Batman Begins: Every boy and Man’s Dream
I was a fan of most of the Batman franchise movies but still think the best one was the Christopher Nolan series starring Christian Bale. It really was perfect in my eyes.
It chronicles the journey of how a billionaire becomes a crime fighting superhero after suffering a tragedy in his youth, losing his parents in a robbery gone wrong. I grew up reading the comic books of Batman. Batman was the original Jason Bourne. He pretends to be an unserious billionaire bachelor by day and a crime fighter terrorizing criminals by night.
“The training is nothing. The will is everything. The will to act.”
Bruce Wayne is a normal man with brains and resources but through tremendous discipline he travels the world and learns fighting skills to enable his mission of cleaning up Gotham City.
On his journey to gather skills he eventually joins with an assassin guild, the League of Shadows.
His mentor there tells him:
“I know the rage that drives you. Like you I was forced to learn there are those without decency, who must be fought without hesitation, without pity. That anger gives you great power, but if you let it, it will destroy you.”
What I learned in myself is that fear is a driver of anger.
“You travelled the world to learn the mind of a criminal and conquer your fears. But a criminal is not complicated. What you really fear is inside yourself. You fear your own power, fear your anger and the drive to do great & terrible things. Now you must journey inwards. Breathe. Breathe in your fears. Face them. To conquer fear, you must become fear. Embrace your worst fears.”
I’ve always been driven by fear. Fear of poverty, of not being respected, of not belonging. All of us have some fear that drives us and debilitates us subsconsciously. And most of us don’t understand this, let alone face it. “This is a world you don’t understand. And you always fear what you don’t understand.”
We have our external journeys, chasing wealth, love, health and fitness. I certainly have. Yet all of our journeys end up focusing inwards eventually. No matter how successful we become for some reason I see us do stupid things, almost like self sabotage. It’s like we have a self destructive instinct. Not exploring, not knowing ourselves and our shadows are the seeds of our eventual ruin.
“Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves back up.”
But like Bruce Wayne, if you face it, you might have a chance. “People need dramatic examples to shake them out of their apathy….l’m using this monster inside to help others.”
“If you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal. And if they can’t stop you, you become something else entirely. A legend.”
So for all the guys out there, maybe be more courageous and take action. “It’s not what you are underneath, it’s what you do that defines you…..We can bring Gotham back!”
Sun, Sand and Grounding: It’s the Small Things
It’s Sept 2025 in Batumi, Georgia. I came for the final GITA (Georgian Innovation Technology Agency) Grants program and I’m stressed. Home is a mess, some financial payments did not show up on time and I’m in the middle of several big business initiatives besides all the IC stuff I need to do here. Jet lagged to boot. To say I was a mess was an understatement.
Yet I’m at the Paragraph Hotel which is one of the nicest places I’ve ever been. With views of the sea that are unparalleled. A pool that juts into the Black Sea & beautiful black sand beaches renowned for their healing effect.
So instead of locking myself in the room to work. I took a small break. Hit the gym and some weights. Got some sun. I walked the hot black sand beach to get some grounding and dipped in the Black Sea and the amazing pool. I breathed and everything just seemed clearer and brighter. I just felt better. Things seemed lighter.
So whenever you are feeling stressed and down. Take a small break and get into nature. Even if it’s just for an hour. Breathe a bit and things will be alright. Step back to go forward.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Jan 4th, 2026
"Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right" –Oprah Winfrey
A real American immigrant story. A Navy SEAL turned Defense-tech founder. Learned a lot here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8DjGa16PQM&t=2889s
2. "Read that again. The Netherlands seized a company. China responded by requiring RMB settlement and making European customers negotiate directly with Chinese entities while accepting they’ll get chips only after Chinese domestic demand is satisfied.
This isn’t just retaliation. This is weaponized supply chains advancing RMB internationalization while teaching Europe exactly where they sit in the global manufacturing hierarchy. The Dutch played stupid games with geopolitical theater. Europe’s automotive industry gets to win stupid prizes.
The sanctions boomerang isn’t coming back—it’s already embedded in Europe’s skull. The question isn’t whether it hits. It’s how many more times Western policymakers need to get smacked before they understand that leverage only works when you control what matters. The Dutch controlled a corporate entity. China controls the chips, controls the production, and now controls the currency those chips trade in.
That’s what leverage actually looks like."
https://no01.substack.com/p/play-stupid-games-win-stupid-prices
3. Impressive folks here. Hard tech renaissance and atoms over bits. We need to Million X the El Segundo movement in America. Mission and satisfaction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ1kHP_TRF0
4. "Even if you are a government, there are only two ways to pay for stuff, using savings or debt. For a government, savings equates to taxes. Taxes are not very popular, but spending is. Therefore, when handing out goodies to the plebes and patricians, politicians prefer to issue debt. Politicians will always favor borrowing from the future to get re-elected in the present, because when the bill comes due, they won’t be in office.
If all governments, because of the incentives of its officers, are hard wired to prefer issuing debt rather than raising taxes to hand out goodies, then the next question is how do buyers of government debt fund these purchases? Do they spend their savings/equity or finance purchases by borrowing money?"
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/hallelujah
5. "What If I started late?” You get to work harder and longer. That’s how life works. You can turn around your life at any time. Expecting to magically skip steps doesn’t exist though.
“Kids?” You cannot blame them for your failures. You brought them into the world not the other way around. Also causing psychological trauma to someone decades younger than you. Weak.
“I’m Not Risk Taking.” Cool. It is more dangerous to rely just on your W-2. The days of being at one company forever are gone. Only works at 5-10 companies on the planet. If you work at those 5-10 you already know it.
“I Don’t Have Time”: Utter nonsense. Coinbase was started on off hours after work. Go look it up. You can start a e-com business from your smartphone at this point if you’re talented. What you’re really saying is you lack priorities. Or you don’t care. Neither answer is good."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/no-non-sense-age-by-age-making-it
6. Caught up with this last week's best VC conversation on Silicon Valley online now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PNd9qV5FzA&t=2058s
7. Live Like a King in Buenos Aires. One of my favorite cities in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DfKLar4zCw
8. "We in the west used to play dirty – and during the cold war, we were good at it. Nowadays, we leave grey-zone tactics and hybrid warfare to Russia, which is winning the disinformation war. Europe’s pride in playing by the rules might just be democracy’s achilles heel."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/04/west-moscow-berlin-airlift-cold-war-civilians
9. A spicy episode this week, but it's always educational and plenty of excellent takes on recent big tech news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MftJZXDzPpw&t=1133s
10. Lots of interesting perspectives on Silicon Valley news. Etiquette is back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv4VdtKpQQk
11. What a fascinating conversation about the new form of PE. Bending Spoons, buying digital businesses and owning them forever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLSXhmRHpFU
12. The geopolitical view of Asia Pacific & the critical importance of Australia and Japan and Taiwan for America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RxBUpHqnME&t=1s
13. "Why is NYC a great place to invest in and build companies? As I reflect on my own experiences with NYC companies, the through-line is their focus on the fundamentals. These companies aren’t (or weren’t, in the case of the ones that have exited) exciting because of hype driven by media or by massive fundraising rounds. They worked, or are working, because they look like great businesses. The teams are executing such that the P&L tells the story.
I do believe that San Francisco and Silicon Valley continue to have the highest concentration of the most ambitious founders, and likely always will. But NYC has plenty of founders with world class ambition, and most let their businesses speak for themselves, which feels different from a lot of what we see in SF.
Perhaps one of the keys is that NYC has many people, not just startup founders with world class ambition — arguably the highest concentration of any city anywhere. You may be a great founder, but you’re around great artists, bankers, chefs, lawyers, and more. When everyone around you is reaching for the top, it can’t help but raise the collective ceiling. Everyone honing their craft, finding their footwork in every field, in the city that never sleeps. Just as in San Francisco, I don’t believe elections affect this spirit; there’ll be ups and downs but NYC will always attract many of the best."
https://nbt.substack.com/p/nyc
14. "I was already a published author; a content manager for two companies, one for a big Series D fintech startup in New York City; I’d worked in broadcast journalism; I had a 7-year career in financial services.
I took those skills and created a profitable business doing what I knew and felt the market needed: someone to take complex financial content and turn it into stuff that everyone could understand and want to read.
Which brings me to today, where I have the absolute, luxurious privilege of picking what I do and who I work with to make money on my terms.
The de rigueur term is “portfolio career,” where you generate income by wearing different hats, similar to how a portfolio showcases an artist’s many mediums, or the components inside an investor’s portfolio (stocks, bonds, alternatives)."
https://shindy.substack.com/p/rituals-portfolio-career
15. "If your goal is a great lifestyle, there are countless opportunities to build a business that supports that. If your goal is to create something transformative with a major impact on your city or industry, the idea needs to be correspondingly more ambitious and scalable.
The best part is that none of this is fixed. Some entrepreneurs start with an idea that grows far beyond anything they could have imagined, and that’s the beauty of putting yourself in the arena."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/11/08/align-ambition-with-startup-idea/
16. "Post–high school, the social contract that binds America — work hard, play by the rules, and you’ll be better off than your parents were — has been severed. Seventy-year-old Americans today are, on average, 72% wealthier than they were forty years ago.
People under the age of forty are 24% less wealthy. The deliberate transfer of wealth from the young to the old in the United States over the past century has led to unaffordable and indefensible costs for education and housing and skyrocketing student debt, all of which directly affect young men. It’s why twenty-five-year-olds today make less than their parents and grandparents did at the same age, while carrying debt loads unimaginable to earlier generations.
Neither the minimum nor the median wage has kept pace with inflation or productivity gains, while housing costs have outpaced both. As the costs of college have soared beyond the reach of most families, many of the manufacturing jobs that didn’t require a college degree and were often a ticket to the middle class for (mostly) men have been offshored. A prohibitive real estate market is a contributing factor to why 60% of young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four live with their parents and 1 in 5 still live with their parents at age thirty.
Stuck and unable to afford greater economic opportunities in nearby cities, they find the same crush and collision of density, stimulation, humanity, creativity, eroticism, and conversation that urban areas offer on their phones instead. In Manhattan, a four-hundred-square-foot apartment costs $3,000 a month. In its stead is a seventeen-square-inch mobile studio apartment costing roughly $42 a month, served up by AT&T, T- Mobile, or Verizon."
https://www.profgalloway.com/notes-on-being-a-man/
17. Michael Every: Geoeconomics and some important terms: what is GDP for and the rise of Neo-Mercantilism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOF59C62G9Q
18. This is a great primer to understand stablecoins and how this is becoming the money rails of the world. Important to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FsGlsfIIkc
19. Understand your enemies. A detailed discussion on Russia and China's "complicated" historical relationship.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH_ycZYH8-s
20. Excellent episode from NIA. Some good takes on the latest news and topics on the internet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DdJjs_WtIM
21. A strong case being made here that we are NOT in an AI bubble right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ze3ZNvOdRY
22. Doomberg living up to his name. Energy is life & there are huge implications of this for the EU, USA & the world at large. Don't always agree with all the takes but worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTBFzJDiWsc&t=3176s
23. An insight dense conversation on AI and its impact on the labor market and economy at large. Build your network, stack assets, learn tech & AI agents, build a personal brand and become your own business ie. portfolio career.
Economic singularity coming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aonr8aJfKb8&t=5s
24. Update take on what's happening in Ukraine right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucuMc4nxlto
25. Always insightful and fun to listen to Alex Karp of Palantir.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG9fdLzxTaw
26. I am always happy listening to this. Even though I haven't done any B2B startups investments since Q2 2024, I still learn tons from this conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Euj5TAon_Q0&t=292s
27. "Confidence can belong to everyone who chooses to build it. It grows when we are disciplined and when we keep showing up. As we do so, we will build our skills and abilities. As our confidence grows, it will be manifested in our actions. A confident person will speak clearly, stand tall, and believe in themselves.
Whether you’re a man or a woman, confidence is not found in approval from others. Rather, it is found in the personal conviction that who you are is enough, and you are working hard to be even better."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/the-quiet-power-of-confidence
28. “Europe speaks the language of progress but thinks in the language of comfort,” Krotevych writes.
Every buzzword—”game-changer,” “AI,” “drone revolution”—creates an opiate sense of control, replacing actual preparation for war."
https://underfirenews.substack.com/p/the-drone-wall-is-a-european-myth
29. "The secretary announced two changes that address this imperative. The first is the creation of “Portfolio Acquisition Executives,” or PAEs, who “will be the single accountable official for portfolio outcomes, and will have the authority to act without running through months or even years of approval chains.” The Pentagon is putting the pebble in the right shoe, ensuring that authority and accountability for program success flow to a single person with a face and a nameplate on the door.
The second is the creation of “four-year minimum terms with two year extensions” for key program and portfolio leaders, with “incentives to competition, capability delivery time, and mission outcomes.” No more two-years-and-out. No more musical chairs. Leaders should stay with a program long enough for their career—and yes, their reputation—to be linked to the success or failure of that program.
Secretary Hegseth’s speech was a battle cry for the heretical heroes in defense."
https://www.firstbreakfast.com/p/war-footing
30. "Being right in isolation, insofar as it ever was actually true, is a dead strategy. If you have an insight but cannot coordinate follow-on capital, you lose. If the state floods your sector with subsidies favouring different players, you lose. If megafunds deploy $500 million rounds and dilute your position to irrelevance, you lose. The era of the lone wolf VC who finds the overlooked founder and waits for the world to catch up has largely passed.
Success today is all about coordination. Sam raised $6.6 billion for OpenAI by assembling Microsoft, SoftBank, Nvidia, and a consortium of megafunds. Elon built SpaceX and Tesla by coordinating NASA contracts, state subsidies, and public market capital and crypto manipulation. Jensen turned Nvidia into a 5+ trillion-dollar company by becoming the essential supplier to every AI lab and every hyperscaler simultaneously. These are the new industrialists. Like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan before them, they understand that controlling capital flows matters as much as controlling production. They coordinate capital across institutions and align coalitions around a shared vision. Financing is the key to success.
Questions.
Can you and your founders access megafunds that write $100 million checks?
Can you coordinate with corporate strategics who bring procurement and distribution?
Can you navigate policy and plug into subsidy regimes?
Can you build relationships with sovereign funds that provide patient capital at scale?
If not, you are operating in a different game than the one being played at the frontier.
The best founder today assembles coalitions of capital across VCs, corporates, and government, then aligns them around a shared vision.
The best VC today is not the one who sees the future first. Or writes the best blog. It is the one who convenes the consortium that funds it. The future that is, not the blog."
https://stateofthefuture.substack.com/p/consensus-capital
31. "Most people are used to simpler forms of investing, such as using a Robinhood account to buy a share of Google. Angel investing is a hundred times harder to do well, and those willing to put in the effort will do much better."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/11/15/where-to-start-evaluating-an-angel-investment/
32. "Men are builders. Creators. We’re designed to impose our will on the world through action—not sit at home watching other men talk about being hard.
Watching Goggins scream about staying hard doesn’t make you hard. Reading about manifestation doesn’t manifest results. Listening to a podcast about discipline doesn’t create discipline.
Action does.
Aggressive, relentless, systematic action applied until your mind rewires itself for success."
https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/how-to-build-a-lethal-mindset
33. "These past couple of years have taught me a lot about how to build a life outside a high tax country and I want to lay out what I think is the best way to go about it all. If you’re sitting in Australia or any Western country feeling squeezed by taxes, cost of living, and that growing sense that the harder you work and the more successful you become, the more headwind you cop.
