Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Aug 31st, 2025
“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald
"More forks. The red network hasn’t developed a structure yet that will prevent forks in the future. With each new fork, red network participants will depart, and opposition to its policies will form in unexpected quadrants. Given what we’ve seen so far, the red network may shatter (again) before the 2028 elections, making it possible for the blue network to take power.
The red network might evolve again. One potential evolution is the development of resonant orientation, as opposed to the reflexive opposition (no DEI, no wars, no immigration, no..) we see in both the blue and red networks (due to the way network tribalism works). An orientation in decision-making points you in the direction of solutions that will benefit you. It guides you forward, allowing you to make decisions dynamically rather than reflexively. However, we might not see an evolution like this until 2032."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/the-hard-fork
2. This was illuminating. One of the most thoughtful Private equity investors I've listened to and has unique People-first talent development & personal development perspectives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2nHljZeMQ8&t=1116s
3. It's too bad, I liked Jordan Peterson & know his teachings helped many people.
"And something happened in this era to Peterson that it’s hard to solely blame him for. He was both idolized and condemned in a way so extreme that it seems impossible that anyone could go through it with their ego intact. Wherever he went, young men would be thanking him for saving their lives and interviewers would be asking why he wanted to spread hate speech, with little in between. Peterson always seemed to have a slightly forthright streak that bordered on anger, and while in his early interviews he remained composed, by 2018–19 he often seemed to become more tearful or angry in interviews, suggesting that these extremes took—unsurprisingly—an emotional toll.
Is it his fault millions of fans interpreted that feeling of insight with the belief in his status as savior? Perhaps. Peterson certainly rode the wave, and he seemed to believe his own hype as much if not more than anyone. Being vilified didn’t help, no doubt, but in reality there weren’t enough people suggesting everyone just needed to shut up and let him go be a psychology professor who did the odd public lecture series.
The trajectory of Peterson’s career may have been an inevitability of an ego that couldn’t say “that’s enough,” or it may be the fault of those who expected him to be more than he was. Either way, the failure of Jordan Peterson is a failure of culture, a failure of public intellectualism, a failure of a new media system that seemed to promise a positive replacement to the legacy media and instead produced siloed professional talkers who tour podcasts becoming steadily more unhinged and self-reinforcing."
https://www.persuasion.community/p/reflections-on-the-jordan-peterson
4. "The Great Differentiation is the race to be different. It is the salvation from slop.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is Newton’s Third Law of Motion. It is also an emergent Law of the Market.
Sameness has never been cheaper.
Websites look the same. Writing reads the same. Hype videos hype the same.
Copying is free and frictionless. And because it is cheap, it is low status. What might have been 2019’s most beautiful landing page is 2025’s slop.
When sameness is cheap, differentiation is valuable. But how do you remain differentiated when copying is free and frictionless? Make copying expensive.
The funny part is that, were he alive today, Steve Jobs would not be presenting like Steve Jobs presented in 2007. Copycats killed the style; move on.
Differentiate. Always differentiate.
Everything novel and valuable gets copied, at higher or lower fidelity. This is what René Girard warned about. Mimesis.
Look at me, after all this, copying Peter Thiel’s interpretation of Girard’s insights. Mimesis comes for us all.
Copying is inevitable, and I feared that our new infinite copy machines would drag us into a pit of paltry plagiarism.
What is wonderful about The Great Differentiation, though, what gives me hope, is that people seem to be copying the desire to differentiate.
Instead of faking the form, they are emulating the essence: create something unique and true to you, something that only you have earned. Something different.
This is good advice for all of us.
Differentiate. Always differentiate."
https://www.notboring.co/p/the-great-differentiation
5. "It’s nothing short of a controlled demolition warning. This is a cleanup operation of the mess left over from the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The Federal Reserve Bank and interest rate policy are no longer able to address the core problem. The losses from that time are still festering and slowing down the pace of growth in the US. For Trump and Bessent, now is the time to reverse the windfall gains that the bankers and asset holders made during the crisis at the expense of the little guy.
