor, whole industries have begun treating us more like livestock. We are fattened on processed calories, churned through the parasitic healthcare system, and our attention is stripmined by addictive dopamine loops that sell us to advertisers. Financial desperation funnels us into the digital casinos of stocks, options, crypto, and sports books, while the epidemic of loneliness is monetized by algorithmic brothels flooding us with onlyfans and pornography.
Like the surplus horses after the rise of the automobile, today’s surplus humans are being recycled by the capitalist system in a form of livestock economics. We are metaphorically being ground into meat, boiled into glue, and canned into dog food.
Yarvin is right in that the calculus of power is shifting from that of egalitarianism to that of hierarchy. As technocapital sidelines human labor, the incentive to give ordinary people political power disappears. The open question now is how a system handles a growing class of humans it no longer needs. Rising surveillance, algorithmic bread and circuses, and universal basic income all point to a likely strategy of pacification, not empowerment. When liberty aligned with increased labor, freedom made economic sense. Now that human labor is increasingly redundant, system may begin to seek cheaper tools for controlling a surplus class whose labor and, by extension, political voice, is no longer necessary for the technocapital machine. And so a power struggle looms on the horizon…"
https://www.scimitar.capital/p/state-of-the-machine
13. Catching up on NIA but this is always good. Wide ranging view from the edge of the internet and the creative world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDDHoS-MNQ0
14. Crazy times on the edge of the internet. Crypto news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvUkHcB6jF0&t=485s
15. "To achieve that standard, supply and demand must be precisely balanced—too much electricity can be just as problematic as too little. A baseload power source is one that operates 24/7 at a steady, predictable output. A dispatchable source, by contrast, can be ramped up or down quickly to match fluctuations in demand.
Coal and nuclear are classic examples of baseload power, but they are not ideal for dispatchable use due to their slow ramp rates. Natural gas and impoundment hydroelectric plants, however, are typically both baseload and highly dispatchable, capable of adjusting output within minutes. Battery backup systems are dispatchable but not baseload, as they can respond quickly but cannot sustain output for extended periods without recharging. Intermittent renewables like wind and solar, both dependent on weather conditions rather than demand, are neither baseload nor reliably dispatchable.
Once these fundamental truths are understood, two things become clear. First, the ideal grid is built on a solid foundation of cheap baseload power, supplemented by highly dispatchable sources to manage fluctuations in demand. Second, a grid composed solely of solar, wind, and batteries is preposterous on its face—the volume of batteries required to provide baseload power for days or weeks at a time borders on the absurd. This is why no such system has ever been piloted at a reasonable scale: the moment it is, the flaws would become immediately and fatally obvious.
Which brings us to Australia. Over the past two decades, the country has systematically been replacing its baseload capacity with intermittent solar and wind, without meaningfully increasing its dispatchable capacity. Indeed, natural gas-based generation has been steadily declining in share. When intermittency overwhelms dispatchability, things begin to break. Armed with just this chart, an analyst with no more training than what’s been presented in this article can clearly see that a dangerous threshold has been crossed."
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/the-exception-that-proves-the-rule-7fb
16. "The modern breach is compounded by pervasive and cheap ISR techniques from roadside cameras connected to Wi-Fi for early warning to overhead satellite constellations. And while these systems can be spoofed, degraded, and deceived, it’s a constant battle to poke out the enemy’s eyes while protecting yours. So you have to add even more planning and additional enabling elements to your breach. More subtasks in your operation means more things that can go wrong or threaten the operation by giving away the target.
Let’s not forget about the proliferation of precision fires from one-way attack drones armed with collection mechanisms and warheads so they can pass back intelligence to the second and third waves of strikes before they identify and strike their priority targets. This all makes breaching that much more costly and the breach site even more deadly, demanding more and more resources from the attacking force.
This is why both Ukraine and NATO nations (including the US) are researching and testing autonomous systems specifically for the combined arms breach. If we can perfect the equation for cost x mass x efficiency for autonomous systems in the breach then we can successfully restore the attacking force advantage. And as an expeditionary force, the US Army favors the attack and maneuver, rather than planning for heavy, slow attrition in the offense (defense is a different story and for another article.)"
https://www.breakingbeijing.com/p/into-the-breach
17. "If you have a world in which everyone is encouraged to be a total individualist, they tend to get trapped in that mindset. It’s wonderful when things are going well, because you, your own desires and thoughts are the centre of the world. But the moment things go wrong, you retreat into yourself. And the only thing you can trust is your own ideas. You come to believe in them intensely, because that’s the only thing that makes you feel safe. And I think that’s where we are now."
18. “European companies bring strengths in manufacturing and scaling; Ukrainian companies bring battlefield innovation and speed,” says Fedorov. “Together, we can deliver game-changing capabilities.”
For Kyiv, the program is a strategic breakthrough—a bridge between Ukraine’s frontline ingenuity and Europe’s defense procurement systems. Ukrainian tech will be integrated into the European market, co-developed, co-funded, and co-owned.
“Ukraine is definitely the new Silicon Valley for defense tech,” says Romaniukov. “We have a truly unique experience, and it would be a crime not to use this advantage and develop it.
Whether Ukraine becomes the “next Silicon Valley” for defence technology is still an open question, but the pieces are falling into place. The war has forged an ecosystem where necessity drives invention, investors are engaged, and the output is tested in the most demanding environment on Earth. Given the trajectory, it may be less a question of if than when.”
https://united24media.com/business/is-ukraine-becoming-the-silicon-valley-of-defense-tech-10494
19. "This is something we have written about before on our Substack, when we looked at the consumer market size in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan. For this letter, we wanted to take a top-down perspective on some of the sectors in Central Asia that we believe have the capacity to support multiple venture scale startups.
In a region where the majority of the economy is still early in its digitalisation and inefficiencies continue to plague the day-to-day lives of businesses and consumers, we hope that this letter will serve both to demonstrate the scale of the opportunities for prospective investors as well as to serve as a call for founders who are building or plan to build in these sectors to speak with Sturgeon.
Specifically, we are going to look at the following sectors: financial services; natural resources; logistics; agriculture; and SMEs. Others we considered were auto, real estate, healthcare and education."
https://sturgeoncapital.substack.com/p/key-sectors-on-the-silk-road
20. "In any realm of endeavor where you think short term and focus on immediate returns at the cost of long term returns, you will end up being mediocre. To get ahead you have to think about the future now and steer your ship with that in mind."
https://lifemathmoney.com/always-think-5-10-years-ahead/
21. "These conditions create a situation that resembles Nassim Taleb’s Barbell Strategy.
We increasingly have a world split between young people 1) forgoing college to pursue the trades or 2) gambling everything on digital moon shots.
Taleb writes that the barbell strategy is a “method that consists of taking both a defensive attitude and an excessively aggressive one at the same time.” Here, we see people doing maybe one or the other. The barbell economy creates its own culture:
Safety seekers: Those skipping college debt to pursue trades, finding identity in stability amid chaos. The toolbelt generation is choosing steady work over uncertain professional paths.
Digital gamblers: Those embracing the creator economy, crypto speculation, and AI startup moon shots. Finding identity in potential rather than stability.
Young people aren’t broken. They’re adapting to a world that’s fundamentally different from the one their parents knew. But their parents aren’t wrong either for feeling like the ground has shifted beneath their feet. The attention economy has created new forms of value and new pathways to wealth. The old ways of understanding ourselves and one another are straining to keep up.
The attention economy isn’t going anywhere. It’s too powerful, too integrated into how value gets created now. It’s a system, though, and systems can be changed."
https://www.profgalloway.com/the-attention-economy-and-young-people/
22. A fun discussion here. Wide ranging takes on Silicon Valley news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5Y-WZqsAlE
23. If you want to understand how banks work, how the economy works and thus why the world is the way it is. I hate Tucker but this was a great interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StTKHskg5Tg
24. "It was a stark warning from a man whose journey from besuited grain trader to bearded talisman of Ukraine’s defense is a powerful symbol of the way Kyiv has harnessed ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit to hold off a relentless onslaught from one of the biggest armies in the world. NATO is woefully unprepared for similar attacks, he said.
“We’ve already crossed the threshold of 400 drones [attacking Ukraine] per day,” he told the LANDEURO conference. “I don’t know of a single NATO country capable of defending its cities if faced with 200-300 Shaheds every day, seven days a week. Your national security urgently requires a strategic reassessment.”
Brovdi, who started as a conscript, was appointed as commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces in June, capping a remarkable rise. Swashbuckling, plain-spoken and with a controversial past, he is emblematic of a new generation of social media-savvy, nonconformist commanders rising to senior positions as Ukraine’s military attempts to rid itself of the stultifying habits of the Soviet era.
Ukraine’s drone units make up 2% of personnel but account for one-third of enemy casualties, Brovdi told his audience at the conference in Wiesbaden. His units now focus on hitting the drone operators who have made life so hard for Ukrainians on the frontline.
More broadly, he says drones must aim to kill or wound as many Russian troops as are deployed in Ukraine each month — a number estimated at 35,000. This can be achieved by creating a deep “kill zone” between the frontline and traditionally safer rear areas."
https://cepa.org/article/ukraines-new-drone-boss-and-the-kill-zone/
25. Always frank, I disagree with his take on Ukraine but agree with everything he says about America, about the useless oil sanctions, braindead European energy policy, Western arrogance and China's dominance in key industries seems spot on.
Recognizing reality is needed for smart geopolitical moves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YncOunP4GSQ&t=29s
26. "Andy Grove, the first employee at Intel and its third CEO, disagreed with this belief. In 2010, Grove explained in hindsight the damage this type of offshoring did: “We broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution… Abandoning today’s ‘commodity’ manufacturing can lock [us] out of tomorrow’s emerging industry.”
For the first two decades of the 21st century, most American companies didn’t see dependence on TSMC for the majority of semiconductor fabrication as a problem. But chip shortages from COVID-19-related supply chain disruptions in 2021 and the frenzy for AI chips after 2022 have changed the prevailing opinion. Suddenly, everyone realized it was a problem important enough to be considered a national priority.
The history of the semiconductor is the history of the United States. From inventor, to manufacturer, to consumer, to hostage. The US has had a complex relationship with the semiconductor industry historically. Going forward, it will remain the single most important building block upon which American technological independence will live or die. The only solution to dig ourselves out of our current vulnerabilities is by building an American Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ASMC) from the existing Intel Foundry business."
https://research.contrary.com/deep-dive/building-an-american-tsmc
27. "Riding the flows of the frontiers requires being flow with the leading researchers and practitioners. Getting flow from as many legit people as possible is the grind it takes to distill your own perspective on what is real and what is not. Getting flow from other VCs (particularly the bottom 75%) is akin to the childhood telephone game where any signal is quickly muddied by incoherent noise of people badly regurgitating what they heard and pumping their own bag.
Being ubiquitous across the correct information flow is a 24/7 game. Those who get a bit too rich and a bit too lazy are very quickly left behind. I won’t name names, but many of the top GPs who gained notoriety 5-10 years ago are out; they can't keep up on the technicals, are no longer relevant, and just aren't tapped in. I’ll give you a hint: today’s best are tapped into the AI research community.
So your job is to ride with the right people pursuing the right trends at the right time. And knowing who the right people, right trends, and right time is all about how smart you are, how fast you can learn, and developing intellectual taste. The best VCs will help put you on trend (but you as a founder should already be there).
If we aggregate the five variable attributes as defined above, the formula for vc goodness can be defined as follows:
VC goodness == game x insight x speed x vibe x aura
Founders: measure your VC against my formula. VCs: work on your stats against my five attributes."
https://www.geoffreywoo.com/what-is-a-good-vc/
28. The world through data and the cold eyes of energy and industry. Doomberg.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmnQleZgnzc&t=306s
29. This seems like a holdover from Soviet military times. I hope AFU command is learning from this, hence the drone wall initiative.
"Ukrainian defenders will hold on to a location as Russian forces flank them like a pincer. You'd expect the pincer to close, or for the Ukraininan defenders to retreat before that can happen. But something more curious happens. The Russians forces appear to have no great appetite for taking the territory. Instead, the pincers extend, leaving the Ukrainian defenders in what is now called an "impossible salient." But as Defense Politics Asia says..."Impossible salient is impossible." At some point, you realize the guys in there are dead. Or as good as dead.
This happened again and again. Bakhmut. Adiivka. Chasiv Yar. I think Pokrovsk soon. It takes the Russians absolutely AGES to take each town. Ukrainians boast "yeah, we've turned them into killboxes...meatgrinders for the Russians." Excuse me. If you are the ones INSIDE the impossible salient, you are the one that's being killboxed. If you're the one who don't get the command to retreat before retreat becomes impossible, you are the meat inside the meatgrinder."
https://taipology.substack.com/p/war-in-our-time
30. “It has become high status to invest in manufacturing,” Christian Garrett, a partner on the investment team at 137 Ventures, noted at a fried-chicken-filled after-party downtown. Mr. Garrett said the factories that deals coming out of the conference would build would also create high-tech, “high status” jobs for blue-collar workers.
Speaker after speaker emphasized that military power flows from industrial power, which they said had been eroded by the offshoring of factories and an overemphasis on software, apps and financial products.
From the welcome by Chris Power, chief executive of Hadrian, a defense manufacturing start-up, to remarks by senior administration officials, the speeches drove home a single theme: Maintaining the country’s superpower status requires regaining the ability to produce physical goods at scale."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/us/manufacturing-tech-trump-reindustrialize.html?smid=li-share#
31. The critical importance of rare earths and the dangerous dependence on China for these.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Qlz4ITakkM
32. Glad to see the US military is finally learning from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is job one. Big doctrine change is needed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clvzFWa9VSE
33. "Now we operate exclusively with one gun from hidden positions. This happened for two reasons.
The first is thanks to our reconnaissance drones, which allow pinpoint targeting.
The second is that enemy FPVs and Lancet drones are constantly on the hunt for our equipment and responding to clusters of forces.
Who's winning artillery duels these days?
I'd say we are, because our counter-battery operations rely on high-precision weapons, like American HIMARS. It's also about good intelligence, especially satellite-based. On top of that, we've got lots of other tools, like various types of surveillance cameras, acoustic sensors and American counter-battery radars.
Often it's enough to detect a muzzle flash, then you can roughly locate the enemy's firing position, gather more intelligence and strike it with precision-guided weapons.
In contrast, the backbone of Russian counter-battery efforts is the Lancet drone. But a Lancet hit doesn't necessarily mean the artillery system is destroyed. Many howitzers are repaired and eventually return to the battlefield."
34. "There's something annoying about the obstinate that's not simply due to being mistaken. They won't listen. And that's not true of all determined people. I can't think of anyone more determined than the Collison brothers, and when you point out a problem to them, they not only listen, but listen with an almost predatory intensity. Is there a hole in the bottom of their boat? Probably not, but if there is, they want to know about it.
It's the same with most successful people. They're never more engaged than when you disagree with them. Whereas the obstinate don't want to hear you. When you point out problems, their eyes glaze over, and their replies sound like ideologues talking about matters of doctrine.
The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it."
https://paulgraham.com/persistence.html
35. "All of this made me wonder about competition in AI and where exception handling comes into play. If AI automates more and more tasks, most of that capability should be available to everyone in the industry. A thesis of mine for a long time has been that AI will commoditize all sorts of things as it makes expertise, automation, and assistance more widely available. What if the differentiator becomes - how do you handle the exceptions to AI?"
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/can-ai-exception-handling-be-the
36. "If you are storing the majority of your wealth in Fiat, you will lose long-term. While everyone needs money to spend, the goal is to be an asset accumulator. This means: stocks, real estate, crypto, wifi businesses, etc. Anything that goes up in value of the long-term. Assets, assets, assets!
The second step is the *most* important and the hardest to get through mentally. You must become a business owner or at least an equity builder. If you try to make it with a W-2… those days are long-gone. $400,000 for a doctor in 2000 was real money, in 2025… it is not real money in major cities with a family. Times have changed. Things don’t go back to the past.
The winners front-run money printing by owning scarce assets before the next wave of liquidity hits. This is why ultra-wealthy families don’t keep cash for the long-term. They keep productive assets (businesses, real estate, commodities, equities). They also teach their kids to do the same. Build or die."
Customs Frontline: Hong Kong Cinema Action
I think International Cinema fans have long known that Hong Kong has a thriving movie scene. I grew up watching HK action movie classics like “Running Out of Time”, “Breaking News”, “Infernal Affairs”, “The Killer”, “In the Mood for Love”,“The Young and Dangerous” series. So many fond memories.
You always get nuggets and gems of wisdom from the strangest places. I watched this Hong Kong action film, Customs Frontline on a whim: “pits customs officers against weapons dealers as they tackle a case of arms smuggling” that ranges through Africa but takes place mainly in Hong Kong. Lots of action, drama and twists. And like most HK movies the main characters usually get killed off so you are always on edge.
But plenty of great quotes & lessons.
After the elite customs team suffers several fatal losses the main character starts to act up and tries to drink on the job. His mentor and commander slaps him and says:
“You are on duty. Respect the uniform. And Respect yourself.”
Basically you have to do the right thing and act properly even when you don’t feel like it. Don’t do something that will make you feel bad about yourself later.
His commander also gives some good advice about life.
“Once in a while I daydream about buying an island, building a house by the sea…and live in isolation. But before that becomes reality…I have to be realistic.”
“The truth can be painful sometimes but we have to accept it.”
“A million things are out of our control. But we can at least control our emotions.”
Maybe this is so very Asian but we tend to be pragmatic. It’s not an optimistic culture. It is a driven culture though.
But as I’ve learned the hard way, your goals & drive sometimes take you to the outcome you least expect. You overlook what’s most important in your life. And most times it’s too late to get back.
“The things I once coveted seem meaningless now. What I didn’t treasure before is what I yearn for most.”
Something to this. Don’t take anything in life for granted.