South America is the answer to start building something freer, and, quite frankly, a lot more fun, in 2026 (although it’s certainly not for everyone)."
https://www.geologotrader.com/p/how-to-become-a-sovereign-individual
34. "These negative shocks would be brutal for any country. But for China, which has known nothing but skyrocketing living standards for over three decades, it’s especially galling to be suddenly thrust into a world where you have to run flat-out just to stay in place.
Ten years ago, Chinese people worked hard because they knew that tomorrow would be much better than today; now, they work hard because they know that if they don’t, tomorrow will be much worse than today. Their dream has suddenly flipped from aspiration to survival."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/chinas-people-are-on-a-treadmill
35. "National service benefits everyone who serves, but the benefits are likely more profound for boys — a cohort that’s fallen farther and faster than any other group in recent memory. For boys, physical development progresses more rapidly than intellectual or emotional maturity. My friend Richard Reeves has argued in favor of “red-shirting” boys, just as we hold back college athletes for a year so they can develop further on the field. A structured period of one or two years after high school would give boys the opportunity to mature without the pressures of college or a career. It would also give some a second chance.
Former IDF boss General Aviv Kochavi called national service a “societal take two” for young Israelis. “It doesn’t matter where you came from or what your background is,” he wrote. “A mediocre pupil or youth with a criminal past who dropped out of school can leave the past behind and become an outstanding leader.” We should give the same opportunity to every young person in America.
If we want our youth to feel invested in their country, then America needs to invest in its youth."
https://www.profgalloway.com/national-service/
36. "Switching between tools incurs costs. The tools, the workflow, the prompts that I’ve optimized for Claude code must all be ported (at my expense!) to other tools.
As the capabilities of these models begin to plateau, the costs to shift increase."
The Thunderbolts: Tormented Heroes
I did not expect to like this Marvel movie, especially as Disney has just wrecked the franchise through woke crap. But it was fun to watch. A rag tag group of down on their luck, ex-super heroes who come together and save the world from a rogue CIA director. Anti-heroes doing heroic & good things.
I got some good takes from it. So many of us are in pain right now, especially in the post Covid and ZIRP-era. Life has gotten tough. Many of us are sad and angry.
“You can’t stuff it down. You can’t hold it in alone. No one can. We have to let it out. We have to spend time together. And even if the emptiness doesn’t go away, I promise you it will feel lighter.”
Meditate. Spend time in nature. Make friends. Take action. Transmute this pain. Channel it. That’s what I do. “Keep working on it everyday. Never give up.”
Their former boss and villain of the show said it best. “Do you want to be good or do you want to be someone who changes the world. Righteousness without power is just an opinion. Look, you are brought up to believe there is a bad guy and a good guy. But eventually you come to realize there’s a bad guy and a worst guy. And nothing else.”
I certainly feel this way. Sometimes you just have to crack people’s skulls. Bad guys & criminals need to be put down. And the line between civilization and barbarism is very thin. Too thin. The world is an ugly place full of bad people as we have been learning the last few years especially. Pax Americana is over and our enemies are at the gates, lots inside the gate too. I think this is something most Americans and Europeans are still coming to grips with.
“Dark times, very very dark times.”
But as one of the heroes Bucky says: “Look, I’ve been where you are. You can run but it doesn’t go away. Sooner or later it catches up to you. When it does it’s too late. So you can either do something about it now or live with it forever.”
So this is a call to action and a call to arms. Get fit. Get ripped. Get rich and get organized. Take action. Get power. Protect the shire.
Get strong, so you can be the one to step up when you are needed by others: “Be the one they rely on when they make a mistake.” To be someone. To be more. To matter.
Offensive or Defensive: Portfolio Strategy for Your Life 2
I mentioned Howard Marks in a previous post and I listened to a great interview with him here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfgNtbr2KuE&t=1666s
He introduces the concept of InvestCon levels based on DEFCON based on US Military classifications. Based on your assessment of the global macro and investor sentiment.
“Things are elevated, but I don't think it's a bubble because a bubble is
characterized by just crazy psychology. And I did not detect that.
I still don't detect crazy psychology, but stocks have gotten more expensive as the year has gone on. And so you know I said in the recent memo calculus of value that Nancy and I like to watch action movies and when the bad guys threaten the United States, the Pentagon declares you know like Defcon 2.
They always say, "Well, should we buy or sell? Buy or sell, hold or dump?" And the world is not black or white. It's gray. It's always gray. And anybody who understands how the world works understands that it's always gray. And it's never risk on or risk off. But I think that we should manage our portfolios conscious of our balance between offense and defense. And we can change that balance given what's going on in the environment. So, I said in the memo that I recommend possibly going to Investcon 2.
Now if you decide you want to be a little more defensive than usual for whatever your usual is, you can go to Defcon 1, which is stop buying. Defcon 2, which is tilt your portfolio more toward defense. Sell some of your aggressive holdings and buy some more defensive holdings. Number three, which is get out of all your aggressive holdings. Investcon four is sell some of your defensive holdings. Number defcon five is to sell all your holdings. And number six, defcon six is to go short the market.
And I'm never confident enough. It's not my nature to be confident enough to go to five or six. But I think it's reasonable at this point in time to just be a defcon two, which is to say just to start biasing your portfolio more towards defense and less towards offense. I'm not saying get out of the markets. I'm not saying don't have investments. And I'm just saying maybe you should shift some of your investments towards lower returning
things which offer more safety.”
What an interesting framework to act on. While he got the Defcon Numbers flipped, Defcon 1 is highest readiness and most defense, while Defcon 5 is lowest readiness and peacetime, the point still stands. Classifying the present investing or economic environment will help you figure out the best course of action. Even better if these actions are pre-planned already and automatically triggered without too much analysis paralysis which many of us get stuck in sometimes.
Marks gives guidance in how you do this with a concept called asset allocation:
“I wrote a memo called ruminations on asset allocation, roughly October of last year and I said there are two kinds of asset classes: owning and lending. Your brother-in-law wants to start a business and your spouse says you have to give him money.
You have two choices. You can lend him money in the hope that he'll pay you interest and get your and you get your principal back at the end. You're not involved in the business. You don't rise and fall with the success of the business, but you hope to get repaid at the end.
Or you can become a partner and if he kills it, you do well. And if he does terribly, you lose all your money. Ownership or lending. Stocks are ownership. Bonds are lending. If you shift towards lending because it's safer, you usually give up return, but you offload a great deal of uncertainty. If you stay with ownership, you have the possibility of a much higher return, but also the possibility of a low return or a negative return or a total loss. So every investor at every point in time has to ask themselves what do I want? Do I want to maximize my potential return or do I want to minimize the uncertainty I face?
You can't do both at the same time. I said in one of my books that people come to me for financial advice, friends, and they ask what they should do and I say, "Well, which is more important to keep what you have or make more?" And what did they say? Both. Yes. You can't maximize both. You can't maximize the probability of increasing your wealth and maximize the probability of holding on to what you have at the same time. Everybody has to make a choice and I think it's reasonable to alter your choice as conditions in the world change.”
All this is directly applicable in life. Have plans for different scenarios. Do you take more risk like work for equity, invest in crypto or startups or do you go more conservative. Ie. get a job, go cash or focus on cash flow. It all depends on the situation. Where do you spend your time with something as basic as spending more time with close friends or family or branching out and meeting new people?
“I think today by saying none of this is easy and it's not. It's a complex field. It
requires expertise. You know Charlie Munger Warren's partner who passed away a year and a half ago, he said to me and I put it into my first book. None of this is meant to be easy. Anybody who thinks it's easy is stupid. You know, the worst thing you can do in the world is overlook complexity and think things are easy because if you do, you're likely to be victimized.
I'm not panicked. And you know the most important thing if you're going to be play in this game and be investing, you better not panic because if you permit yourself to be ruled by your emotions, you will constantly do the wrong thing. And I don't panic, but this is not the time for a carefree attitude.”
This all sounds a lot like life in general. And as I wrote in a previous post, investing is life. You are investing your life force, your time and your energy. Life is meant to be variable & challenging, it’s meant to have big ups and downs. Bringing portfolio management skills & thinking can help you weather the inevitable challenges better.
A 2025 Recap & Retrospective: Navigating Thru The Storm
Talk about a tumultuous year. I was pretty optimistic in the beginning of 2025 but it got really messy as the year went on. With Trump 2.0 changing pretty much everything on the geopolitical front, combined with even more financial challenges, my perspective on the world got pretty dark. Not 2020 dark & hopeless but just dark. As folks who read my regular postings, there was a much more ruthless tinge and flavor. Something I deplore but this view is what I have come around to. My conclusion is that this mindset is what is required to survive in this new world order. Perhaps even thrive. Don’t hate the player, hate the game as they say. But it was not all bad.
Business: B
Lots of new business lines in our core business, private credit, real estate, a few deals in the defense/industrial sector. Also preparing to do a few PE deals in 2026. Also joined advisory board & IC of new reindustrialization focused credit fund as well as standing up a new Defense-tech focused PE firm.
Lots of new assets and strategies to learn which is something I look forward to as someone who is naturally curious, learning drives me. The violent reset of the geopolitical board has opened up lots of new opportunities and this is exciting although a bit scary at the same time.
Personal Finance: C-, maybe D
Just a brutal year. Still lots of accounts receivables, 19 months now from an unnamed Balkan country institute. Massively negative cashflow from investment properties due to vacancy and lots of renovations and repairs. Anyone who tells you rental properties are easy money is lying to you. There has been a massive emergency and literal cash crunch every 5 years since I’ve owned these properties, going on 22 years now. And my family's cost structure is slightly out of control. Selling off liquid assets is the dumbest way to fix this but here we are.
A continual one step forward, three steps back. It’s infuriating. It's hard not to feel like I lost momentum these last two years and the lack of progress is incredibly frustrating for type A individuals like myself. Clearly something is not working and close to the point of being sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Having said all this, I have been surprised by how calmly I’ve accepted all these setbacks. I guess all that internal work is working somewhat. I learned the hard way in the past, panic always leads to even more losses. Ultimately, I know I’ll be fine in the long run but these last few months have forced me to do a complete rethink of how I manage my finances. The obvious conclusion is I need a complete revamp and a focus on driving cash flow, not stacking more illiquid assets, which is what got me in trouble leading up to 2020. I need bigger reserves and it’s Code Red now. Or more popularly said online, “going more autistic.”
2026 will be a ruthless focus on managing my cost structure better + prioritization on monetization to grow cash flow. I just don’t have much time left for much pro bono stuff anymore. I don’t feel it’s valued by most people these days. In fact, they feel entitled to my time and energy. It does not serve me or my family anymore. I’ll always be happy helping good people and those I consider friends and family, but this circle is getting smaller over time. A tribe by nature needs to be tight. I am taking a harder-edged stance in general: “Gold for my friends, steel for my enemies.”
Travel: Travel was out of control. Said “Yes” to way too much stuff. Spent way too much money. Many of these trips were not even monetization or strategic ones. I need to fix this. But while tiring, I had fun though so it’s something at least. I did do more trips back to Canada to spend time with my folks which was good and I don’t regret that at all as my folks are getting old.
Having said that, I was pretty burned out on travel by the time December rolled around. Impacted my training and sleep in a negative way. Will be cutting back on travel in 2026, I finally need to operate under the age of austerity and focus. I will finally see if I have any of that supposed discipline that I pride myself on.
Went to lots of countries in 2025:
Saudi Arabia: 3X
United Kingdom: 2X
France: 3X
Germany: 1X
Canada: 9X
Poland: 3X
Ukraine: 2X
Georgia: 1X
Japan: 2X
Uzbekistan: 1X
Turkey: 1X
Health: A-
Continually working with my personal trainers although my travel schedule did not allow me to do my annual muay thai fight training trip. But will rectify this in 2026 and probably do the “Lethal Gentleman” training camp in Poland too. (Yes, this is a real thing). I trained and ate plenty of protein and gained 8 pounds of muscle mass. I feel and look better than I did 20 years ago.
Family & Relationships: A-
Some big breakthroughs this year and have enjoyed some calm at home (famous last words). Nice to have the home element feeling a bit more safe and secure compared to the last few years. Lots of fun family trips together to Whistler (twice), Banff, France & Germany. I am really enjoying time with my teenage daughter. Trying to be present in the last year and half with her before she heads off to college. It’s so much fun wandering palaces, museums, national art galleries, farmers markets and shopping malls with Amber. She shares many of my interests, particularly in history and architecture.
Personal Development: A-
Continuing the streak I had from 2024, I have read even more books and watched lots of Youtube videos on a wide range of Silicon Valley, investing, geopolitics, global macro and military/defense related topics. One of the few areas of progress this last year. I’ve also continued to be active on LI and X (aka Twitter) and mined these places for lots of great insights on where the world is going. I can’t believe these tools are free, or relatively free that is.
2026:
So some thoughts as we move into the next year, from the very intelligent Arbitrage Andy:
“If 2025 was the prelude, 2026 is the chapter where the plot actually detonates.
The world is moving faster, systems are wobbling harder, and nobody is coming to save you or me.
Most people can agree things never really returned to how they were pre-pandemic. It just kind of feels like life accelerated.
Life didn’t “go back to normal”, it just hit the gas across the board. Everything started moving faster: the economy, the news cycle, the politics, even the way people think. It feels like we skipped a chapter and woke up in a different country. The pace, the pressure, the instability.
You can feel it on the roads, in the stores, in the way people interact.
The jump from the end of the pandemic to now (almost 2026) was even faster.
Society feels thinner now, stretched out to some extent. People are stuck in some super quick race to survive and “make it” before we hit some type of terminal velocity. You either adapt or get rolled by it.
It genuinely feels like America and the world hit fast-forward while the floor underneath us started to crack. You can sense it in the silence on the subway (where you hopefully aren’t being attacked by a vagrant), in the tension at the grocery store, in the way people drive like they’re in downtown Fallujah. Even in the media masturbation of the same stories, scandals, and pop culture slop.
This is the environment we’re stepping into for 2026 kings, a world moving quicker than the majority of people can process. Normies are entirely stagnant. Based lords and chads see where things are trending.”
The polycrisis is here. We’re surrounded by literal predators, scam artists and wolves. I enter 2026 with some trepidation but I never doom. I’m a grinder and survivor. I’ve reinvented myself many times already. My whole life has prepared me for this.
While I expect 2026 to be a tough year, I will squeeze out as much health, wealth, learning, fun and adventure as I can. I will attack my problems with calm determination. I will focus deeply on the critical path to navigate my way out of this storm. Stay optimistic, stay mentally and physically strong, expect a lot of hard work and pain and you will be okay.
As I have stated before from Dune Prophecy: “Adversity always lies in the path of advancement. Most would run from it, I will walk through it.”
Happy New year everyone!
Asset or Liability: Portfolio Strategy for Your Life
I have been on a Howard Marks kick these last few months. The legendary investor and founder of Oaktree Capital he has documented his intellectual journey through decades of writing. His letters are a must for any investor.
So why should everyone read his letters? Well, at the end of the day we are all investors. Some of us invest our money. All of us invest our time and energy, all in hopes of some return at some period of time. We invest in our hobbies, our health, our relationships, our family, our education, our reputations and our career. For me, it’s an interesting way to think about your life. A valuable framework.
If you use a portfolio strategy, when looking at your life there are questions you need to ask and honestly answer here:
Are we investing in the long term or short term?
Are you presently holding assets or liabilities?
This is especially relevant not just in investments. The truth is most of your relationships are probably liabilities, not assets. This is why you have to really curate your circle and find the location of a maximum number of high ambition, smart & competent people. You also really need to be careful of what you read and listen to aka your media diet.
Most people listen to mainstream media and it’s why they are NGMI. If you listen to and read what everyone else is, you will do whatever one else is doing. The crowd is usually wrong or at least always too late.