They intend to hit the pension fund companies, the insurers, and corporations that have been paying themselves all too well as a result of the GFC windfall. In addition, any companies that served as fronts or revenue-generating sources for the Deep State or the opposition will no longer have the privilege of state sponsorship, protection, or plausible deniability. They are likely to go bust. I have called this process the digital redenomination of your entire life. We must get ready for it.
This time, the American public and indeed the world are being encouraged to adopt Bitcoin and stablecoins because they will not only be fully convertible into US Dollars, they will also give the coin holders the most senior credit position, thus protecting them from loss. Bessant’s plan is to create an environment in which the zombie banks and zombie assets that are still lingering and hindering the economy's performance can be written down and written off. It’s a controlled demolition. Yes, pension funds will take a hit, but there is a new wave of entrepreneurial businesses that will now be financed through tokenization, creating a new wave of Apple’s and Tesla’s as well as making it vastly easier for small and medium-sized businesses to get funding.
This new financial system breaks the lock that Wall Street and private equity/venture capital had on the markets. The advent of tokenization and crypto is fundamentally a new way of financing start-ups and ventures. No longer will Wall Street and private equity remain the gatekeepers of who gets money and who doesn’t. They gave their money and blessings to a minuscule number of ventures and denied access to the vast majority of viable businesses, principally because those businesses looked unlikely to become unicorns (a business that achieves a billion-dollar valuation in a short period of time).
The “work horse” businesses, real going concerns (which I wrote about here in June 2022), that had real customers with real cash flows and real profits had nowhere to go. Banks stopped lending to them decades ago. These workhorses have been increasingly relying on private family office money, often at heavy interest rates or with painful equity give-aways. As the tokenized market replaces the stock market, the avenues for funding are going to widen considerably for everyone.
This is an entrepreneur’s revolution."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/controlled-demolition-warning-tokenization
6. "Keep in mind, you have to really commit to the reset: you can’t go for a run and then keep doing exactly what you were doing before, spending the whole journey fixating on what was bothering you back home. Immersing yourself in the meal or process or new environment is vital to triggering the reboot (and thus, the potential for different circumstances)."
https://colin.substack.com/p/tactical-reset
7. "This systematic pollution of the information space is not new. It is the digital acceleration of a timeless human tactic: the corruption of narrative to control perception and power. Since the advent of language, whispers have become slander; since the printing press, pamphlets have smeared rivals; governments and factions have always sought to burn unfavorable records and propagate their own version of history. What has changed is the scale, speed, and automation.
Bots and AI weaponize these age-old tactics, operating at machine speed and global reach, injecting falsehoods directly into the data streams that will form the foundation of future understanding. The parchment scroll and the printing press have been replaced by the training dataset and the API call, but the goal remains chillingly familiar: to control the story, to own the past, and thereby dictate the future."
https://emburlingame.substack.com/p/the-new-frontlines-of-truth
8. This is a must watch interview if you want to learn how innovation works and how to instigate it. A masterclass for founders and investors. VK is a legend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ9cYDeum4U&t=2002s
9. "After years of working with European startups, I’ve observed that companies from countries with relatively large home markets — Germany, France, Spain and the U.K. — can fall into what I call the “mid-sized country trap.” These markets are large enough to sustain initial growth, but create a comfort zone that can stifle global ambition.
This makes internationalization more difficult down the line, as neither product nor culture supports agile expansion into new markets. Startups can get locked into local optimizations, acquire technical debt and end up having to “restart” the company in each new geography. As a result, they become vulnerable to competitors who have built scalable products from the ground up and are able to move faster."
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/europe-most-ambitious-global-startups-mignot-index/
10. "So stop getting caught up in the day-to-day noise of financial markets. Zoom out for a second. Ask yourself: what is the single most important trend for the next decade and what should I do about it?
For me, it is clearly the US dollar debasement that is going to continue happening. And bitcoin is the solution to the undisciplined monetary and fiscal policy."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/the-us-dollar-is-being-destroyed
11. "What is a “Supply Chain”?