Woe to the Conquered: Failure is Slavery in this New World
I finally watched Gladiator 2 and I have pretty mixed feelings. It’s a jumbled mess, but yet had some great action scenes. Shows Rome in all its splendor, horror and glory. Yet the characters are strange, the storyline middling, the speeches not so inspiring or quotable like the first movie. Who can forget “what you do in this life, echoes in eternity” or “Are you entertained?” Or “Strength and Honor.” It’s hard to recapture the essence of a classic.
But I’m not writing this as a movie review. I’m writing this as the big lesson that I think most people missed. There was a quote in the early part of the movie by the victorious Roman General Acacius after he had conquered Numidia. He says: “Woe to the conquered.” And truly is, all the survivors made slaves and shipped back to Rome to fight in gladiator games or serve as literal slaves to Rich Romans.
So many of you are wondering so what? It’s just a movie. Well this movie is reflective of reality. Reflective of the state of human history for most of our known world. The strong win and conquer, the weak serve them. And usually in not so pleasant environments.
We presently live in a world where most people believe that slavery is bad, that you help, protect and take care of the weak. Judeo-Christian values. Ones that drive the West. It’s not perfect. But it’s not terrible either. But this is all under threat. We have squandered the peace and gotten weak.
Most of the world, especially the Axis of Autocracy don’t believe in our values. Most of the Global South doesn’t believe this. Not saying they should either, they have their own proud histories, beliefs and cultures. Perhaps this fight was inevitable. Borders will change. Sovereignty can only be defended with strength. The weak will be eaten, literally and figuratively. Might makes right.
“The greatest temple Rome ever built. The Colosseum. Because this is what they believe in. Power. They gather here to watch the strong strike down the weak…..He spoke of dreams. I speak of truth. And in my Rome, it’s the law of the strongest.”
It’s probably a return to the way human history always has been. The formerly strong get weak and stupid. And new and hungrier challengers come forth to topple the old order. And the winners are absolutely merciless, treating the losers horrifically. If they did not completely slaughter or wipe them out all the men and enslaved all the women and children.
I truly believe our way of lives are under threat. This fight this upcoming decade whether hybrid, economical, or kinetic will be existential. If we lose, it will not be pretty. Remember that America helped rebuild Japan and West Germany after defeating them in World War 2.
Our enemies CRINK will not be so kind or merciful if they win. You don’t have to go too far into history to find evidence to prove this. Katyn Woods in Poland when thousands of Polish officers were executed by the Soviets in 1939. Holdomor in Ukraine during the 1930s where an estimated 5 million Ukrainians were starved to death. Russia literally raped and pillaged most of Eastern Europe in 1945 and after WW2. The genocide of the Uighurs at present by the CCP. Russia in present occupied Ukrainian territories with their torture centers and summary executions. It’s all there for the observant to see.
So wake up everyone in the West. Pax Americana is over and the jungle of chaos is creeping forward. The multipolar world is here and we, America and our allies (or the ones that the Trump administration has not alienated yet) are in the fight of our lives. I feel this closely and deeply with my deep personal ties to Ukraine, Taiwan and Japan. I fear for the future of my child especially with my teenage daughter in JROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corp). The stakes are high. And very personal now.
This will be impacting all of you soon too. Each of us needs to be acting accordingly. America ain’t perfect but I much prefer an American order or empire even than to the alternative of CCP led one, which is a new form of surveillance state tyranny.
Get angry for the dire situation our incompetent corrupt Western elites have put us in. We are in the death ground. There is no front line. The frontline will be everywhere and we will all have our part to play. “A man can choose to fight and stay alive. It’s the same in life as it is in the arena, is it not?”
The main bad guy Macrinus, played by the excellent Denzel Washington goes on to say:
“It is an art, choosing gladiators. Some choose entertainers. Some chops brute force. I choose rage. The crowd loves blood. And they love those who love blood as much as they do. Rage pours out of you. You will be quite the fighter.” Rage and a sense of urgency is all I have now. “The Greeks call it thymos. Smoke. Rage. That rage is your gift. Never let it go. It will carry you to greatness.”
I will end this with a quote from the movie, repeating Virgil: “The gates of hell are open day and night. Smooth is the descent and easy is the way. But to come back from hell and view the cheerful skies, in this task mighty labor lies.”
“Strength and honor” is needed now more than ever in our world.
Logan Roy’s Wisdom: Take the F–king Money
I’ve been on a Succession tv series binge recently. Succession a satirical black comedy-drama as described on Wikipedia:
“The series centers on the Roy family, the owners of global media and entertainment conglomerate Waystar RoyCo, and their fight for control of the company amidst uncertainty about the health of the family's patriarch.”
I’ve never watched a show where literally every character is a completely horrific, absolutely terrible human being. Maybe that is the point. Probably also a morality tale. As the Defector wrote: “Succession is about a lot of things, and one of them is the ways in which the richest, most powerful, and most sociopathic people in America go about shaping the world that the rest of us have to live in. These people have the power that they do, in part, because they can describe and manifest the world to fit whatever vision most pleases them.” But anyways, it’s damn entertaining. Like watching a dramatic train wreck in slow motion. It sticks in your memory after a long time.
The Patriarch Logan Roy, modelled off Rupert Murdoch & Andrew Carnegie, is always good for a quote. "You're such f**kng dopes. You're not serious figures. I love you, but you are not serious people." His threats during corporate intrigues: "I’m gonna grind his f**king bones to make my bread." Or when he tells his eldest son, Kendall: “You’re not a killer. You have to be a killer. But now a days, maybe you don’t. I don’t know.”
He gives great life advice: “You make your own reality. And once you’ve done it, apparently, everyone’s of the opinion it was all so f—ing obvious.” Sometimes even prosaic insights: “The future is real. The past is all made up.”
But there was one quote that stood out to me: “America, I don’t know….When I arrived, there were these gentle giants smelling of gold and milk. They could do anything. Now look at them. Fat as F-ck. Scrawny or on meth, or yoga. They pissed it all away.” My God is this not true. Especially in 2025.
It’s the barbell effect in America. Extremistan. One side of the barbell, a small group of ultra fit, competitive and ruthless (and lucky) individuals who own all the assets and have crushed it. And on the other side of the barbell, unhealthy, uninterested, video game playing, Netflix watching, fast food eating, lumpen mass. The great divergence. It’s so strange and the difference is so extreme. It’s a volatile mix and history shows that inequality only leads to massive societal violence. Not sure how it gets better.
All I can honestly say is that things in America are only gonna get more competitive, meaner, rougher and tougher. As Logan Roy said: "Life’s not knights on horseback. It’s a number on a piece of paper. It’s a fight for a knife in the mud."
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Sept 28th, 2025
"It is not the hours you put in, but what you put into the hours." - Unknown
"But for the rest of the world, Xi’s blunders and his increasingly inward focus might provide a temporary reprieve. China’s economic and technological power at this moment in history is truly spectacular; if its leaders wanted to turn that power toward conquest and domination, they could. In fact, every other great power did try to use their power to dominate weaker nations to some extent.
But if Xi Jinping spends the next one or two decades suppressing internal challengers and committing economic blunders, it could save the rest of the world from the threat of Chinese hegemony. An inward-looking, mildly sclerotic China would be a bit of a tragedy, but it would also allow countries like Japan, India, Vietnam, and Korea — and of course the United States — to breathe a sigh of relief.
Right now, with Donald Trump busy smashing everything that made the free world such an effective bloc in the first Cold War, Xi Jinping and his personal shortcomings might be our best hope to avoid domination by the most powerful autocracy the modern world has ever seen."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/xi-jinping-is-the-main-thing-holding
2. "This efficiency gain will accelerate with AI. As productivity tools enable founders to build more with less, we’ll see teams generate more ARR per employee while valuations continue to climb. The best founders are already achieving with five engineers what previously required twenty.
We’re witnessing a shift in startup financing. The small, disciplined seed round that launched thousands of companies in the past decade has been replaced by bigger rounds, higher valuations, compressed timelines, & loftier expansion expectations."
https://tomtunguz.com/death-of-small-seed-round/
3. This is truly a master class on the art of venture capital. Learned a lot listening to this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-5IsqFgrZM&t=3760s
4. "The old American Dream is dead: It has been like this for a while. It will be difficult/impossible to work a single W-2 with a stay at home mom + 2 kids and white picket fence. The new reality is that you’ll be buying that house, however, you’ll be working online in some sort of internet based business (E-com, SaaS etc.).
Instead of hiring a bunch of people in Bangladesh, you’ll be hiring AI software to do the vast majority of the work. We went from hiring people to 1099/free lance to straight up “no need for anyone except AI/software unless a sales person”
If we were to leave you with anything in 2025 niche business world? The winners of the next decade are not scared of AI. They are not scared of crypto. They are not scared of new technology. They absolutely love all of it.
They are using it to scale their business. They are using it to get better returns. They are using it to survive and thrive.
Darwin was right and will always be right. It isn’t the strongest that survives, it is the most adaptable.
If you want proof that no politician is going to come along and save you? Just look at the latest schedule for money printing. Another $1 Trillion in borrowing to come in Q3."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/why-most-are-still-poor-and-what
5. "For centuries, a shadowy consortium of private bankers – the "Financialists" – have woven a global web of debt and legal chicanery, designed for one ultimate purpose: to own the world. Rooted in treaties like the 1648 Peace of Westphalia and the power shifts of England's 1688 Glorious Revolution, their system methodically stripped princes and nobility of their lands through wars, economic upheaval, and punitive laws. The prize was always the land itself, acquired not through conquest with armies, but through the silent conquest of debt."
https://emburlingame.substack.com/p/the-great-reset
6. "It's incredibly difficult to be a long term successful investor.
Other than the extreme mental focus and patience it takes, you also have to be very comfortable with feeling wrong.
I don't mean feeling wrong about your personal thinking and research. I mean feeling wrong relative to the narratives that are being projected all around you."
https://mailchi.mp/d597ee5adebd/stretching-the-value-spectrum
7. A sober assessment on rare earths, energy and geopolitics here. But reality is hard, China is the one who has escalation dominance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CErnoEgiPp0
8. Interesting take. Alt-Geopolitics.
"The modern tools are sharper. Cleaner. Stealing from man and State alike. It's only a matter of scale and structure.
A man owns a building. He thinks he owns it. He holds the title. Good paper. Thick paper. But he borrowed money. Big money. The loan has covenants. Buried deep. Like traps in the jungle. His other business fails? A small thing. Unrelated. It triggers the cross-default. The big loan dies. A vulture fund buys the dead debt cheap. They take the building. They evict the man. The title was his. The debt was theirs. The debt won. Because it was enforced by guns. The State's guns. Violent property managers, are States.
These are but some of the ways how they took it. Financialists in Venice. Amsterdam. London. Wall Street. Dubai. A thousand years. Patient. Relentless. The nation-state was their shield. Their manager. Westphalia, the Glorious Revolution, made it all legal. The US model worked for some. The French model for others. And where these failed, the good ol'British Empire model would do.
Now they finish it. Tokenization. Crypto. Digital chains. They lock the debt into code. Forever. No nation-state needed anymore. The theft is permanent."
https://emburlingame.substack.com/p/the-great-reset-c2
9. Always fun to listen to this alt-geopolitics from Tom Luongo. Don't agree with everything but it's an entertaining take on world affairs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ckq4NuVFls
10. "First and foremost, I would say that the speed of iteration of everything is just extraordinary. I know people think of Ukraine and drones. That tends to mean aerial drones, but Ukrainians have been innovating tremendously, also in ground vehicles and sea vehicles. And it’s not just the drone bodies themselves, it’s all of the components. It’s navigation systems. It’s resistance to electronic warfare. It’s the ability to fly in GPS-denied environments. It’s all of these pieces, in terms of the technology. The Ukrainians have really had this incredible focus on homegrown drones that they are building, the long-range drones striking deep inside of Russia.
I have to tell you, the fact that the West is not paying a lot of attention to what’s going on here is deeply alarming. The speed at which this technology is evolving, and that the U.S., Europe and NATO are all really slow. And the thing that people really have to understand is that this is how Russia and China are going to fight. It is going to be just vast numbers of relatively low-price-point things that are extremely destructive …
But in the context of the damage, just even the psychological initial damage that Russia could do in Europe, or if the Chinese send something over the mainland United States – just thousands of drones that there’s no good way to take down- as a preliminary start to some kind of a ground war. There are a lot of very scary scenarios that are out there that I am not seeing a lot of response to yet."
11. One of the best weekly discussions on Silicon Valley news with a B2B view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRJMlvxOJ9o&t=3063s
12. This is a harsh splash of reality. It's hard to listen to but reality usually is. Lots of food for thought but I have given up on America and the West yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSVOQl-vFKk
13. This is another splash of cold water on America's geopolitical & economic position. The Unipolar moment has clearly passed but our elites and politicians refuse to act accordingly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUaEUCNAIcM
14. "With Azure and Google Cloud Platform growing faster than AWS, the once-strong incumbent’s market position may lead to three equal players. The next trillion dollars in cloud revenue will flow to the platforms that best integrate AI into every layer of their stack."
https://tomtunguz.com/cloud-market-share-shift-2025/
15. "While it would be prudent to acknowledge the complexity of the US-China tech competition – not simply the story of the rise of one and the fall of the other – it is also I think necessary to look beyond it. The global tech race is often framed as a two-way contest with everyone else a mere also ran. And while it is true that there is unlikely to be a third competitor who can become relevant across the entire spectrum of new technologies, we do have hard to ignore countries and centers of excellence in specific domains coming up in various parts of the world.
Asia’s dominance of the battery industry would be a case in point. All ten of the largest battery manufacturers are now Asian: six Chinese, three Korean, and one Japanese. In the time it took me to write my new book Northvolt went from promising upstart to Europe’s best funded startup ever to a collapsed has been. When I interviewed its founder Paolo Cerruti in 2020 he was upbeat that the company could own 25% of the continent’s market for batteries which would ensure that Europe “takes a strategic part of the value of the future car in its own hands.”
The ambition struck me as realistic, even modest, given it was regional and not global in scope – which in my mind set it apart from companies in the Valley which sell far more fantastical visions. But the fact that it couldn’t deliver on what seemed to me to be circumscribed ambition shows the stranglehold that Asian players have on this corner of the tech industry."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/the-global-contest-for-breakthrough
16. "Socially engaged men face the decision of whether to cap the number of their friendships or not. My advice: Never shut down possibility. Get in the way of chance. I’m always on the lookout for new friends. As we’re the average of our five closest friends, wouldn’t it make sense that I’d want to keep expanding and upgrading that friend group?
The goal isn’t to surround myself with doppelgangers, it’s more about me learning, getting better, thinking differently. I find friends by pushing the limits. By not being afraid to put myself out there. By going beyond my comfort zone, e.g., staying home and watching Netflix. By assuming other people are on the lookout for friends, too.
Example: George Hahn reads the audio version of my weekly newsletter. During Covid, he came out with a bunch of very funny viral videos. One day I sent him a Tweet: Can we be friends? Sure, he wrote back. What are you doing now? Nothing, I said. Okay, said George, let’s grab coffee. An hour later, we were having brunch in Soho. Recently, the CIO of an investment firm texted me out of nowhere: I think we’d be great friends. Think of it as friendship cold-calling. It takes courage and resilience. If others aren’t interested, they’re not interested. If they bite, you might find yourself having breakfast or lunch with someone great."
https://www.profgalloway.com/friending/
17. "On one side, we’re witnessing the rapid emergence of exquisite systems—sensitive, advanced, and highly capable technologies. These include space-based platforms, hypersonic weapons, and proliferated sensors that stretch the boundaries of what’s technologically possible.
On the other, there's a growing demand for inexpensive, expendable materiel—drones, loitering munitions, and mass-manufactured components. Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb, Israel’s recent FPV drone swarms, and the Replicator initiative all highlight this trend toward scalable, attritable systems enabled by advanced and even federated manufacturing."
https://buildingourfuture.substack.com/p/the-split-in-the-spear
18. "We've seen this before.
When the internet exploded into everyday life in the 1990s and early 2000s, my parents’ generation had to adapt to a world that suddenly expected email addresses, online forms, and digital literacy. Many did. Some learned more quickly than others, often with the patient help of their children or coworkers. Some never fully caught up, though, instead finding themselves excluded from opportunities that assumed technological competency, like being able to send a cold email or file taxes online.
The difference now is that AI moves even faster, and its work is often invisible—it outputs a seemingly palatable information soup through a complex transformation of its inputs that we can’t precisely trace. Even if you can comfortably prompt ChatGPT, you need to parse its outputs. Unlike traditional web search, which presents multiple sources to compare and weigh against each other, AI gives you a single answer—confident, coherent, and low-friction. That ease is part of what makes it so powerful, but it also makes it easy to stop questioning.
My parents have professional-level English, yet reading through a dense AI-generated response can feel overwhelming, like trying to drink from a firehose. The simple-looking interface expects you to bring not only language and prompting skills, but a whole set of unspoken literacies: how to skim and scan quickly, how to spot what’s boilerplate AI-speak, how to steer the tool with a firm yet flexible hand."
https://every.to/p/how-i-m-preparing-my-parents-and-myself-to-be-fluent-in-ai
19. "The July 31 U.S. trade deadline has passed, and the United States has delivered its harshest blow yet—a staggering 35% tariff on Canadian goods, justified under the dubious pretext of combating illegal fentanyl imports. With the door slammed shut on negotiations, Canada faces a stark new economic reality. But from crisis springs opportunity, and Canada must seize this critical moment to redefine its economic sovereignty.
Washington's decision is not merely protectionism—it is economic coercion, weaponizing trade policy to subordinate Canadian sovereignty to American corporate interests. This is no ordinary trade dispute; it is economic warfare disguised as trade policy.
Canada has—rightly—refused to capitulate to Washington's latest trade ultimatum. But as Canadians consider this moment of backbone, we must confront an uncomfortable truth: this is not the end of American economic coercion. This is the beginning of a new phase."
https://barryappleton.substack.com/p/trade-by-threat
20. China and Open Source AI, really valuable discussion on the tech wars going on right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTqINzeudJ4&t=147s
21. I enjoy these takes on Silicon Valley news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEOpqKGHIA0&t=1398s
22. "What deals get him excited? “I've always been on the deeptech side, it’s far more interesting than the fucking commoditised software plays.”
