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.