The unfiltered reality when I reflect on my life so far, is that I’ve over-invested into my career & underinvested in my health, family and true friendships. I wasted too much time on limited upside opportunities and tolerating incompetent and bad people.
So basically on my “life balance sheet”, I find I have far too many liabilities. Something I’ve spent a considerable time this year trimming & fixing. Just like selling off money-losing stocks in your portfolio, you should do the same for energy sucking relationships or time wasting situations. Time is of the essence and none of us are getting any younger.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Dec 28th, 2025
"Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius." – Pietro Aretino
"State Capitalism, American-Style
China has been forcing the action of the game, and the US is now responding with its own industrial policy, albeit with a lag.
The US has recognized it needs access to more raw materials and manufacturing—and fast.
So over the last six months, the United States Government has shifted from a head coach to a player, identifying key areas of vulnerability and no longer being content to let market forces determine outcomes.
The moves haven’t been subtle regulation changes, tax incentives or subsidies - but outright ownership in private companies. And as we will see, the government can be the ultimate activist investor—write a cheque, and then modify policy to complement the business model."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/a-new-seat-at-the-table
2. Love the promise of this initiative: California Forever. Let's Build!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElhxzUO7YQM
3. "Product-market fit is not a one-time event. As the technology changes rapidly underneath, so must your product."
https://tomtunguz.com/product-market-fit-not-static/
4. An absolute masterclass on investing. A legend in the hedge fund business. Dan Sundheim of D1 Capital.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRh0KTutZis&t=2080s
5. "We’ve been in the lean times for several years now, excluding the AI boom, and entrepreneurs in the current grow, margin, burn phase would do well to recognize that economic cycles always repeat. It’s worth doing the mental exercise: what might the next grow, grow, grow cycle do to your business? What changes would you make, if any? And vice versa, if you happen to be in a grow, grow, grow phase now, what lessons from grow, margin, burn would you carry forward?"
https://davidcummings.org/2025/10/25/from-grow-grow-grow-to-grow-margin-burn/
6. Solid vibe check on this week's Silicon Valley news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDYdIoHe4XA
7. A solid interview with Peter Zeihan, Jay Martin asks some good questions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjFQQ5Q_U-A
8. "Of course, the real insidious process is happening online, where every big web platform is imitating a gambling casino. And they rake in gangsta profits bigger than any gangsta has ever made.
How bad is it? Consider this fact: Among the eight largest companies in the world, at least half of them promote addiction with screen interfaces that mimic slot machines."
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/why-is-everything-turning-into-a
9. "History evolves through competition between models of governance, and this moment is ripe for change. Even the most rigid systems will soon adapt to the demands of global natives, because they hold the ultimate power: they can vote with their feet. I don’t expect today’s nation-states or government authorities to build the systems of tomorrow. I expect global natives to build them."
https://globalnatives.substack.com/p/parag-khanna-foreword
10. A timely take on global geopolitics with Hal Brands.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gkw2vbJCFkQ
11. Quite a helpful discussion on public investing and thinking about AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLlmQoCZe2A&t=88s
12. "U.S. healthcare isn’t about caring for health — it’s about monetizing it. Just as Big Tech found the gangster app for shareholder value (rage), the industrial food, hospital, and pharma complexes have found obesity. They get you addicted to sugar and salt, then hand you to the “non-health” complex for replacements, dialysis, and statins. They’ve even rebranded disease as identity: You’re not obese, you’re living your truth. No — you’re finding diabetes. McDonald’s and Coca-Cola celebrate obesity so UnitedHealthcare can monetize it. These stocks aren’t equities; they’re obesity indices.
We know exercise, healthier food, and less screen time help. But they’re not enough. The good news: Obesity may have peaked in the U.S., and we have the tools to actually reverse it. Pushing for a radically lower price and rolling out weight-loss drugs to tens of millions of Americans could be revolutionary — possibly the best civic investment in recent history."
https://www.profgalloway.com/americas-best-bet/
13. "In today’s age, as soon as you snap out of the spell of the traditional publishers and look around, you do notice inspiring experiments.
Stripe Press clearly cares about books. Infinite Books and Jimmy Soni are entering the industry with an author- and tech-first mindset. James Clear helped launch an authors-first hybrid publisher at Author’s Equity, and the authors I talk to love working with them. Bookvault pairs beautiful design with print-on-demand flexibility. Lulu gives you an API to print & ship books anywhere in the world.
Craig Mod has nearly a decade of putting art and craft first, publishing beautiful art editions of his work. Derek Sivers sells direct and only makes authors pay for his books once. Steel Brothers is turning books like Walden into breathtaking collectibles. MSCHF is remixing reality itself with its releases. Even rogue divisions within Penguin’s imprints prioritize design, like their clothbound classics."
https://newsletter.pathlesspath.com/p/reclaim-the-book-310
14. A view of the emerging new world order from the eyes of Singapore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXSI4cCm3BM
15. "The core problem for high earners? Fixed cost escalation: 1) housing, 2) vacations, 3) private schools, 4) country clubs and more. Now the lifestyle owns the person.
Most don’t buy freedom. They buy overhead.
Once lifestyle steps up, it becomes the new baseline. It is easy to go from Toyota → Porsche. It is painfully hard to go from Porsche → Toyota. You’re locking in higher floor level spending.
You are in copper handcuffs: too rich for empathy, not rich enough to keep up with increasing responsibilities and family obligations. You’re getting smoked at high marginal brackets, you don’t own the firm - can’t sell the job you have, you can’t pass expenses through an entity - minimal deductions and you can’t arbitrage residency or corporate structure without blowing up your career.
Gross income sounds enormous. However, your after-tax is significantly lower than you like to admit. Privately, when talking with financial advisors, they will explain that making $200,000 a year is required to save $100,000. After taxes and lifestyle overhead, the rest is already gone
That’s why high earners feel broke. Optically they are not broke. They are living a good quality of life. What you don’t see? The minimal change in net worth."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/how-to-end-up-broke-despite-clearing
16. Lots of good insights into where we are in the AI market and some learnings in Defense. Pretty interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGoUu5VLvLY
17. "Navies are what make ambitious, civilizational projects possible. Pirates are fast, but disorganized and limited in reach. A navy builds the infrastructure, supply lines, and trust needed to operate anywhere. That’s what lets a company move from one clever product to a lasting platform — from a single ship to an empire.
Building a navy means designing systems that keep working when the founders sleep. It means turning individual heroics into collective excellence. The founder’s challenge is to evolve; to go from the pirate who captains the ship to the admiral who commands the armada. Even the great pirates of history knew this. The ones who thrived built fleets, ruled cities, and became the very order they once defied.
The instincts that made you decisive early on still matter, but they must be embedded in the culture so others may move with the same conviction. The pirate spirit is not contempt for order but a hunger for the horizon — the need to press beyond the edge of the map. A strong navy gives this fire a purpose. The greatest fleets were forged not by taming the reckless, but by giving them command and a cause worth their daring."
https://a16zamericandynamism.substack.com/p/be-the-navy-not-a-pirate
18. "The headlines of declining growth, persistent inflation, and stretched federal budgets confirm that the economy is not in good shape. But how severe are the problems and are they likely to reach a point where the Kremlin really does have to reappraise its war strategy?
There is no formula that can identify a certain tipping point. At one extreme one could imagine economic disruption triggering mass discontent, runs on the banks and a collapsing currency - something functionally equivalent to a decisive military victory. But the point might be no more than realising that the choices between spending on the war and sustaining the civilian economy – between ‘guns’ and ‘butter’ - are becoming more acute and unlikely to get any easier."
https://samf.substack.com/p/ukraines-theory-of-victory
19. "Seeking fortune, you’re more likely to find it in extreme environments. This argument was core to If Nassim Taleb were a VC: venture should unabashedly go after the most right tail things. A high loss ratio is a feature. Most companies, funds, and vintages are bust, some are milli-baggers. It’s the exact opposite of Buffet being perfectly willing to trade away a big payoff for a certain payoff."
https://jordsnel.substack.com/p/vol
20. "Despite Africa’s growing relevance, the U.S. is challenged to engage there, hindered by fragmented policy tools, disjointed agency missions, and a reactive strategy. The US excels in mature, but relatively shrinking markets, but struggles to compete in less mature but growing economies. These are symptoms of a broader shortfall in how Washington conducts economic statecraft. Africa is the leading edge of a global problem.
China understands this. Its approach to economic statecraft fuses commercial, diplomatic, and security objectives into one coherent campaign. China’s model had real appeal: it brings rapid execution of projects and provides much needed capital to nations eager to develop. For some states, China also provides a level of financial opacity that would not survive the scrutiny of more transparent western capital formation avenues.
Using state-owned enterprises, concessional loans, and infrastructure-for-resources deals, Beijing secures control over ports, access to critical minerals, and digital infrastructure, often on terms that weaken local sovereignty and grant China exclusive access to key value chains. While African nations gain roads and railways, they also are burdened with debt, opaque contracts, and long-term strategic dependency."
https://theledgereconstatecraft.com/issue1/outcompeting-china-africa.html
21. "The RUBBER DUCKY concept aims to maximize targeted Defense Industrial Base (DIB) production capacities by inferring and cataloging the industrial base's production functions. This is achieved through economic modeling of diverse incentivization mechanisms, which generate 'bodies of evidence' to support optimal investment strategies. This approach would transform industrial policy from a reactive, crisis-driven function into a proactive, strategically managed element of national security."
https://theledgereconstatecraft.com/issue1/rubber-ducky-defense.html
22. "I always try to emphasize the human factor in “unmanned warfare” — how we keep forgetting to include the cost of labor to produce these drones, the cost of training crews, and the need to build the infrastructure that enables such training.
Governments may provide their forces with thousands of advanced drones, but without trained personnel to operate them, the equipment becomes useless. NATO allies should not only acquire technologies but also start training their crews as quickly as possible.
Both Russia and Ukraine treat drone crews as the most valuable targets on the battlefield. Yet while NATO countries focus on acquiring fleets of unmanned hardware, they should prioritise just as much training thousands of pilots, mission planners, and engineers — people capable of performing defensive and offensive operations and adapting to multiple types of drone threats."
https://ukrainesarmsmonitor.substack.com/p/unmanned-warfare-80-of-drone-success
23. "Quite simply, the elite are the ones who have lost faith in the system that has served them until now. They think it’s all going to crash—at least economically—and, more importantly, that there just won’t be enough food and shelter and energy and stuff to go around when it does.
Convinced an inevitable collapse is coming—private bunkers aside—their best answer for survival in the chaos is to get as rich as possible, buying up as much land and assets as possible, while also building a military force capable of controlling the hordes of us who won’t have enough food or shelter or medicine. Even if it means enacting policies that hasten the collapse, that’s preferable to losing control over one’s monopoly on the remaining spoils. As long as the edifice is coming down, may as well do controlled demolition.
So they invest in crypto while devaluing the dollar, lower their own taxes while raising taxes on the poor through tariffs. The tariffs simultaneously bankrupt farmers who can’t find a market, and see their land purchased by private equity who can then rehire them as sharecroppers. Put as many people as possible out of work by firing government employees, which leads to a cascade of failures of the businesses they patronize."
https://rushkoff.substack.com/p/the-intentional-collapse
24. Really neat company here. Durin: building automated drilling rigs!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCYGhHQYzjI
25. "It is probably too early to judge the general effectiveness of drone warfare across a full range of tactical or operational scenarios. Against a fully functional combined-arms operation benefiting from a superior reconnaissance-strike complex, electronic or physical countermeasures, or even drone killing drones, it is possible to envision a force blowing through the drone opposition before it can have much effect.
Dispatches from the front already report that drones are more effective when accompanied by artillery barrages to disrupt electronic warfare, cripple air defenses, and send infantry to ground. The strategic and political impact of drone use is also an open question, that is, how will drones interact with war as a “political phenomenon and a social institution.” Nevertheless, there is no doubt that drones are both a multifaceted opportunity and a dynamic problem that manifests at the blistering pace of wartime innovation."
https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/colin-gray-the-rma-and-the-rise-of-drone-warfare/
26. Constraints are powerful and pain leads to growth. Learning from Roelef Botha of Sequoia Capital.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_MkoMeihWk
27. An insight dense conversation on building startups and investing with Keith Rabois.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLZoJ_Wv5oE
28. Either way, Japan is ramping up defense spending.
"But while the ministry said defense-related spending in fiscal 2025 was at 1.8% of GDP — near the 2% gold standard targeted by many Western nations — those figures may do little to satiate Trump.
The U.S. president has already won acquiescence from NATO nations to spend 3.5% of GDP on defense, while his administration has demanded that American allies, including Japan, target a “global standard” of 5%."
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/10/23/japan/politics/japan-pm-takaichi-defense-spending/
29. "When we see something like a wildly-distorted view of artificial intelligence get enough cultural traction to become considered “conventional wisdom” despite the fact that it’s a wildly unpopular view held by a tiny, extremist minority within the larger tech sphere — that is the result of focusing on investors instead of inventors. Who cares what the money-movers think? We want to hear what motivated the makers!"
https://www.anildash.com/2025/10/24/founders-over-funders/
30. "In a unipolar globalisation era, such as 1991 to 2008, an empire can survive, and arguably thrive, without deep industrial might by leaning on reserve currency status, financial dominance, technological leadership, and nuclear deterrence, while outsourcing manufacturing to global supply chains. This model produced decades of prosperity, but also deep fragility.
The world stage has shifted into a multi-polar configuration, where sovereign industrial supremacy is a critical factor to ultimately decide who comes out on top, ideally purely by deterrence. The Western world's neglect of its manufacturing base over the past 30 years has led to an existential cross-road by eroding the very foundation of its historical power.
The West has to find its way back or risk a decline and ultimately potentially a replacement of the Western Empire, the timing of which will be decided by method of replacement: Either through continuously escalating military conflicts or, more likely, a drawn-out economic decline."
http://www.theintegrationage.com/
31. Another excellent discussion. Read books and you can just do things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw2bK_jLz8M
32. "Interception is fast becoming the next great defense market.
The wars in Ukraine and between Israel and Iran have made one thing clear: saturation works — and the economics of defense are being rewritten.
On some nights, more than 600 drones have been fired toward Kyiv. Each wave forces Ukraine to spend orders of magnitude more than its aggressor to defend itself. The same pattern played out in Israel: each round of Iranian drones and missiles cost Israel tens of millions to $200 million per day to intercept. A month-long war with Iran could cost around $12 billion. In the first week alone, Israel spent roughly $5 billion, or about $725 million per day.
The reason is simple. Most of Iran’s projectiles cost only tens of thousands of dollars, especially the Shahed family, while Israeli interceptors cost 10 to 100 times more per shot. That asymmetry — between cheap offense and expensive defense — is now shaping procurement policy across the West."
https://louiseboucher.substack.com/p/interception-is-the-next-big-defense
33. "For decades, China’s grip on rare earth elements (REEs) has been viewed as an unbreakable monopoly — a moat built on chemical expertise, industrial scale, and patience.
But over the past year, the U.S. has begun to dismantle that logic piece by piece.
And it’s not doing it by catching up.
It’s doing it by leapfrogging — rewriting the game entirely."
https://tanviratna.substack.com/p/how-the-us-plans-to-leapfrog-the
34. A very thoughtful discussion on investing in public and private tech investments: Thomas Laffont of Coatue. True masterclass of investing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDvL98GLQB0
35. "“Will to fight” is not a fixed category. Instead, it is a social potential: something that can be cultivated or suppressed. Across issues as varied as tax compliance, welfare take-up, or financial bailouts, we know that trust or mistrust in society can shape outcomes. Defense is no different. If planners assume society won’t step up and design policies around that belief, they make it more likely that society will live down to expectations.