Is European tech in a good or bad place? “I'm very bullish on European entrepreneurs. I'm not very bullish on European markets,” he says.
“The quality of entrepreneurs is going up just because there's so many more — whatever you want to call them — mafias or clusters who are able to pass on their knowledge. Silicon Valley is a state of mind , it's not necessarily geographic today.
“But boy does Europe love to navel-gaze,” he adds. “Europe has to realise that it's not gonna be the US, it's not gonna be China, and that's okay, yeah?"
https://sifted.eu/articles/michael-jackson-interview-brunch
23. "The graphic below, from the presentation, is one of the most important insights. I’ve seen in a presentation. AI capabilities grow exponentially, but companies absorb the capabilities linearly. The companies that can change their workflows to adopt AI at the pace it improves, will win."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/ai-needs-clinical-trials
24. "Today, that geographic link between energy and power—central since civilisation began—faces its deepest disruption. Solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries are maturing at the same time, allowing energy generation anywhere with basic industrial capacity. Small modular nuclear reactors, an almost mature technology, promise factory-built units that ship like heavy machinery. The constraint now shifts from controlling land to building and deploying technology.
As I’ve argued in my late-cycle investment theory, today we're generally seeing dynamics much like the 1970s. That decade saw oil markets fragment when producer nations seized control of reserves from Western oil majors. Libya nationalised in 1970, followed by Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and others. By 1973, these newly empowered producers could restrict supply through OPEC, quadrupling prices. The smooth, integrated system that had delivered cheap energy for decades shattered overnight into volatile spot markets needing new intermediaries.
Today's fragmentation follows a different path but causes similar market disruption. Instead of producers limiting supply, consuming nations are building domestic generation to escape import dependence—all while energy demand rises fast, notably due to AI. China's fossil fuel imports peaked in 2019 as renewables scaled. Europe aims for energy independence through vast wind and solar projects. Like in the 1970s, today’s transition creates profitable complexity for those able to navigate fragmented markets, volatile pricing, and shifting trade flows."
https://www.driftsignal.com/p/from-petrostates-to-electrostates
25. "Critics raise three key objections to American reindustrialization: We don’t have the time, the workforce, or the money.
They argue that fixing our defense manufacturing challenges alone will take years, require hundreds of thousands of workers, and cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
But that view looks at the problem from the wrong end. By revitalizing the sector most vital to our national security, the defense industrial base, we can spark positive ripple effects across the broader economy.
Before World War II, the US held 40 percent of global industrial capacity. Today, that number is just 17 percent, and China is the one with the dominant position.
To catch up, we must deploy advanced technologies and bold policies to reinvent manufacturing, starting with defense."
26. "Chapman’s bizarre story – which culminated in an eight-year prison sentence – is a curious mix of geopolitics, international crime and one woman’s tragic tale of isolation and working from home in a gig-dominated economy where increasingly everything happens through a computer screen and it is harder to tell fact from fiction.
The secret North Korean workers, according to the federal government and cybersecurity experts, not only help the US’s adversary – a dictatorship which has been hobbled by international sanctions over its weapons program – but also harm US citizens by stealing their identities and potentially hurt domestic companies by “enabling malicious cyber intrusions” into their networks.
“Once Covid hit and everybody really went virtual, a lot of the tech jobs never went back to the office,” said Benjamin Racenberg, a senior intelligence manager at Nisos, a cybersecurity firm."
27. "So the next time you think about startups and innovation, I hope one of the first words that comes to mind is permissionless. No permission required to invent the future. No permission required to start a business. Build a permissionless mindset—and create something from nothing."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/08/02/entrepreneurship-as-permissionless/
28. "There is widespread ignorance on the current state of American industry and manufacturing technology relative to China. Industry in the United States is hollowed out and backward. Why is this? It’s not so easy to put it under one word or concept. Environmental regulations aren’t bad: in fact the words of these regulations are quite reasonable. But they’re enforced by fanatical, stupid or malicious bureaucrats who interpret them in a way that makes building of new factories basically illegal or too costly in most of the United States, especially in places like California where the human capital and other conditions exist for very modern factories to be built. This is why it would be less costly to build factories in China or Vietnam even if you raised tariffs 300%…aside from these regulations, the introduction of advanced manufacturing technology and automation is prohibited by union regulations in most of America.
You can put all up all the tariffs you want, but until you change these kinds of things, you won’t actually have any kind of reindustrialization that matters. The extension and corruption of environmentalist norms, with which I fundamentally otherwise agree, but which now in warped form tyrannize over the American economy is a subspecies of a bigger problem, the moral fanaticism and purity tests that go a long way to explain the rot at the core of America’s functions. It’s been obvious for a while for example that oil and coal are “icky” in an aesthetic, sociological and maybe moral sense to a large section of American polite society, so during Democrat administrations the United States cuts off its own knees in those fields.
But it’s not just Democrat things: manufacturing as such violates America’s new moral sense regarding labor fairness and environmentalism, so it gets shipped off to China; energy in general as well, so off to China; America had the world’s leading rare earths mining, and it got closed and shipped off to China, with the public justification being environmental. Ditto, drones, which the FAA regulates and puts on hold to study for 15 years for noise & such, while China ends up owning the industry. America had a great vapes industry, & was on its way to high-quality vapes free of toxic substances, but it got legislated out of existence so now it imports sketchy vapes from China. And so on. What is all this? It has little to do with tariffs or trade. It’s unclear what “these things” are. “These kinds of things” consist in part of an atmosphere of moral purity tests and taboos, in part of a selection of “elite” classes that are susceptible to such: but it has to do with human decision, mindset, and culture.
In all this debate, the poor quality of America’s “elite” or managerial class, which is unserious & self-righteous, is maybe the biggest weakness, & it’s again hard to decide if this is a cultural, social, economic or political problem."
https://www.bronzeagepervert.yoga/p/american-industrialization-and-china
29. Balaji is frigging smart. He has a very dark view of America's future and culture, but he is not wrong. He has a hard take on China's future too. He is a reality shill as he says.
This was hard to listen to, just like reality is. Listen and judge for yourself. We have so much work to do to turn things around in America, Canada and the EU.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-CjidoeMaE&t=6146s
30. "With smaller models, the model has less capacity to recover from mistakes, so the tools must be more robust & the selection logic more precise. This might seem like a limitation, but it’s actually a feature.
This constraint eliminates the compounding error rate of LLM chained tools. When large models make sequential tool calls, errors accumulate exponentially.
Small action models force better system design, keeping the best of LLMs and combining it with specialized models.
This architecture is more efficient, faster, & more predictable."
https://tomtunguz.com/local-instructions/
31. Elite Slovak NATO soldier and officer to joining the AFU and fighting in Ukraine. It is a good frontline view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo3TZXrRwms
32. Some really interesting global macro discussion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlzyDwZDYfo&t=887s
33. What a fun and educational conversation with the online legend Tim Ferriss. Recommended.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D_AGAb_A-4&t=2728s
34. "Emotional discipline is built through investing, personal life and even as a boss/employer. There is a reason why CEOs are pretty good investors. They are good at reading emotions.
You earn all of this by surviving volatility and by getting burned a few times.
Most people simply say “I coulda shoulda woulda”. The smart ones reflect back with self awareness and say “how did i feel at that time”. If you’re being honest with yourself, you’ll recognize the emotional state you were in (either high or low) that caused you to make the bad decision.
When It Comes to Investing Be Cold and Robotic
Sound terrible? Great. Welcome to the big leagues.
Your employer would love to fire you. Instantly. You’re just a cost and impact him negatively. The only way you are valuable is if he is paying you *less* than you are making the firm. Otherwise the firm would go out of business.
Now apply this to investing. If you have no emotions, you’ll become a significantly better investor. Instead of investing based on how you feel or how the population feels, you’ll invest based on *who* is involved. If Warren Buffet just bought the stock, probably a good sign. If the guy who sold marijuana at your high school is pitching you the stock… not great."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/emotions-reading-is-more-important
35. "Warfare has always been performative — the means of actions carry significance beyond their explicit destructive effects. What distinguishes the June operations is not their performative nature, but their post-operation communications methodology. Like the “shock and awe” of the 2003 Iraq War or CNN’s coverage of the first Gulf War, the June operations captured global attention using novel tools — social media, real-time distribution, and comprehensive disclosure.
However, the strategic communication gains likely justify the costs in information. While it is challenging to fully understand the perceptions internal to the Kremlin or the highest rungs of the Chinese Communist Party, the adjacent impacts demonstrate a magnitude that would make the meaning hard to ignore. Ukraine’s revelation of coordinating 117 drones across five time zones and 4,300 kilometers of Russian territory sent an unmistakable message about Russian vulnerabilities, while simultaneously boosting Ukrainian morale and international credibility. The extent of Mossad’s infiltration into Iran likely serves to reinforce regional deterrence, rather than limit future operations.
For the United States, the complexity and distance of Operation Midnight Hammer — involving over 125 aircraft, seven B-2 stealth bombers, submarine-launched Tomahawks, and true global coordination — served to reinforce a message of unambiguous American technological superiority and global reach, with a more consequential target audience in the Indo-Pacific rather than exclusively in the Middle East."
https://warontherocks.com/2025/08/is-warfare-becoming-more-performative/
Learning from Everyone, Especially Those you Disagree With Part 2: Advice for Men
I really hate to write about Andrew Tate (and his more debonair brother Tristan) but the man has sound bites. And clearly smart. Moral? A different thing although all there seem to be are accusations and no convictions. I have trust issues with mainstream media narratives. But the point is you learn from everyone.
I was listening to a podcast interview he did and it really helped me as a family man, parent and man.
“If I wake up and say I don’t care how happy I am, I want to be proud of myself and I want to make other people proud of me, so I have to do these things irregardless of how I feel, then I am going to have a fantastic life.
How else are you going to get instant happiness unless it’s temporary. To get long term happiness is something that is only going to come from dedication and hard work, which requires short term suffering. It’s just delayed. If you are dedicating yourself and working hard for future happiness but considering most people are never happy with what you get and only want more, your life just becomes hard work, dedication, struggle and suffering just to exist within. And you don’t operate under the paradigm of happy or sad.”
He goes on: “You achieve your contentment when we make others happy. We give, we go to work, we struggle, we make money, we suffer so others can be happy because of us. It’s not our job to be happy ourselves.”
This is a powerful frame to look at your life. Pain and suffering is the gateway to growth and success. Even more important is where this attitude takes you.
“Unless you are competent and capable as a man, you can’t even love anything unless you are competent and capable as a man……..If you have no competence, you have no skills, no use case, your love is completely useless. Men are nothing but success objects. We are valued by what we do. Men are competency objects. Men are “what can he do”? What is he good at? That is all we are measured on is our capability.”
Amen. The minute I understood and incorporated and lived this attitude my entire life got better. Happiness is a psy-op for men.
You have to be a personal responsibility maximalist. “As a man every single thing that happens to you in your life, you absolutely and completely deserve.” If you want your life to become better, rewire your brain, step up and do the hard work.
Playing Hard Ball: Surviving and Thriving in Trump 2.0’s World
One of the best reads I’ve had to understand this new world of operating. Counter to everything I’ve learned and practiced in my 26 years here in America. We really are entering a brand new world. Frank Rotman of QED Investors wrote an observant tweet early March:
“The Zero Sum Society
Our society seems to be moving in the direction of embracing a troubling premise: That one person's gain must come at another's expense. The disturbing willingness for an individual to profit a little by causing the masses to lose a lot reflects a profound moral disconnect. It feels like people are increasingly comfortable playing a PvE (player vs. everyone) game regardless of the net impact on the collective. You see this in politics. You see this in crypto. You see this in human rights. You see this everywhere.
Speculation About How We Got Here
• The hyper-financialization and broadcasting of everything
• Growing inequality creating separate realities where the suffering of others becomes invisible or normalized especially when personal profit is involved
• Increasing social isolation and declining community ties, making it easier to harm faceless "others"
• The widening physical and psychological distance between decision-makers and those affected by their decisions
• Structures that diffuse moral responsibility, allowing no individual to feel accountable for collective harm
• A cultural shift from "citizen" to "consumer" as primary identity, narrowing our perspective to personal benefit
• Social media algorithms that reward outrage and tribalism over empathy and nuance
• The rise of "optimization" as a value that prioritizes efficiency over human well-being
• Short-term incentive structures that reward immediate gains over sustainable outcomes” (Source: https://x.com/fintechjunkie/status/1897101926078042521)
Explains a lot. Explains why everyone is so on edge and stressed. We are living in the new Hunger Games now. Especially in America.
I also read Kairon’s newsletter religiously. I don’t agree with his politics but he has excellent insights on the world. Here is what he wrote about Trump's negotiation style which seems super relevant in this new winner take all world.
“This is perhaps the biggest obstacle when it comes to Trump. People don’t understand how the name calling, crassness and blustering on Social Media can result in competent foreign policy. For people who took political establishment/corporate training like myself, Trump is antithetical to everything you’ve ever known.
Every convention, every rule, every norm must be tossed aside to understand and deal with him.
He is a different kind of Statesman, (some would say not one at all); one who will press the advantage when he knows he holds the winning hand, grace isn’t apart of Trump’s winning rhetoric. If he can win and take 80% he will do so. If he can push and get 100% and some of your winnings, he will do so.
Because he expects everyone else to do the same.
Why is he suggesting buying Greenland again, is he going to conquer half the World?
What is it with 25-200% tariffs, is he serious?
Why does everything around him look like chaos?
Trump grew up during the time where sales and negotiation was hardball. Every inch won, is hard-won and Trump has taken that to heart. If he asks for the moon, a rocket doesn’t seem so bad. Many in the institutional class won’t know this, but this is what every poor man knows now as: the Facebook Marketplace Negotiation. Or what everyone in the 80’s just referred to as sales.
Everything is a bargaining tool for Trump, nothing is off the table. The polite society Neo-Liberal “tit for tat”, arguing over “table-stakes” percentages is over. Tariffs are a bargaining tool. Retaliatory and Reciprocal Tarriffs are the same reasoning. (Trump also knows and views Subsidies as “Reverse Tariffs”)
Why did Canada and Mexico acquiesced to demands immediately, because Trump’s final demands were “reasonable”. But Tariffs are still on the table if they don’t follow through.” (Source: https://mercurial.substack.com/p/understanding-trump)
I’m known for being very direct, sometimes harsh but it comes from caring. I’ve always tried to be fair and reasonable. I’ve always tried to do the right thing albeit with lapses. I’ve always tried to be generous with my time and help. Overall, I think it’s done me and my reputation well here in Silicon Valley and around the world. But I sometimes wonder if this is outdated in this new world order.
I’m tired of seeing so many awful people get ahead in the world. I wonder if I should not be more selfish, ruthless and hard- edged in this world. Maybe it’s time to be more assertive and less tolerant. To be more selfish and transactional. “To get the bag” as they say. To push back and retaliate more. As always, more food for thought personally. We shall see.
Learning from Everyone, Especially Those you Disagree With & Even Hate: Violence is Real
I try to learn from everyone. I listen to opposing views from mine, and even from awful horrific folks. The All-in-Podcast guys, Mike Cernovich, Tucker Carlson, Cyrus Janssen, Betrand Arnaud, the list is endless. But I always learn stuff from them. I learn from everyone. This is how you grow as a person. It’s good to have heroes but to follow people blindly is dangerous. This is why you also want anti-heroes in your life.
I used to be a fan of Andrew & Tristan Tate but for obvious reasons things have changed. I admired them for their erudite discussions, ultra masculine and fighting form and hustle. And like that they teach young men to work & train hard and more importantly to expect that life is hard. It’s been personally very helpful. But I disagree with their views on women and the pro-Putin and right wing views. The Tates are the extreme and obvious counter reaction to the left wing woke stupidity. One might even say over-reaction.
However in a March 2025 interview on the PBD Show, Andrew Tate said something really insightful: “If a line is crossed, violence appears. If you run your mouth, you will get checked. Violence is the underpinning of civilized society. Violence runs everything. This world we live in is run by violence.”
This is 100% true. And this is why every man needs to learn how to fight, wield a blade or shoot a gun. It’s a must in your tool set of skills. It gives you confidence. It’s a core part of male competence especially as we are entering the time of the beast and as the world becomes more chaotic.
“Men have a burden of performance. Men should be capable.” Many of us in modern society have forgotten this to Western society’s overall detriment. But this gets fixed one man at a time.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Sept 21st, 2025
"Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work." — Stephen King
An investors view on defense tech. This was an interesting conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZEcy25ICIA
2. The Chip wars and the new rise of Hardware in AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va6sKJQv-u4
3. "The big problem is that, historically, we’ve been very concerned about data privacy and most terms of service limit the usage of the data we create in apps. Plus the last wave of software innovation was SaaS those companies charge for workflow and don’t really use or aggregate data in any way. We may have to wait a few years for AI startups with novel data acquisition strategies to show the market the best way to create value generating unique data sets.
But I believe its coming. And I think its important for investors to consider where models are going next, what data they need, and who generates it."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/ai-takeover-targets-for-data-and
4. "The ranges at which modern shore-based systems can strike ships means that any nautical action must focus first and foremost on geographical points: to eliminate enemy batteries, to establish anti-missile and -ship umbrellas, to emplace radars and airfields, etc. In practical terms, it is outright impossible for a purely fleet action to occur at scale.
The missile age only exaggerates these dynamics. Current weapons can strike ground targets several thousands of kilometers away and create anti-air and anti-ship bubbles hundreds of kilometers wide. The question of sea control around any objective of strategic value is now dominated by key terrain. Merely sailing within an enemy’s missile and aircraft engagement zones requires careful consideration, and any decisive campaign would entail numerous fights for position.