Simply: it's the set of companies that make the goods and services that you use to ultimately make your products. There are essentially no products produced that don’t require raw material inputs, energy, or services to be built. Even mining, where the input is under your feet, requires some of the most complex machines in the world to operate, engineering and geological services to explore, and specialty chemicals to process ore. Essentially, everything produced at any level has a chain of supply behind it.
When building complex products with relatively complex inputs (like batteries, drones, etc.), the supply chain can make or break a hardware startup. Even the most vertically-integrated hardware startups (Anduril being an example close to my experience) typically have several components or subsystems that are entirely designed, manufactured, and supported by another company. Sensors like infrared cameras were typically procured as a “black box” item - i.e., it was designed and built by someone else. This fact is largely underappreciated, especially in today’s discourse about reshoring manufacturing. Yes, we desperately need to do it. No, it doesn’t happen overnight."
https://newsletter.mcj.vc/p/hard-truths-from-the-hardware-trenches-justin-lopas-base-power
12. What a fun AMA with Not Investment Advice this week. Good brain candy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQj04-sokTg
13. Quite a good conversation on Startups, AI, Energy and the future of the West.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVX-l5ERxiw
14. Artillery becoming more vulnerable and obsolete in war?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S19R4jdA930
15. "What started as a passion project has struck a nerve. Audiences are responding not only to the film’s explosive action and outrageous humor, but also to its underlying themes of hard work, friendship, and life on the margins. At recent screenings in Yokohama, fans lined up for autographs, and a toy industry expert even praised the movie saying, "This movie should be shared. It’s a film that is needed in today’s world."
https://www.tokyoscope.blog/p/japans-new-cult-hit-is-a-bonkers
16. The most weekly fun in B2B VC right now. And you will learn the nuances of doing the investing job.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONAVeuKxzl0
17. "The Army has a gap to close between long-range precision weapons and indirect fires at closer ranges, so they’re looking to attack drones to fill in the mid-range capabilities, the service’s vice chief of staff said Wednesday.
The concern is having enough rounds to feed all of these systems.
“In particular, both production rates and price points associated with some of our critical munitions that are out there for our big frames and our big platforms … and based on what has happened in Israel and Iran and the expenditures that are there, what's happened in Ukraine. Our magazine depth right now is not where it needs to be.”
18. You always get smarter when you listen to Balaji as he makes you think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJO0AW9VV-Y
19. Weekly update on Silicon Valley news. This is a fun discussion as always.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iKEafMw6qI
20. "The decade witnessed several other wars that are much less well studied yet are of interest. Two in particular stand out: the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922 and the Chinese civil war of 1924, sometimes called the Second Zhili-Fengtian War. Both saw intense combat between vast numbers of men equipped with machine guns, artillery, and airplanes, fighting on dense fronts tied to rail corridors. Yet neither was fought on so long or continuous a front as existed in northern France. Lines of contact were much shorter, usually formed under more dynamic circumstances and in different terrain, creating many more opportunities for operational maneuver. As a result, major battles never lasted more than a few weeks and often ended decisively.
These case studies have especial resonance today. Modern firepower seems to give the defense an edge, while tightly binding operations to narrow supply corridors; yet Ukraine remains our only point of reference for large-scale near-peer conflict between 21st-century militaries. Heavily-fortified lines stretching hundreds of kilometers through open country draw inevitable comparisons to the Western Front. Yet it is precisely those conditions which are unlikely to be replicated in a future war. Studying similar-but-different examples is therefore a useful exercise in broadening our frame of understanding.
The Sakarya campaign seemed to confirm many of the lessons of the Western Front. What had worked against a widely dispersed enemy around Kütahya and Eskişehir could not succeed against a well-entrenched foe along a continuous front. It was difficult for a large, lumbering army to execute sweeping operational maneuvers so far from a railhead, even if the logistical demands of its artillery were relatively light.