It is easy to show how leaders’ pessimism about society can become self-fulfilling. People are unlikely to meet the moment when political leaders use conscription to discipline youth rather than to build trained mass. The same holds when leaders oppose pragmatic fixes to recruitment or retention problems, such as allowing soldiers to sleep longer, because they feel it looks “soft.” And when armies place conscripts and reservists in static or dull and dangerous roles out of mistrust in their ability to master complex skills, they squander their potential."
https://warontherocks.com/2025/10/is-europe-too-soft-to-fight/
36. "These dynamics do not bode well for the United States in a long war with China. Right now, the U.S. has what appears to be the more capable military, and certainly the more battle-tested and technologically advanced one. It might inflict disproportionately higher losses on the Chinese at first. But because of its diminished production capacity, the U.S. would struggle to make up even a small part of the battlefield losses that it would inevitably suffer. China—which is as much the workshop of the world today as the United States was in World War II—could churn out replacement weaponry at an impressively quick pace."
37. AI & Job loss and plenty of other topical news. NIA this week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vjKolzu08U&t=2s
38. Spikey people and how to make a good decision in the Investment committee. This is how Sequoia crushes and continues to crush.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38m7mp8bngg
39. Another excellent discussion this week on B2B & AI. Good stuff.
Learning from Balaji Srinavasan: Tech Visionary
Balaji Srinavasan is one of the most influential people online, formerly of Silicon Valley, now residing in Singapore. Libertarian & wildly successful tech investor & entrepreneur in both biotech and crypto. He is a wickedly sharp observer of the world. A true savant.
His keen knowledge is clear in this interview with Peter Diamandis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ_S6S7-z5E&t=5879s. I’ve rewatched it a few times and pulled out some recommendations he has on how to thrive in the future below.
Peter Diamandis: “So between the entrepreneurs out there and people just listening who are tech fans what's your top points of advice. What's your most heartfelt advice to both entrepreneurs and the average individual listening to this?”
Balaji: “Okay. So for entrepreneurs first I would say go direct. Build your own following
on social media, get good at AI, create content, don't give interviews to legacy media, only do tech podcasts, tech shows, but even more than that, basically build your own influential individual voice as a creator, as the authentic voice of your company. Don't hire public relations people. Only hire creators if you're hiring them. You don't have to hire too many but basically don't outsource your content creation. Content creation is as
important as code and you should be doing that in-house and you should be using all the modern tools and you don't have to use full AI by the way. You can use half AI. So go direct. That's number one.
Number two: move to Florida or Texas. Get there as soon as you can if you can. Get to a place. Move to Starbase maybe where Elon is. And you know essentially take it from a company town to a portfolio town and a tech town. If I was in the US, I'd be in Texas or Florida, specifically Miami or Austin and near Starbase and so on and cluster with other folks there. I think property rights have a better chance of getting protected there.
Number three: if you have cryptocurrency, get your keys off exchanges. Get your coins off exchanges. Do that now. Figure out your cold storage. Figure out all that stuff. And don't talk to anybody about the details of it. Right. I'm just saying that basically you don't want to. I don't have any imminent thing, but I'm just saying to do that now. And there are two things. Exchanges can be and governments can take them over. Yes. Like look, if Bitcoin really really runs, if it really runs, then at a certain point people basically start getting scared and then all kinds of crazy things are going to happen, right? So, be in a state where property rights are respected, where Bitcoin is respected like for example, Texas, I think the state legislature has something which is the right to hold Bitcoin shall not be infringed, right? That's a good place to be, you know, right, with your cryptocurrency and so forth.
Get involved with your local tech community. Tech is a community. And so, actually thinking of it as a community and doing as much offline social. I almost don't have to say this because people kind of already do it organically in tech, right? But tech is a community. And so, for example, that might mean not simply homeschooling, but crowdschooling, microschooling, right? Where you're educating your kids together, right? Start doing collective action, you know, things with tech people in your spare time because you're going to want community in, I think, the years to follow, right? You're going to want people you can rely on in the physical world, not simply the digital world. That's why I'd also go to those places.”
Location matters, especially places full of like-minded individuals. But also places that recognize property and money rights. This has been eroding in almost every part of the world but especially in Europe, Canada and America in the recent decade.
“Finally I would say read as much as you can of BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) content in translation.Okay? Because unless you've actually and and travel, if you have not been to Riyadh, if you haven't been to Dubai, if you haven't been to Shanghai, if you haven't been to Bangalore, if you haven't seen how much better the rest of the world is getting and has gotten at in a meteoric rate over the last 5 to 10 years.
You aren't calibrated unless you've been to Shenzen, Bangalore, Dubai, and also Eastern Europe. Hopefully Russia there's some peace treaty or something like that. I would also say you know hopefully Russia gets to peace and the Russia Ukraine thing gets to peace. I think Moscow has also improved a lot since the Soviet era but Eastern Europe, Russia, India, China and Dubai and Riyadh have radically changed. So really calibrate what the world is because movies will not show you that. The only movie that's shown rich non-westerners in recent times is probably Crazy Rich Asians or maybe Squid Game, right? And so they're not really showing it, right? So you have to get the on the ground experience. Otherwise, you're not calibrated.”
This part is the most important. You have to get out of your bubble. Both your information and location bubble. These are dangerous blinders and the only way to open them is to travel and read things that don’t just confirm your world view. Most dangerous if you only follow Western media, it’s the most dangerous and deceptive filter bubble around. The West has fallen behind and it becomes clear when you travel to Asia or the Middle East. The first part of dealing with a problem is acknowledging you have a problem.
Peter Diamandis: “All right. For the general public, you hit that for entrepreneurs.
Let's go to the individual who's in a job in LA, in San Francisco, in middle America. What's the most important you know things that they need to be thinking about?”
Balaji: “Where's all the money going into? It's going into the tech companies, and it's now going into all the crypto treasury companies, right? Which is like the Bitcoin treasury companies, but also Ethereum treasury companies, all this kind of stuff, right? So, in a sense, American capital markets are getting sunsetted in favor of internet capital markets. And actually if you look at just crypto alone, crypto is the number four global market after Shanghai, NYSE, NASDAQ and gaining fast and will become the number one global market. Right? If you don't own crypto right now, begin to look at it. I never give anybody financial advice in that sense but as a technology and as a platform yes, it's taking over. Right now every bank is adopting it. And so you should definitely understand it.
It's kind of one of those things, sometimes what happens is people will see something in the news and they'll see it says it was a scam or whatever. And they tune out of it and they come back, you know, years later like, "Wait a second, it actually developed a lot." Like the dotcom crash and then web 2.0 was like that. People didn't pay attention to the internet over the 2000s and the whole thing got built back up, right?
So that's a related kind of concept when you see something in the news, especially if it's like an asset. Again, I'm not telling anybody to buy any asset, but a useful thing to do is set like a if you see something that's interesting, set a calendar reminder for it. And then 30, 60, 90, 120, 150 days or what have you, you can make a purchase or whatever decision, a research decision when it's not in the news. Because when in the news, it's usually overpriced or underpriced because it's making a big move, right? When it's outside the news, you're not reacting on emotion and you can reallocate your position accordingly, right? So, that's just something I think is a useful thing to do. You can be hyper hyperrational about it especially if you write down, you know, what your long-term thesis on it is.”
Basically Balaji says track the trends that you see around you, whether geopolitical, demographical or even technological, both short term and long term. This is fun and can be incredibly profitable. Additionally it helps you understand what is happening around you and buffer you from the shocks.
Balaji: “Related to that, don't gamble, right? There's a lot, unfortunately, there's a lot of, you know, day trading type stuff andI know people like to do that, but I think it's just too hard to just buy and hold for the long run if you're if you're putting something somewhere else.
Let's see other things. I would say that from social media that it's like watching pro sports in the sense for example when you watch like tech founders or something like that on X it's like watching really really successful athletes on TV. Like if you ever dribble the ball it's actually really hard to dribble a ball and run and dunk and and they make it look effortless. They make it look so easy to do that and it's really so so so hard right? So, anybody who is building something, first you yourself should be a builder, but second, you should also in general not attack other builders, right?
It's always easy to do that on social media. It's a cheap way to make oneself feel superior. ‘Look how dumb Elon is. I can't believe he missed a spot on that rocket.’ There's like a lot of people who do this kind of thing, you know what I'm talking about, right? And so, look, if Elon isn't successful, nobody's successful. If Elon isn't smart, really, there's very few people who are smart.
You know, so you have to be able to give respect to others to get respect for oneself, right? And so just like, you know, I'm not saying slavish. You don't have to flip to the other extreme, but just know that game recognizes game, right? You know, respect people online and try and build. I mean, I know X is just a player versus player environment. Everybody yells at each other all the time. There's sites like Farcaster and so on that have a more healthy and civil atmosphere.
So try to seek out online communities as well that model the civility that you want to communicate to your friends, to your family members, your loved ones and you know community members….. Be a relatively good example. I've recognized by the way that sometimes you have to defend yourself online and it's a dangerous environment and all that kind of stuff. But try not to be the person who's doing the first strike, you know. Try to make it a better world for people in that sense.”
No one likes a jerk. Yet it feels like the internet is filled with them due to the engagement algorithms. Be a good citizen, be a good human, be a good example. Try to stay positive and be supportive of other creators and builders.
So much to take in but you can never go wrong from listening to Balaji, one of the first truly world internet citizens. He really knows what he is talking about. So pay attention if you want to really thrive in this new world.
Lessons from the Everyday Spy Part 4: Focus on the Right Things
It’s timely that I release this on Christmas Day. The last of my write up on Everyday Spy’s interview with Steve Bartlett’s “Diary of a CEO”
He asks Andy and Jihi:
What advice would you give to the average person in general, just generally in their life, you know, about how to live a good life based on what you've seen, what you know now, and how you look at the world?
Andrew says: “For me, a good life is a life spent doing the things you want to do, the things that bring you joy when you have the age and the energy to do them. It makes me super sad whenever I meet people who wait until their 60s and they retire to be free to try and travel and that's when they focus on learning the guitar and that's when they focus on art and their body just can't keep up with them. Their body can't travel like it used to travel. They have a shake in their hand. They can't paint anymore but they believed for 30 years that it would be better when they retire instead of acting on it right now.
And for me, it's all about finding joy in the moment today. My son is 12. He plays chess now. He wants to play video games with me now. He wants to go deep into details about his favorite manga comics right now. All of that could be different in 5 days. My daughter is seven, doing handstands and doing cartwheels and all she wants is for daddy to give her a shoulder massage at night and tell embarrassing stories about my childhood to her while she falls asleep. That's what she wants now.
All that could be gone and never come back in 6 months. I have to do it now. If I don't do it now, it'll never happen. I won't be able to wait until I'm wealthy. I won't be able to wait until I sell a company. I won't be able to wait until I retire and then try to get these moments back now.
So, what can I do? I ask myself every day, what can I do right now to maximize the joy that I get right now? Because it's not just my joy that's happening. It's also the joy that I'm giving to the people who want my time and space. My wife, my kids, my peers, my clients. What can I do to bring joy to myself will bring joy to others?
Why does that matter so much? My life is filled with people who failed to figure that out. My life is filled with a mother who kept waiting to do the things that she wanted to do and now she still doesn't get to do it. And grandparents who retired poor and family members who retired poor and people who died early and people who got hurt and can't walk.”
Jihi adds: “you know, I realize that Andy has been right all along. It really is. You never
know what the next moment is going to bring. And so, you have to enjoy every moment that you have right now. You know, don't put off that trip until next year. Do it as soon as you can. Don't you know, like those dishes don't need to get washed right now. If your kid wants to read a book with you, you can just put that off for a little bit. So it's taken me a long time, but Andy and I are now aligned on how to live every moment with as much joy as you can and to my other point, like you you never know when shit's going to hit the fan.
So enjoy it now because you never know when you might have to, you know, flee your house cuz you're, you know, it catches fire or flees the country because a war breaks out or, you know, getting arrested in a foreign country.”
Learn from this before it’s too late. This is incredible wisdom. It’s also hard to absorb personally because I spent so much of my 30s and 40s on my career at the expense of my family life. I missed so many important moments in my daughter’s childhood and it’s a good reason my home life is a mess. I deeply regret it. So on this Christmas Day, put down that phone, touch grass and spend it with those important in your life. Breathe, take everything in and savor this moment with them. Merry Christmas everyone!
Lessons from the Everyday Spy Part 3: Focus on the Basics
So assuming we are not going to meet an apocalypse anytime soon. There is much to mine from Everyday Spy on how to thrive.
Steve Bartlett asks them: “Are there any particular skills that people who are trying to be successful in their average life, because this is called the Diary of a CEO, that you learned through your time at the CIA that you think are most useful for people to be successful, however you define that, in their day-to-day lives?”
Andrew says: “The first thing I want to say is that our book Shadow Cell talks not
necessarily about awesome spies. It talks about how we went back to the basics. We went back to foundational espionage, what we call at CIA, sticks and bricks. We gave up all the technology. We gave up all the fancy satellites. We gave up all the drones.
And we went back to build off of strong foundations. And we didn't do that because we're smart. We did that because the terrorist groups that won the global war on terror were using bricks and stones and sticks. And they were winning over an American Department of Defense that had a $900 billion budget every year. We spent $8 trillion in the global war on terror only to evacuate Afghanistan. All of that happened because they were using foundational tools that we couldn't crack. And in the shadow cell, that's all we did. We used foundational tools that proved to dominate time after time.
And there's so much in everyday life. And there's so much in business from marketing to sales to budgeting to hiring practices to, you know, annual and semiannual reviews. There's so much that businesses can take from this basic idea of never letting go of the foundations. Never let go of your sticks and bricks.”
This is what I try to instill in my founders. This is what I try to focus on myself. It’s always the basics. They never get old and it works most of the time. You get into trouble when you try to be too clever. Innovation is great but there is a reason the basics are called the basics. They are the foundation. They are “Lindy” and have withstood the test of time.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Dec 21st, 2025
"The color of springtime is in the flowers, the color of winter is in the imagination."--Unknown
Genuinely interested in checking out Paraguay. On the list along with checking out Colombia, Ecuador & Peru.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OndEgodGLnU
2. Oren Cass is an economist very popular with Trump admin 2.0. Listening to this helps you understand what policy will be for the next 4 years at least.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMFw6kPiGUs
3. "For thousands of years, Europe was the cradle of civilization, wealth, and innovation.
Its geography made it inevitable: mild climate, fertile soil, abundant freshwater, navigable rivers, dense biodiversity across tight borders.
Today, in the AI age, geography is optional. You can create wealth from anywhere and live wherever you want.
But when people are free to choose, a pattern is emerging: many are choosing Europe again. Not just tourists or remote workers, but founders, families, creatives, and capital.
Because while you can replicate Singapore, you can't replicate Florence. You can automate scale. You can't fake civilizational density.
And you certainly can’t fake history.
The macro forces are converging:
-Remote work permanence. High earners can relocate without losing income.
-EU infrastructure investment. Within 2 hours from larger cities there are thousands of incredible villages with culture, services, history.
-Property price gaps. Portugal priced in global demand; Italy hasn't (yet).
-AI proof. People will prioritize quality of life. Non-machine-replicable places, services and experiences will appreciate.
-Anti-gentrification sentiment. Nobody wants to live stacked in a 20-floor impersonal building where an apartment costs 30 years of mortgage.
If you can earn in USD and spend in EUR, you've already won. Build in USD and Bitcoin, spend EUR.