Targeting enemy ships in open waters put a premium on intelligence. News of arriving convoys (whether via intercepted communications or espionage) informed patrol routes, while raiding squadrons pushed out fast vessels or aircraft to scout. In the 21st century, satellites, UAVs, and sonar buoy networks, making it increasingly difficult for ships to protect themselves by hiding in the blue expanse."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/naval-warfare-is-positional-the-influence
5. Balaji and the concept of the Network State. The Sovereign Individual future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBAbSsPFTcY
6. Extreme results require extreme efforts and drive. The Italian eyewear tycoon Del Vecchio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bijdxv0lG7w&t=1512s
7. "With software-defined defence, and the use of autonomy, you can invert that capability triangle and have sensors and autonomy as the key driver of effect and speed, with the platform there to support the software. In this way, in the air Helsing wants to dominate electronic detection and fast response; on land they want to solve the fragmented kill chain; with maritime, detection is a huge problem. Scherf and Reil believe that AI can solve this complexity.
The team explained their view that the previous prime model for defence saw companies wait until government had defined a requirement, and then contracted one company to build that requirement. This has led to a lack of speed, and to companies spending around 3% on R&D.
The new model that Helsing is part of sees venture funded companies spend nearer 30%-40% on R&D without waiting for the contracts. This moves risk away from government to the company and its investors, and should deliver better innovation faster, which is what the speed of modern warfare requires."
https://www.resiliencemedia.co/p/the-long-read-how-helsing-sees-the
8. "The other strategy is to remain consistent, not worrying about trends or engagement and simply sticking to what you know best – staying authentic to a personal ethos or brand identity in the deepest sense. In a way, coffee shops are physical filtering algorithms, too: they sort people based on their preferences, quietly attracting a particular crowd and repelling others by their design and menu choices. That kind of community formation might be more important in the long run than attaining perfect latte art and collecting Instagram followers. That is ultimately what Anca Ungureanu was trying to do in Bucharest. “We are a coffee shop where you can meet people like you, people that have interests like you,” she said.
Her comment made me think that a certain amount of homogeneity might be an unavoidable consequence of algorithmic globalisation, simply because so many like-minded people are now moving through the same physical spaces, influenced by the same digital platforms. The sameness has a way of compounding."
9. "Founders are expected to adopt a linear wealth mindset and take big risks that maximize expected value as cogs in the venture capital machine dependent on power law home runs. The tales of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg risking everything they had and emerging with the largest personal fortunes on planet Earth reinforce the mythos that drives the entire risk taking sector, while survivorship bias conveniently forgets the millions of founders who go to zero. Salvation comes only to the select few who clear an ever steepening power law threshold.
That taste for outsized risk has seeped into everyday culture. Wage growth has severely lagged compounded capital, causing ordinary people to increasingly see their best shot at real upward mobility in negative EV jackpots. Online gambling, 0DTE options, retail meme stocks, sports betting, and crypto memecoins all testify to the phenomena of exponential wealth preference. Technology makes speculating effortless, while social media spreads the story of each new overnight millionaire, luring the broader population into one giant losing bet like moths to a light.
We’re becoming a culture that worships the jackpot and increasingly prices survival at zero.
And AI exacerbates the trend by further devaluing labor and intensifying winner take all outcomes."
https://www.scimitar.capital/p/the-jackpot-age
10. A top tier Silicon Valley investor on turning around a storied venture capital firm, KP. Lots of interesting insights on running a vc fund.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzEzKbsAp5E
11. "This is just a numbers game. The chances of meeting someone legit in a city is less likely than the internet. The internet has everyone on it all day everyday. Similarly, you will learn more from the internet vs. classical education. All the edge/new research items are tested by people in the real world. By the time it becomes “science” it is dated.
The internet is also real life. If you want it to be. Just 35 years ago, you couldn’t do anything. The social circle you got is what you were stuck with. Now? Totally different. If everyone around you is a certified loser, you just go on the internet and connect with like minded winners. No hurdle. No $50,000 a year social club. Nothing.
One of the fascinating things about “moving up in society” is that the internet still wins. If you want to solve something and you can choose the internet vs. the country club, the internet still wins. The problem with luxury areas is that a chunk of the people are actually *not* successful! Their parents may have been the winners and they are simply mediocre just living off the success of the family.
In short, if you want to be on the edge of information/new things. You actually need to spend more time using the internet and connecting with people. Hence, max bullish on digital immersion.
If you’re actually living life and constantly learning stuff you won’t really get writers block. After a long period of time, people will know you only do stuff you’ve tried."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/major-things-weve-learned-writing
12. "Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie were able to build empires because they operated in an era of rapid infrastructure build-out, limited regulation, and national urgency. Today’s builders face red tape, unrealistic compliance regimes, and capital markets that have favored software over steel.
What is the point of making money if you don’t have the country to make it in? What is the point of service unless you’re looking past the promotion to why you serve in the first place? What is the point of writing policy unless it’s a mandate
to fix the problems that we set out to fix?
This is a republic, but only if we can keep it. We gave China all our capital and skills and deindustrialized the nation for decades—now, we’re stuck squaring up against them with a 1,000-to-1 industrial disadvantage.
The hour is late. The game is on. And America has an incredibly short window to return to its position as the industrial superpower of the world—and bring back the millions of skilled-trade jobs we need and should have never lost in the first place."
https://www.thefp.com/p/america-wont-exist-if-we-cant-build-things-china-industrial-power
13. "Do you feel like the PRC is playing everyone? Also, where are the European leaders? Every one of those ports is in a NATO nation. Does anyone have full confidence that should a general war break out in the Pacific with the PRC that those ports in NATO nations will just continue to function as normal?"
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/the-battle-of-the-ports-is-afoot
14. "But honestly, why should employees stay loyal when founders are the first to jump ship for a bigger payday? The real issue is structural: when a founder can unlock billions by licensing IP instead of seeing the company through to an exit, the system doesn’t just allow it—it rewards it.
Silicon Valley’s game of musical chairs now includes everyone—even founders of billion-dollar companies with hundreds of employees and nine figures on the balance sheet. These are the same founders who once pitched investors and recruits on a lifelong mission, only to step away the moment a better seat opens up.
In the high-stakes race to AGI, careers in Silicon Valley have become liquid assets—negotiable, transferable, and always for sale to the highest bidder. Founders and employees alike are playing the market.
Still, I believe restoring loyalty—especially among founders—is essential if Silicon Valley wants to preserve its unique ethos."
https://www.newinternet.tech/p/show-me-the-money-founders-loyalty
15. Building the electrostate and driving reindustrialization in America. Learning from China.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca3a4bPOoag
16. "Like a predictive index for how the military intends to fight in five to 15 years, shifts in this year’s RDT&E proposal suggest the emergence of software-defined weapons, agile acquisition models, space-based sensing architectures, and a growing emphasis on autonomy and electronic warfare."
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2025/07/what-rd-budget-proposal-says-about-future-war/406467/
17. “Ukraine operates in ‘wartime R&D mode,’ with direct feedback from the frontlines, no bureaucracy, and a focus on what works,” Maksym Vasylchenko, Co-owner and CEO of Tencore told me. “Decisions that take months elsewhere happen in days here. Additionally, the government, volunteers, and private sector collaborate closely, and the end-users – soldiers – are also involved from day one.”
18. A good tear down on the principles behind the success of the Chain Smokers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGROj4R9tnQ&t=2123s
19. "If you agree with my view that seed investing is getting squeezed by YC and the mega-funds, then it is obvious that the pressure is very high to pursue sustaining innovations vigorously just to hold ground. Not being aggressive will mean ceding market position pretty quickly to these two formidable forces, as well as the other seed players and new entrants into the space.
So, what does sustaining innovation look like for seed investors? Don’t overthink it–sustaining innovation will be about leveraging AI to transform the way VCs source, select, win, and support portfolio companies.
The challenge with disruptive innovation is that you have to get a lot of things right at the same time. You have to be non-consensus AND have the right timing AND have the right execution. A lot of the ideas above have been tried before in some fashion, but most have failed. Is it because the ideas are fundamentally flawed? Non-alcoholic beer was not a new idea, but no one was all that excited about O’Doul’s when Athletic Brewing came around. Was it the wrong premise? The wrong execution? Or just bad timing?
Similarly, a non-core geo “rise of the rest” strategy has been tried many times before. And although isolated examples of winning companies in second or third-tier cities abound, most of the firms that specifically targeted these markets failed to capture this value. Is the premise wrong? Or was it timing or execution? Hard to know.
I also think that some of these experiments can be pursued by individual partners if not by entire firms. Perhaps some of these non-standard strategies can work beautifully, but it’s tough to build an entire firm around them. Or perhaps you need to combine a few different disruptive innovations together to enjoy a sufficient portfolio effect. Either way, individual investors or entire firms need to make some tough calls about what disruptive innovation to pursue to drive meaningful alpha in their returns."
https://nextview.vc/blog/a-path-forward-for-seed-vcs/
20. Hoping this Ukraine-US Drone and weapons deal happens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l04pp_Ly638
21. "So, seed funds are stuck. If you are a highly regarded or proven founder, mega-funds will offer you unbeatable terms. If you are a less proven founder, YC is a very attractive option. How much of the market is captured by these two unstoppable forces is hard to pin down, but I think they represent at least 25%+ of the market and growing. Yes, there are many great founders who don’t choose one of these two paths, but no matter how you slice it, the seed funds are fighting for a smaller piece of the pie."
https://nextview.vc/blog/a-crisis-moment-for-seed-vc/
22. One of the best weekly discussions on venture capital in B2B & AI. Lots of insights and lessons here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lFDEWFzHVk
23. "To make a long story short, the US and its allies are not well prepared against saturation missile attacks and don't have enough coverage to protect military installations, command and control centers, airfields, naval ports, or even logistic centers and factories (putting aside attacks focused on critical infrastructure, as we see on a daily basis in Ukraine).
It should be obvious that the US industrial base is not ready for the challenge, that there are not enough factories, and efficiency (understood in terms of output) is low. The Pentagon is still relying on ordering missile production from existing factories rather than really trying to reform the manufacturing infrastructure so we can match the output of Russia, China or even Iran."
https://weapons.substack.com/p/the-concerning-future-of-missile
24. China Shock 2 and the unprofitability problem of manufacturers there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhsdTx7dJwg
25. Drones and the growth of marcher lands.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq0e6hJUfw8
26. This is an important conversation besides the topics of Silicon Valley. Bringing back fun, investing in fun. Actually liking what you are building and investing in. Silicon Valley has gotten too greedy, too serious & too meh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhK7tEv_lK8
27. "The journey between those two points—from insolvency to influence—reads like fiction, the kind of story editors reject as implausibly neat. Yet here sits the evidence: a man who parlayed supernatural hustle, pattern recognition, and an immigrant’s refusal to accept limitations into one of the Valley’s most successful seed firms, backed by Stanley Druckenmiller, Bill Ackman, Kevin Warsh, and Michael Ovitz.
“I’ve been discounted by so many people in my life,” Naimi says, and the scar under his eye seems to deepen in the fading light.
Word of Naimi spread quickly through Silicon Valley’s network. By early 2017, everyone wanted to hire him. By August, when he had momentum doing his own thing, he was declining those offers and fielding proposals from VCs wanting to become LPs in a fund he didn’t yet have. He wasn’t convinced the approach would scale to a full fund, but when the conversation evolved to buying equity in his management company, the equation became too attractive to ignore.
In the deal that emerged, Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, David Sacks, Keith Rabois, Michael Ovitz, Kevin Hartz, Bill Ackman, Stanley Druckenmiller, and Kevin Warsh bought 20% of his management company, Abstract, for $10 million in upfront cash. Naimi was 26 years old with a theoretically worthless company that had maybe $10 million in total assets under management.
“It was a group that I’d only read about and would have given the equity to for free if they’d asked for it,” Naimi says. “But if they were willing to pay for it, then that made it even better.” The deal included a seven-year sunset provision, whereby the investors earned economics on everything Abstract did in that window. By the end of 2024, Naimi owned 100% of his firm again.
Since that initial $100 million fund in 2018, Abstract has raised capital at an accelerating pace: $270 million in 2021, $300 million in 2023, and $500 million in 2025. The firm manages $1.8 billion in assets today, including $600 million in realized and unrealized gains, making it one of the largest seed investors in the world.
Half of Abstract’s funds rank in the top decile for their vintage; the other half in the top quartile. The portfolio includes seed and early-stage investments in breakout companies like Neon (bought for $1 billion), Replit, Krea, xAI, Partiful, Hebbia AI, Garner Health, Crusoe AI, and Polymarket."
https://joincolossus.com/article/ramtin-naimi-man-hot-hand/
28. "Attractive opportunities: as Goldman Sachs put it, Europe is a fertile hunting ground for opportunities with a great risk/reward ratio and the chance to outperform. If you want to find alpha, come to Europe! The US market is entirely grazed over, while European markets remain relatively unexplored.
The message is loud and clear: we are likely to see sustained, large-scale reallocation of capital into European equity markets. This will not play out overnight, and it's not over just because markets have already seen a rally.
Just to be clear, asset allocators won't be abandoning their US exposure anytime soon. However, many are currently overexposed to the US market and will likely seek to rebalance their portfolio, both to manage risk and to position themselves for the next leg of the economic cycle.
Non-US, and in particular European equities, are the most attractive underpriced call option currently available in global equities markets. US investors who haven't yet diversified globally have already missed out, given how weak the US dollar has been of late. This is likely to encourage others to join the trend."
https://www.undervalued-shares.com/weekly-dispatches/allocating-to-europe-a-new-3-part-series/
29. If you want to understand China's economy and their growth & dominance in manufacturing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=qb644F-iE_s
30. "I left the conference impressed that Washington D.C. clearly understands the importance of industrializing. We're in the early stages of the game here, so a lot of these voices and efforts are uncoordinated, but seeing this level of focus from Democrats and Republicans alike confirms my belief that reindustrializing the United States is deeply important generational project with broad support, a project that is extremely difficult but has the potential to deliver enormous benefits for the United States if we can pull it off. It's a project that can knit us back together as a nation.
In other words, this is the kind of effort I can devote the rest of my life to."
https://blackpowder.ghost.io/notes-from-reindustrialize/
31. "The Europeans of Zweig’s youth did not grasp the fragility of their world, with its growing domestic tensions and fraying international order. Many of us in today’s West have suffered the same failure of imagination. We are stunned and dismayed that what we took for granted appears to be vanishing: democracy in the United States, which was a model for much of the world, and international institutions and norms that allowed many nations to work together to avoid war and confront shared problems, such as climate change and pandemic disease.
As a historian, I study those moments in the past when an old order decays beyond the point of return and a new one emerges, but I never expected to live through one. I should have. Today’s world is lurching toward great-power rivalry, suspicion, and fear—an international order where the strong do what they will, as Thucydides wrote, and “the weak suffer what they must.” Imperialism, which never really disappeared, is back. Governments and think tanks now speak of spheres of influence, something the U.S. long opposed. If history is a guide, this will not be an easy or pleasant transition.
Under the Trump administration, the United States no longer demonstrates the will to dominate the globe, and China does not yet have the capacity. History offers yet another model for the present situation, and perhaps for the future: spheres of influence, in which great powers dominate their own neighborhoods or strategic points, such as the Suez Canal for the British empire or Panama for the U.S., while lesser powers within the sphere accept, not always willingly, their sway, and outside ones steer clear to preserve their own dominions."
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/04/world-order-europe-trump/682639/
32. "In Ukraine and Israel, there is a tight feedback loop between battlefield experience and technical execution. If a new system works, it is used. If it fails, it is replaced. Success is measured in battlefield victories, not project management green ticks.
By contrast, in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, procurement cycles can last longer than some wars. Risk aversion, complex chains of command, and strict acquisition protocols all work to slow down innovation. These militaries certainly have the technical capability to build Trojan Horse-style drone systems. What they lack is the institutional flexibility to deploy them in time to matter.
No other government could have pulled off these attacks. Because they haven’t had to. Ukraine and Israel’s systems are designed to adapt quickly and deliver results. The ancient Greeks knew that the willingness to act on a new idea is just as important as the idea itself - something that the Pentagon seems to be starting to understand."
https://www.resiliencemedia.co/p/pete-hegseth-the-battle-for-troy
33. So many lessons from history. In this case, the Russo-Japan history and the importance of grand strategy and knowing when to stop. The Meiji generation was the greatest generation of their time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxIeJjEGLdo&t=2s
34. Big changes happening in Japanese politics which will have big impact on bond markets and the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yjqtkSdAXM
35. "Overall, this kind of growth isn’t just hypergrowth—it’s something even more dramatic. But regardless of the growth rate, the core principles remain the same:
Stay close to the customer.
Build opinionated functionality for your ideal user.
Deliver something they couldn’t do before your product existed.
Growth of this kind is rare, but I hope more entrepreneurs get the opportunity to experience it. And no matter how fast the business grows, the ultimate goal stays the same: to deliver real, lasting value to your customers—not just today, but well into the future as they continue to evolve alongside your product."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/07/26/beyond-hyper-growth/
36. "They make up my book BREAKNECK: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. It’s driven by a few simple ideas. That Americans and Chinese are fundamentally alike: restless, eager for shortcuts, ultimately driving most of the world’s big changes.
That their rivalry should not be reasoned through with worn-out terms from the past century like socialist, democratic, or neoliberal. And that both countries are tangles of imperfection, regularly delivering — in the name of competition — self-beatings that go beyond the wildest dreams of the other.
The simplest idea I present is that China is an engineering state, which brings a sledgehammer to problems both physical and social, in contrast with America’s lawyerly society, which brings a gavel to block almost everything, good and bad."
37. "76 out of 96 countries surveyed now report net favorable views of China, while 55% of all countries hold net negative views of the U.S. Just last year, the U.S. had a comfortable net favorability of +20 points (versus China’s +5), but today China sits at ~+14 while America has plunged to around –5. That’s a massive shift in barely twelve months.
