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.