You don't need to relocate full-time. But you do need a foothold."
https://palombo.substack.com/p/why-italian-villages-are-europes
4. "Stack your passports like you stack Bitcoin.
Both represent insurance against single points of failure. Both require long-term thinking. Both seem unnecessary until they become essential.
Concentration risk doesn't just apply to portfolios. The same logic holds for citizenship."
https://palombo.substack.com/p/stack-your-passports-like-you-stack
5. This is why Sequoia are the best and have been forever. For anyone who wants to understand how to build a long lasting Venture capital firm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8njhsYUNNk
6. Enlightening conversation on what's up with internet culture. Good stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iug0dyIlpsA
7. "Most founders can’t handle ambiguity. They need confirmation their burn has purpose. That someone walked this path before.
Nobody has. That’s why it’s worth building.
Every great company looks inevitable in retrospect. We forget they were built by people stumbling through chaos, finding patterns nobody else saw because nobody else stayed uncomfortable long enough.
Your competitors are following frameworks right now, perfectly. That should scare you way more than chaos."
https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/surrender-to-chaos
8. "You can’t predict when/if a bubble will burst, but Azeem Azhar, founder of Exponential View, and researcher Nathan Warren, created a framework that compares historic bubbles with AI today. In their estimation, AI is a boom, but “booms can sour quickly and there are several pressure points worth watching.” If AI capex exceeds 2% of GDP, that’s cause for concern; it’s currently estimated at around 1.3%. A sustained fall in enterprise or consumer spending levels is another pressure point.
A flawed, though perhaps directionally correct MIT study, rattled the AI ecosystem claiming that 95% of firms have yet to see measurable ROI from their AI pilot programs. We’re approaching a valuation redline if/when P/E ratios reach the 50x to 60x range. Finally, if internal cash covers less than 25% of capex, Azhar and Warren believe investments in data centers will come under pressure."
https://www.profgalloway.com/how-does-the-end-begin/
9. "These five capability areas—long-range precision fires, decision dominance, cross-domain integration, reduced sustainment demands, and all-domain protection—are mutually reinforcing. Together they form the foundation for how the U.S. and its allies can fight and win in an era of advanced tech-enabled warfare.
As we cautioned at the start, there are other required capabilities, but these present some areas where the U.S. (and allies) can invest to achieve asymmetric advantage over the antagonistic Axis of Autocracy."
https://buildingourfuture.substack.com/p/five-frontiers-of-future-warfare
10. Some tinfoil alt-geopolitics, some of it kind of makes sense. Questioning the popular narrative.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK5gj_Zyl7c
11. Pretty interesting company in the defense space.
https://www.generalcatalyst.com/stories/seeding-the-future-with-valinor
12. "Without urgency, Europe risks dependence abroad and disillusionment at home. With urgency, Europe could transform defence into a driver of technological sovereignty and public services into engines of human flourishing.
Avoidance was the founding logic of Europe. But in this new age of shocks, avoidance will only guarantee decline. The choice is not whether Europe will act, but whether it will build the machinery to act in time—one grounded not in chainsaw disruption but in a more profound renewal of the state’s foundations."
https://rainerkattel.substack.com/p/europe-needs-a-machinery-of-urgency
13. "On October 14, both the U.S. and China rolled out parallel port fee regimes. The structure was nearly identical: any ship linked to the other country — by flag, build, operator, or ownership — would be hit with special port fees, capped at five voyages per year. China’s version started at RMB 400 per net ton, with a stepped escalation to RMB 1,120 by 2028. The U.S. version began at $50/NT, also rising annually.
The symmetry wasn’t accidental. It was a controlled escalation. But what got lost in the headlines is how fundamentally these fees shift the unit of control.
The tariff is no longer the frontline instrument.
The ship is now the gate.
And the question isn’t “what are you carrying?”
It’s “who built you, who owns you, and who flies your flag?”
https://tanviratna.substack.com/p/flags-fees-and-the-future-of-trade
14. Selling and working with the DoW is brutal. This is a must watch if you are in defensetech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLhzOSWbsTw
15. This is an old one from 2008. Wonder where these entrepreneurs are.
"A small but growing number of what might be called adventure capitalists are going to Baghdad. The American entrepreneurs are defying ongoing insurgent attacks, the country's dysfunctional government ministries and the skeptics."
https://www.npr.org/2008/05/01/90090656/security-progress-in-baghdad-draws-entrepreneurs
16. Palmer Luckey is a true American industrial hero. Glad people like him exist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owEpy_Fr_Mo
17. A reminder that America still needs our allies. Not just militarily but especially industrial base-wise if we want to be able to deter China.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSRHTWP1f2w
18. Learning from the best. Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKtIoF4yLos
19. "The agreement to create a Palestinian State is influencing many other geopolitical negotiations including Ukraine, Venezuela, and other seemingly unlikely places. Make no mistake. We are witnessing a modern day Yalta. Just as Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin carved the world up so that WWII could end, today Trump, Putin are engaging in a Grand Bargain which involves carving up the world today. China is involved too but that’s for another article.
As my subscribers know, the Arctic is also the key to the abundance of space. Whoever controls Arctic-Space Communications controls the space economy. Svalbard is currently the prime location for this new hotly contested geopolitical space between Earth’s North Pole and the Moon’s South Pole which, to remind, is home to a vast supply of Helium 3 and water (I’m calling this hotly contested geopolitical zone the Terra Luna Space until somebody comes up with a better name).
This Terra Luna Space is the beachhead to the abundance of energy, resources and internet connectivity in space. Notice that the Tunnel of Love Bridge would connect to a much larger North South Supply Route into Russia and China as well. This makes me think the deal is not just over control over Donetsk. The superpowers are aiming for a deal regarding the distribution of resources from space. That would be so far above Q clearance that most people in superpower militaries will not be in on the discussion.
Trump has not trusted his military and just hauled in the whole top ranks to a highly unusual, very short notice meeting on September 30th. The Secretary of War emphasized, “the need for a nonpartisan military and noted the oath of allegiance to the Constitution.” Hmnn. Also, the President made it clear. If you don’t like the strategy, get out. Interesting timing."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/wars-and-peace-modern-day-yalta-and
20. "The bottom line here is that peace deals in the Middle East and Ukraine depend on the continuation of certain wars elsewhere - places that we don’t usually consider - like Latam, space, and the Arctic. These are property swaps. Russia takes more of Ukraine, or gets better terms in Ukraine, and the US gets arrests in Venezuela and gets to successfully ringfence Finland, the Nordics and Scandinavia while clearing organized crime out of Sweden.
Russia supplies the US with real dossiers on the people who created imaginary dossiers that were designed to undermine The President. This reveals who is aligned with the drug cartels. Trump gets to cut off Deep State cash flows while the Deep State finds it harder and harder to argue that there is no Deep State as their top leaders face legal discovery and their cartel buddies sing."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/wars-and-peace-modern-day-yalta-and-3fb
21. "Israel’s long-term existential security requires three things.
--A Global System that is at worst neutral on balance, and an international system that the US controls.
--Strong US Support to provide the economic and military aid it needs to survive.
--An ability to routinely win Moral Wars due to a deep appreciation for the horror of the Holocaust and the strength of the term “anti-semitism.”
The loss of these components puts Israel and its Diaspora at existential risk. In contrast, Israel isn’t existentially threatened by terrorism or attacks by Hezbollah or Hamas."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/pyrrhic-victories
22. Flow software will drive how hardware products will be built. Pretty interesting conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=989_qK5dVTU
23. Maximum bullish on Ukraine. This place is gonna boom after the war ends.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCxbN2xhwRE
24. "China’s new strategy isn’t to dodge trade barriers. It’s to absorb them. To move the chemistry, the capital, and the industrial base offshore—then sell back into protected markets under someone else’s flag.
Morocco is the new test case. And this time, China isn’t just relabeling goods. It’s rewiring supply chains from the mine up: phosphate rock becomes battery packs. What started as raw material leverage is now a full-stack industrial inversion."
https://tanviratna.substack.com/p/ev-tariffs-were-supposed-to-isolate
25. A more detailed conversation with Dan Wang of Breakneck. Trying to understand where China and America are going.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVOfP5fy_kQ
26. "Everyone knows Samsung and Hyundai. But behind these global giants, a new wave of Korean companies is quietly reshaping fintech, travel, and biotech. Their stories carry lessons for entrepreneurs everywhere."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/three-korean-companies-youve-never
27. "Statistically, the most reliable way (based on probabilities no “guarantee”) is building and owning a business. Not a side hustle that funnels a few extra thousand per month into your brokerage/crypto exchange account. A real asset that pays you, goes up in value if P/E multiples expand, compounds in value based on intelligent operations and gives you pricing power (hint: businesses all pass inflation costs back to the customer assuming their product is not a disaster)
This isn’t a platitude. It is statistics.
Go through Wealth Management companies. Their clients? All small business owners and small real estate entrepreneurs (which is just another business anyway). This trend is structural.
Own the pipeline. Earn money while you’re sleeping. Suddenly inflation works for you… for the first time in your life.
Entrepreneurship is messy.
It will test your relationships, patience and ego. But it rewards agency. Owners decide strategy, culture, pricing and who keeps what piece of the upside. Psychological freedom is real and matters for long-term decision-making. Owners live with consequence and with optionality; employees live with perceived safety and ceilings. If you want uncapped upside and a hedge vs. wage-squeezing inflation, ownership is the structural route
Business Can Be Boring, Even Markets Get Boring: For long-term readers you already know how this goes. There are periods even in *stock markets* that are painful. In fact, we’ve lived through this the past couple months. Nothing particularly interesting has happened since the rate cut in September. The difference? The people who stick around and keep paying attention are always the ones who make it. First to know about new trends and not playing catch up when the tides shift.
Business is no different. The people who bet on themselves and grind when it seems like nothing is happening = get the payout. Takes about 3 years. It sucks. It isn’t exciting. You won’t be on national television. In fact, you’ll see your digits on a screen net worth pass that $1M mark and go “uhh that’s it?”. That’s how it actually works."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/start-a-business-the-only-real-way
28. The age of American unreliability. Geopolitics is so unstable these days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POyGjSWHde4
29. "When I asked whether there was anything China still hoped to learn from the United States, our interlocutors were polite but basically out of ideas. The subtext was unmistakable: China has absorbed what it needed and is now writing its own playbook.
This attitude was unlike any other I have encountered in ten years observing the U.S.-China relationship. After a century of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers, the Chinese Communist Party seems incapable of resisting the temptation to twist the knife — to savor the sensation of its newfound power after so long being denied the same. The reflex is human, and it is not something that can be negotiated with. The danger is what happens when it collides with an American political culture constitutionally incapable of humility.
For all its dysfunction, the United States remains a superpower. It is not merely a prideful country, but an arrogant one — with no memory of life before primacy. Beijing’s self-assurance may be well-earned. But if this month’s trade escalation is any indication, future flexing at American expense will trigger a reaction in both capitals that is more emotional than strategic. And as markets saw last week, the collision of two egos masquerading as nations is not a contest of systems but a test of impulse control."
https://www.choosingvictory.com/p/a-proud-superpower-answers-to-no
30. "Monocle has established a template that marries well-designed, high-quality print products with a multifaceted brand that makes money in many ways far beyond the core product. Monocle’s business lines include cafes and shops, a digital radio station/podcast network, books, events and plenty of brand activations. That’s the key these days. Being a magazine business is a losing proposition in 2025; being a brand is not."
https://www.therebooting.com/p/the-monocle-playbook
31. "The red canon and Silicon Valley canon never contradict — they coexist seamlessly within the same enterprise. Huawei, as one of the world’s most successfully globalized companies, appears intensely patriotic precisely because of this effortless code-switching between intellectual frameworks.
Internally, Huawei has nearly replicated IBM's Integrated Product Development process wholesale, adopting thoroughly Western management practices. Yet from the outside, you would never detect the company’s profound absorption of Silicon Valley orthodoxy. This dual fluency — speaking the language of revolutionary struggle for internal mobilization while implementing McKinsey-grade operational excellence — represents a uniquely Chinese form of corporate bilingualism. The company’s public patriotism masks its private cosmopolitanism.
Simultaneously, there exists what I call the “grey canon” — a collection of texts that are opaque, ancient, yet foundational. The corpus of classical Chinese texts rarely appear on glossy startup booklists, yet they silently scaffold how entrepreneurs think about power, time, and their place in the world.
The Chinese entrepreneurs grew up seeing the jianghu as a model for navigating opaque power structures, forging alliances, and cultivating individual mastery in a world without fixed rules. To read Jin Yong was to learn that survival depended as much on soft power — guanxi, renqing — as on hard power. And in Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem, they encountered metaphors of cosmic precariousness that resonated with their own competitive landscape. Together, Jin Yong and Liu Cixin gave Chinese technologists an imaginative toolkit as rich as Tolkien and Asimov had given Silicon Valley: one rooted in jianghu ethics and cosmic existentialism, the other in systems of magic and spacefaring empires.
Where Silicon Valley imagines itself through Middle-earth, Mars, and cyberspace, China’s tech world thinks simultaneously in terms of the jianghu. Both are literary infrastructures, invisible yet omnipresent. They don’t dictate policy or product, but they shape theimaginative baseline — what a hero looks like, what failure means, how a society might collapse or endure."
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/12-books/the-china-tech-canon
32. "Reserves, the portion of a fund held back for follow-on investments, are less a strategy and more a story. A narrative that helps VCs feel in control in an industry built entirely on uncertainty. And like most good stories, it hides a more uncomfortable truth.
Although Benchmark have been doing a no reserve strategy for a long time, it is rare. Some emerging managers I’ve met are quietly breaking the reserve rule. They buy more upfront. They price uncertainty. They design portfolios that don’t depend on getting allocation later, because they know they probably won’t. They’re not waiting for clarity from others that a company is their outlier, they’re betting on conviction from the beginning. Because in venture, you don’t get paid for knowing, you get paid for believing before everyone else does."
https://jamesheathvc.substack.com/p/reserves-are-a-scam
33. "To be clear, this amount of travel is not for everyone. And the opportunity cost calculations very much change depending on the stage of your company and your stage of life.
But if you can mentally get over the hump of “travel is hard”. If you can switch your mindset from “this is intimidating” to “this is easy”. If you can transcend the stress that typically comes with travel, you’ll find yourself with a superpower that few can match."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/traveling-is-an-underrated-superpower
34. "We must always remember that elegance is not reserved for the ballroom or the opera. Rather, it lives in our everyday lives. It is the soft-spoken thank-you, the kind word, the easy manners at the dinner table, and stepping up the way we dress when we go out of the house. While we cannot control what the rest of the world does, we can be more mindful of our actions. When we do, we can bring the world a little more elegance and make it a brighter place."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/restoring-elegance-to-everyday-life
35. Good topical discussion on AI and the Crypto world. NIA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUuDXBAniJM&list=PLIBc05HkMJHFpVxxZTD-_MbTAYtwAOEg_
36. "At present there are 2 policies on the table.
The F-35 policy. The creation of a Democratic Supply Chain (that is how they call it). The Pentagon is already in close cooperation with defense industries of Europe, Japan and South Korea by layout the ground work of a totally separate military supply chain from China which is doing its embargo. Thus far, the ratio is 60% US supplied and 40% EU supplied. EU is pushing for 50/50. Every single Nato ally is being asked to supply as much as they can and expand capacity as much as they can to supply Ukraine.