First and most importantly, the way America is pursuing its “America First” foreign policy is actively alienating the rest of the world. Wanting to prioritize your own interests is normal and every country does that. But the U.S. has chosen to do it in the most hostile, disrespectful, and loud way possible. Publicly ridiculing allies, demanding loyalty without reciprocity, and openly treating global partnerships as burdens has consequences. You don’t win influence by telling the world you don’t care about it and then act surprised when it stops caring back."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-169295506
38. "And yet in terms of the actual on-the-ground reality, I don’t see MAGA doing much pioneering. Instead, I see a fundamentally deconstructive movement — a furious assault on progressive culture, liberal institutions, and the structure of the U.S. economy in general, with no idea of what should replace it. On culture, factories, infrastructure, energy, technology, and institutions, MAGA is tearing things down without building things up.
Manufacturing production and employment barely budged during Trump’s first term, and they haven’t budged yet in his second.
And in his second term so far, Trump has been doing things that actively inhibit business investment.
First, and most obviously, there are the tariffs. Trump and his people believe very deeply that foreign competition is holding U.S. manufacturing back, and that if America closes off its markets, domestic factories will appear to replace the vanished imports with their wares. But they fail to understand the economics of supply chains. Tariffs starve U.S. manufacturers of the parts, materials, and components they need to make high-value products. If America is forced to mine all its own metals, chop all its own wood, and do low-value assembly work, that will pull American workers off of more valuable jobs doing the more technologically advanced parts of manufacturing. The result will be rising costs, diminished profitability, and decline.
The problem isn’t just that burning America down is bad; it’s that the Trumpists don’t actually know what they want to start over with. Unlike the Christian Right or the business conservatives of my youth, they don’t seem to have a vision for what the country should look like after all the tearing down is complete.
As a result, MAGA looks less like a normal political movement than a protracted backlash — a lengthy blast of rage against all the ways progressivism was changing the country in the 2010s. It’s surprising how long that rage has managed to last, but eventually that fire will have to fade. And when it does, MAGA supporters will look around and realize that they didn’t have a constructive vision for the future of their nation."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/maga-doesnt-build-anything
39. Even the talent in the big media world will be moving into small team, big business mode.
"Colbert, Fallon, and Kimmel shouldn’t be worried. They are caged in a broken business model, and it’s only a matter of time before they break free. In his first broadcast since CBS pulled the plug, Colbert earlier this week warned Trump that the “gloves are off.”
When his contract ends in 10 months, the economic shackles will also come off. Instead of leading a $60 million business with 200 staff, Colbert will likely helm a $20 million business with 12 highly skilled people. These shows might lack the glitz and glamor of late-night. But that can be an advantage, as Colbert demonstrated during the pandemic, when he delivered monologues at home without a live audience, his wife, Evie Colbert, by his side."
https://www.profgalloway.com/last-laugh/
40. "At so many big companies, executives are marginal optimizers and can’t do the work we need them to do to really make major AI deployments. They can’t revamp value chains to take advantage of this technology, and most of them won’t be able to do so until they see how someone else does it and have a clear roadmap to follow.
AI technology is far from perfect. It is moving fast, and has a very long way to go to fulfill the expectations of the AI industry. But it’s good enough to be deployed much more widely and in much more useful ways than it has been to date. And I think that’s because most executives don’t know what to do, and don’t have the skills to navigate something like this. The AI gap is exposing just how incompetence there is at the executive level in corporate America."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/how-ai-is-exposing-executive-incompetence
41. "US investment could unlock this unused potential without competing with existing production. A $100 billion defence manufacturing effort—based on NATO's capability gaps and European procurement budgets—would put idle workers to work while meeting NATO commitments. Green energy projects could absorb $200 billion, reducing Europe’s reliance on Russian gas and generating returns for American investors. Advanced manufacturing partnerships might add $150 billion, building allied capacity without threatening US jobs.
This works because European investment keeps dollars circulating abroad instead of quickly flowing back through exports to the US. Defence equipment stays in Europe, and infrastructure can’t be shipped across the Atlantic. This turns Europe’s weakness into a shared strength.
Still, physical investment alone won’t reach the full $900 billion target—digital innovation will be essential to fully escape Triffin’s trap.
The emerging escape plan—replacing trade deficits with foreign direct investment while building digital dollar infrastructure—holds real promise. Europe’s idle capacity could absorb $400–500 billion in American investment. Strategic resource projects might add another $200 billion. Stablecoin systems could create structural dollar demand of $200–300 billion annually. Together, these could supply global liquidity without causing deindustrialisation."
https://www.driftsignal.com/p/can-america-escape-the-triffin-dilemma
42. "In fact, German and European decision-makers must finally recognize that there are no quick fixes. Only a sustained, long-term missile industrial effort can get Europe back on track in the missile domain. This requires acknowledging that modern war demands thousands of conventional long- and deep-strike capabilities, backed by a robust and continuous order intake.
The core problem, of course, is that even a major effort launched now — of which an order for the Typhon system may or may not be a part — will not deliver quick results. If German decision-makers still believe in the 2029 timeline for having to be ready to deter Russia, there is no time to lose. And under a pessimistic reading of the situation, the window may already have closed. Still, a delayed start is better than continued inaction."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/homeopathic-missile-doses-for-europe
43. "so the market for data did grow over the last ten years. it is certainly bigger today than it was. but it not grow nearly as fast as any of us predicted. and that’s because getting value from data is still SUPER hard.
does AI make it easier? yes. but so did all the other innovations in the last ten years and those innovations did not meaningfully grow the market for data.
Data businesses (companies that sell data – think rows and columns) are good businesses. They make good profits. They grow (albeit slowly) well. But they are not great businesses – and most should not take venture capital funding."
https://auren.substack.com/p/data-is-actually-not-a-great-vc-backed
44. "Surround yourself with individuals committed to real growth. Whether they move quickly or slowly, operate intensely or calmly, what matters most is their intentional progress.
Some people are built for sprints; others excel at marathons. That's fine. Speed and style differ, but intentionality and continuous improvement are non-negotiable.
As a founder, your job isn't just to encourage growth, it's to ruthlessly eliminate the busy-for-nothing, the ego defenders, and the pretenders from your environment.
Improvement starts where ego shuts up.
Choose your team wisely."
https://2lr.substack.com/p/choose-your-team-wisely
45. "Within the last six months, everyone working in AI or leading a company seems to be saying some form of “all the jobs are going to disappear.” And if they aren’t saying that, they are saying that we are headed for some sort of massive disruption. If not that exactly, then anyone not using AI is going to be steamrolled by this new digitally automated economy.
What’s true here? What are these people trying to signal when they make these bold pronouncements?
Jobs are so much more than a basket of tasks, and I think a lot of people miss this when talking about employment trends. They are a way of transferring wealth to large amounts of people, ways to give people dignity, ways to grant status, vessels for feeling useful, and so much more. I don’t even think we understand how central the job is to modern society, but one way to think about it would be to think about the backlash if all large companies laid off 90% of their workforce.
First, it would crush the economy unless there was immediate fiscal stimulus, not to mention the obvious backlash and protests that would ensue. Most companies don’t even push past 10% layoffs (Microsoft laid off about 7% of the workforce in its recent announcements), not to mention widespread firing aversion among the people in charge of hiring decisions at every level of a company. The job, in other words, is not just a bundle of tasks; it is a container that stands in for a complex web of beliefs that undergird society.
For this reason, I suspect the job will far outlast most of these predictions, and I’d predict we’ll have an unemployment rate in the US below 10% for the coming decades."
https://newsletter.pathlesspath.com/p/why-is-everyone-in-ai-talking-about
46. "The next generation of legendary companies are smaller and faster than ever before.
Leverage at every layer—sales, ops, product, finance, support.
That doesn’t make them AI companies.
It makes them efficient businesses maximizing every resource they have."
War Mode: Dan Koe Wisdom
I saw this incredible video by Dan Koe, Godfather of Solopreneurs, up there with Justin Welsh.
It can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0AB6pZpotg.
He introduces the concept of “War Mode”, we know Monk Mode when you disappear, remove yourself from the world, reject anything fun and go to incredible focus to get stuff done.
“War Mode” is “exactly opposite. You attack your goals. You simulate a hunt. You say YES to everything. You expose yourself to massive experience. You overwhelm your mind with chaos and force yourself to expand into a new identity. You become the person who can bear a massive load of responsibility. Someone who doesn’t crack under pressure because that means death (metaphorically of course).
So I use this war mode as a means to take my mind, body and business to another level when I need to. Because the problem here is the problem with modern life right now in general. People work on simple tasks they hate all day, never challenge themselves creatively, and think they need a break from work.
Now personally I think people would benefit from more work than they would more rest. One, because rest for most people is synonymous with a pleasurable escape from boredom rather than a deep recovery session from stimulating work.
The second is that the average person lacks periods of pure intensity toward a meaningful goal. They lack true balance, which lies, in contrast, meaningful work & meaningful rest, both with pure focus. Not the middle path, but the path of high highs & low lows, catastrophic failure and blissful success. Those are where the most profound lessons are learned. And if you are floating in the middle, life becomes a blur of boredom and anxiety. Too many people simply want to escape the stress & mundaneness of everyday life, so they think more rest or a fancy vacation will do it for them.
I’d like to propose another solution, to go a little insane, to flip the switch overnight, to transform into an entirely new person.” Find an Alter Ego and build your new you. All in the direction of a big massive goal and vision.
“To change who you are, you must educate, practice and experience new information to reprogram your mind’s faulty wiring that was installed by society. You must rip yourself out of the environment that is keeping you the same.You must force yourself into places you don’t belong until you do. You must channel what you learn into a project that moves you toward your vision.Take your alter ego and go war mode. You attack your goals. You simulate a hunt. You say YES to everything. You expose yourself to massive experience.” Commit to war mode for 2-3 months. Rest and then do it again. This is where growth happens.
I love it. What a great concept to follow. A time to “Lock in” as they say in the Crypto world. Traveling and busier in business than I’ve been in a while, laying down the foundations for the future. All while training: staying fit and strong and repairing my broken family relations. After resting in July and August, I’m now gearing up again for “War Mode” in September.
Go to “War Mode” people, because that is what it will take to get through this mess of the year and the rest of this decade.
Rip Cole’s Yellowstone Cowboy Wisdom
Rip Cole is one of the main characters of the Yellowstone show and is the foreman of the ranch. Hardcore. Capable of incredible violence. Brutal when he needs to be. He does what he needs to do to protect his ranch, crew and family. A real man. To be so physically and mentally strong. A leader that his people respect.
Yet he is kind and warm with his loved ones. He takes care of them. Incredibly loyal. And he is surprisingly wise and prosaic. He is calm, cool and collected, especially in a crisis. Something I aspire to one day instead of reverting to anxiety and anger.
He is very “Adlerian”, which I think is the way we progress in life. There was a conversation he had with his troubled wife Beth.
“Beth: Do you ever think about us?
Rip: Us is all I ever think about.
Beth: When we were kids. You ever think about that?
Rip: I think about now. I think about tomorrow. I don’t give much time to yesterday.
Beth: Yesterday is what eats me.
Rip: Maybe yesterday is what eats everybody. That’s why I don’t think about it.”
At age 50 I realize I need to just let go of the past sometimes. Reliving bad memories, old insults and indignities. My grudges drive me way too much to be healthy. It leads to unnecessary angst and conflict. Moving on is the right and smart move.
Rip said once: “You know what, I never think about what happens a year from now or ten years from now. I always worried about today with an eye on tomorrow.”
I know I should be more like Rip, focussed on the present, with an awareness and view of the future.
Salaar Ceasefire: Army of One
A crazy and ridiculously silly, yet violent movie that is a modern day gangster movie, a story around powerful descendants of Dacoits (bandit warriors from ancient India). “The fate of a violently contested kingdom hands on the fraught bond between two friends turned foes in this safe of power, blood shed and betrayal.”
Two best friends Deva & Varadha grew up together in the gangster capital of Khangsaar. A unique imaginary world. Amazing world building here. Deva in his youth, swears loyalty to his friend for saving his and his mothers life. “Only for you, I will be a bait or a shark. Only for you, whenever you call me, I will come back to this place.”
“During the time of the Persian empire, the Sultan, however big the problem, wouldn't deploy his formidable army. He would only go to one man. For whatever the sultan wished for… and destroy whatever the Sultan rejected.”
As usual there are lots of wise lessons in this movie. “Children are like molten iron….mold them well and they become lamps that spread light. If you don’t they become blood shedding swords.”
“You can stop a river with a dam but you can’t stop a raging ocean.” The point as exemplified by our main character Deva is that human vitality and energy overcomes most challenges and issues. Yet for many of us, myself for sure this energy is usually spent on our darker impulses.
“I know for a fact that no hunger can match the hunger for vengeance. Our time has come.”
When his friend Varadha asks for help 25 years later, Deva answers the call. And it gets very bloody soon. “A hunter is not pained by not being able to find prey, as by not being able to hunt. So In that case declare hunting season. The crimson of flowing blood is always beautiful.” Deva, a violent, one man army unleashes hell on Varadha’s enemies.
We learn the eternal lessons that power is always taken. Never given. “The strongest shall prevail. The Strongest shall rule.” Something the world is relearning again the hard way in 2025. Unfortunately the world is very harsh and cruel to the weak.
Deva delivers the Khansaar empire to his friend in a bloody evening of killing a la John Wick but with swords & axes. But there is a crazy twist in the end. A fun and interesting movie. Can’t wait for Part 2.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Sept 14th, 2025
"The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle." — Steve Jobs
"All in all, the trading houses delivered three essential services to the manufacturers partnering with them. First, they financed long-term commodity contracts, keeping input prices stable. Second, they built distribution networks to open foreign markets. Third, they gathered and shared intelligence that helped firms adapt products to regional demand.
Yes, Japan had the Toyota system, a radical new way of making things. But that alone wouldn't have changed the game. It's one thing to invent cinema. It's another to build Hollywood. What the sōgō shōsha added was the institutional infrastructure to turn technical advantage into national economic strategy. Japan's post-war boom was about more than better manufacturing. It was about building sophisticated intermediaries that linked domestic production to global markets.
We talk endlessly about equity funding, when hardware businesses need much more. They need equipment financing, project-based capital for large-scale deployments, working capital to smooth cash flow, relationships with reliable suppliers, market intelligence on foreign competitors, and distribution into overseas markets. These capabilities lie outside venture capital's skill set. And culturally, Americans are ill-suited to it. They don't look outside their own market because they rarely need to. And inward-looking firms don't become global exporters.
That's where Erebor might come in. As the first serious attempt to build a modern American sōgō shōsha, it could be designed for the reindustrialisation of a high-tech, capital-intensive America. If my hypothesis holds, Erebor may be a sign that the real work of rebuilding national industrial capacity is underway.
More specifically, Erebor's charter application targets four specific sectors: virtual currencies, artificial intelligence, defence, and manufacturing. These sectors share common characteristics: high capital intensity, long development cycles, uncertain revenue timing, and strategic importance to American competitiveness. They're precisely the industries that need patient capital and sophisticated financial services but struggle to access them through conventional channels.
The stablecoin focus distinguishes Erebor from both traditional banks and failed predecessors."
https://www.driftsignal.com/p/digital-shosha-how-america-could
2. "What’s emerging as a result is a fragmenting monetary order: on the one side, a more top-down, state-driven system, exemplified by central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) from Frankfurt and Beijing; on the other, a more free-wheeling system built and driven by the private sector.
It is a confrontation between rival visions of the power of money and how it should be deployed: each responding to the same structural pressures and slowly moving toward a model where banks can no longer create money as freely as they have since the Renaissance.
Lagarde’s vision is of an enhanced monetary sovereignty for Europe, one in which the dollar is no longer, in the words of Richard Nixon’s Treasury Secretary John Connally, “our currency, but your problem”.
But the eurozone’s ambitions now face a formidable challenge from a newly emerging alternative: a world of private digital currencies blessed and underpinned by U.S. regulation."
https://www.politico.eu/article/genius-act-donald-trump-euro-dollar-stablecoin/
3. "“As Grayson explained, you make the best decision you can based on what you know, but the success of your decision will be heavily influenced by (a) relevant information you may lack and (b) luck or randomness. Because of these two factors, well-thought-out decisions may fail, and poor decisions may succeed. While it might seem counterintuitive, the best decision-maker isn’t necessarily the person with the most successes, but rather the one with the best process and judgment. The two can be far from the same, and especially over a small number of trials, it can be impossible to know who’s who.”
If you want a balanced and properly diversified portfolio, you want your component parts to be uncorrelated to each other. For some years now, stocks and bonds have essentially been joined at the hip, their prices increasingly driven higher as interest rates have collapsed, courtesy of our friends at the central banks. But what happens when interest rates and inflation start to rise – perhaps in a disorderly manner ?
We have written of late of our concerns about inflationary pressure. If inflation does turn out to be a higher risk factor, or if you are simply seeking portfolio insurance for your cash and other investments, then all roads lead to gold, and precious metals more generally.
Our favourites are the monetary metals, gold and silver, because we are increasingly concerned about the possibility of central banks losing the confidence of market participants in the paper money system. Gold and silver, to our thinking, are not so much commodities as alternate forms of money that, unlike conventional money, cannot be printed on demand."
https://timprice.substack.com/p/winning-the-great-game
4. Learning from history (yes, dude mentioned here was insane though)
"From Russian soldier, to God of War, to Khan of Mongolia — this was the legacy of Baron Roman Ungern Von Sternberg.
Is it possible for a Westerner to simply show up in Central Asia and conquer the steppe like Ungern today?
Yes!"
https://roguephilosophy.substack.com/p/how-to-live-like-ungern-von-sternberg
5. This was a deep but insightful conversation on the American Dynamism movement by the cofounder of the A16Z American Dynamism Fund. Well recommended.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GePNdT790gU&t=2475s
6. "For entrepreneurs in the hurricane of building their businesses, remember that this is one moment in time, and that as you keep pushing forward, it too will evolve and hopefully improve. What might be a fun team activity around a foosball table might not be the same vibe the following year. But holding onto those memories—even if there’s a little financial hiccup, like signing up for a credit card to try to keep the foosball vibe alive—makes it that much sweeter. Enjoy the journey today, right now."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/07/12/foosball-and-the-startup-journey/
7. "Do not trust those older than you, simply because they are older than you. The modern world allows many fools to reach old age - it is no longer proof of wisdom. An elder was not historically esteemed simply because they were old, but because it was implicit that to reach that age required a certain level of skill, from which could be inferred a certain degree of insight and understanding of the world.