By attempting a 19th-century style campaign—or at least by not adapting once their maneuver failed—the Greeks sacrificed an opportunity to use their superior firepower from a well-supplied position. By the same token, the Turks were unable to aggressively pursue. Their main force could not maintain an adequate pace to fix and destroy the Greeks, while their cavalry could only harass logistics and create diversions, but not execute an envelopment. And when they attempted a large-scale maneuver of their own at Afyon, they too suffered from mobility and logistical problems, while the Greeks could take advantage of interior rail lines."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/successors-to-the-western-front-pt
21. "Entrepreneurs would do well to include KPI definition slides at the end of their board decks to ensure that everyone is on the same page and the metrics are calculated in a way that is readily understood and, ideally, aligned with industry standards."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/07/05/kpi-definitions-in-board-decks/
22. "Tipping is not a common practice in Japan. In most situations, offering extra money for good service is politely declined, as exceptional hospitality is expected as part of the job. But now, a new smartphone app could begin to change that, allowing customers to express appreciation in ways that were once considered off-limits."
https://www.tokyoscope.blog/p/is-tipping-in-japan-the-future-new
23. "This time, it’s the UAE. Dubai and Abu Dhabi, arms wide open, like some desert whorehouse for the world’s elite. It’s no accident. The UAE sits there, neutral, a tightrope walker between East and West, with financial guts that make the world jealous. DIFC and ADGM—playgrounds for bankers, rules loose as a barfly’s tongue, cash flowing from sovereign wealth funds like ADIA and Mubadala, endless rivers of black gold turned green. The government’s iron fist keeps it stable, no questions asked, no whispers in the night. And the Global War on Terror? That mess tied Western spies and money men to the Gulf with chains of blood and oil, forged in fire and betrayal. Now they’re cashing in that trust, cashing in the bodies piled high.
Look around. Dubai and Abu Dhabi suck in capital fleeing Russia and China, untold trillions in offshore wealth, a black hole for dirty money. The GWOT built a web of secrets, clandestine and covert armies, illicit cashflows and cash now turned to this, a dark network pulsing beneath the surface. Proxy wars? The UAE’s hands are bloody in Yemen and beyond, across Africa and South Asia, Muslim bodies piling up for their plans, stacked like cordwood. Syria? Wasn’t that ISIS, established under Obama and Clinton, used to take down that ancient people, now leading ethnic cleansing, a slow genocide in the desert?"
https://emburlingame.substack.com/p/uae-is-the-new-city-of-london-and
24. "Entrepreneurs have complained for a long time that VCs don’t really fund innovative ideas, but prefer obvious marginal innovation kinds of things. That has worked ok because those companies get picked up at small exit multiples by big players, and, occasionally they do turn into big companies on their own.
As AI makes all the marginal innovation easy and obvious and taken by the existing players, the success distribution might shift to the weird ideas. If it does, VCs will follow. And then maybe we really get the world entrepreneurs want - the one where the weirdest and craziest stuff gets funded."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/weird-stuff-wins-the-new-ai-strategy
25. "Stop waiting for the destination to validate your journey. The validation is in the running itself. The act of building is the reward."
https://startupistanbul.substack.com/p/there-is-no-finish-line
26. "A Japanese woman who had lived in America in the 1990s told me that she found American society to be generous, kind, tolerant, and helpful. But when she goes back now, she said, she sees a lot of anger and the culture feels a lot colder.
In a nutshell, my argument was that diversity was always America’s strength, but only because we were able to use geographic diversity to temper the stresses and strains created by our ideological diversity. When Americans started arguing about politics and society over Twitter and Facebook and TikTok, it immediately stopped mattering as much who their physical neighbors were; in a short space of time, we were thrown into a small room with their countrymen who disagreed with them about everything. This created instant anger and friction throughout society.
American social media has become a playground for British and Australian fascists, Latin American communists, Pakistani Islamists, and every other kind of foreign extremist under the sun. Often, the hapless and vulnerable Americans have no idea whether the content they’re consuming on Twitter/X was made by foreigners, so they just assume it came from their countrymen; this makes them think their countrymen are far more extremist than they truly are, stirring division within American society and sowing distrust of neighbor against neighbor.