The Nationalist Policy. U.S. would withdraw from Europe and Japan and would focus only on its own hemisphere. Hence, the invasion of Canada, Panama Canal, Greenland and the entire Latin America and its SELF SUFFICIENT supply chain. That is why the Nationalists are squarely against the F-35 program."
https://ektrit.substack.com/p/us-global-hegemony-is-dead-free-to?r=2r2y
37. Incredibly insight dense conversation on the state of venture capital and AI. Learned a lot today here.
Lessons from Everyday Spy Part 2: Predictions for the Future America
So as continuation of the previous write up on the Everyday Spy interview with Steve Barrett. I found some really insightful and good takes on where America is right now. And more importantly the implications of the changes. As an old saying I heard growing up in Canada: “When America sneezes, the world catches a cold.” You may not like it but it’s true. An aging hegemony that still rides astride the world. I warn you, this is a long transcription but it’s really spot on.
“So the writing on the wall for Americans is that we are transitioning into something new. We will never go back to what we were. And so you either need to be a part of creating the new America or you need to start thinking about where else you're going to go because the America we knew before no longer exists and it will never come back. This is new America now. So you either take part in it or you leave.
Everything keeps going. So, you know, I don't know that America is heading for a future that I want to be a part of. I think that's for me. I think that's a true statement. But I think there's a lot of Americans out there who this is the path that they want to take.
Andy goes on to say: “So when Ji says that we're in a transition and she doesn't know where it's going, she is accurate. We don't know what the future holds. Except we know the future holds more pain for sure because we will either come out of this through a painful transition that makes us better or we will come out of this through a less painful transition that leaves us in a position that none of us want to be in and then we're going to have to put in more pain to fix it all again.
I think that we have a solid 60/40 right now. I think there's a 60% chance that we don't like where the transition ends and then we spend 15 to 25 years fixing it again. Fixing our economy, fixing our superpower status, fixing our foreign relations, fixing our trust of our own government. I think there's a 40% chance that the the decisive action Donald Trump is taking right now is adopted widescale and we actually stimulate our economy, get people back on the same page and and move forward in a way that keeps us one step ahead of our of the threats that we see from China, the disaster that we see continuing to unfold in the Middle East, the precipice that we have come up against in terms of geopolitics.
There's a chance that we come out of that, but I think the dominant chance is that we don't. And I would say that that's not just my opinion. That's the opinion of economists. That's the opinion of foreign relation experts. There are multiple people out there who are all saying that our budgetary decisions, our foreign policy decisions, our military infrastructure decisions, our economic decisions are risky. Risky means there's a chance they'll work, but it's a low probability chance, not a high probability chance.
In such a scenario, then the economy would be hurt and then there'd be more wars presumably because if we're if the society becomes more individualistic and focused on themselves and nationalistic, then they become more of an island. People get more paranoid. They start building, I know Trump said he's building like he's calling it the Golden Dome over the United States so that he can fire any rockets out of the air if anyone attacks. And then you kind of have to unravel that and try and go the other way potentially.
I try to do as much reading as I can. I'm sure you're the same way. And one of my gifts to myself is when I read fiction and I'm reading a book called “The Left Hand of Darkness” by a sci-fi legend named Ursala K. Le Guin. And it's a book from the 70s. And I'm reading this book and in it she has this quote where she talks about nationalism inside the world of the science fiction planet that she's on, right? And the quote is something like nationalism is not a product of pride. It's a product of fear.
People aren't nationalistic because they're proud of what they have. They're nationalistic because they're afraid that something might take away what they have. And anytime you are driven by fear, you don't have the chance for true happiness. And what I found in that that passage from the sci-fi book was really very insightful to what I see happening across the United States. We're all nationalistic, left and right, gay and straight. Whether you are old or young, we're all nationalistic. We all love our country.
But the things that's driving so much of our nationalism is this fear of the other side. Not a fear of the collapse of our society, not the fear of some rising power across the ocean. But for some reason, we're more afraid of our neighbor than we are afraid of the real threats that are out there. Because at the end of the day, people in California and Mississippi have much more in common than the United States and China. But for whatever reason, we get so distracted and so confused with our own infighting, that we don't realize that infighting is exactly what all of our adversaries from Russia to North Korea to Cuba to even Bulgaria, which is a NATO country that's pro-Russia, our infighting just helps them.”
The chaos in America only helps our enemies or competitors if you choose to call them that. The world is going back to the zero sum world it was before Pax America where there was relative stability.
Andrew goes on: “And what's the potential worst case scenario of that infighting? Because people think, okay, it just means people are going to pop off each other on on X and Twitter and social media and they're going to scream at each other and then
gridlock is the biggest challenge. I don't believe that we're going to be going into any kind of civil war in the United States. We're not going to shoot each other. We're not going to go machete our neighbors. Not now.
But gridlock is going to lead to economic collapse. Economic collapse is going to lead to very real individuals having very real problems. Which is going to lead to an increase in criminal activity. People will steal from each other. People steal from stores. People will you know lie and hurt each other to try to take care of their own.
And as that society starts to collapse and we become more and more tribal again. All very predictable in all case studies that we've seen all over the world. As we become more and more tribal, then we will become fed upon by our adversaries who don't have the same problem.”
The interviewer asks: “When you said gridlock is the first sort of domino that falls there. What is
gridlock?
They answer: “I see gridlock is policy gridlock. We don't know how to move forward with Israel. We don't know how to move forward with the budget. We don't know how to move forward with whether or not we ratify these election results. Right? And in the passing of the time that we don't know how to move forward, it creates an opportunity for somebody else to bypass the democratic process and just dictate the outcome. And that series of dictations makes it so that the outcome is less collaborative, less well thought out, less well defined, less palatable for more people. And then that distrust kind of continues on. We do live in a moment now where the distrust for government is higher than it's been in a long time. We see the largest decline in American currency that we've seen in decades and in this century.
We see a lack of public trust. We see consistent presidential approval ratings below 50 for every president that comes through. We are in a place where the people just don't trust their own government. And I would say that that's not such a big deal except that we are the wealthiest country in the world. We are the largest military in the world. We are the largest producer of financial tools and the largest producer of weapons. We are a big F–ing deal to not have our Sh-t together.”
This is immensely terrifying. And as they say, the impact will be global and not just restricted to America. This is where your mindset really matters. An ability to stay calm and see through the noise. To begin preparing for all scenarios. Get fighting fit. Get skills. Stack cash. Make lots of friends. Remember 3 passports are the new 1 passport.
You owe yourself, your family and your community on this. And remember, if you are going to panic, panic early! :)
Lessons from Everyday Spy Part 1: The World is A Scary Place
I highly recommend this excellent interview with a real literal spy family who worked for the CIA, Andrew and Jihi Bustamante. It can be found here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fu6bYPTp_kE&t=15s.
The key sentence that stuck out to me:
“I don’t know if America is heading toward a future that I want to be part of”
I kind of understand the feeling. The world is a scary place.
Jihi: “But when I worked with refugees, I realized that humans can be horrible. And know I worked with Bosnians and I worked with refugees from Rwanda where you know their neighbors literally turned on them. People who they had grown up with literally the next day came over with a machete or came over with a gun and killed their family members and chased them through forests or through whatever. And that can happen anywhere.
That was the first time that I realized that anytime somebody says that can't happen here, that's a lie. That can happen anywhere. None of those people ever thought, "Oh, yeah, that could happen here." None of those people ever thought that. People always think that can't happen here. My neighbor would never do that to me. And that's not true. And then when I worked for CIA, that compounded the sense of the world behind the scenes is a dangerous place and you can't fully trust. I sound horrible saying these things. You can't fully trust anybody.
That's why. So, you know, you really have to understand that people are a combination of good and bad. And while I would like to think that people would always try to adhere to the good, I always have to keep in mind that people have a bad side to them and there's any set of circumstances that could trigger that.”
Steve Bartlett asks them: “Do you think we're in one such moment?”
They respond: “I think we're always in a moment. I think some part of the world are always in that moment.
And I'm a big believer of seeing the writing on the wall. I don't think that, you know, my advice to people is don't be complacent. Just like Andy said, you know, don't be complacent in your business, but don't be complacent in your life either. Like when before World War II kicked off, there was tons of writing on the wall of what was coming and people just kept thinking to themselves that can't happen here. It can't get that bad, can it?
Forewarned is forearmed. When it comes to your health, wealth, security and family, I go back to the great Silicon Valley saying: "It's better to be a year early, than a day late.”
Ganbatte: The Japanese Way of Finding Luck & Happiness
I had a really rough long Labor Day weekend. After a pretty awesome summer with the family where there seemed to be progress, everything just broke again. WTF. I was so enraged. Literally enraged. Cursing the world and my luck. Rage is the first place I go to. Old habits die hard. I don’t deal well with setbacks and messed up plans, even though they happen all the time. I ended up at Kinokuniya Bookstore. There is just something about a bookstore that calms me.
I stumbled upon an interesting book called “Maneki Neko: The Japanese Secret to Good Luck & Happiness” by Nobuo Suzuki. I found some passages that really helped me. Acted as a valuable reminder in fact.
“Ganbatte.” “This Japanese expression translates as “Do your best” and is used to encourage someone who is carrying out a complicated task, or to raise the spirits of someone who is going through a tough time. It is an exhortation to keep on making an effort instead of trusting everything to chance. Far from leaving the result in the hands of fate, as other languages do when wishing “Good Luck!” this expression is an invitation to put our all into what we’re doing so it turns out as well as possible.”
It’s exactly as Thomas Jefferson was reported to have said in a more pithy way: "I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."
So assuming we all believe this, I return back to the book and what the book says are the 3 essentials of Japanese culture.
“1. Effort: Coming back to someone who is carrying out a greater fortune through an effort than we are — the famous Japanese kaizen, making continuous improvement the basic tune that we do put into our results — the progressing effort for achieving good results.
2. Wisdom: Knowing what makes success — what the Japanese second keys to success are — is included in knowing what luck is. To help you with that, I have included a list of good books and authors that we believe help you lose sight of the second key, the Japanese keystone — the rapid recovery — and what you believe that creates a clear picture of fortune.
3. Confidence: If you have the third ingredient — the conviction that you can achieve it, saving goes as a popular pick — the third that we believe is nothing more than aspiration. There is nothing feasible in this world that we haven’t first visualized mentally and that we achieve it. You also have to aspire to create fortune.
With these three ingredients, we are all set to influence our luck and shape the universe to a small part of its possibility.”
That weekend showed me I have plenty of work on myself that I need to do. But the universe eventually delivers, if you actually do the work. It starts with a strong and good mindset. So go fix your mindset.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Dec 14th, 2025
“In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.”--William Blake
Two of the smartest individuals in the world, sharing their knowledge. Naval & Balaji. Worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiN1orWlZvw
2. Arthur Hayes is a one of best observers of global macro & crypto. Short but good conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uSEqggMvNw
3. "Ukraine has shown how quickly a major war can escalate and how asymmetric it can be. Europe spent decades in “peacetime mode” — shrinking forces, aging equipment, under-invested innovation. Scaling back up takes time: training recruits, reopening barracks, refitting vehicle fleets, rebuilding supply chains.
Security is not just the military’s job; civilians contribute to it as well. Founders, investors, media, everyone. Most tech waves come with a moral story—social networks “connecting the world,” crypto “democratizing finance,” AI “advancing science.”
Defense is different. It’s not optional lifestyle tech; it’s about protecting our societies."
https://new-defense.com/investing-in-defense-tech-startups-matt-kuppers/
4. Lots of good takes here on latest tech & AI news. NIA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeb53UD4_dk
5. "Every major success story is a case study in pain tolerance and conviction. Compounding only works for the few who stay solvent long enough to experience it. It’s the price of admission to the 1%.
Most people can’t tolerate being underestimated or delayed. They need recognition and attention. So they cash out to scratch the ego.
They need comfort, so they give up options. They mistake motion for progress and validation for security. They exit the game voluntarily, right before it turns unfair in their favor.
The irony is that singular focus on survival/adaptability creates inevitability.
If you stay in the arena long enough, the odds eventually tilt toward you. The longer you can withstand pain, boredom and obscurity, the more tail events you’re exposed to. Life runs out of ways to stop the man who refuses to leave.
If you’re in that grinding phase where nothing seems to click, that is entirely mental., If you’re making the right choices the momentum piles up silently. You’re not supposed to feel rewarded. You’re supposed to survive.
Every month you stay solvent, every year you hold your ground, your probability of breakthrough rises. That’s the math of attrition.
People Hate Cockroaches and Yet They Teach a Valuable Lesson, Find a Way to survive"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/getting-rich-is-a-game-of-attrition
6. What an interesting concept: The Network State. Good to have a plan B these days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfsaiGWv7oU
7. Pieter Levels at the Network State Conference. Illuminating conversation with the OG Digital nomad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw2EKZNI5p4
8. Lots of nuggets of insights for anyone working or investing in defense-tech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGgPwKDJBrc
9. Frexit coming? An interesting take on global macro right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRmgw52426g
10. "By the fall of 2023, Thrive Capital, the New York-based investment firm Kushner started 13 years earlier, had become a kind of overnight sensation. In 2010, Thrive’s first fund was $5 million, and included companies like Kickstarter and GroupMe; by 2023, its eighth fund was $3.3 billion, including a maniacally concentrated $2 billion investment in Stripe at a $50 billion valuation, and a $150 million check to OpenAI at a $29 billion valuation. (The companies are now valued at $107 billion and $500 billion, respectively).
Along the way, Thrive’s bets on Instagram, Spotify, Warby Parker, Skims, GitHub, Slack, Robinhood and other companies had become conspicuous for being prescient, aesthetic, and exquisitely timed (among its mostly vindicated admirers), or for being absurdly priced, momentum-chasing, and too highly concentrated in dysfunctional businesses with unproven returns (among increasingly sheepish critics).
In 2010, moreover, the unknown Kushner brother’s unknown little firm was making a bunch of large but weird-sounding claims for itself, like that it was a stage-, geography-, and sector-agnostic venture firm that would concentrate all its investments in a very small number of companies; that it was not only an investment firm but also itself a company; that it incubated its own companies as well as invested in others; and that it didn’t just invest and incubate but functioned as a service provider, product creator, and embedded operational commando unit for founders.
By 2023, every self-respecting investor on Sand Hill Road was also saying such things about themselves, even as they wondered how a New York firm made up of a handful of kids in their 20s and 30s—many of them with zero experience in venture capital and from the technology Bermuda Triangle of New Jersey—had become some of the most desired investors in tech, and the ones most closely associated with the otherwise distinctly West Coast boom in artificial intelligence."
https://joincolossus.com/article/joshua-kushner-thrive-new-world/
11. "Given the fact that the Russian finances are largely dependent on the money brought in by oil and gas sales, that missing 20% is creating an uncomfortably looking hole in the state budget. This missing revenue is an objective problem for the budget and the economy, especially since the Russian state is - once again - spending more this year than the year before. And as a result, 2025 is probably the first year when the Russian economic luck has started to run out - and the economic and fiscal effect of the war is increasingly seen and felt.
Unlike in previous years, economic growth has slowed to just about 0.6% GDP, inflation is still relatively high, and Moscow has been forced into some uncharacteristic admissions of trouble. The 2025–26 budget is still heavy on defense spending but lighter everywhere else and as officials are having to rethink what can they actually afford and what will need to be cut. Taxes are going up, debt is inching higher, and the government is searching for more and more places to cut spending without triggering public backlash."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-176215638
12. "Perhaps this particular point is here because I’m writing this piece after 3 years of non-stop recession/stagnation/stagflation (whatever) and many years of COVID, but there was a TON more optimism in 2015 than in 2025.
The general public (not guys making money online) are seeing their costs rise, their real incomes decline, and they are worried they are going to lose their job to AI and global turmoil.
Just a decade ago, people were far more optimistic and more willing to spend money. Having luxury products and big brands was considered aspirational.