In the modern world, these assumptions collapse because advancement into one's older years is no longer contingent upon wisdom, and because society changes at an ever greater pace for which they did not come of age in, are not adapted to, and subsequently cannot keep up with. This is not to say there are not timeless (dare I say, immutable) fundamentals inherent to human nature that can be passed on, and still remain as true today as they were 2,000 years ago - but it does mean that someone who made their money or dated say, 20, even 10 years ago cannot give you solid advice on how to replicate the successes they had, because the world they achieved those things in is so vastly different from the world you're trying to achieve them in.
Good advice today becomes obsolete tomorrow - this is the unfortunate downside of the beast that is a socially decaying but rapidly technologically advancing society, initially catapulted by the revolution that is the internet, followed by the hyperconnectivity of social media, which has at present culminated in the fever pitch that is the emergence of AI. You never really get a chance to catch up, because you're in a process of infinite adaptation. And so just as you've adapted, all of a sudden you're maladapted again. Not because you've changed, but because the environment has."
https://thesovereigncitadel.substack.com/p/a-letter-to-the-young
8. This kind of felt like the good old days of All in Podcast. Similar vibes. I enjoyed it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KypnjJSKi4o
9. "The people are angry - inflation is cutting their purchasing power; immigration is challenging proud social norms; and the post-war national consensus trust in America as Japan’s benefactor, guardian, special partner and ultimate role model is quickly turning from disbelief-at-what-is-happening to mistrust and discontent.
Make no mistake - this is about so much more than the tariffs: the ruling LDP’s foundational raison d’être was to be America’s independent but loyal agent in liberated-by-America-now-democratic Japan; and this core is exactly what is is being disrupted — the emerging realities of America’s new national priorities, economic agenda and undemocratic leadership style are, simply put, unacceptable to the Japanese people, thus undermining LDP credibility.
The elite bureaucracy will become even more empowered to run the nation.
Good thing: they actually do know what they are doing and bring not just of best-in-class technical competence, but also highest integrity to the national interest. Importantly, they are both trusted and feared by the business and finance elite. Without consistent majority-backed orders from elected leaders to do otherwise, the technocrats are poised to keep Japan a relative bastion of stability against populism, nationalist exuberance or nostalgia. Boring, perhaps….but highly competent, certainly.
As an aside, and in sharp contrast to the new US dynamics, Japan’s elite technocrats are very committed to consulting with private sector innovators, plutocrats, techBros and financial pirates; but they are also committed to keeping them as far away from dictating the policy agenda as possible. This is not a contradiction - Government is to serve the public, not private interests.
So Japan will stand out on the global stage. In a world increasingly dominated by strong leaders with strong visions, Japan’s policy decisions being directed primarily by the elite technocracy may not be such a bad thing for Japan.
Here, I do not worry that, as both America and China, but also India and Europe, get increasingly assertive in imposing their respective grand visions onto their partners and allies, Japan’s political paralysis and lack of vision makes Japan less relevant.
Quite the opposite — as the global ideological battlegrounds harden, Japan’s insistence on best-in-class administrative competence and conservative pragmatism could very well result in global trust in Japan rising. Japan become the voice of reason."
https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/cracks-in-the-consensus
10. Honestly, from what I learned from the Woke insanity in Silicon Valley during the 20-teens through 2023, it's better not to apologize even if you said something stupid. The zealots see weakness and just go at you more.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/11/sequoia-bets-on-silence/
11. AI & Geopolitics. I always learn from Pippa Malmgren, her insights can be uncomfortable but she has been right more often than not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgmn5PyJzfQ
12. "In today’s age of AI where everything is moving at an incredibly fast pace, the idea of acquiring a company and going through a prolonged review process is completely unrealistic and unfathomable for both acquirers and startups. If you take Windsurf as an example, Google acquiring the company and having to wait for 12+ months to take over the IP and employees is certainly a dealbreaker. It is completely unrealistic given the intense competition in the market.
Even if Google had absolute certainty that the acquisition would clear the HSR process, the delay would render this acquisition impractical and uneconomic. A year in the world of AI is eternity. Speed is everything and speed is the driver for this new Blitzhire structure. It circumvents the HSR review process, allows the acquiror to take over the key employees and IP of the startup, and have the employees with a badge in their office the next day.
In summary, Blitzhires are another form of an acquisition and should be evaluated through that lens. Certainly, not everybody may be thrilled of the outcome. Certainly, employees left behind may feel betrayed and unappreciated. Certainly, investors may feel founders may have broken a social contract. But, for a Blitzhire to work, usually everybody needs to work together and align. The driver behind these deals is speed. Maybe concerns over regulatory scrutiny are part of it, but more importantly speed. Not going through the HSR process at all may be worth the enormous complexity and inefficiency of foregoing a traditional acquisition path.
Finally, the structure is incredibly inefficient and it just tells you how far acquirors are willing to go in order to achieve their strategic objectives. The structure results in double taxation, which is a huge leakage in value. The acquired startup pays corporate income tax and the investors pay taxes on the distribution of the proceeds, whether via a share repurchase or dividend. The structure is also grossly inefficient in that you need to create a credible case that it is in fact not an acquisition, which prevents the acquiror from acquiring all of the employees of the target."
https://medium.com/@villispeaks/the-blitzhire-acquisition-e39361ed00bb
13. Austin Gray of Blue Water Autonomy on autonomous ships. These guys are the real deal, I'm not an investor but it's a really important company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S967znM8mR0
14. "Though most NATO allies have agreed to spend 5% of their GDP on defense, absent a major war, it’s unlikely to happen except in a very few places like perhaps Poland or one of the Baltic republics. They won’t do it because they promised the USA, they will do it because they believe it is in their interest to do so.
You see, in 2025, it is expected that the USA won’t even break 3% of GDP on defense. We will probably wind up just at 2.9%. If Uncle Sam isn’t going to break 3%, I don’t see our allies stretching for 5%. We would be lucky if they match us, and we’re drifting to 2.5%."
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/the-big-defense-budgets-are-not-coming
15. This is a must listen to for all young and old business people. Lots of great insights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxAwUb86MUE&t=1860s
16. For anyone trying to understand the chaos and GAG (Golden Age of Grift) of the present day world. A must listen if you want to thrive in this nutty moment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMpuFACusAU&t=1s
17. "We need a rebel alliance: not a single product or company, but a diverse ecosystem of technologies that work together across the stack to demonstrate the tangible value of user-owned memory.
Most important to this alliance will be entrepreneurs who know how to build practical products that make data ownership matter to real users.
This rebel alliance is creating a powerful kind of connective tissue that's structurally incapable of evil because power is distributed, not concentrated in any single entity. Whether these solutions ultimately converge at some point or thrive as an interconnected network matters less than the fundamental shift they represent."
https://blog.usv.com/the-rebel-alliance
18. “Made in China”
For those in the West and of a pre-Gen-Z generation, the label often signifies something cheap, of poor quality, or counterfeited, like “Reebok” with one “e.”
Soon, it may signify something completely different.
Together with the general pivot to quality in the global luxury (all of the sudden, there are so many craftsmanship ads and so many types of cashmere to recon with), Chinese brands are winning through quality in their local market."
https://andjelicaaa.substack.com/p/the-quality-advantage
19. "Outside of being early to a major winner in FAANG or another huge company we’re unaware of today (such as Tesla), nothing really keeps pace with inflation. You can run the numbers backward and forward into excel.
You spend practically 40 years in spreadsheets, go and calculate the one that matters. Your personal net worth growth with reasonable assumptions. Don’t assume you’ll be the star (you already know if it’s true) and just do the classic up until 33-34 followed by a flat line.
Let us know how it goes.
Oh. And do the same assuming you started a small biz that did $50K and you sold for $150K. Sure beats trying to save $5 by skipping coffee at Starbucks…"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/is-any-industry-keeping-up-with-inflation
20. "The Fourth Law has several products already under its belt.
Its two flagship devices — the Lupynis-10-TFL-1 unmanned aircraft system (UAS) drone and the a TFL-1 autonomy module that can be used with third-party aircraft — have gained traction, it said, in the category of first-person vision (FPV) drones, “more than doubling mission success rates while increasing costs by only 10-20%.” (It doesn’t disclose costs, nor what percentage of missions are typically successful.)
The tech is capable of "overcoming EW jamming, acquiring, and striking targets in challenging conditions,” according to Colonel Ruslan Shevchuk of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
There are dozens of third-party companies already integrating TFL-1 tech into their systems, Azhnyuk added.
Urgent need meets consumer-style usability
In a fascinating interview earlier this year, Azhnyuk described how the startup was born out of the need he saw on the front line, but also his background in consumer technology.
Namely on the defence front, the company addresses one of the most important problems in unmanned warfighting – jamming. The Russian Army has been investing heavily in electronic warfare capabilities since the Cold War, and that has meant that on the front line in the war in Ukraine, Electronic Warfare is both a major challenge and the focus of serious innovation. This topic is sensitive, and is at the heart of a battle that means life or death for soldiers in the field."
https://www.resiliencemedia.co/p/ukraines-the-fourth-law-raises-funding
21. "Miners in the West have long called for a separate pricing system to help them compete in supplying the rare earths group of 17 metals needed to make super-strong magnets of strategic importance. They are used in military applications such as drone and fighter jets, as well as to power motors in EVs and wind turbines.
Under a deal made public last week, the U.S. Department of Defense will guarantee a minimum price for its sole domestic rare earth miner MP Materials, at nearly twice the current market level.
Analysts say the pricing deal, which takes effect immediately, should have global implications - positive for producers, but may increase costs for consumers, such as automakers and in turn their customers."
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/analysis-us-rare-earth-pricing-174836811.html
22. A masterclass in special situations investing. One of the most interesting alternatives investment firms around. Sixth Street.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPFor81KJx0
23. This is one of the better geopolitical & global macro conversations in recent days. This will help you make sense of where the world is going.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unc84swwVH0&t=1880s
24. "The Ukrainians have been getting smarter about Westerners just showing up to “check the box” on combat validation. “…They (Western firms) do beautiful pitch books, beautiful presentations about how they’re operating in Ukraine. But actually they’ve done just a couple of flights in Lviv [the western city more than 1,000km from the front line]…The big problem, after that, is that billions of dollars go to the companies that still don’t have any idea what they’re doing.” said Roman Knyazhenko, CEO of Ukrainian drone firm Skyeton in a particularly damning piece in the past week’s Telegraph.
This is a recurrent theme with Ukrainians we talk to: western defense co’s showing up to do the testing equivalent of seagull managementand then bugging out after fairly benign testing to “check the box” of combat validation for marketing purposes- that’s why the Ukrainians are so cynical about western UAS and CUAS systems."
https://bowoftheseus.substack.com/p/it-worked-in-ukraine-is-not-a-substitute
25. "To win at scale and unlock enduring economic gains, the United States should pair sheer production capacity with software-driven technological flexibility. A modular code stack turns swarms of small autonomous systems into “hardware-enabled, software-defined” platforms whose function changes with a simple firmware update. One week it’s a loitering munition, the next a crop-sprayer, warehouse picker, or oil rig inspector. The same low-cost microcontrollers and AI libraries that animate aerial drones can also drive factory robots, subsea monitors, and medical assistants. Opening this architecture to both public and private sector developers will spur real-time solutions across industries worth hundreds of billions of dollars and generating more growth and tax revenue on top of the initial defense investment.
Stack all these numbers atop one another, and the picture clarifies. It is possible to hit a million-drone per year pilot line in 12 months, scale to ten million in year three, and if there is a commitment to parallel capacity builds, reach 100 million units by year five. That trajectory does not close the entire gap with China, but it gives Washington a credible deterrent and a bridge to the billion-drone annual target the moment Congress decides the stakes warrant it.
Industrial policy in the United States works best when it focuses on demand signals, not central planning. The Pentagon memo frames drone supremacy as “a process race as much as a technological race,” aligning perfectly with this call for demand-signal government programming. The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration did not design the B-24 Liberator — it guaranteed Ford that if Willow Run built one an hour, the government would buy every last bomber. The same clarity is needed today."
https://warontherocks.com/2025/07/factories-first-winning-the-drone-war-before-it-starts/
26. "True lethality doesn’t come from slogans.
It comes from designing a force where every warfighter is fully supported, every piece of gear works when needed, every bit of ISR feeds into decision-making, and every logistic chain functions under fire.
It means funding the unglamorous: maintenance, repair, and overhaul agreements with Allies and partners, systems to ensure resupply when logistics are contested, C2 redundancy, EM spectrum superiority, targeting networks, and precision manufacturing.
It also means training, educating, and empowering gifted individuals to understand policy and strategy and able to design campaigns of discrete tactical actions to achieve those policies and strategies.
It means not only building warriors—but giving them the tools, teammates, and trust to fight like professionals."
https://buildingourfuture.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-declining-lethality
27. Best conversation on B2B investing and solid breakdown on the Windsurf X Google X Cognition deal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSudjTgRm7o
28. "The US and NATO allies have rolled out the “Eastern Flank Deterrence Line,” prioritizing ground-based capabilities and weapons interoperability as a bulwark against Russian aggression.
General Christopher Donahue of the US Army Command in Europe and Africa unveiled the plan at the inaugural LandEuro two-day conference in Wiesbaden, Germany."
29. "That led to Sceptre, a rocket-propelled 155mm artillery shell that Steelberg says can hit targets up to 95 miles away— nearly triple the range of standard rounds — with precision, even in GPS-denied environments.
Given its differences from standard rounds (those without rocket assist) — which have a range of about 15 miles and require add-ons for rocket propulsion and precision guidance — it's a category-defying munition more comparable to an extended-range GMLRS. But, like the original 155mm round, it's fired from a howitzer.
In artillery battles, range is critical; after all, that's part of the reason the HIMARS, a rocket artillery system, was so effective when it initially arrived in Ukraine: it gave Kyiv's forces much-needed reach in combat. Steelberg says it will "change the balance of power" on the Ukrainian battlefield and beyond, though it would need to be widely fielded first."
30. "Among those in the defense tech industry, there’s been growing chatter about the rise of these defense disruptors—what you might call the neoprimes. We—one of us a technology investor, the other a former portfolio manager at the Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit—are often asked: Is the rise of neoprimes real? What exactly is a neoprime? What defines one? We set out to answer those questions, using data to support our observations. We believe neoprimes are changing the culture of defense acquisitions and developing technologies that will reshape how wars are fought. Shifts in defense spending and policy are empowering neoprimes to grow and move faster.
While many of these traditional primes trace their roots back over a century, a new tribe of Silicon Valley players has entered the arena. They are accelerating deployment timelines and pioneering a different model—defined by rapid iteration, software-first architectures, and a greater appetite for risk. They're deploying operational systems in months rather than years or decades. They’re not just building prototypes for demos and exercises—they’re scaling production and securing billion-dollar contracts.
While they may not yet match the traditional primes in total contract volume, they are closing the gap year over year. A handful of key firms are leading the charge, with an expanding set of startups gaining traction. Backed by venture capital and supported by a growing network of influential advocates shaping policy and public opinion, neoprimes are starting to redefine how the government approaches the acquisition, fielding, and sustainment of new technologies. They are becoming mission-critical to the defense industrial base of America."
https://www.thecipherbrief.com/defense-neoprime-innovation
31. "Just a month after raising $2.5B at a $30.5B valuation, officially entering “neo-prime” territory, Anduril looks more than ready to take on the real primes—this time in the cruise missile game."
https://www.tectonicdefense.com/andurils-barracuda-blasts-off/
32. "If the U.S. wasn’t enshittifying the platforms that it controls, then other countries wouldn’t be considering how best to get away. It is quite amazing how rapidly the public debates in places like Europe and Canada have shifted, even while they are still looking for practical ways to protect themselves from their past protector. As the US tries to use platforms to re-engineer democracy in many of these countries, their choices are going to be increasingly difficult.
Equally, they should note that if the US was truly secure in its platform power, it wouldn’t be making increasingly deranged threats against other countries that dare to consider other options. Trade uncertainty and trade wars are painful, but the alternatives are so much worse."
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-enshittification-of-american
33. "To fuel this industrial renaissance, we need innovative financing tools—new asset classes and platforms that creatively blend grants, subsidies, venture capital, private equity, debt, and infrastructure financing. Founders shouldn’t have to navigate this complex landscape alone, crafting solutions from scratch. Just as venture capital revolutionized startup funding decades ago, bold new models can unlock the capital needed to scale advanced manufacturing today.
Alternatively, the government could fast-track IPOs for industrial startups, letting them tap the stock market’s capital. Striking accredited investor rules could also help, but pitching to the masses is still a time suck when founders just want and need to build.
This capital problem is draining energy. Solving it turbocharges our American Industrial Renaissance."
https://adastracapital.substack.com/p/beyond-vc-funding-the-american-industrial
34. "For entrepreneurs thinking about their next idea, my recommendation is to research the robotics space. Talk to companies and ask how they might use robots in their business. When researching, consider both the creation of new robots and all the businesses that will be built to install, manage, service, and finance them. Robots will soon be ubiquitous, and thousands of new startups will be created in the process."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/07/19/robots-everywhere/
35. Solid conversation this week on latest Silicon Valley news: Meta vs. OpenAI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjjCWsqem8g&t=1041s
36. "We're in the thick of peak hype on AI right now. Fantastical sums are chasing AGI along with every dumb derivative mirage along the way. The most outrageous claims are being put forth on the daily. It's easy to look at that spectacle with European eyes and roll them. Some of it is pretty cringe!
But I think that would be a mistake. You don't have to throw away your critical reasoning to accept that in the face of unknown potential, optimism beats pessimism. We all have to believe in something, and you're much better off believing that things can get better than not.
Americans fundamentally believe this. They believe the hype, so they make it come to fruition. Not every time, not all of them, but more of them, more of the time than any other country in the world.
That really is exceptional."
