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.