Now people are cutting spending where they can (which is a mistake, they need to build online businesses and find ways to increase their income) and consider big brands to be “flaunting” i.e. instead of aspiration, it’s seen as social ineptness."
https://lifemathmoney.com/the-state-of-the-world-part-1-what-changed-in-the-last-10-15-years/
13. Some learnings from a top PE firm, in this case Orlando Bravo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1q4wcV-ImY
14. This was eye-opening. How to be an elite operator in the military and the costs of it. How to recover from serious injuries both mental and physical.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwRc2SEo-VI&t=257s
15. "As venture capital moves deeper into Hard Tech and reindustrialization, investors who understand how commodity risk flows through a business will underwrite smarter and help founders scale faster. Out-engineering competitors isn’t enough. Founders will need to manage pricing risk, backlog, and capital intensity with the same precision they apply to their technology.
Revenue quality matters just as much as revenue growth. Know the shape of it early and keep learning how it moves."
https://www.alsoblogposts.com/p/commodity-futures-and-hard-tech
16. "But one of the most threatened business models of the pre-AI, human knowledge worker era is seat-based pricing. Seat-based pricing is entirely predicated on the fact that a single human can only accomplish so much, causing the need to hire more humans and pay for more seats as a business scales. In such an era, sales incentives were aligned with the industry – companies added more employees and salespeople sold incremental seats.
Now, as individual employees can spin up countless agents to scale, salespeople pitching more seats is sounding increasingly tone-deaf. Modern companies will increasingly aspire for talent density in the form of a smaller group of more productive and more capable people, as opposed to “growing seats” as they scale.
AI-native startups are taking advantage of this new world with outcome-based pricing (e.g. pay per new lead, per new project, per item sold, etc) with a simple “let us reduce your seats of X” sales pitch. I anticipate smart incumbents will eventually cannibalize themselves by splitting their sales teams, having one team sell seats and the other team sell against seats to those customers who are ready. Won’t be fun, but will be necessary."
https://www.implications.com/p/the-next-frontier-of-data-moats-verticals
17. One of the best shows in tech. "AI Bubble, Stablecoin Boom, and Runnin' Down a Dream."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX6q6lvoYtM
18. "I believe the best part about the Japanese stock market, IMO is that you can really find investment opportunities across the spectrum of value to growth - and there are specific ways in which you can try and find an idea that fits a certain style. Sure, maybe a traditional screen may work but some might be less obvious or immediate. Whether it’s to look for a massive value unlock from a cash-rich balance sheet, a potential take-private or simply just a great business that’s growing but is overlooked."
https://madeinjapan.substack.com/p/how-to-find-interesting-investment
19. "New technologies tend to advance rapidly and often in unexpected directions. Mature technologies advance much more slowly, much more expensively and with much more difficulty. The West’s problem is that it has an enormous financial and doctrinal investment in systems of mature technologies, which are increasingly unlikely to ever be asked to perform the missions they were designed for.
And it’s not, once more, just a hardware problem: indeed, the majority of the confusion in the West at the moment results from the fact that no-one really knows yet how to make use of the new technologies of drones and their various different capabilities, in a networked war. As we can see in Ukraine, the Russians are still in the process of working this out themselves, and it’s anyway not clear that lessons learned will be applicable everywhere: the Israeli use of drones against Hezbollah was quite different.
I mentioned the Battle of France in 1940 earlier, and I’ll close with a comment by the famous historian and Resistance martyr Marc Bloch in his posthumously published work L’Étrange défaite. “Our leaders,” he wrote “in the midst of many contradictions, strove, above all to recreate, in 1940, the war of 1915-1918. The Germans fought the war of 1940.” Our leaders today are trying to recreate a war that was never fought, but that was widely anticipated, and until recently was the model for military planning.
The Russians learned the hard way that the nature of war has changed and is still changing. But for the reasons I’ve discussed I’m not at all sure that the West can adapt in the way that the Russians are trying to. Going back to the start and trying again is never easy."
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/learning-from-the-defeat
20. Understanding Nvidia and the future of AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE6sw_E9Gh0
21. "So, contrary to common belief, the promotion of multipolarity reflects subversion rather than realism. It serves the interests of powers that want to weaken the United States by convincing it to limit itself."
https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/the-multipolarity-farce
22. "What sets the world’s best accelerators apart is the strength of the teams working with founders. The quality of the mentorship, as well as the introductions that mentors can potentially make.
This starts with the employees of the accelerator. The best accelerators employ partners, entrepreneurs-in-residence and even operational staff who have firsthand experience working in some of the world’s fastest-growing tech companies."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/why-do-99-percent-of-startup-accelerators-fail
23. "This concludes our coverage of politics as a field in the Decline of the West. Beyond this, I refer you to Caesarism, but this is the point where apathy for politics begins and systems decay into private operations. We are living in the height of this control-matrix and the younger among us will see everyone they know give up with the notion of change over their lifetime, paving the way for imperial politics and great men to do as they wish with no one in their way."
https://spenglarianperspective.substack.com/p/how-money-controls-democracies
24. Luke Gromen is one of the best global macro observers in the world. AI will wreck the debt market we live in right now. Lots of brutal implications of the trend line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeTzV0kP2S4
25. A grim take on declining neoliberal order. The importance of energy & commodities coming to the fore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkHusA154Ng
26. NIA with usual good takes on the latest tech and crypto news on mid October.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JGJ4c3CBk8&list=PLIBc05HkMJHFpVxxZTD-_MbTAYtwAOEg_
27. Fascinating discussion on the new 1929 book, need to check it out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQcveYRfZgs&t=2s
28. Learning the art of venture capital in the latter half of the conversation. But lots of good takes on the latest tech & AI news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZAstljD60c
29. "Italian towns on the Ligurian coast. But here’s what makes them different from every other Italian coastal option:
France is 15 minutes across the border. Monaco is 40 minutes away.
Timur’s point was simple: you get similar elegance to the Côte d’Azur at a fraction of the price. A sea view villa in Sanremo runs around €600k. The same thing in Cannes costs... well, significantly more.
But what really caught my attention was the three-system access.
You live in Italy, so you get Italian tax residency. The 50-60% impatriate exemption I wrote about before applies here – effective tax rate of 9-15% if you qualify for it.
You shop in France. Fifteen minutes and you’re at a Carrefour where grocery prices make more sense than Italian supermarkets (some will say they’re better…I would need more convincing…).
You network in Monaco. Forty minutes and you’re in a zero-tax jurisdiction where serious European money lives and does business.
Portugal gives you Portugal. Spain gives you Spain. Even Switzerland, you’re fundamentally operating in one system despite the borders.
But this? You’re actually moving between three different jurisdictions depending on what you need.
Three tax systems. Three cost structures. Three business cultures.
I’d completely overlooked this possibility."
https://palombo.substack.com/p/the-three-country-arbitrage-nobodys
30. "But for those who get in early, they could lock in a wonderful Italian chapter.
In my view, America is the greatest country on earth to build, to create, and generate value.
It's easily the best country in the world to "build."
But this does not necessarily mean it is the greatest country for enjoying what you have built.
Italy's tax regimes could allow you to have both – career optimization through location arbitrage and lifestyle maximization through cultural depth.
Personally, I'd love to spend more time in Italy.
Build in USD. Save in Bitcoin. Spend in euros.
Live longer!"
https://palombo.substack.com/p/the-new-italian-renaissance-is-here
31. "We're not just talking about a lifestyle hack. We're witnessing the emergence of parallel systems that operate independently of traditional infrastructure.
Starlink and Bitcoin essentially allow these systems to run everywhere – money and communication decoupled from local governments and banks.
Think about it: in 100 years, how strange will we look to our descendants for needing paper passports to travel and physical banks to access value?
Right now, we're in the early stages of this transition. You can build your base wherever brings you joy – a small town in southern Italy, a village in Portugal – and still participate fully in the global economy.
Do you want to optimize for the world as it was, or as it's becoming?
The old model: tie yourself to expensive hubs, compete locally, accept whatever tax and lifestyle trade-offs come with that choice.
The new model: generate value globally, optimize costs strategically, design life intentionally. Optimize for lifespan, not just income.
We're in the early stages of the biggest reorganization of how value gets created. Individual sovereignty – the ability to optimize across multiple jurisdictions while maintaining parallel systems for money and communication – becomes the competitive advantage.
It won't be easy or super smooth. But what fascinates me is that we're living in a much more "possibilistic" era. You have choices previous generations never had.
The question isn't whether this shift will happen. It's whether you'll be positioned to benefit from it.
The infrastructure exists. The opportunities are real. The arbitrage is measurable.
But windows like this don't stay open forever.
My take:
Earn US Dollar. Spend Euro. Live Longer."
https://palombo.substack.com/p/earn-us-dollar-spend-euro-live-longer
32. A much deeper interview with Dan Wang on China vs. America. It’s really quite insightful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSY68wBQ97I
33. "Industrial competitiveness is a moving target. As China supports the diffusion of capability across the Global South, the entire global cost curve shifts downward. Nickel refining in Indonesia, lithium processing in Chile, and phosphate-based battery production in Morocco all draw on Chinese technology and finance capital. Each new project adds scale, deepens experience and lowers the marginal cost of production globally. Each project can impact global pricing, thereby creating risks for new aspirant projects, as has been seen in the case of Indonesia’s nickel project, which has effectively delivered such low global prices that other projects are no longer viable.
For the U.S. and its firms, this means entering a marketplace where the baseline for efficiency has already dropped. Even if localised production is achieved, its cost base will sit above the new global norm. What begins as strategic autonomy ends as cost isolation. The US runs the real risk of becoming an industrial island in an ocean of lower cost, Chinese-enabled capacity. Put another way, the US can make the transition it aspires to, towards greater industrial autonomy, but it will end up as a higher cost, lower standard of living social settlement and political economy.
Industrial time is not linear. For China, it compounds but for the U.S., it compresses. Beijing’s model is iterative. Every project informs the next. Washington’s is restorative. Each project seeks to rebuild a lost ecosystem. The longer the lag, the more subsidy required, and the higher the relative cost base becomes. Tesla’s experience encapsulates this trap. The more it invests to localise battery supply chains, the faster China’s ecosystem grows globally, eroding Tesla’s cost advantage. Even if Tesla achieves full vertical integration in the U.S., it will do so in a world where Chinese-supported production elsewhere has already redefined global efficiency standards.
Time, in this sense, is not neutral. It is the medium through which advantage accumulates. While the U.S. struggles to rebuild the factories of yesterday, China is building the industrial geography of tomorrow. And by the time America’s vertical integration is complete, the world will already be horizontally integrated through Chinese-supported industrial ecosystems that define the next global cost frontier."
https://warwickpowell.substack.com/p/tick-tock-time-matters-and-pax-americana
34. "A self-sufficient semiconductor industry may be out of Europe’s reach, but a more vibrant one is not. Europe has a meaningful edge in certain steps of the semiconductor supply chain, and it can cooperate with allies—including the United States—for the supply chain segments it lacks.
The billions of euros being poured into the continent’s rearmament can also be an opportunity for its chip makers, given how critical artificial intelligence has become to defense. To take full advantage of these trends, European leaders need to build on the chip industry’s strengths with deeper partnerships, not a futile drive for self-sufficiency…"
https://chrismillersnewsletter.substack.com/p/why-strategic-autonomy-is-the-wrong
35. What an excellent interview. Enjoyed watching this. Lots of stuff around career, life, Christianity, Anduril & Defensetech, AI + the Future of War.
You’re Too Online: Touching Grass & The Unmooring of the Real Life World
For Succession fans, that term “You’re too online” would be recognizable. But the reality is that many of us are way too online. I’m certainly guilty of this. I spend hours everyday online, email, Youtube, messenger and X aka Twitter. Way too much X.
I get lots of insights and inspiration but also lots of rage. It has also led to a marked decline in sociability in real life and dramatic decline in my ability to focus and concentrate. The quick dopamine hits are really damaging. And I’m generation X where I had to adapt to this in my twenties and thirties, not teens. No wonder the kids these days are so whacked out. Their brains are fried.
I think this is why there has been a backlash against mobile phones in some schools and households. We see the rise of digital sabbath where 1-2 days of the week are spent away from phones and computers. I see the rise of experiences and more hardcore athletic endeavors whether mountain climbing or martial arts where you have to be present. Or you literally will fall off a cliff or get punched in the face. We see the popularization of meditation. These are all signs of the counter-reaction to the digital trend. A way to retake our lives back.
As the ever wise Tai Lopez said: “Never stay fully connected to the (digital) world. Leave the phone in the house and go outside for at least an hour a day.”
Go take walks in nature. Grab a coffee or long lunch with some friends. Go rock climbing. Learn martial arts or how to shoot a gun. Travel to obscure places off the beaten path. #LiveExperienceMaxxing is a thing. If you do this, you may have a chance to recover from the digital dopamine hits wrecking all of us. Besides, IRL experiences are always better than virtual ones.
Complete and Total Personal Ownership Is the Only Path to Success
Every day I learn something new. I find an interesting podcast or Youtube video or have a great conversation with a friend or new friend. Or whenever I read a newsletter. It’s no different today. I am a fan of Justin Waller, the blue collar baller and he wrote something that stood out to me.
“If it’s not your fault, you can’t fix it.
I learned that in the steel business.
You think guys show up on time?
They don’t.
You think projects run smoothly?
They don’t.
Men drink too much, make mistakes, fight in hotel rooms, and cost you contracts.
And here’s the truth,
If I let myself believe that was their fault… I was done.
Because the moment you put the blame on someone else, you hand them all the power.
But if I say, “It’s on me”?
Now I can do something about it.
I can fix the hiring process.
I can change the training.
I can track back and find where I failed.
That’s how you win.
Not by crying about circumstances.
Not by blaming other people.
But by making everything your fault.
See, accountability isn’t a burden.
It’s the only way to keep control.
And control is how you survive in business.
So the next time something falls apart, I want you to stop yourself from pointing the finger.
Instead say, “This one’s on me.”
And then fix it.
That’s the difference between conquerors and victims”
I think my lack of success was not due to a bad work ethic but a bad attitude to life. Avoiding hard problems, avoiding problems and conflict. That is the way of the weak man. But I think the biggest piece is really taking personal responsibility. It’s so much easier to blame your parents, society, your boss or whoever instead of where the finger should actually be pointed. To yourself. It’s always on you. No excuses.
I learned this the hard way. But once I started taking responsibility for everything, I was able to tackle the problems I was dealt. Life got better in general. You earn your way to the next level of problems. To new levels of personal growth. Almost like in a video game. So for all the men out there, don’t complain, this is a privilege. You will always have problems. It’s up to you on how big a problem and how to deal with them. The world rewards the problem solvers.
Taking Losses and The Humbled Investor: Ego is the Enemy
I finally had the courage to go check my old crypto and stock trading accounts, to review the investments I made in 2020 and 2021. Yikes. A massive sea of red. Most of my crypto investments were 90-98% down.
I went into Q4 of 2020 with arrogance and euphoria. After some very good startup exits & exits in general in the year, lots of markups, I thought I was smarter and better than I was. Plus with the craziness of the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon) era, it seemed like everything was going up. I admit I got caught up at the top of the cycle. Nothing like a bunch of money in your pocket to make you get cocky and stupid. I went big into investing in startups, VC funds, crypto and stocks. Well, no surprise, post-2022 many of these investments are not doing well. Especially my crypto and startup investments.
Nothing like big losses to humble you.. Reality smacks you in the face and you are forced to learn and rethink your investment thesis. I learned I clearly did not do enough research. I learned I needed to concentrate my investments, or else I might as well just invest in Index Funds. I learned DCA aka Dollar Cost Averaging is your friend, as slow and steady is better for my personality.