Giving Grace and the Locus of Personal Control: The Duality of Man
I was taking a flight to Riyadh early in the year. And not sure what it was with this flight. It was full of older South Asian ladies. It seemed like they had never been on a plane before. Invading my personal space. Blocking the aisle talking to each other as people were boarding. Two of them actually took my seat and sat in my row until the attendant checked their ticket and they realized it was on the other side.
The old me would have raged and probably started yelling at them. The new me, more Christian & more relaxed me, just breathed a few deep breaths, shook my head and smiled. Everyone is on such a trigger edge now, angry and so quick to fight especially since 2020. I’m trying not to add to this.
I’m trying to be more patient & tolerant. To give people grace even when they don’t deserve it. I’m trying to be more Christ-like. Job-like forbearance.
But don’t mistake this for weakness. To anyone who pushes too far, unreasonably and too aggressively, I will hit back. I’m not yet there at the “turn the other cheek” level yet. There are limits to tolerance and patience, something modern Western culture has taken too far. You only need to look at the deterioration of law and order across Western Europe & many Blue States in America. Weakness only emboldens bullies and criminals.
As the ever wise Richard Cooper says: “You can't call yourself 'peaceful' unless you are capable of decisive & lethal violence. If you aren't capable of violence, then you aren't peaceful, you are harmless. Very important distinction there.” (Source: https://x.com/Rich_Cooper/status/1889419414061142349)
A man should be capable of incredible violence but also a high level of compassion. The point is to have the capabilities but also have the judgement and emotional control. Something I’ve worked on my entire life doing.
Ingrates Never Win: The Power of Appreciation and Gratitude
I’m a big fan of Tony Robbins, he was just getting really popular when I was a teen and read his books and heard of his seminars. Never went though much to my detriment. Mainly because it was so looked down on my friends, family and culture in Canada. “Oh he is just a con artist”, or “It’s just stupid American motivational stuff.” Well, fast forward 3 decades and most of these folks who said this are nowhere in life. And I am behind because I foolishly listened to them.
So it’s January 2025, and I’m attending Tony’s free “Time to Rise Summit”, 4 days X 3 hours a day of Tony sharing his stories and providing frameworks to improve your mindset and life. Incredibly valuable. I got plenty of notes and recommendations for improving my life. And I mention this again, it cost me nothing. 2 days in and I saw something really interesting and enlightening happen.
We were 2 hours into day 2 and Tony started to talk about his bigger program and how he put together a special package for attendees. Then he had a colleague show up and do a small sales pitch for a follow on program. Standard stuff as part of a sales funnel. And it was a really good offer. Anchored everyone and showed value of over $2100 usd but offered for $495 usd. It even includes a charitable donation to Feeding America. Great masterful packaging.
What was interesting was the response from what I would say 1/5th of the attendees on the chat. You started to see snarky and negative messages like “of course, there is a sales pitch”, “I can’t afford that”, “this is so American”, “What a scam,” “I’m so disappointed seeing this sales pitch” and even “Bait and switch.”
But you know what this shows, it showed a bunch of go nowhere losers. It showed a bunch of people who missed the lessons Tony shared in his summit. It showed a crappy mindset. It shows a lack of gratitude. Why? Tony literally just did and would go on to do a full on 4 day show with valuable ideas and tactics to make someone or everyone’s life better. He offered massive value at no cost to the attendees and earned the right to pitch something. It wasn’t even a hard sell. He wasn’t making anyone buy it. So strange. The point of paying for the package is the show of commitment and investment to yourself. You get what you pay for.
Mindset is everything. No one owes you anything. Appreciate what other people do for you. You should be grateful for what you have and what you get. This is the path to a more satisfying and more peaceful life. I’d also say a more accomplished and successful life too.
The Urgency of Becoming an Entrepreneur: Your Only Route to Thrive in 2025 & Beyond
I’ve learned so much and gotten so much value from folks online. One of them is Bowtied Bull who wrote a detailed write up Jan 21st, 2025 that got me thinking. Net net: Safe is Unsafe.
"The mega trends don’t really change and the thesis here is still the same: The most dangerous place you can be is in the middle of the herd.
Playing it safe in a career definitely feels comfortable but the higher ups are already using AI tools/software to get rid of the middle as fast as possible. That’s the vast majority of white collar 6-figure paychecks.
It’s what society has conditioned you to do: “Stick to the plan. Follow the rules. You’ll be rewarded.”
Unfortunately, this no longer works in the 2020s. The boomers who told you to get a stable job for 40 years and retire didn’t adapt to the new economic reality: Equity Owners or nothing.
If everyone is doing it, there is no real upside. No different from investing in something that everyone already knows about. While investing in something like the S&P likely goes up long-term, it’s not going to result in exiting the middle.
People will congratulate you on the small promotions at work but it’s just another step towards being stuck. When everyone is doing the same thing, the returns shrink, the competition intensifies, and the risks multiply.
With globalization, automation, and cost-cutting, wages have stagnated while housing, healthcare, and education costs have skyrocketed. Playing it safe in this environment is like staying in a boat that’s slowly sinking."
Source: https://bowtiedbull.io/p/trump-initial-change-and-why-corporate
All this has been very apparent to anyone paying attention to the economy but the BTB guys captured it and articulated it so well.
This was further backed up an eye-opening essay by @TheRealEstateG6: (Source: https://x.com/TheRealEstateG6/status/1876433167789543926) stating the big opportunity that exists for entrepreneurs and the peril faced by employees.
“Let’s summarize this section. You have the world getting more and more financialized with sophisticated investors owning a higher and higher percentage of the businesses in this country.
You have extremely low friction for hiring new, highly skilled employees.
You have AI coming in, which is going to drastically reduce the level of menial white collar jobs.
You have the globalization of the talent pool, which makes it incredibly easy to find a harder working (I’m sure a lot of Americans will get offended by this but I’ve hired both and it’s clear to me foreign workers are simply harder workers on average) employee at roughly 1/4th the cost of an American employee.
You have (extremely likely) expanded high-skill immigration, which is going to further increase the supply side of the labor equation and bring down wages.
And you have a rapid pace of change that’s likely to make long term tenure as an employee very difficult.
Employees are going to be squeezed from all angles in the next 20 years.”
How do you get ahead of all this?
Get fit as you need health energy to do anything and do anything over a long period of time. Good things and big things take time. This could take you 3 years, could be 10 years. Either way you need to be able to sustain a hard pace and allow compounding effects.
2. Develop skills, invest in yourself. Learn sales, marketing, project management, human psychology and behavior, study technology trends and try new low code/no code/AI tools. Build relationships with good, smart people.
3. Then build equity. You do this by building a business, could be ecommerce, could be an agency, could be anything. Acquire an offline SMB. Build equity. Build cash flow via consulting.
Do something.
This is all about surviving. Survive so then you can thrive as most folks fall by the wayside. Sorry but Darwin was right. If you thought the world was competitive out there now, it’s gonna be even more so over the next decade.
I’ll let the guys at BowtiedBull close as they have been right on almost everything for the last decade: “Playing it safe is comfortable, but comfort rarely leads to escaping the middle.
The middle of the herd is the last place you want to be when the stampede begins.
Instead, seek out asymmetric bets. Find the edges of the map. That’s where the outsized rewards—financial, personal, and otherwise—are waiting. Because at the end of the day, the riskiest thing you can do is to let life pass you by while you’re stuck in neutral.
You’re not here to play it safe. You’re here to win. Good luck, the divide will accelerate for those embracing all the new tech and those hoping we return to the past.”
Nuff said. Now get to it!
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Sept 7th, 2025
“Taking a break can lead to breakthroughs.”― Russell Eric Dobda
"As a solopreneur, lifestyle inflation is especially dangerous because income isn't guaranteed.
When you work for someone else, you might get a raise and upgrade your lifestyle accordingly, especially if you feel confident about your job security. But as a solopreneur or entrepreneur, your income can fluctuate wildly. So, if you've inflated your lifestyle across every category, you've created a financial floor you can't fall below without serious consequences.
I've watched people go from feeling free at $250K to feeling broke at $750K because they inflated their lifestyle across every category instead of being intentional about the categories that actually mattered.
So they become trapped by their own success. They can't take a month off. They can't turn down work they hate. And they can't experiment with new ideas that might not pay immediately.
Make a list of the things that genuinely improve your life. Try not to think about what you're supposed to want or what other people want.
Ask yourself this:
"If I can only splurge on three categories for the next 5-10 years of my life, what would they be?"
https://www.justinwelsh.me/newsletter/lifestyle-inflation-kills-freedom
2. "Goldman places the little-known conflict between Japan and the USSR as one of the key pieces in the puzzle that the two regimes had to “solve” in 1939-41. It made Stalin’s agreement with Hitler even more attractive, and it fatefully directed Japanese conquest South. Perhaps that Goldman makes, at times, too strong a case for the importune of the Nomonhan war, but the conflict surely deserves much more that the oblivion into which it seems to have been consigned by political historians.
Especially so now when the war in Europe is directly connected to geopolitics in Asia. Perhaps one should not have been surprised when several days ago, Chinese foreign minister explicitly linked the outcome of the war in Ukraine to the situation in East Asia."
https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/nomonhan-1939
3. "VC angle: Upwelling looked at U.S. buyout funds because they provided the deepest data pool, but Mark says the venture funds likely have a bit longer growth curve but the end result is the same — peak and then an extended tail-off.
The bottom line: Private equity portfolios are aging, as exits have become harder to come by. LP portfolios needn't follow suit."
https://www.axios.com/2025/07/08/private-equity-tail-risk-upwelling
4. "The lack of legal rights isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Tokenization allows investors synthetic access to the financial performance of a company that they normally wouldn’t be able to purchase a piece of. For Robinhood’s European users, who live in countries where regulations make it difficult to buy stocks in the U.S., Tenev’s announcement means easier access to U.S. stocks. And why wouldn’t they want to invest in even a synthetic version of the best-performing stock market in the world?
The American stock market, of course, comes with its specific nuances. One is that American companies are staying private for longer than ever before, meaning that regular people can’t invest in some of the highest-performing companies of our time. America’s drippiest CEO understands this. The new announcement doesn’t just open up synthetic access to public companies. It also tokenizes private company stock, starting with OpenAI and SpaceX.
There’s a part of me that likes what Robinhood is gesturing at. Regular people can now own a token that represents a stock in one of these companies. Getting everyday people access to the tools of wealth creation—in careful, thoughtful ways—means we have a world where value is more equitably distributed. And this was impossible to do heretofore."
https://www.gettheleverage.com/p/the-private-markets-are-broken
5. "If you have successfully launched a pilot, your next challenge is to overcome the budgetary valley of death and achieve sustainment funding. The Navy’s budget cycle plans 2.5 years ahead, so depending on the source of your pilot funding there may be slim years before scaling with congressionally appropriated funding through the Program Objective Memorandum (POM)."
6. "While hard tech startups, or Vertical Integrators, can require more capital than software startups, those capital needs don’t necessarily translate into more dilution for equity investors. In fact, hard tech startups that master structured finance achieve lower dilution than software companies burning equity on customer acquisition.
The capital they do spend tends to go to more productive uses; hard tech spend is more differentiating than software spend. Factories are deeper moats than increasingly expensive customer acquisition in competitive markets. And because so much capital is required, and potential winners are identifiable earlier, the leading hard tech companies actually can use capital as a moat. Not everyone can raise the mix of equity and debt required to build big things, which means less competition for those who can.
We have written at length about our belief that the future will be owned by companies that combine bits and atoms, software and hardware to build better, cheaper, and/or faster products than incumbents. To that belief, we would add money. Bits + Atoms + Dollars.
The future belongs to companies that combine the world's best engineers with the world's best financial engineers.
During the hard tech renaissance, smart technical founders have realized that they must also be smart about the way they capitalize their businesses, and have become more aware of the myriad financing options available to them."
https://www.notboring.co/p/capital-intensity-isnt-bad
7. "One of the factors in Ukraine, that was even seen as far back as World War 2, is enemy jamming. Today that is much more sophisticated than blanking out radio transmissions in the earlier war, because we are talking about the transmission (both ways and interactively) of megabytes of data and precision targeting that could be transferred by satellite. Systems such as Elon Musk's Starlink are, so far at least, resistant to jamming, but Starlink is not yet in tanks or other US-made combat gear. Sensor integration, situational awareness, target selection and maneuver information, all of which is time sensitive, is terribly important, as are ways to spot threats from drones and other anti-tank weapons.
It would be a worthwhile idea, before the Army gets going with another tank design or a modification of an existing one, to start testing how any of this might work in a real war. While the Ukraine war might not last too much longer, perhaps there is time to test out some of these ideas.
Similarly, some tests of autonomous operation and sensor integration, along with active defense systems, should also be platformed and tried out, both to see what its capabilities and limitations are, and to find means of improving operations.
The pathway to a robotic tank should be kept open, but doing so also will entail a significant doctrinal revolution on how to use armor on the modern battlefield. Sticking with the old paradigm and trying to fight off the furies won't cut it in this day and age."
https://weapons.substack.com/p/the-slow-race-toward-a-robotic-tank
8. "Now you see the real battle that the USA is facing. More and more people are making their money digitally. This means they are no longer tied to a specific geography. This is probably part of the reason for Trump’s obsession with Tariffs. Have to find a way to make sure everyone is reliant on the USA. Don’t want a million companies founded in tax havens constantly selling to the US consumer without paying a dime to the growing $37 trillion debt.
Is there anything they can really do about it long-term? In our opinion no. You’re going to be forced to earn your living digitally via e-commerce, SaaS, online ads, copy writing, crypto currencies, etc. (The most viable continues to be E-commerce assuming no high-tech expertise - if you’re high-tech you already know and don’t need to ask if a SaaS is a good idea or not).
Cream Rises to the Top: This is the major reason for our belief. When you see an ad on Instagram, Yahoo, Google etc. You have no idea who made it. Who designed the landing page, who made the copy, who did everything behind the scenes (IE. the person making the real money).
This makes it difficult/nearly impossible to create any sort of tribalism to fend off the digital future. Sure. You can support locally/regionally but when it comes to actual private commerce and digital competition… good luck.
You Should be Thrilled: The days of “who you know, not what you know” is coming to an end. It is turning into “what you know, what you can do”.
Before it was possible to just know the right people and that was it. Locked into forever job placements. Dying quickly. Now it’s just performance based
Are you able to create nice ads? You will be rich
Not able to make ads but can create incredible copy? You will be rich
Not able to do either but can make addictive videos? You will be rich
Can’t do any of those but can predict what people will spend on? You will be rich
Have no connections? Congrats, doesn’t matter anymore. Facebook/Meta/Google will do all the targeting for you anyway. Don’t even need built in traffic since they can show it to the ideal buyer for you
The only downside here is that the non-performers will be left behind. Something akin to New-Age-Feudalism.
Since we know the money being earned is slowly turning digital/internet/computer based and we know that your face/name/location doesn’t matter anymore… It leads you to pretty clear conclusions: 1) you have to create skills and talent related to a digital economy, 2) you can’t rely on tribes/groups simply handing you opportunity anymore and 3) you’re going to hear the phrase “I don’t care where you grew up or where you went, just show me the results” a lot more.
Everything is going to be tracked, no one will be able to hide behind the veil of “being a nice guy”. While it’ll work in the corporate setting while you’re collecting those paychecks. It isn’t going to last forever."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/usa-the-land-of-opportunity-and-the
9. "Nations do not collapse overnight, nor by accident. Their downfall is rarely the result of a single war, a bad ruler, or an unfortunate event. It is, more often, the slow accumulation of choices made: the lost virtues, the eroded character and the ignored foundations.
Landes warned that success is earned, not inherited; built, not assumed. Civilizations rise on the strength of discipline, honesty, merit, knowledge, and foresight. They fall when those traits are mocked, discarded, or forgotten. The pattern is not mysterious. It is historical law.
Unlike material destruction, which can often be rebuilt, moral and institutional decay follows a subtler course. It feeds on comfort, amplifies weakness, and resists correction. Once a society loses its capacity for self-restraint, once it chooses pleasure over principle, narrative over truth, and entitlement over effort, it enters a cycle from which history offers few painless exits.
In that sense, decline is not a policy error. It is not a glitch. It is the natural consequence of prior indulgences—the final stage of a long chain of moral concessions and cultural abdications. Just as financial bankruptcy begins gradually and ends suddenly, so too does civilizational collapse.
Again, Rothbard captured the heart of the matter: “The great crisis of our age is not one of knowledge, but of courage. Not what to do—but whether we will do it.” Therein lies the narrow gate to renewal. It is not reforms or technocracy or clever governance that reverse decline. It is the rediscovery of virtues once thought obsolete: thrift, truth, duty, honor.
But renewal, if it does come, exacts a price. It demands sacrifice, clarity, and the rejection of comforting illusions. Most societies, having grown accustomed to their decadence, cannot and do not pay such price.
History does not mourn their passing. It simply moves on.
So, for those of us concerned not just with capital but with civilization—whether as investors, citizens, parents, or heirs—the most important indicators may not be GDP growth or interest rates. They may instead lie deeper: in the strength of institutions, the honesty of discourse, the cohesion of culture, and the moral stamina of the people.
Fortune follows character. And when character fades, ruin is not imposed. It is invited."
https://forumgeopolitica.com/article/why-do-nations-rise-and-fall-a-survey
10. "I believe that a strong domestic VC industry — especially at the early stages — is an essential component of any tech ecosystem. Despite all of the technological and cultural shifts that are happening, the vast majority of Pre-Seed and Seed deals are led by local investors. Which means that the availability of strong local early-stage funding options is critical to the success of startups around the world.
But once you’ve got a product and/or some early traction, all bets are off. At the later stages (and, increasingly, at Pre-Seed and Seed for top founders), the competition for the privilege of investing in their companies is now global.
Today’s founders are emboldened by choice and, just as with consumers of the past, there’s no going back to mediocrity for them. As Everett Randle predicted, the most exposed and vulnerable funds are those currently stuck in the “middle” — surrounded by heavily-resourced megafunds on one side and a growing number of laser-focused emerging funds on the other. That leaves such VCs with the choice first posed by famed hedge fund manager Paul Tudor James: “adapt, evolve, compete or die.”