Foreigners who love America are likely to move here; those who hate America are likely to get involved in English-language social media discourse from afar. And so thanks to social media, young generations of Americans — having grown up on the internet and being more used to taking social cues from strangers online — are especially vulnerable to the tide of anti-American sentiment they encounter online. This is probably a big reason why the young generation is so much less patriotic.
America is therefore a country of normal people being ruled over by would-be revolutionaries whose information space is dominated by X and TikTok — by extremist theories, by trolls and grifters, by busybody foreigners, by viral misinformation, and by bored anonymous teenagers. If we want our country back, we need to retake the information space that is radicalizing our hyper-engaged elites."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-to-take-our-country-back
27. "Unsurprisingly then, the modern mentality simply cannot comprehend actual acts of widespread cruelty and violence, and above all it blanks out at the idea that one day we could experience them. Episodes of mass killing in Cambodia, Burundi or Rwanda are so far beyond what the western mentality can understand that they have become nothing more than horrors without content.
We sort of know that terrible things happened to individuals in the former Soviet Union, Greece under the Colonels, in Latin America, in apartheid South Africa and in more recently in countries such as Syria, Iraq and Libya, but we wrap them in normative cotton wool entitled “human rights violations.” Few accounts by those who survived Assad’s prisons have been widely published, for example, because our contemporary Liberal view of the world simply can't refine them into anything it can understand, given its facile understanding of human behaviour."
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/such-times
28. This is a good conversation on tech & venture from a guy at the center of things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z94vn0pTewg
29. "In the feudal-ascendant stage, weak monarchs typically need to come crawling to the baronial class for funds and military resources, usually on poor terms, and baronial rebellion is easy. The monarch is not much more than a Schelling point for times when the baronial class needs to stop infighting to undertake a bit of cooperative activity, like crusading. When feudal lords have the upper hand, there is typically a competitive market for knightly talent, and the knightly class enjoys horizontal labor mobility across lordly courts and halls (from where we get words like courtliness and courtesy, the culture of manners and associated genre of literature that is Crouch’s focus). Entry into this class is fairly open from below, and knightly heroes share main-character energy with the commoner class (as we see in the tale of Robin Hood, who is ambiguously poised between the two classes).
But in the monarchy-ascendant stage, the reverse is true. Baronial classes lose power and control, get more tightly attached to courts, and compete with capital-city courtier classes, whose power derives from sources other than land holdings. The monarch typically has strong direct relations with an urban population that is economically powerful but lacks land-based wealth. The itinerant knightly class, meanwhile, is typically demoted in status. Much of its function is commoditized into standing imperial armies, with a shift from heavy cavalry to light cavalry and infantry. What remains of the knightly class becomes horizontally immobilized and closes itself off to entry from below, to preserve what remains of its power.
This pattern of using a mythologized historical era to reflect the nature of a contemporary society is not an accident. We’ll look at our own times in a minute.
It is worth noting that the feudal-monarchial cycle does not end with the arrival of modernity and the eclipse of horses in warfare. Suitably abstracted, I think the cycle has continued to this day, even in the military world. Knightly heavy cavalry has given way to special forces (not to the more literal descendant, tanks) and their bespoke, temperamental helicopters. The baronial class now runs armaments industries. Drones have replaced longbow archers.
It’s not hard to see why this era is appealing. Commoner men could aspire to work their way up and sideways as high and far as their talents and taste for adventure could take them. Commoner women could hope to parley beauty similarly, into wealth and status by marrying up (hypergamy). The game was learnable, and open to those with the appropriate aptitudes. But not too open! A few advantages of birth or connections could help, and were welcome, as does a sense of being a Chosen One destined for greatness. The game was open to commoners, but also loaded against them, and governed by rules that recognized specialness."
https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/be-history-or-do-history
30. "IP monetization is probably the most exploitative form of capitalism. It coasts on the past patents, inventions, ideas, and creativity, and capitalizes on the legal protections they enjoy. Rather than spurring innovation and protecting entrepreneurship, modern IP suffocates it.