I learned that investing at the top of the cycle for startups is bad for your portfolio. My 2021-2022 vintage portfolios are pretty god awful. Not like investing in Chamath SPACs awful but pretty close. Yet at the same time Power Law is truly amazing, in Venture Capital and stocks. That winners sometimes can more than make up for all the losses.
And I learned that no matter what, no matter the preparation, you will inevitably have losses. You will always have losses & bad investments. That’s the game. No risk, no reward. So take your losses, learn the hard lessons and keep on going. Stay in the game and use the power of compounding both in capital and knowledge to your benefit.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Dec 7th, 2025
"Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era."--Will Durant
Palmer is an American gem. Wide ranging conversation on geopolitics, tech and defense. Building the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCKdPLMmXkE
2. "As incumbents move upmarket, they leave the bottom of the market ripe for disruption. Small funds, disciplined early stage investors, and emerging managers are the ones filling the gap. Because of our fund sizes, fees are tiny—this sector of the market makes money off the carry, not the fee, in perfect alignment with our LPs, which our LPs also love. The best of these disruptive managers are hungrier, more aligned, and structurally motivated to find alpha-rich founders and ideas—exactly what LPs want.
Over time, more and more LPs will realize this, and will add a pocket for “new VC” to their portfolios. These upstart funds will thrive—historically, smaller and emerging funds return way more to their investors. And eventually, this emerging layer of investors will become the true, new venture capital industry.
The megafunds will continue to make money, right up until the opportunity to deploy it profitably in gigantic pre-IPO megarounds disappears."
https://www.fastcompany.com/91413783/andreessen-horowitz-leaked-decks
3. "There’s a corollary here too. The companies that will win aren’t necessarily the ones training the best models. They’re the ones that make it easiest to use AI effectively. That might be through better APIs, better workflow tools, better evaluation frameworks, or better ways to combine multiple models for different tasks.
The future isn’t about picking the winning model. It’s about building systems that can flexibly use whichever model is best for each specific task at any given moment.
So if you’ve been paralyzed trying to decide which model to build on, stop waiting. Pick one that’s good enough for your needs today and start building. When something better comes along—and it will—you’ll be able to switch. The model doesn’t matter nearly as much as what you build with it."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-model-doesnt-matter
4. "What looks like a coincidence is in fact a design.
China’s economic planners have built a system that uses foreign innovators as catalysts — importing technology, competition, and expertise, then converting them into domestic advantage.
The state opens the door just wide enough for learning to occur, then quietly closes it once local players have mastered the game.
The result is a generation of Chinese champions — Baidu, WeChat, Didi, BYD, Alibaba — each forged in the friction of foreign competition.
The catfish were invited in to stir the tank; the cod that survived now rule the sea."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/chinas-secret-strategy-for-beating
5. "How Takaichi Sanae deals with these two issues will determine whether she’ll be a success or failure. The fact that - unlike her two technocrat-led-consensus-first-and-foremost predecessors - she’s been a fighter all her life makes me hopeful she’ll serve for more than just one three-year term. Like in “Shogun”, there’ll be plenty of drama, intrigue and unexpected plot twists: to succeed, Takaichi will have to create both an asset bubble and Yen appreciation."
https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/takaichi-bubble-banzai
6. Glad to see this conversation. Building hard stuff in San Francisco.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FddjP_zNkyc
7. The Future of war: AI & Autonomy. Worth watching. America is very behind in all these areas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmRRolaIGZA&t=28s
8. AI will be eating the labor market. This is the promise for VC & businesses and peril for society.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhyhR4Bzc0I&t=7s
9. David Senra: How Extreme Winners Think and Win. Talk about intense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mesjY6l2T8c
10. "The dollar has long been among America’s most powerful strategic assets. Preserving the dollar’s centrality helps sustain US oversight of global transactions and Washington’s ability to enforce rules against drug cartels, terrorist organizations, and other transnational threats. It is also a key diplomatic tool in the current great power rivalry.
BRICS threatens to chip away at the dollar’s dominance by creating opaque, unregulated channels for trade and finance. Unless Washington acts decisively to defend SWIFT, regulate stablecoins, apply diplomatic pressure, and reinforce the legitimacy of US global financial oversight, BRICS will continue to construct an anti-US financial order while presenting itself as the champion of neutral nonalignment and multipolarity."
https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/break-the-brics
11. Alot of my concerns as well on America's direction in the long run.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWFJH__wxlY
12. "Latin America is not what we think. It isn’t local, and it isn’t peripheral. It’s the new epicenter of superpower rivalries and global organized crime. Today, drug routes, crypto flows, and geopolitics intersect more directly in Latin America than anywhere else on Earth. When President Trump threatened Hamas over the hostages, they sent an armada to Venezuela. His message wasn’t just meant for Hamas in Gaza — it was aimed squarely at Hamas operations in Latin America.
Hamas’s survival doesn’t depend solely on its presence in the Middle East anymore because it’s gone global. Hamas depends on its cash flows out of Latin America, and so does Syria, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and even Iran’s Quds Force. They all operate from the Tri-Border Area, where Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil meet, as well as in Venezuela. The geopolitics of Latin America are no longer regional — they’re globalizing too, like everything else, with logistics and finance operations run with the same efficiency as those of multinational firms.
Latin America has an abundance of resources — and just as many vulnerabilities. Trump sees it for what it is: a geopolitical RISK meets Monopoly board. Every move is about property — staking territory, tracking the opposition’s bets, seizing assets that matter. But this isn’t just a contest for land or ports. It’s a battle for narratives and neural space — who controls the story, and who controls belief. In the 21st century, the front lines of power run not only through pipelines and ports but through perceptions.
Forget the old clichés of coups and cartels. This is about battleships, bitcoin and bananas - not bullets. At least so far. Latin America is no longer a distant theater. It’s where the world’s next balance of power is being written — in cash flows, code, and cognition. It’s not just a contest for physical land, raw materials, and critical infrastructure but a fight for narrative and cognitive control."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/bananas-battleships-and-bitcoin-how
13. An important discussion on how we got into the mess we are in right now in the West. The failure of NeoLiberalism and the consequences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pmb2VZ0Jg8Q
14. "The self-help aisle promised transformation through commitment. AI promises transformation through experimentation."
https://tomtunguz.com/ai-enables-instant-workflow-adoption/
15. "Investing is very good at enforcing a sensitivity to reality". A philosopher hedge funder. Fascinating convo on the art of investing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xkWJq4Qcps&t=3s
16. "The unusually prosperous boomer decades produced more elite aspirants than legacy prestige tracks could absorb and the imbalance has been further exacerbated by globalization and immigration.
The result is a civilizational oversupply of strivers and a bottleneck of prestige. Status is inherently positional, and not everyone can be at the top. Coupled with stagnant living standards, this social scarcity amplifies anxiety and mimetic rivalry across the striver class and creates the cultural phenomenon we see today.
Strivers typically come from home environments that set high expectations for achievement, emphasize hard work, and normalize competition. Mimetic rivalry is the motivational engine of the striver. Most strivers are routed into prestige tracks like finance, tech, law, consulting, and medicine. It has gotten harder over the last generation to strive and prestige tracks have grown crowded, drawing more strivers further out the frontier of risk.
Strivers are overrepresented in the Crypto and AI industries, where much of the outsized opportunity of this decade has emerged. These industries offer the best chance of breaking into the modern landed gentry class: accumulating enough wealth to live entirely off of capital gains."
https://www.scimitar.capital/p/self-reflections-of-a-striver
17. I always learn from Raoul Pal. Lots of global macro, AI & Crypto and investing. Worth listening to. The great reset.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JcuRhCKZdA&t=3785s
18. "While governments are powerful, the people always find ways to retain their sovereignty. In many cultures that experienced endemic inflation over centuries of successive governments or dynasties, cultures created gifting rituals marking major life milestones (birth, marriage, and death) that involve the exchange of hard money. In this way, the people save through cultural rituals. No politician dares subvert these rituals lest they lose their mandate to lead and find themselves headless.
In the modern era, when the power of centralized governments — whether a democracy, socialist republic, communist state, etc. are all powerful because of the advances of thinking machines and the internet, how can we the people preserve our rights to sound money? The gift that Satoshi gave to humanity via their Bitcoin whitepaper is a technological miracle that was launched at a very important time in history.
Bitcoin in the current state of human civilization is the best form of money ever created. Like all money, it has a relative value. Given that Pax Americana quasi-empire rules via the US dollar, we value Bitcoin relative to the dollar. Assuming the technology works, Bitcoin’s price will ebb and flow because of the price and supply of dollars.
The Pax Americana quasi-empire is but a nostalgic dream. What comes next? This is the question with which global leaders wrestle. Change is not good nor bad, but change creates economic winners and losers. Sometimes the losers are politically and economically powerful, which creates issues for ruling parties. In order to shield the negative effects of change from the populace, politicians print money."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/long-live-the-king
19. "It’s only 2025 (not even 2035) and we’re entering a phase where active income is no longer a viable path to making it. Making it means you are personally free from future obligations to outside entities (defined as a boss and anyone who can take away the most valuable asset in the world - Time)
“You can sell a business. You can sell land. You can sell stocks. You can sell assets. You can’t sell your job.” - BowTiedBull Philosophy
If that saying doesn’t stab you in the heart, you’re not paying attention. Likely stuck in the world of NPCs and NGMIs
The next decade you’ll witness a tectonic/earthquake level change in how freedom, power, and survival are distributed.
Life’s winners (You): people who own durable, productive assets.
Life’s losers (NPCs): people who rent out their time, allowing someone else to compound their equity.
This is the new reality. Based on compounding math + policy + technology. Here we’ll walk through what you need to own, why it works and why asymmetry is the only way to operate. Daily life is going to change. The vast majority won’t even start the smallest scalable niche item: WiFi Money/managed-internet biz that makes money while you sleep."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/you-cant-sell-a-job-the-final-decade
20. Lots of juicy discussion on the latest Silicon Valley news. AI is dominating the news, investing and business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1bmrugU_6E
21. Overall, a pretty important discussion for America.
"Manufacturing's Future, The Electric Tech Stack, and Automation"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOv2EqojRkw&t=200s
22. "For entrepreneurs thinking about an exit strategy, remember this: the best exits happen when you first build a great business and the market comes knocking. Once you’ve built something truly great, potential acquirers will notice and opportunities will emerge. Focus on greatness, not on the exit."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/10/11/focus-on-building-a-great-business-not-an-exit/
23. "I was most struck, though, by the similarities with today’s links between industrial capacity and national power. In Beijing and Washington, policymakers look nervously at a “war of the factories.” Xi’s statements about the geopolitical implications of industrial capacity would not have sounded out of place in the 1930s.
The tech transfer and localization requirements imposed on Ford in the 1930s look like those imposed by China on Western firms in recent decades—and those that Washington has tested recently on chip and battery firms to push them to move to the U.S. I read a lot about the ‘end of globalization’ today, but what I see in practice is remarkably similar to what Link sees in the 1930s: a “furious” effort to remake it."
https://chrismillersnewsletter.substack.com/p/the-war-of-the-factories
24. "Most people think small. Most people live small. They don’t care to step outside the ordinary, and that’s why so few ever get the extraordinary. I often use the “walk sign” theory as a reference: most people will follow once someone takes the first step, but they rarely make the first move.
Thinking big takes no more energy than thinking small. In fact, it often takes less. And when you think big, you’re competing against fewer people. The kind of people you want on your side. Few understand this."
https://brittanyhugoboom.substack.com/p/you-need-to-start-approaching-beautiful
25. Japan is treating their defense very seriously. Offensive power is the best defense as they say.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/01/asia/japan-warship-tomahawk-missiles-intl-hnk-ml
26. "According to Liherko, the actual situation on the battlefield looks different from maps that show Russia surging forward. He drew an alternative diagram with several small blobs representing enemy troops. “It’s more dynamic. We stay in our position. They try and go forward,” he explained."
27. Some of the best commentary on Silicon Valley news from some top tier investors around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72htG-AOykI&t=336s
28. Wow this was one of the best interviews on how to scale a growth stage venture firm. Insight Partners, one of the biggest and best investors out of NYC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4zzkuFyI18
29. "You’re essentially trying to build discipline during the least disciplined time of year.
The Alternative? Start in Q4 (October).
Starting your 2026 goals in October 2025 gives you a three-month head start. By the time January arrives, others are just beginning their doomed resolutions, you’ve already stacked habits, built colossal momentum & began rewiring your identity."
https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/why-91-of-new-years-resolutions-will
30. AI Chip Wars. Learning some new things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvlE8-MzxyA
31. "That’s why the new export controls don’t target NdPr. They target the aforementioned heavy rare earths - because those are the ones with real geological scarcity. And now that Myanmar’s supply line has proven how fragile it is, the timing starts to look intentional.
With this in mind, China’s latest export controls begin to make a lot more sense. As seen previously with antimony and other metals, dual-use regulation is the official framing, but this also appears to be a calculated move to ensure that domestic downstream industries - magnet producers, EV manufacturers, defense contractors - aren’t left short in a market where heavy rare earth supply is both limited and under pressure. In that light, the move is as much about industrial policy as it is about playing tit for tat with the Trump administration.
And here lies the uncomfortable truth for the rest of the world: if you want to build a rare earth industry that can actually compete, it’s not enough to copy what China did with NdPr. You need to go where the heavies live - and for a part, that means developing ionic clays. It means dealing with messy permitting, environmental risks, and all the local politics that come with it."
https://sustainabledude.substack.com/p/why-china-banned-rare-earths-but
32. "While crypto is having a moment, refining is too - in the opposite way. It’s rising in value.
In March, President Trump ordered all U.S. military bases to build refining facilities and begin stockpiling critical refined metals. It sounded obscure at the time, but it’s central to what’s coming: a world where the 3D printing of metals and materials becomes the backbone of military power. Modern battlefields are turning into print-on-demand environments. As I said in recent Substacks, the 3D printer is the equivalent of the metal stirrup the Mongolians used to create the largest empire on Earth. See my piece, War in an Era of Intelligent Machines: Stirrups, Conoidal Bullets, 3D Printers, Lunar Nukes, and Special Ops Forces.
And, as Elon Musk has said, we need to keep people off the battlefield because drones - 3D printed drones like the “Widowmakers” - combined with AI will be immediately lethal to all humans. In a robot-to-robot world, refined rare earths and Helium-3 become the decisive variables. Wars won’t be won by territory or troop counts. Wars will be won — or lost — by who runs out of critical materials first."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/no-laughing-matter-the-race-for-helium
33. Probably one of the most critical and important companies in America right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgRo82sSPCU
34. "AI will not distribute prosperity evenly. Its impact depends on whether firms can retain the surplus it generates—a function of market structure, capital intensity, and institutional context. The key divide lies not between manufacturing and services but between businesses able to escape the market economy’s competitive pressures and those that remain trapped within them.
Manufacturers with scale, process knowledge, and high capital barriers will likely capture surplus and reinvest it, compounding returns. Client-facing service providers will see most gains flow to clients or upstream AI vendors. Proximity services remain the crucial variable: if AI can unlock productivity gains there, and workers organise to claim their share, it could trigger the first meaningful realignment of the social contract since the post-war boom.
America will extend its dominance in platforms and professional services, deepening existing advantages while leaving most workers behind. China will tighten its grip on manufacturing, converting scale into market power as AI amplifies control and efficiency. Finally, Europe will pursue scale without mass, using AI to enhance precision manufacturing and perhaps pioneer a new balance between capital and labour."
https://www.driftsignal.com/p/capitalism-in-the-ai-powered-economy