Thankfully, there are many paths forward for fund managers to take. They can reorient around a more focused thesis, as Canadian firm Two Small Fish and U.S. firm Susa Ventures did with deep tech (the latter via spinout fund Humba Ventures). They can develop compelling platform offerings, as many U.S. VCs did post-2008. Or they can even double down on a geographic advantage, demonstrating to local founders that they understand their needs better than anyone, as Toronto-based Golden Ventures recently did in spearheading the inaugural Toronto Tech Week."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/whats-going-on-with-early-stage-founders
11. "It is no secret that, for years, America's economy has been running on financial parasitism rather than production. Wall Street dismantled the industrial backbone.
Labor was deskilled, jobs outsourced, and infrastructure allowed to decay while ten trillion dollars vanished in endless foreign wars and corruption. The country that once built the world's factories can no longer even manufacture the tools to win a trade war.
Mr Trump's tariffs are not a coherent policy. They are a symptom—a sign of late-stage imperial decline.
Markets seem to agree. Since February, some $10 trillion in stock market value has evaporated, and despite periodic rallies, there is no illusion that this is 2001. China is not cowering. It holds the keys to the future: rare earths, battery technology, semiconductors and a huge industrial base. The strategic high ground is not in tariffs, but in control of the supply chain.
Trump claims the tariffs are punishment for China "ripping off the USA." The Chinese are not angels, but the real question is: who truly gutted American industry? Was it China or Europe? Or was it Wall Street and Washington?
Who hollowed out the factories, looted pension funds, turned homes into speculative assets, and poured trillions into forever wars that enriched defence contractors and hedge funds?
Indeed, America has been "ripped off," but by its own elite decision-makers—who outsourced jobs, deregulated finance, and prioritized short-term profits, all while using the dollar as a powerful weapon in debt creation and government intervention in the affairs of other nations.
Beijing may have naturally pursued its own interests vigorously but did not orchestrate any theft. The theft happened in American boardrooms, think tanks, universities, and Senate committees, under the banners of "free markets", "national security" and "financial innovation."
So, who really "ripped off " whom? Is it the one who, for decades, produces goods at razor-thin margins, or the one who buys and pays for them with money conjured from thin air?
This moment is not the climax of a trade war—it is the end of an illusion. The illusion that America can sanction, tariff, and bully its way to eternal dominance. An empire that neither makes nor builds cannot win an economic war. It can only lash out, hoping its reputation will substitute for relevance."
https://forumgeopolitica.com/article/the-end-of-illusion-1065
12. A fun and insightful interview with the God king of Indie Hackers & Digital Nomads: Pieter Levels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StkCdcZ1ovE
13. "The period from 1920 to 1928 was the height of the Warlord Era, in which China was wracked by civil conflicts between rival military factions. Some vied for control of the central government, while others sought to retain their autonomy in more far-flung provinces. It was only the Northern Expedition, which swept across the entire country and brought China under the Kuomintang’s unitary control, that the period finally ended.
From a military perspective, the civil war of 1924—called the Second Zhili-Fengtian War—was among the most interesting of the period. Although it lasted just two months, it mobilized several hundreds of thousands of men equipped with modern weaponry in two theaters separated by a thousand kilometers. Ultimately, the military outcome in both was decided more by betrayals by key figures than any battlefield developments, but the fighting gives us an interesting perspective on operational maneuver in post-World War I conflicts."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/successors-to-the-western-front-pt-6b3
14. "The rare-earth policy also serves as proof of concept for broader export-control frameworks. Analysts in China are already discussing how targeted regulatory enforcement swathed in national-security rhetoric might be applied to battery materials, aerospace alloys, and biotech.
In future crises or negotiations, Washington and its allies may find themselves confronting not only supply disruptions but also navigating a deeply institutionalized Chinese framework for economic coercion.
The next phase of great-power rivalry will be fought as much through spreadsheets and customs declarations as through tariffs and treaties. To respond effectively, the U.S. will need to treat critical minerals—and other strategic sectors as well—not only as supply-chain issues but also as components of a broader strategic competition. This includes investing in domestic refining capabilities, forging trusted international partnerships, and closely monitoring how Beijing deploys its growing arsenal of economic policy tools."
15. "Silicon Valley isn’t biased against Hong Kong. Or Hokkaido. Or Beijing. It just really, really loves things that look... familiar. And it’s not personal — it’s pattern recognition.
So here’s the real-world checklist founders often overlook:
Don’t expect Silicon Valley investors to value traction that happens outside their backyard.
Don’t underestimate how regulatory headwinds can kill deals before they start.
Don’t just pretend to be a U.S. company.
Don’t let your cap table become a geopolitical liability.
Don’t assume a U.S. exit is your only path to a landmark success.
As a founder and CEO, it’s your job to make things effortless for investors, partners, and customers to understand you. Remove the friction. Speak their language. Build in their backyard — or at least rent a desk in it."
https://edithyeung.substack.com/p/as-a-longtime-silicon-valley-investor
16. One of my favorite conversations on B2B investing and general Silicon Valley news. It's funny, opinionated and it's informative.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWcKAudkn3A
17. "Delusional goals rewire your brain.
Your brain is literally reshaping itself right now based on what you're learning and thinking about, this letter included. When you imagine a better future, it activates the same brain networks as if you were experiencing them. Every single moment of focused attention is a chance to rewire your brain in alignment with the person you want to become. That's one of many reasons doomscrollers and those who don't manage their inputs (mental or physical) are digging their own grave one moment at a time.
Those 3 decisions – an aspirational hourly rate, concentration of force, and giving myself no other option but to succeed – created the perfect conditions to make more money than my younger self thought was possible.
None of those decisions involved obsessing over "what skill to learn" or "what business model to choose." I didn't have time to think about that. I had to learn it all."
https://letters.thedankoe.com/p/these-3-decisions-will-determine
18. "Automation threatens millions of jobs, but beyond near-term economic pain is a deeper concern. Entry-level roles stand to be disproportionately affected—the places where, for generations, people went to accumulate experience and learn their craft. Knowledge risks becoming merely transactional, a commodity to be accessed, rather than relational or internalized. Information on tap instead of an ongoing dialogue with ourselves and the world. We should use automation to take away mundane obstacles and drudgery. I do. But we must recognize the distinction between that and what I call productive friction. This is the kind of difficulty that’s worth preserving, the kind of struggle that pushes you forward as you push against it.
The trick is in knowing what to look for.
Today, it's harder for many to find a first job, yet never easier to create your first opportunity. Human labor is shifting toward adept humans leveraging AI to accomplish vastly more. In this emerging world, proof of work replaces credentials and titles. What matters is what you've made or shipped, not what degrees you have or where you got them. A teenager building their own thriving app; a Shopify intern candidate proactively pitching themselves; a student provocatively challenging university administrators. This is friction made manifest. Knowledge gained from this kind of experience cannot be prompted into existence; it must be earned.
How do you do this work? Simple: Do it. Try lots of things, fast. Bring people along with what you are doing. Instead of trying to climb some arbitrary career ladder, consider following experiments and ideas that draw you in. Every hour spent wrestling with software, every failed print run, every brutal critique creates part of a foundation that you’ll later need to place bigger bets and call bolder shots."
https://every.to/thesis/in-the-ai-age-making-things-difficult-is-deliberate
19. "It’s never been easier to start a company and build a product. As a result, some of the “typical” defensibility strategies are too slow to compete in this era of rapid AI scaling.
The answer: you need multiple short-term and long-term defensibilities strategies. Speed to scale is your primary lever, but you have to be constantly building for the future. Network effects will play a key role in what companies survive this AI boom and become dominant, but you need to deploy them when the time is right. As part of a long-term battle strategy.
One way to think about it: Your startup should be like a motte-and-bailey castle.
In medieval warfare, a motte-and-bailey castle had two distinct defensive positions: the bailey – a large, easily accessible courtyard where daily business happened and initial battles were fought – and the motte – a heavily fortified tower on a hill where defenders could retreat when the bailey was overrun. The bailey was designed to be abandoned when necessary; the motte was built to be impregnable.
For AI startups, your “bailey” consists of the fast-deploying defensibilities that establish your market position: superior distribution, rapid scaling, and brand momentum. These get you in the game quickly, but won’t hold forever against determined competitors. Your “motte” is where you retreat as competition intensifies: true network effects, deep workflow embedding, and systematic lock-in that become nearly impossible to dislodge.
The key is knowing when to fight in the bailey and when to build the motte."
https://www.nfx.com/post/ai-defensibility
20. "As a rough estimate, we’d expect that $7.4T to come down to around $4-5T or so. Wealthier people have locked in some 5% rates for the long-term but money market is shorter duration. When the cuts happen it’ll be hard to justify matching inflation (which is probably 3.5% if they are stating that it’s 2.4%).
Of that we’d expect: 1) S&P, 2) QQQ, 3) Crypto and 4) mega tech stocks to be the beneficiaries. Every single year you’re going to see strange companies make turn arounds. However, the future is still the same. Large scaled up companies and then niche companies (the ones *you* should be building to funnel excess money into crypto and tech).
Niche companies will become more profitable high-margin and lean. This is due to high quality scale with no head count changes. The mega companies will be able to pick up whoever they like and pay a bit less as they are the only real employers due to pricing power."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/trillions-sidelined-crypto-week-and
21. The case and importance of investing in Defensetech. It's imperative.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW1TSWB5cS0
22. Understanding supply chains from Vietnam versus Mexico.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3jRuaHNeOo
23. "History whispers lessons in the rise and fall of financial power, dark, malevolent and violent human enslaving and consuming power. From Venice’s medieval banks to Amsterdam’s trade networks, the City of London’s martial reach, and Wall Street’s post-war Financialism, each era saw a new center emerge as old ones waned.
Today, as we mark July 11, 2025, a subtle yet profoundly dangerous shift seems to be nearing completion. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), with its Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), is carving a niche that could very well redefine the global power landscape for many decades—centuries—to come."
https://emburlingame.substack.com/p/is-the-uae-and-the-islamic-world
24. Always a cold but collected conversation on energy. And remember, energy is life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO6NAwyWRK8
25. "Fast forward to today—knock-offs have become dupes, duplicates that have indistinguishable quality from the more expensive, higher margin original. In some cases, a dupe is the exact same item from the same factory with the logo tag removed.
Dupes today are far from taboo; they've become a status symbol for the modern consumer who has infinite access to information. What makes someone cool today is the ability to think smarter, spend less, and not compromise on quality. If you’re covered in logos and paying full-price, the joke is on you.
The dupe economy isn't killing premium brands—it's forcing them to justify their premiums. Companies that adapt by offering genuine value at fair prices will thrive. Those that rely solely on brand mystique and inflated pricing will struggle.
The consumers driving this trend aren't looking for cheap alternatives; they're demanding smart alternatives. The question for your business is: Are you giving them a reason to choose you beyond the logo?"
https://brianne.substack.com/p/the-dupe-economy-why-todays-consumers
26. "Any move by Saudi, China et al to move from G7 reserve currencies/bonds would be self defeating - it would crash bond prices, and the value of their own portfolios (they would suffer immediate huge mark to market losses), global interest rates would rise, expectations of global growth would drop resulting in lower oil and commodity prices (hurting Saudi Arabia, et al and risking their dollar pegs) and actually would then encourage a flight back to quality, back to the dollar, Euro, Sterling, bunds, et al, and hence actually would increase the reserve currency status of G7 assets, so would prove counterproductive.
It is not going to happen as Saudi, China et al value global market stability above all else. Talk is cheap - action will cost Saudi, China, etc al dearly, and they are not going to risk losses to themselves to help Putin."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/econ-101-for-lagarde
27. One of the best shows in tech & Silicon Valley. Coverage & opinions of the weekly news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X52BNWZrXSk
28. "Milei’s success in bringing down Argentina’s inflation, while also restoring growth after one painful year, show that the macroleftists’ constant dark warnings about austerity are at least sometimes overblown. Fiscal conservatism isn’t always desirable, but Milei is showing that the costs often aren’t as high as many progressives believe.
Meanwhile, Milei’s microeconomic policies — the deregulation, the moves toward privatization, the anti-union policies — are the dog that didn’t bark here. With poverty now falling and consumption rising in Argentina, it doesn’t appear that those free-market policies have crushed the middle class. So far there’s no sign that inequality has increased substantially either, with the Gini coefficient looking stable.
And in a few cases, we can see Milei’s free-market policies actually getting results. The scrapping of national rent control seems to have created such a big housing supply boom that it has actually driven rents down.
Does this mean that hardcore libertarians are right, and that countries all over the world should slash government and unleash market forces? Well, no. The more complicated, nuanced truth is that which economic policies are best depends a whole lot on where you start. Argentina before Milei was a Peronist mess; China before Deng was a Maoist disaster. Plenty of government expansions throughout history have reduce poverty without wrecking economic growth; witness the New Deal, or Korea’s industrial policy push in the 1970s.
The boring truth is that the ideal economy is a mixed one; it’s built on the foundation of markets, but also contains a significant amount of redistribution, public goods provision, and industrial policy. The exact optimal balance depends on the country, and on the times; even if you happen to get it exactly right for a while, the optimal mix will change over time as countries develop, as technology changes, as trading patterns shift, and so on. Someday, if Argentina over-indexes on Milei’s early successes, they might very well become too laissez-faire.
Instead of picking one ideology and sticking to it, countries should recognize when they’ve veered too far in one direction, and take steps to change course. If some of your people are suffering in poverty while others prosper, you should establish a social safety net. If you’re choking on pollution from unregulated industry, you should establish some environmental protections. If you’ve nationalized your industries and they aren’t doing well, you should privatize them. If you’re falling behind technologically, you should try some industrial policy. If you’ve shackled your economy with inefficient subsidies and entitlements, then you should do some deregulation."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/free-market-economics-is-working
29. Conversation with the cofounder of Solana on More or Less. Good stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23aYyLi-ONw
30. This was really illuminating. Inside the mind of an endowment manager. LP insights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0TwqZIF32s
31. "For nearly a century, aircraft carriers have dominated naval warfare theory.
It has become a nearly sacrosanct precept of naval warfare.
But should it be? Or, has advanced technologies including precision warfare and the ability to find, fix, track, target, and engage increasingly smaller craft at increasingly larger ranges obviated the advantages of the aircraft carrier?
A Gerald Ford-class aircraft carrier (of which the John F. Kennedy is one) costs somewhere around $13.3B and carries around 50x F-35Cs at a cost of $100M/aircraft. Sink one of those and down the drain goes ~$20B and more importantly up to 5,000 Sailors.
Or should the Navy scale back its acquisition of these large systems and reprogram some of that money to smaller, more agile, craft that can launch and recover autonomous systems, missiles, and other weapons while minimizing crew requirements?
The Navy needs to put in some hard thought on the future of warfare and how it will adapt. It needs to way the trajectories of technology with the various risks of its options."
https://buildingourfuture.substack.com/p/building-slow-falling-behind-the
32. This was a grim conversation on WW3. Learned some stuff despite it being terrifying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qObdS-bhRM&t=12s
33. "But, there are two ideas that I think about a lot right now:
Mining companies are digging up metals that seem to be increasing in price everyday. At the same time, those companies energy costs (especially diesel) are remaining surprisingly low. Considering that mining company’s energy costs are up to 40% of their operating expenses, there may be some incredible earnings coming out over the next couple of quarters.
Small and mid cap tech companies in emerging markets are very interesting right now. Two examples are Nu Bank ($NU) and dLocal ($DLO). Their valuations are very reasonable, they have tremendous demographic tailwinds, and their TAM is barely penetrated."
Understand Yourself to Manage Yourself
I get called into jury duty here every other year and I find the whole thing anxiety-inducing and annoying. Not that it is particularly hard and yes, I know it’s your civic duty and such. But for some reason it just really throws me for a loop.
The lack of control, the inability to plan anything that week while you call in every day at 430 pm to see if you have to go in. Sometimes you get through the week without being called in. Or like in January of 2024 for me where you do get called in after 3 days of waiting. Called in, waiting in a room doing nothing for hours. Having everything you do overseen by a bailiff and judge who decides your fate on their whim. Also then throwing off your entire schedule the next few weeks after, costing me time and real money. A massive monkey wrench in my schedule which drives me berserk.
Never understood why it bugged me so much. Then my therapist told me she thought I had a mild case of OCPD which is Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. Which leads to rigidity and stubbornness, obsessiveness with order, rules and control, plus an inability to trust others. A need for perfection & predictability.
It all kind of makes sense. I think these leanings made me a good operating executive and made the trains run on time wherever I was. Having different plans, being super organized, following up intensely. Not resting until I got the task done. I was able to be a bit more tolerant at work and business. I learned to make allowances for others although it ate me up inside.
But this was not how I run my own personal schedule and life in general. And probably why I am hell to live with. The inflexibility, the lack of trust in others. I hate unreliable people.
And I especially hate it when my plans and schedule get derailed. I just loath uncertainty, even if I know intellectually this is just life. The insane levels of rage that comes out when this happens. It all makes sense now.
So what? you might say. The point I am making is that understanding yourself is critical for managing yourself and your life. Knowing your flaws and predilections, so you can have more control over yourself. To manage hard situations you find yourself in better. And whether you like it or not, there will always be hard situations that come up. It literally never stops.
Because of this, I still do have plans, and still inevitably follow them rigidly. I just make sure I don’t over book myself & give myself lots of gaps in between calls and meetings so I can be a bit more flexible and less tense aka intense. I meditate. I take short naps to clear my head.
I’ve also tried to change my mindset. Life used to happen to me, and I’d feel so angry when my plans get derailed. Now I try, stress “try” to follow Tony Robbins’ lesson of being grateful and treating “life as something that happens FOR me.” This is new for me so very far from fully embracing this. But my new religion helps as the saying goes: “Let Go, Let God”. Trust in life, and trust in God’s plan. It’s reassuring to me for some reason.