It artificially keeps brand corpses alive and milks any distinguishing (and trademark protected) brand code, logo, pattern, color, monogram or, other signifier. And that is just in the domain of branding. In art, fashion, design, film, music, it protects melodies, silhouettes, designs, shapes, materials, plots …
Vetements, a fashion brand, recently lost a trademark application in the US for being too “generic.” For a brand name that means “clothes” in French, this serves them well. For a brand that made its name by ripping other brands off (Vetements launched with a copy of a DHL t-shirt), it serves them even better.
When it comes to IP, the line between creative exploration and creative exploitation is thin. IP economy goes hand-in-hand with visual culture."
https://andjelicaaa.substack.com/p/ip-economy
31. "More Debt and How This Impacts You
No surprise, this means you need to build a biz, become an asset holder. If $5 trillion is coming, this will cause prices to go up directionally.
Realistically, if your goal is to get rich for the right reasons (to be in control of your life) you’ll never deal with this level of corruption/depravity. Best to avoid all that stuff anyway.
If a 21 year old 10/10 super model girl shows interest in you when you’re 50+ staying at the Four Seasons… Run. Run far far away.
The goal on this side of the web is to buy your way into personal freedom. Sovereign Individual.
You can leave the whole ego chasing, blackmailing and constantly looking over your shoulder to the billionaire crowd. The goal is to get rich and be free. Just don’t let anyone know you achieved just that. Otherwise you might find yourself hanging out with people who were on the Epstein “disappeared” client list."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/govt-crushing-bond-holders-again
32. "As I wander through the world, giving talks to all kinds of audiences representing a wide array of sectors, I find that people have not heard of the Dark Enlightenment and businesses are not yet deploying AI. The inherent caution and ignorance within old institutions is set to be besieged by the inherent confidence and deep expertise that is embedded in the new startups.
Look at Erebor. Before it even opens its doors for business it’s already achieved a $2b valuation. Yet, the media keeps describing Erebor as a bank that aims to fill the shoes of the now defunct Silicon Valley Bank. See Bloomberg’s “Crypto, Startups and Banking Make a Scary Mix: Circle, Erebor and others look like they could run straight toward the Silicon Valley Bank trap.” No. Sweet but no. Erebor aims to demolish the biggest banks in the market and create an entirely new Kingdom. The Administration wants to restore its position on the commanding heights of the market mountain tops (whether Erebor or Erewhon) so that the world’s money keeps flowing into the US and funding the US economy. This grand strategy looks set to work.
The Europeans understand that it is going to work. In response, they have their
own vision of the new Kingdom. It involves greater centralization of decision making as Mario Draghi showed us with his grand plan for the future of Europe (here) and greater control as President Macron outlined in a speech last April in a speech called “Europe – It Can Die: A New Paradigm”. Both suggest that the new philosophy that can work is essentially a combination of communism and control. It can be achieved through government control of asset allocation and the use of CBDC as a means of nudging the population to spend on the things that government wants. It’s a kind of financial repression.
It’s why ECB President Christine Lagarde is railing against stablecoins saying it represents “the privatization of money” which is an anathema to the central bankers. They see no irony on the fact that the Federal Reserve and the BIS (which has soveriegn immunity) are also private institutions who effectively issue private money too, which is President Trump’s big gripe. In Europe CBDC will be used to tell citizens to buy certain bank bonds and that they must not buy fast food. Make no mistake, America’s approach to the commanding heights of the market mountain top also involves financial repression. Stable coins may be instruments of financial repression too as Arthur Hayes explains (thanks again to Matt Pines for bringing this to my attention)."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/erebor-erewhon-stablecoins-zizians
33. "Of course, if it wasn’t uncool to know things about war and warfare, maybe leadership could’ve seen the difference between good and bad policy and more eloquently argued for doing the right thing. Maybe we wouldn’t be at risk of losing our global advantage in scientific research or at risk of losing in the Pacific or abandoning Ukraine. The problem with American foreign policy isn’t some bullshit about masculinity or lethality, it’s about not knowing what the hell we’re doing.
There’s probably a dozen other things I could rant about here, but I think the above encapsulates the basic issues with democratic foreign policy thinking. And to be sure, there are people up and down the chain of liberal schools of thought that do know their stuff. They are just too few to fight the good fight themselves and no singular administration will fix that. The foreign policy class faces an identity crisis and it feels like some are just waiting around for a grand strategy that will justify it all like the second coming of a Messiah. But there is no one else, there is no secret backroom of geniuses waiting for their chance.
Grand strategy is bullshit. A strategy is grand when it works and misguided when it doesn’t. The only way you make a strategy work, the only way you manage the massive foreign policy arm of the United States, the only way we win…is by building a cadre of capable, critical thinkers and doers from the ground up. And if you’re just starting out and reading this, don’t give up. Victory starts with you."
https://www.breakingbeijing.com/p/there-is-no-one-else
34. "What is one tool that could blunt a successful invasion of Taiwan that some people in the Pentagon know we need, but don’t seem to be able to get the funding to move it to a critical mass?
It’s mining, of course, but for this scenario our war-hack is a special subset of mining: aerial mining.
You don’t have to mine it all, just the most likely approaches to where the PRC wants to be, or are most suitable for their special-purpose landing barges. The PRC can have uncomfortable uncertainty on where the rest of the mines are.
Fear is the defender’s ally.
Mines buy time, narrow access. That is what you need to make any invasion, should it take place, have a better likelihood to fail at best, give Taiwan and her allies the time they need to reinforce her at worst."
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/how-to-blunt-a-prc-invasion-of-taiwan
35. "So stock allocations are exploding higher for American households. The stock market continues to push higher and higher as it outperforms other regions. And the US dollar, which everyone thinks will continue weakening forever, may be ready to reverse course and remind the world why dollars are the global reserve currency.
Time will tell what happens. Just make sure you keep your mind flexible. Don’t become dogmatic about any scenario or outcome. The world is more dynamic than ever before. You will need your critical thinking skills as we continue accelerating faster and faster into the future."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/is-the-us-dollar-comeback-upon-us
36. "Taiwan could adapt the Japanese model to their domestic needs by establishing a Quick Reaction Reserve quota — say, 150,000 troops.
Second, Taiwan should adopt a modern-day “vertical resilience” strategy. Taiwan should use its mountainous terrain for concealment and protection against overwhelming firepower. Underground infrastructure is vital: Taiwan should modernize and expand existing tunnel networks to protect weapons, communications, and personnel. And vertical resiliency can help establish redundancy in communication networks — from cables deep underground to space-based systems.
Third, asymmetric capabilities are critical to fighting lopsided battles. Taiwan cannot afford to invest in high-end, exquisite capabilities that will take ten years to acquire. Instead, Taiwan is now in a situation where, like WWII-era Japan, it must do everything in its power to strengthen its defenses in a compressed time. Therefore, Taiwan should focus on acquiring asymmetric military capabilities over conventional ones. Drones are an excellent example. They can be mass-produced, stored in ordinary (and concealed) cargo containers, and launched in swarms. And not all drones require expensive guidance systems: many can follow remotely controlled lead drones, while other drones can even be operated by civilians with relatively minimal training.
Fourth, just as important as having deterrence is messaging deterrence. Imperial Japan successfully telegraphed to its would-be US invaders that Taiwan’s force posture was changing rapidly, and that any battle over Taiwan would be horrific. Taiwan today can likewise clearly communicate its ability and willingness to defend. For instance, Taiwan could consider holding public competitions showcasing its military capabilities. What would China think if a world-class drone-piloting student competition were held in Taiwan, where award-winning students told media, “We would like to use our skills to support military operations in the event of a Taiwan contingency?”
And finally, if nothing else, Taiwan and allied nations should feel confident that deterrence is possible. Eighty years ago, Operation Sho-2Go worked: the United States was deterred from invading Taiwan. Deterrence can be achieved again today."
https://www.chinatalk.media/p/operation-sho-2go-how-imperial-japan